Tag Archives: Gulf stream

Climate Science

Global temperature, the North Atlantic cold blob and the Gulf Stream

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September’s global temperature confirmed that we are living in the hottest year on record. Here’s the map:

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NASA tells us that the record-warm September means 11 of the past 12 consecutive months dating back to October 2015 have set new monthly high-temperature records. June has been down-graded to third hottest, because of late cold temperatures reported from the Antarctic. Also September was only a slither warmer than 2014. It’s the long-term trends that count. So let’s look at the 30-year moving average from Open Mind: Continue reading Global temperature, the North Atlantic cold blob and the Gulf Stream →

Climate Action, Climate Policy & Planning, Climate Science

Climate clippings 132

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1. Accelerating ice loss from Antarctica shelves

Some ice shelves in Antarctica are thickening and some are thinning. The pattern between east and west is obvious from this image:

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When we sum up losses around Antarctica, we find that the change in volume of all the ice shelves was almost zero in the first decade of our record (1994-2003) but, on average, over 300 cubic kilometers per year were lost between 2003 and 2012.

According to the ABC story, some shelves lost almost 20% of their thickness.

Melting ice shelves does not itself cause sea level rise, but the shelves buttress land ice, which then becomes more mobile. The graph in the bottom corner of the image shows that East Antarctica is now also experiencing a net loss of ice from ice shelves.

2. Top polluters to set own limits virtually penalty free

ANU economist Frank Jotzo said the system is designed so no-one gets caught by it – a toothless tiger. Tony Wood of the Grattan Institute said the ideas proposed in the paper simply would not work. They were commenting on a Government consultation paper outlining “safeguards” to ensure the big polluters do not offset emissions saved through the Emission Reduction Fund (ERF), a flagship component of Direct Action.

Australia’s 140 top polluters will set their own limits for future pollution virtually penalty free, according to the Government’s latest Direct Action policy paper.

Companies subject to the safeguards will select a baseline, or limit, for future pollution.

That baseline will be set according to the highest peak of emissions from the past five years.

Just plain stoopid!

3. What’s going on in the North Atlantic?

Stefan Rahmstorf asks the question at RealClimate. There is a large patch in the North Atlantic which has cooled in the last century.

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Rahmstorf explains:

Our recent study (Rahmstorf et al. 2015) attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years.

In fact during last winter, which was the warmest on record for the planet overall, this patch had the coldest temperatures on record.

Chief suspect has to be the increasing freshwater coming off Greenland. There will be consequences.

The consequences of a large reduction in ocean overturning would look nothing like the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow. But they would not be harmless either – e.g. for sea level (Levermann et al. 2005) particularly along the US east coast (Yin et al. 2009), marine ecosystems, fisheries and possibly even storminess in Europe (Woollings et al. 2012).

A complete breakdown of the current was given up to a 10% chance this century in the IPCC report. This may have been an underestimate.

4. Rapid Arctic warming is changing the Jetstream and the weather

Another study, also involving Rahmstorf, looks at changing atmospheric circulation patterns due to Arctic warming.

The Arctic is warming faster than lower latitudes. The Jetstream velocity depends on temperature difference, hence it is slowing. It is also more wavy and has a tendency to get stuck, so heat or cold persists over a large area. Ironically, there is less storminess. Storms transport water onto land and break up persistent weather patterns.

The jet stream that circles Earth’s north pole travels west to east. But when the jet stream interacts with a Rossby wave, as shown here, the winds can wander far north and south.

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5. Brisbane EV charging technology takes on the world

Brisbane-based electric vehicle infrastructure company, Tritium, has done a deal to supply its award-winning Veefil DC fast charging stations to America’s ChargePoint company. ChargePoint has 21,000 EV chargers around the US.

The Australian-made stations will be installed on major routes across the country, including the express charging corridors on both the east and west coasts of the US that are being built as part of a recent deal between ChargePoint, Volkswagen and BMW.

The 50kW Veefil stations – which in the US will be called DC Fast stations and will be ChargePoint branded – are able to deliver up to 80 miles or 128 kilometers of charge in just 20 minutes, thus removing one of the key barriers to EV uptake: range anxiety.

Climate Science

Climate clippings 24

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I’ve been on holidays for a bit. Here are some links that I saved from a few hours spent on my daughter’s computer last week by checking some of the usual sources. In the next few days I’ll check the feeds and see whether there are more links to share.

E10 debacle puts the brakes on biofuels in Germany

German motorists have shown uncommonly good sense by not buying the biofuel mixture E10.

The real reason, though, was confusion over which car models could use the stuff without harm. Meanwhile a study found that:

up to 69,000 square kilometers (about 27,000 square miles) of forest, pasture and wetlands would have to be cultivated as farmland to satisfy the future demand for biofuel in Europe alone. This is an area twice the size of Belgium. One consequence of such cultivation would be the release of up to 56 million tons of CO2 a year, or the equivalent of the emissions of an additional 12 million to 26 million cars on European roads.

Continue reading Climate clippings 24 →