Global Warming 2020

Global Warming News : NASA Study Links Severe Storm Increases, Global Warming

The frequency of extremely high clouds in Earth’s tropics — the type associated with severe storms and rainfall — is increasing as a result of global warming, according to a study by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

In a presentation today to the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, JPL Senior Research Scientist Hartmut Aumann outlined the results of a study based on five years of data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft. The AIRS data were used to observe certain types of tropical clouds linked with severe storms, torrential rain and hail. The instrument typically detects about 6,000 of these clouds each day. Aumann and his team found a strong correlation between the frequency of these clouds and seasonal variations in the average sea surface temperature of the tropical oceans.

For every degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average ocean surface temperature, the team observed a 45-percent increase in the frequency of the very high clouds. At the present rate of global warming of 0.13 degrees Celsius (0.23 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, the team inferred the frequency of these storms can be expected to increase by six percent per decade.

Climate modelers have long speculated that the frequency and intensity of severe storms may or may not increase with global warming. Aumann said results of the study will help improve their models.

“Clouds and rain have been the weakest link in climate prediction,” said Aumann. “The interaction between the daytime warming of the sea surface under clear-sky conditions and increases in the formation of low clouds, high clouds and, ultimately, rain is very complicated. The high clouds in our observations—typically at altitudes of 20 kilometers (12 miles) and higher—present the greatest difficulties for current climate models, which aren’t able to resolve cloud structures smaller than about 250 kilometers (155 miles) in size.”

Aumann said the results of his study, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, are consistent with another NASA-funded study by Frank Wentz and colleagues in 2005. That study found an increase in the global rain rate of 1.5 percent per decade over 18 years, a value that is about five times higher than the value estimated by climate models that were used in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

JPL manages the AIRS project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information on AIRS, visit http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

Source: Global Warming News, Climate Change information at sciencedaily.com

Geoscientists Drill For Earth Secrets Under Arctic Lake

In the next few days, a convoy of bulldozers and trucks will set out from a remote airport in Siberia, heading for a frozen lake 62 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but the trip isn’t a holiday visit to the North Pole. Instead, the trucks will deliver core-drilling equipment for a study of sediment and meteorite-impact rocks that should provide the longest time-continuous climate record ever collected in the Arctic.

Once in place next month, the drilling will allow an international team of geoscientists led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Martin Melles of the University of Cologne, Germany, to burrow back in time, retrieving core samples more than 3 million years old and answering questions about Earth’s ancient past.

Almost impossibly remote, Lake El’gygytgyn (pronounced el’geegitgin), 11 miles in diameter, was formed 3.6 million years ago when a monster meteor, more than a half-mile across, slammed into the Earth between the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea. Because this part of the Arctic was never covered by ice sheets or glaciers, it has received a steady drift of sediment – as much as a quarter mile (1,312 feet or 400 meters) deep – since impact. Thus, it offers a continuous depositional record unlike any other in the world, say Brigham-Grette and colleagues, beneath the crater lake that’s just over 560 feet deep, equal to the height of the Washington Monument.

This week’s convoy will take 25 days to crawl through the frozen dark, building a 224-mile ice road as they go, over which the heavy drilling equipment can be moved from the remote airstrip at Pevek, in the north of Russia’s Chukotka Autonomous Region. “Lake El’gygytgyn is logistically among the most difficult places on Earth to carry out a scientific drilling program,” Brigham-Grette acknowledges. But by all accounts, the rewards should be worth all the effort.

In preparation for this day, scientists from institutes in Germany, Russia and Austria as well as UMass Amherst have been flying in by helicopter for focused tests over the past 10 years, drilling pilot cores and taking other samples and measurements. The site has passed every test. For example, the lake bed has been undisturbed by earthquakes, other underground shifting or drying for thousands of years. Pilot cores of 16.7 meters long (54 feet) have already provided a snapshot of climate from 300,000 years ago.

El’gygytgyn thus offers a truly unprecedented and ideal opportunity, Brigham-Grette notes, for piecing together a clearer picture of the hemisphere’s prehistoric climate and the dynamic processes of global climate change since the meteor’s impact. Notably, the researchers hope they can learn more about the unexplained shift from a warm forest ecology to permafrost, some 2 million to 3 million years ago. Comparing cores from under Lake El’gygytgyn to those from lower latitudes will help the climate scientists with a high-resolution tool to study climatic change across northeast Asia “at millennial timescales,” Brigham-Grette says. In addition to climate data, cores may offer the researchers an opportunity to study the 3.6-million-year-old “impact breccia,” that is, how Earth’s bedrock responded to the meteor’s impact.

Some sampling began in November at the science camp drilling site on the lakeshore, where researchers will study the climate history of the permafrost (frozen ground) that surrounds the lake. The other two drill sites will be in the deepest part of the lake. Waiting until Arctic winter to transport and install the equipment, the team can use the frozen lake surface to support drills specially designed to withstand the extreme weather conditions. The scientists plan to start drilling overlapping cores at these frigid locations in February using the windswept lake ice as a drilling platform. Sampling will continue until May 2009, as part of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP).

To ensure the safety of both scientists and drill-team members on the isolated lake in potentially life-threatening conditions, Brigham-Grette and colleagues have scrutinized how the ice shifts, cracks, and responds to heavy wind and circulation forces before settling on rig placement. Workers and scientists will live in a protected personnel carrier that will also transport cores from the rig on the lake ice to the science camp on the shore.

Sediment cores will be processed for shipment and stored at the lake in a temperature-controlled container until they can be flown to St. Petersburg and later trucked to the University of Cologne, Germany, for study by the international team. An “archive half” of each core will also be stored at the University of Minnesota.

The international collaboration is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, and GeoForschungsZentrum, Potsdam. In addition to UMass Amherst, investigators from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Far East Geological Institute, Vladivostok, the Northeast Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute, Magadan, and Roshydromet’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, are taking part.

Source: Global warming news, climate change, greenhouse gas effect information at sciencedaily.com

Ancient Soil Replenishment Technique Helps In Battle Against Global Warming

Former inhabitants of the Amazon Basin enriched their fields with charred organic materials-biochar-and transformed one of the earth’s most infertile soils into one of the most productive. These early conservationists disappeared 500 years ago, but centuries later, their soil is still rich in organic matter and nutrients.

Now, scientists, environmental groups and policymakers forging the next world climate agreement see biochar not only as an important tool for replenishing soils, but as a powerful tool for combating global warming.

Christoph Steiner, a University of Georgia research scientist in the Faculty of Engineering, was a major contributor to the biochar proposal that was submitted by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification last week at the United Nations Climate Change Conference meeting in Poland. The new climate change agreement will replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

“The potential of biochar lies in its ability to sequester-capture and store-huge amounts of carbon while also displacing fossil fuel energy, effectively doubling its carbon impact,” said Steiner, a soil scientist whose research in the Amazon Basin originally focused on the use of biochar as a soil amendment. At UGA’s Biorefinery and Carbon Cycling Program, he now investigates the global potential of biochar to sequester carbon. He also serves as a consultant to the UNCCD, a sister program to the climate change convention.

Steiner explained that almost any kind of organic material-peanut shells, pine chips and even poultry litter-can be burned in air-tight conditions, a process called pyrolysis. The byproducts are biochar, a highly porous charcoal that helps soil retain nutrients and water, and gases and heat that can be used as energy.

But because the carbon in biochar so effectively resists degradation, it also can sequester carbon in soils for hundreds to thousands of years, effectively making it a permanent “sink”-a natural system that soaks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Soils containing biochar made by ancient Amazon people still contain up to 70 times more carbon than surrounding soils and have a higher nutrient content. Steiner said scientists estimate biochar from agriculture and forestry residues can potentially sequester billions of tons of carbon in the world’s soils.

Biochar also avoids the disadvantages of other bioenergy technologies that deplete soil organic matter, said Steiner.

“Removing crop residues for bioenergy production reduces the organic matter accumulating on agricultural fields and thus the soil organic carbon pool, which depends on constant input of decomposing plant material. In contrast, pyrolysis with biochar carbon sequestration produces renewable energy, sequesters CO2 and cycles nutrients back into agricultural fields.”

This unique system ideally utilizes waste biomass, and thus does not compete with food production,” said Steiner. Currently most waste biomass decomposes or is burned in the field. Both processes release carbon dioxide stored in the plant biomass-for no other use than getting rid of it. Biochar can capture up to 50 percent of the carbon stored in biomass and establishes a significant carbon sink, as long as renewable resources are used and biochar is used as a soil amendment.

To address our world’s climate change dilemma, said Steiner, “We need a carbon sink in addition to greater energy efficiency and renewable energy. Acceptance of the UNCCD proposal in Poland is a first step to make carbon trading based on biochar a reality.

“This has not only consequences for mitigating climate change, but also for agricultural sustainability, and could provide a strong incentive to reduce deforestation, especially in the tropics.”

Source: Global Warming News, Climate Change, Greenhouse Gas Effect information at ScienceDaily.com