Tag Archives: ocean

How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

by sseerss4tr Posted on August 10, 2015

How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

By on 10 Aug 2015commentsShare

What do glaciers have in common with my bank account?

They’re both slowly melting away — sometimes in big chunks, other times at a slow trickle — and both represent existential crises that end in either the demise of humanity or me moving back in with my parents. Which is why I’d like to ignore both of them — you know, ignorance is bliss, what you don’t know can’t hurt you, etc.

Except bliss doesn’t last, and what you don’t know can hurt you — and hurt you and hurt you. So as a grownup, I do, in fact, check my bank account — through scrunched eyes and gritted teeth, but still! — and I would like to know what’s going on with those glaciers, even if I’m making this face the entire time.

The problem is, there’s no online banking equivalent for monitoring melting glaciers. Even scientists don’t always know what’s going on with those giant hunks of world-altering ice. But according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers have figured out a new way to use seismic vibrations to monitor the melting of tidewater glaciers — those that end in the ocean, rather than on land. Here’s more from a press release:

Meltwater moving through a glacier into the ocean is critically important because it can increase melting and destabilize the glacier in a number of ways: The water can speed the glacier’s flow downhill toward the sea; it can move rocks, boulders and other sediments toward the terminus of the glacier along its base; and it can churn and stir warm ocean water, bringing it in contact with the glacier.

“It’s like when you drop an ice cube into a pot of warm water. It will eventually melt, but it will melt a lot faster if you stir that water,” said Timothy Bartholomaus, a postdoctoral fellow at [The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics] and the study’s lead author. “Subglacial discharge provides that stirring.”

Bartholomaus and his colleagues realized that they could use seismic equipment to monitor such subglacial discharge when they were trying to study earthquakes — or “icequakes” — caused by glacier calving and kept detecting mysterious background vibrations. Those vibrations, it turned out, came from meltwater running through the ice.

Landlocked glaciers are easier to monitor because scientists can just measure the amount of runoff in glacial rivers. But if we only monitored landlocked glaciers, it would be like me only monitoring my grocery bill and ignoring rent, student loan payments, and health insurance.

“All of the biggest glaciers in Greenland, all of the biggest glaciers in Antarctica, they end in the ocean,” Bartholomaus said. “We need to understand how these glaciers are moving and how they are melting at their front. If we want to answer those questions, we need to know what’s occurring with the meltwater being discharged from the glacier.”

So while I go check my bank account, you grit your teeth and stare at this picture of the Yahtse Glacier in Alaska. All that brown water at the top is meltwater runoff.

Tony OneySource:
Scientists pioneer method to track water flowing through glaciers

, Eurekalert.

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How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How subglacial discharge is kind of like blowing all of your money at Chipotle

Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

by MinnieCourtice Posted on July 13, 2015

Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

By on 13 Jul 2015commentsShare

To most people, hopping on a plane from Hawaii to the East Coast and getting in way earlier than expected is just a stroke of luck — little more than an excuse for a self-congratulatory coffee from one of the 200 Starbucks lining the airport terminal. But to Hannah Barkley, a PhD student in oceanography at MIT who is about to put you to shame, it’s a scientific phenomenon worth investigating.

Barkley enjoyed one of these lucky trips on her way back from doing field work in Hawaii not too long ago. Back on campus, she asked Kris Karnauskas, a researcher in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Geology and Geophysics Department, why her flight was so off, and the two subsequently got lost in decades worth of wind speed data and flight times between Honolulu and major West Coast cities. Long story short: There’s a strong link between those lucky flights and fluctuations in climate.

In a paper published today in Nature Climate Change, Karnauskas, Barkley, and two of their colleagues report that about 88 percent of the variability in domestic flight times is linked to variability in atmospheric circulation. This is largely thanks to a combination of El Niño events — those annoyingly irregular bouts of high Pacific Ocean temperatures — and the so-called Arctic Oscillations — winds that circulate the North Pole, periodically confining the cold arctic air to the pole or letting it escape down to the mid-latitudes.

As the climate changes, both of these atmospheric factors will likely change, meaning the average length of a flight could change, too — which, in turn, could have a real impact on climate change. (Phew, that’s a lotta “change.”) Here’re the numbers from a press release:

According to the study, there are approximately 30,000 commercial flights per day in the U.S. If the total round–trip flying time changed by an average of one minute, the amount of time commercial jets would spend in the air would change by approximately 300,000 hours per year. This translates to approximately 1 billion gallons of jet fuel, which is approximately $3 billion in fuel cost, and 10 billion kilograms of CO2 emitted, per year.

“We already know that as you add CO2 to the atmosphere and the global mean temperature rises, the wind circulation changes as well—and in less obvious ways,” says Karnauskas.

Depending on whether that change is an increase or a decrease in average flight times, this could be good news or bad news for the rest of us, climactically speaking. Karnauskas eventually wants to look at all global flights, according to the press release. In the mean time, perhaps domestic airlines should take note:

In reflecting on the findings of this project and the simple question Barkley had initially asked, Karnauskas says one of the biggest surprises is that the airline industry doesn’t seem to be aware of the flight time patterns beyond the day-to-day.

“The airline industry keeps a close eye on the day-to-day weather patterns, but they don’t seem to be addressing cycles occurring over a year or longer,” he says. “They never say, ‘Dear customer, there’s an El Niño brewing, so we’ve lengthened your estimated flight duration by 30 minutes.’ I’ve never seen that.”

Maybe you haven’t noticed, Karnauskas, but we humans aren’t the best at planning for — or even acknowledging — climate variability.

Source:
Air Travel and Climate: A Potential New Feedback?

, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

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Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

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The forecast for the next century? Scary with a chance of dying

by AgnesCoronado Posted on June 23, 2015

The forecast for the next century? Scary with a chance of dying

By on 23 Jun 2015commentsShare

Time for a quiz! Climate change will increase the size and frequency of which of the following?

A) Droughts B) Floods C) Hurricanes or D) Blizzards.

Sorry — trick question! A new study in medical journal The Lancet adds more credence to the theory that climate change will bring more of E) All of the above — and what’s more, that many more people will be directly endangered by these natural turbo-disasters. Since most climate assessments look at models averaged over the whole globe — including huge unpopulated swaths like, say, the Pacific Ocean (no shade to whales) — this study offers new insight by focusing on where (and how) actual humans are living.

The New York Times explains:

The report, published online Monday, analyzes the health effects of recent episodes of severe weather that scientists have linked to climate change. It provides estimates of the number of people who are likely to experience the effects of climate change in coming decades, based on projections of population and demographic changes.

The report estimates that the exposure of people to extreme rainfall will more than quadruple and the exposure of people to drought will triple compared to the 1990s. In the same time span, the exposure of the older people to heat waves is expected to go up by a factor of 12, according to Peter Cox, one of the authors, who is a professor of climate-system dynamics at the University of Exeter in Britain. …

Says Cox: “We are saying, let’s look at climate change from the perspective of what people are going to experience, rather than as averages across the globe,” he said. “We have to move away from thinking of this as a problem in atmospheric physics. It is a problem for people.”

Wait just one second: Is this a study that focuses on the actual, meaningful impacts that climate change will have on the lives of humans, as opposed to the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere? Yes, please, scientists!

Source:
Risk of Extreme Weather From Climate Change to Rise Over Next Century, Report Says

, New York Times.

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The forecast for the next century? Scary with a chance of dying

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Can This Awesome Solar-Powered Plane Make It Across the Pacific?

by EleanorZavala Posted on May 5, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared on Wired and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Later this week, a single-seat, solar-powered plane with a wingspan longer than that of a Boeing 747 will take off from Nanjing, China, headed for Honolulu. For a normal passenger jet, that’s about a 12-hour flight. Solar Impulse 2, the 5,000-pound plane powered by nothing but sunshine, will take five days.

This is by far the hardest part of the plane’s journey around the world, which started in Abu Dhabi last month, and should finish there in August. Swiss pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg have been working up to this for 12 years, and they’re fully aware of how trying it will be.

“If we are optimistic, we will say that we’ve done six legs out of 12,” Piccard says. “And if we are pessimistic, we will say have have traveled 8,000 kilometers out of 35,000.”

Which is to say, things are going according to plan, but there’s much left to do, including the flight to Honolulu, then a 3,000-mile leap over the rest of the Pacific to Phoenix, Arizona.

The trick to staying aloft for days at a time is straightforward. The solar panels that cover the wings and fuselage of Solar Impulse 2 charge four extra-efficient batteries, which power the 17.4-horsepower motors. You charge up when the sun’s out and cruise at up to 28,000 feet. At night, you drop to about 5,000 feet, converting altitude into distance.

There are two factors that make the Pacific crossing especially challenging: The ocean’s size and the pokey speed of the plane (try 20 to 90 mph) mean each pilot will need to spend four or five days and nights aloft to reach land, in a cockpit that resembles a tube hotel in miniature. The second problem is the weather: Solar Impulse 2 needs pretty specific conditions to takeoff, cruise, and land—and that all needs to be planned out five days in advance.

André Borschberg has spent 72 hours at a time in a simulator to prepare for this flight. Niels Ackermann/Rezo.ch/Solar Impulse

Borschberg is scheduled to take off from Nanjin on May 7, at the earliest. If the flight goes as expected, he will take five days to make the trip to Honolulu. Then Piccard will make the four-day trip to Phoenix.

Pilot Preparation

It doesn’t sound like much fun: There’s no walking around, or even standing up in, the 135-cubic foot cockpit. The cabin is neither heated nor pressurized, though it is insulated.

To get used to the cramped conditions, the pilots have spent long stretches in a simulator. They use meditation, breathing exercises, and whatever yoga they can manage to keep their bodies and minds feeling as fresh as possible.

Piccard and Borschberg will sleep in 20 minute stretches (the aircraft has autopilot functions and there’s not much to collide with over the Pacific), six to eight times a day. It’s hardly a good night’s rest, but it’s enough to get by, and the seat fully reclines. They have an alarm set to wake them up, but their bodies have gotten used to the routine, and don’t really need it, Piccard says. “It’s very interesting how the human mind can adapt to this type of new situation.”

The grub sounds pretty good, especially for air travel: Nestlé made special meals that can survive temperatures from -4 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s mushroom risotto, chicken with rice, and potatoes with cream and cheese. “It’s very nice,” Piccard says. The toilet, FYI, is built into the seat.

It may seem difficult to stay focused when you’ve seen nothing but ocean for days on end, but it’s not a major concern to the pilots. “There’s quite a lot of things to do,” Borschberg says. More importantly, they’ve been working up to this for more than a decade. They’re jazzed.

Of course, they’ve got to be ready for things to go wrong. In the event of a sudden catastrophe, like an engine or battery fire, they’ve trained for bailing. If cloudy weather stops the panels from charging the batteries adequately, Piccard and Borschberg will take their time putting on the dry suit, preparing the parachute, alerting mission control, and switching on an emergency beacon. “You get out very peacefully,” Piccard says.

The cockpit of Solar Impulse 2 resembles a tube hotel, in miniature. Solar Impulse/Pizzolante

They key in any situation is getting away from the plane—there’s a serious risk of electrocution when you fly a pile of electronics and batteries into the ocean. Then you settle into your life raft, because you’re thousands of miles from land, and major shipping lanes, it may take two or three days to be picked up.

The Weather Game

There’s a lot to take into account, says team meteorologist Luc Trullemans. Routes are decided using radar and satellite data, and flight simulations. Equipment from engineering consultancy Altran and a team mathematician lend a hand. Cloudy skies mean the solar panels can’t recharge the batteries. Wind conditions are crucial: Tailwinds are best, and the team will tolerate cross tailwinds up to 45 degrees (90 degrees would be blow fully sideways). Headwinds are a problem for a plane with limited power: Between Myanmar and Chongqing, China, Piccard found himself flying backwards at one point.

The six legs of the Solar Impulse 2 journey already completed have been relatively short affairs, between 15 and 20 hours. That’s not so tricky to plan, because at the time of takeoff, you have an excellent idea of what the weather will look like for the whole flight.

All that gets way more difficult now, because the team can’t predict the weather with the accuracy it wants more than three days in advance. “We must be 100 percent certain with our weather forecasts for the first three days of the flight and of course, the takeoff conditions,” says Trullemans. After that, the route can always be changed … on the fly … but major deviations are best avoided. The plan is to keep a sharp eye on coming conditions. The pilot can fly to the north or south to avoid a cold front, for example.

Beyond that, you hope for the best: Tailwinds, clear skies, and no need to inflate that life raft.

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Can This Awesome Solar-Powered Plane Make It Across the Pacific?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Prepara, PUR, Radius, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can This Awesome Solar-Powered Plane Make It Across the Pacific?

Look At These Crazy Wave Clouds!

by AdaPutilin Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Look! In the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a cloud that looks like neither a bird or a plane! A wave! It looks like a wave!

High above South Carolina yesterday “wave clouds” rippled through the sky. They are bonkers!

Look at this video:

Now look at this one:

Weather.com has a whole gallery of crazy shots.

What is a wave cloud? WIRED explains:

These crazy clouds that look like a row of crashing waves are known as Kelvin-Helmholz waves. They form when two layers of air or liquid of different densities move past each other at different speeds, creating shearing at the boundary.

“It could be like oil and vinegar,” Chuang said. “In the ocean, the top is warm and the bottom is really cold. It’s like a thin layer of oil on a big puddle of water.”

When these two layers move past each other, a Kelvin-Helmholz instability is formed that is sort of like a wave. Parts of the boundary move up and parts move down. Because one layer is moving faster than the other, the shear causes the tops of the waves to move horizontally, forming what looks like an ocean wave crashing on the beach.

“It really is like breaking waves,” Chuang said. “A wave breaks when the water on top moves so much faster than the water below that it kind of piles up on itself.”

The world is a weird and beautiful place.

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Look At These Crazy Wave Clouds!

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This chafing ice sheet is making us really uncomfortable

by PorfiriWeldon Posted on March 11, 2015

This chafing ice sheet is making us really uncomfortable

By on 11 Mar 2015commentsShare

Friction — can’t live with it; can’t live without it. One minute the fickle force is keeping you from sliding out of your chair; the next, it’s giving you a chafing situation that’ll bring tears to your eyes. And then all of a sudden it’s deciding the fate of humanity.

Fine, that last one might be a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s kind of what it feels like after reading this new study about friction’s role in the stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet — you know, the one that could raise sea levels up to 16 feet if it collapses? Which, by the way, scientists are pretty sure that it will? The study from researchers at Caltech, published this week in the Journal of Glaciology, indicates that the imperiled ice sheet could be in an even more precarious position than we thought.

Here’s the rub (sorry): Previous models of the ice sheet assumed that, wherever the sheet made contact with the ocean floor, there was a constant amount of stress keeping it in place. This new model, on the other hand, incorporates a frictional force that varies along the base of the ice sheet as growing water pressure counteracts the weight of the ice sheet.

This frictional force brings the grounding line of the ice sheet — the area where the ice sheet touches off the ocean floor and becomes a floating ice shelf — into shallower waters than researchers had expected. It also reduces the amount of stress the ice sheet feels at the grounding line. Together, these put the entire ice sheet in a more precarious position — previous studies have shown that the way the ocean bed slopes in these shallower waters is conducive to ice loss. Andrew Thompson, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech and a coauthor on the study, said in a press release:

Our results show that the stability of the whole ice sheet and our ability to predict its future melting is extremely sensitive to what happens in a very small region right at the grounding line. It is crucial to accurately represent the physics here in numerical models.

And this isn’t just a computer model, but there’s still plenty to learn about what’s going on with this enormous slab of ice that has the power to completely change the world as we know it. Still, every time I read “extensional stress” in this paper — and the phrase comes up a lot — I accidentally read it as “existential stress.” That has to mean something.

Source:
Friction Means Antarctic Glaciers More Sensitive to Climate Change Than We Thought – See more at: http://www.caltech.edu/news/friction-means-antarctic-glaciers-more-sensitive-climate-change-we-thought-45903#sthash.1lDBITCl.dpuf

, Caltech.

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This chafing ice sheet is making us really uncomfortable

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All the best science experiments involve dynamite

by ColetteUKM Posted on February 19, 2015

All the best science experiments involve dynamite

By on 18 Feb 2015commentsShare

Picture a scientist. Good. Now make that scientist a geologist who studies tectonic plate movement. Are you picturing a total badass? Well, you should be, because from 20th century Arctic expeditions to modern day explosives, badassery abounds in the study of plate tectonics.

Let’s start with Alfred Wegener, the German scientist who first proposed the concept of continental drift way back at the start of the 20th century. Yesterday, the New York Times published this beautiful cartoon about Wegener’s work:

To recap: Wegener flew around in hot air balloons to study the atmosphere, hunted seals, fended off polar bears, traveled around on dogsleds, rigged up scientific equipment to box kites, and — perhaps most impressively — endured wicked backlash from the scientific community for what was then a radical new concept. (Lest you forget, this all happened in the early 1900s, which makes these expeditions about a thousand times more impressive.)

Okay. I promised you explosives.

While continental drift is now common knowledge, scientists still don’t entirely understand how the continents move, which is why some of them recently decided to detonate a bunch of dynamite 50 m below the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand.

No, this was not the move of a bunch of mad scientists, but an attempt to create some harmless seismic waves. Seismic waves like those generated by earthquakes have long been a useful tool for geologists to explore the earth’s underbelly because they pass through (or bounce off of) different surfaces differently. By measuring how these waves travel, scientists can effectively see the different layers of whatever the waves are moving through.

The problem is, seismic waves from earthquakes are too big to get a very precise picture. Seismic waves generated with carefully placed explosives, on the other hand, provide a much more fine-grained view of whatever they’re traveling through.

And so, equipped with plenty of dynamite and hundreds of seismometers, this international crew of researchers continued the tradition of badassery in their field and blew up the ocean (they didn’t really, but it sounds cool when I say it like that). More importantly, the team came away with some valuable new information about how the plate under New Zealand moves around. Turns out, there’s a thin, lubricating layer of rock between the plate and the mantle that allows for some slippage. Scientists have suspected layers like this to exist under other plates, so this is further evidence that this may be a common feature of tectonic plates around the world.

Our big takeaway? Scientists should probably use dynamite more often.

Source:
Geophysicists blast their way to the bottom of tectonic plates

, Physics World.

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All the best science experiments involve dynamite

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What is a ‘sky river,’ and why is Miss Piggy flying in it?

by BDRWilliam Posted on February 18, 2015

What is a ‘sky river,’ and why is Miss Piggy flying in it?

By on 17 Feb 2015commentsShare

Earlier this month, Miss Piggy took an epic seven-hour trip on the Pineapple Express, reminding everyone that the she still knows how to party. A video documenting the experience shows Miss Piggy and her crew clearly flying high and soaking up the Northern California weather. There’s also this one dude who’s just devouring some snacks.

Of course, by “Miss Piggy,” I mean the decked-out government airplane built to fly through hurricanes, and by “Pineapple Express,” I mean the river of water vapor that flows over the Pacific Ocean and brings California about 40 percent of its annual precipitation. But you guys knew that, right?

Anyway, atmospheric rivers like the Pineapple Express are major players in the Earth’s water cycle. The big ones can transport up to 15 times the amount of water flowing through the mouth of the Mississippi River, and when they hit land, mountain ranges like those on the California coast push the vapor up higher into the atmosphere, where it condenses into rain and snow.

During the first week of February, for example, the Pineapple Express hit the West Coast and doused parts of Northern California for days. It wasn’t enough rain to end California’s drought, but it was enough to make going places suck for lots of people.

Understanding how these atmospheric rivers work is important for both short-term weather forecasting and climate modeling, which is why during this last Pineapple Express, scientists flew directly into the thick of it.

Miss Piggy is part of a fleet of planes known as “hurricane hunters” that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to take data from inside hurricanes. Kermit and Gonzo are also part of the fleet (read about the collaboration between the NOAA and Jim Henson Productions here).

As a hurricane hunter, Miss Piggy is equipped to collect all kinds of weather data. Here’s a sample of the measurements she took during the Pineapple Express, from the LA Times:

Radar equipment mounted on the aircraft’s exterior measured precipitation and cloud thickness. Probes attached to the wings measured the number and size of liquid cloud droplets. Another of the plane’s radar devices measured the height of ocean waves.

Three other planes joined Miss Piggy on the sky river that day back in early February. Two collected data at higher altitudes, and one collected water droplet samples. There was also a ship taking measurements 230 miles off shore, and a satellite measuring surface winds. The International Space Station also got in on the action, measuring how dust particles (aka the nuclei at the center of vapor droplets) mix above the ocean. Scientists hope all the data will help them better understand how these rivers behave as they flow over land so places like Northern California can adequately prepare for them.

In a statement to the LA Times, Ryan Spackman, the lead researcher on board Miss Piggy, said the day’s mission was “an unprecedented interrogation of an atmospheric river event in landfall.”

Way to go, Miss Piggy. You still got it!

Source:
Scientists go high and low for data on drought-fighting ‘sky rivers’

, LA Times.

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What is a ‘sky river,’ and why is Miss Piggy flying in it?

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Watch out, Arctic: Shell is coming for you again

by NestorBaile Posted on February 13, 2015

Watch out, Arctic: Shell is coming for you again

By on 13 Feb 2015 11:33 amcommentsShare

Even as Shell is talking a good talk about climate change, it is pushing ahead with plans to drill in the Alaskan Arctic as early as this summer. The company suspended operations there in 2012 after a series of minor disasters. Its contractor was hit with eight felony counts and fined $12 million late last year.

But now Shell is moving forward again, with what looks like a newly reaffirmed go-ahead from the Department of the Interior (DOI). One clear sign of its intent: The company has leased a port on the Seattle waterfront where it can base its Arctic operations.

On Thursday, the DOI released a revised environmental impact statement for drilling in the Chukchi Sea — which Shell won the rights to do in 2008. The report found that there’s a 75 percent likelihood that the operations will result in one or more large spills — that means more than 1,000 barrels — during the 77-year lease. The report also forecast 260 smaller spills.

This revised DOI report follows a court ruling that found that, back in 2008, the department lowballed the amount of oil Shell would be able to extract from the lease. Lowballing the amount of oil that could come out of the ground also meant lowballing the amount of damage the efforts to extract it could cause.

But despite the new environmental impact statement, and the strong likelihood of a spill, the department will likely allow drilling operations to move forward following a public comment period. The environmental groups that brought the suit don’t see this as a victory.

“There is no such thing as safe or responsible drilling in the Arctic Ocean,” said Marissa Knodel, a climate campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “Shell’s record of recklessness and the federal government’s own environmental analysis show that approval of Lease Sale 193 would be unsafe, dangerous and irresponsible.”

Greenpeace’s John Deans said the decision “will drastically undermine [Obama’s] recent proposals to protect parts of the Arctic, including the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, from oil drilling.”

Shell’s plans come, ironically, as the company is saying it will now engage seriously on climate, and is pushing other oil companies to do the same. Its recent decision to work with activist shareholders who are demanding that climate change factor into management decisions appears to be a first step in that direction.

“I’m well aware that the industry’s credibility is an issue,” said Shell CEO Ben van Beurden in a speech on Thursday. “Stereotypes that fail to see the benefits our industry brings to the world are short-sighted. But we must also take a critical look at ourselves.”

At the moment, however, it doesn’t look like the company’s plans to salvage its climate-related “credibility” extend to cancelling its designs on the Chukchi Sea — one of its more dangerous operations, and one that inspires quite a bit of ire in its critics.

Besides the danger that drilling poses to Arctic environments, there’s the contribution it would make to climate change. A recent study found that if the world hopes to avoid 2 degrees Celsius or more of global warming, 80 percent of the world’s untouched fossil fuel reserves would have to stay in the ground — including all of the oil left in the thawing Arctic.

But people who believe that will happen, van Beurden says, aren’t clued in to reality. “For a sustainable energy future, we need a more balanced debate,” he said. “‘Fossil fuels out, renewables in’ — too often, that’s what it boils down to. Yet in my view, that’s simply naive.”

If policymakers agree with that line of thinking, we’ll be in for some catastrophic warming.

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Watch out, Arctic: Shell is coming for you again

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Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year? Here’s Why It Doesn’t Matter.

by NorrisReichert Posted on February 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to NASA, all of the following statements are true:

2014 was the warmest year on record, dating all the way back to 1880.
2014 is far more likely than any other year since 1880 to have been the warmest.
There’s a 62 percent chance that 2014 was NOT actually the warmest year since 1880.

Wait. What??

OK, let’s rewind a bit. It’s a scientific fact that humans are warming the planet by releasing greenhouse gases. This has already resulted in “considerable costs,” explains Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research—ice is melting, sea levels are rising, and heat waves and fires are getting worse. Global warming is a very clear trend stretching back a century, and temperatures in any given year aren’t really that important.

Still, it was big news last month when NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration jointly announced that, in separate analyses, they had both concluded that 2014 was the warmest year on record. “When averaged over the globe, 2014 was the warmest year on record,” explained NASA earth sciences director Michael Freilich during a January 16 conference call announcing the new findings. As you can see in the chart below, both agencies calculated that 2014 was just slightly warmer than other extremely hot years—specifically, 2010 and 2005.

NOAA/NASA

Of course, calculating the warmth of the entire Earth over a full year is difficult. To do this, climate scientists analyze air and water temperature data collected from thousands of weather stations, buoys, and ships around the world. As explained in this helpful Wired article, this involves complex algorithms that correct for various inconsistencies and potential sources of error.

By far the most important source of uncertainty—at least when trying to calculate the warmest year—is the uneven distribution of temperature measurements around the world. According to NOAA climate scientist Deke Arndt, the agency has adequate temperature data for roughly 88 percent of the planet’s surface. The biggest gaps are in the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, as well as in parts of Africa and the Arctic. (NASA uses a different methodology that includes data covering a greater portion of the globe.)

In other words, the figures reported by NASA and NOAA represent their best estimates of what the temperature readings they do have mean for the Earth’s climate as a whole. When it comes to detecting the broader warming trend, those estimates are extremely reliable. But ranking individual years is more complicated. “According to our tools, 2014 had the warmest temperature…that’s indisputable,” explains Arndt. The uncertainty, he says, comes from assessing how well those tools measure what’s actually happening, as well as from “what may have happened in the areas we didn’t measure.”

When they released their findings, NASA and NOAA attempted to quantify this uncertainty. As NOAA scientist Tom Karl explained to reporters at the time, this table (PDF) shows the probability that 2014 (as opposed to other extremely warm years like 2010 and 2005) was really the warmest year:

NOAA/NASA

So both agencies found that 2014 was far more likely than any other year to be the warmest. NOAA put the probability at 48 percent—that’s more than two-and-a-half times higher than the next likeliest year. NASA put the probability that 2014 was the warmest year at 38 percent—lower than NOAA but still much higher than any other year.

Unsurprisingly, critics pounced on the 38 percent figure. “NASA climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record…but we’re only 38% sure we were right,” blared London’s Mail on Sunday, a frequent source of climate change skepticism. The Mail story blasted NASA for having issued a press release that didn’t include the uncertainty.

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Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year? Here’s Why It Doesn’t Matter.

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