Global warming is the rise in the average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans since the late 19th century and its projected continuation. Since the ...
I began a new blog that will serve as a clearing house of articles on Tom Harris, ICSC and is affiliates. I will continue to add references as I learn of them. Please send me any that may be missing. You can find it at this location: Tom Harris and ICSC
by FishOutOfWater, DailyKos, December 13, 2016 "Figure 3 Time series of freshwater content in different layers of the Beaufort Gyre region. Blue bars depict total liquid freshwater content. Black bars show freshwater content in sea ice. Yellow bars – freshwater content in the mixed layer, red bars – in the Pacific and green bars – in the Atlantic water layer. Freshwater content is shown in thousand cubic kilometers. Upper left bars shows total annual freshwater flux into the Arctic Ocean from all rivers; green and black small bars show errors in liquid and sea ice freshwater content estimates. All freshwater contents are calculated relative to 34.8 reference water salinity." The build up in volume from 2002 to 2015 is about the volume of Lake Michigan which stores 4,918 cubic km of water.
Huge volumes of fresh water have been building up over the past 20 years in the Arctic waters north of Alaska. A volume the size of Lake Michigan built up from 2003 through the end of 2015. Before the 1990s, there were regular cycles of fresh water build up and release within decades as periods of high pressure north of Alaska were followed by periods of stormy weather. Scientists suspect that over the past 20 years large amounts of melt water from Greenland’s glaciers have changed the dynamics of the North Atlantic ocean and the Arctic atmosphere. Since the 1990s, a dome of high pressure has persisted in the Beaufort sea and the anticyclonic winds have pumped fresh water towards the high’s center building up a mound of relatively fresh water over a huge area north of Alaska. The primary source of the fresh water is rivers that flow into the Arctic. Over the past several decades, sea ice melting has added about 20% to the increase of fresh water in the Beaufort sea.
The freshwater content of the Beaufort gyre increased by a volume the size of lake Michigan from the 1970s to 2008.
A major 2008 report by a team of scientists led by Wood’s Hole oceanographer Andrey Proshutinsky found an increase of 5000 km3 of fresh water from the 1970s to 2008. www.whoi.edu/…
From 2008 to 2015 an additional 2000 km3 was added so the total increase in fresh water is 7,000km3. The total volume of the world’s second largest lake by volume, Lake Michigan, is just under 5,000km3.
Preliminary data from the BGOS 2008 cruise indicate that the FWCL in the BG continued to rise in 2008 and reached 21,000 km3– a historical maximum from all available years of observations. Compared to 1970s climatology (the pre-90s decade with the most extensive data coverage, (Figure 1) there has been a FWCL increase in the BG of approximately 5,000 km3. This is comparable with the volume of fresh water annually delivered to the Arctic Ocean by rivers and through Bering Strait (5700 km3 per year, Serreze et al., [2006]).
The freshwater layer in the Beaufort sea deepened by 3 meters - about 10 feet from 2003 to 2007. Because the Beaufort gyre covers a large area, this is a huge volume of fresh water. Anticyclonic winds associated with persistent high pressure in 2007 caused Siberian and North American river water and water from a record melt of sea ice in 2007 to flow into this Arctic sea north of Alaska.
The persistent anticyclonic Beaufort high pressure builds up a mound of water under it because the direction of a mass of water moves to the right of the wind direction in the northern hemisphere because the rotation of the earth gives the water spin. See this post at Neven’s sea ice blog by an Arctic oceanographer for details. neven1.typepad.com/...
On the other hand, cyclonic rotation associated with low pressure areas causes water to well up from below the center of the low. Thus years of high pressure followed by years of storminess cause moderate periodic surges of fresh water from the Arctic to the north Atlantic ocean. It was like the Arctic breathed in fresh water then breathed it out in a period of a decade or less. The largest observed freshwater surge called the “Great Salinity Anomaly” happened in the early 1970’s.
The Great Salinity anomaly was one of the likely causes of the brutal American winters of the 1970s. Fresh water tends to float over denser warm salty Gulf Stream water in sub-Arctic seas of the north Atlantic. This keeps the warm salty water from releasing its heat to the atmosphere and sinking thousands of feet into the deep Atlantic. This disruption of the thermohaline circulation is popularly called slowing down the Gulf Stream. The deep overturning circulation brings Gulf Stream water to the subarctic seas, warming Europe and north America. When deep water formation slows brutal winters tend to follow. This effect, combined with the reflective effects of growing levels of sulfuric acid pollution over the north Atlantic in the 1960s and 1970s caused cold north American and European winters in those decades. This cool period that broke up the trend of greenhouse gas caused global warming that has been ongoing since the turn of the twentieth century has been intentionally misinterpreted by climate change deniers to confuse politicians and the public about climate change.
Winters were miserably cold in Minnesota and the central and eastern U.S. in the 1970s.
Last spring, following the extremely abrupt collapse of the winter polar vortex in a sudden stratospheric warming a very intense Beaufort high developed driving more fresh water into the gyre. The strong high pressure in the sunny spring months melted out the ice early. Midwinter high pressure under dark skies is favorable for ice growth but under the bright long sunny days of May the ice melted and the water took up enormous amounts of heat. That warm water then opened up the ice plugged channels between the islands of northernmost Canada. If high pressure breaks down now the thick plugs of multi-year ice that used to block the channels won’t be there to impede the fresh water from draining out to the north Atlantic. The largest channels have a thin ice cover.
Arctic scientists fear that a large volume of the stored fresh water could be rapidly released, drastically impacting the northern hemisphere’s weather. earthobservatory.nasa.gov/...
As I said back in my first blog entry, one of the key objectives of the expedition was to produce an up-to-date assessment of the freshwater content of the Beaufort Gyre. Based on a preliminary analysis of the data collected on this cruise, my colleagues reckon the total freshwater content of the Gyre could be at a record high. A chemical analysis of the ocean surface suggests that sea ice melt contributed around 20 percent of the fresh water mixed up within the surface waters, compared to around 80 percent from Canadian and Russian rivers flowing into the Arctic. The sea ice contribution was thought to be neutral a few decades ago, but the ice is now melting more than it’s growing, as we clearly witnessed, causing an imbalance. The wind circulation is also important in driving the ocean circulation that sucks in fresher surface waters into the Gyre (see an earlier blog of mine for more details).
Why does this all matter? Well, some scientists posited that the Beaufort Gyre oscillates between periods of spinning up and sucking in freshwater, and spinning down and releasing fresh water. A kind of breathing, if you like. The Gyre has been spinning up and sucking in fresh water for a few decades now (2008 saw a big increase) and we keep waiting, with similarly bated breath, for this trend to reverse. If the Gyre does reverse (breathe out), the Arctic Ocean will likely dump a load of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean (as we think it did in the 1970s), which could cause some big impacts on weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere. We’re not expecting a scene out of The Day After Tomorrow, but we’re not entirely sure what could happen either.
This dark half of the Arctic year has been by far the warmest to date on record and storms have repeatedly slammed the sea ice to record lows while pulling in heat from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. If this stormy weather continues, the fresh water dome will break down and the fresh water rapidly drain towards the north Atlantic through the channels of the Canadian archipelago and through the Fram strait east of northern Greenland.
The weather forecast for the next 10 days by the European model is insane. Deep lows will pull massive amounts of heat into the Arctic, which will keep sea ice extent and volume at record low levels for the date and will work to spin down the currents that keep the dome fresh water in the Beaufort sea.
5 day ECMWF weather forecast shows storms entering the Arctic from both the Atlantic and Pacific. The winds will bring enormous amounts of atmospheric heat, taken from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, into the Arctic.
The weather pattern developing in the Arctic is the pattern that has drained the fresh water form the Beaufort gyre in the past. Extremely deep lows are moving from the Atlantic into the Arctic. Low pressure is dominating the region from the Atlantic’s subarctic seas to the Arctic ocean. If this pattern continues through this winter, a volume of fresh water greater than lake Michigan could be set in motion towards the north Atlantic and the overturning circulation could stall when the light fresh water caps the Labrador sea. This could cause the Gulf Stream itself to slow while heat would build up in tropical oceans.
Extreme low pressure is forecast by the ECMWF model to cover the Arctic and north Atlantic in 7 days.
Scientists and Arctic observers are shocked by this year’s extraordinarily warm Arctic weather but the sudden release of fresh water to the Atlantic could cause a sudden shift to much colder winter weather towards the end of the decade. This is a very unpredictable situation, but Greenland ice cores show that rapid, extreme climate oscillations may be triggered by north Atlantic salinity cycles. www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/…
We may be entering a period of extreme climate chaos.
The Trump camp has long been rattling the saber when it comes to environmental regulation and climate change. Donald Trump himself famously called climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese. Well, it now stands that if they follow through with their threats to gut environmental laws and pull out of the Paris Treaty, the very country they'll promote to world leader on these same issues is none other than China. How poetic.
Outgoing White House science adviser, John Holdren, gave an interview to Eos magazine, which reported,
“If the United States were now to back out and say, ‘We’re no longer going to lead,’ the leadership would then fall solely on China’s shoulders,” he said. Last month, Zou Ji, deputy director of China’s National Centre for Climate Change Strategy, told Reuters that if the United States abandons efforts to implement the accord, China’s influence in global climate governance likely would increase.
“I think before anybody considers very seriously changing the U.S. position, they ought to ask themselves, ‘Do we want China to have the sole global leadership in this domain?’” Holdren said. “What are the wider consequences of that? Is that in our national interest?”
The deniers will have to face the fact that there are consequences to your actions. I wonder if they're really prepared to deal with those consequences.
Summary:President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team for the Department of Energy has submitted a detailed questionnaire to the Department.Many of the requests solicit personal information on department employees and consultants relating to the role, if any, they may have played in activities that the transition team appears to be questioning.
The Department correctly has refused to provide answers that identify individuals and their activites, and will furnish only information that is available to the public.
Seeking such information on individuals appears to be propagandizing the scientific activities of the Department.By soliciting this information the transition team implicitly chills the activities of the staff, intimidating them as they carry out their professional duties and casting a pall on their job security.Such behavior is intolerable and must be put to an immediate end.
Introduction. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s dictatorial regime controlled political expression or dissent from the party line by encouraging citizens to inform on their neighbors; even family members would inform on their relatives.Mark Osiel writes of citizens of former Soviet bloc countries who still struggle with memories of “neighbors informing on neighbors, friends on friends and husbands on wives….People watch one another, in even the most private settings, with hair-trigger sensitivity to the possibility of betrayal” (“Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law”, 1997, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ).
As President-Elect Donald Trump prepares to assume the awesome powers of the U.S. presidency he expressed a view eerily consonant with those above.As reported in Time on Nov. 25, 2016 he told a rally in Myrtle Beach, SC “[p]eople move into a house a block down the road, you know who’s going in. You can see and you report them to the local police.”He understood that in most cases such informing on one’s neighbors would be unfounded and so “be wrong, but that’s OK.”President-Elect Trump, it appears, is perfectly comfortable with this remarkable invasion of our right to privacy.He condones neighbor-on-neighbor espionage, one of the means that police-state dictatorships have used in the past to maintain power.
Trump Transition Team’s Questionnaire to the Department of Energy.The Trump administration’s transition team for the Department of Energy has issued a detailed set of 74 questions directed to the Department’s employees, requesting detailed information on programs and staffing related to climate change and nuclear energy, and other operations as well. Among the questions are certain ones asking employees to name colleagues engaged in climate science activities, and their funding, and to list other individual professional activities.Such questions are transcribed here verbatim, identified by the number used in the document:
·13. Can you provide a list of all Department of energy employees or contractors who have attended any Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings?[The social cost of carbon relates to secondary costs to society as a result of carbon-induced global warming.These include damages from extreme climate events, loss of agricultural yield, wildfires, and adverse health effects, for example.]Can you provide a list of when those meetings were and any materials distributed at those meetings, emails associated with those meetings, or materials created by Department employees or contractors in anticipation of or as a result of those meetings?
·15. What is the Department’s role with respect to JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear agreement)? Which office has the lead for the Department?
·19. Can you provide a list of Department employees or contractors who attended any of the Conference of the Parties (under the UNFCCC) in the last fiv years?[A Conference of the Parties (COP) is one of the annual meetings held under the UNFCCC (U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change) that negotiates international climate treaties.The meeting that resulted in the Paris Agreement of December 2015 was COP21.]
·69. Can you provide a list of the top twenty salaried employees of the lab, with total remuneration and the portion funded by DOE?
·70. Can you provide a list of all peer-reviewed publications by lab staff for the past three years?
·71. Can you provide a list of current professional society memberships of lab staff?
·72. Can you provide a list of publications by lab staff for the past three years?
·73. Can you provide a list of all websites maintained by or contributed to by laboratory staff during work hours for the past three years?
·74. Can you provide a list of all other positions currently held by lab staff, paid and unpaid, including faculties, boards, and consultancies?
Questions 13, 19, and 69-74 are troubling because they ask agency personnel to point the finger at their colleagues, and to identify their work products and their communications, in ways that are potentially threatening to the named employee’s status within the Department or to his/her employment security.This chilling effect arises because it is widely known that President-elect Trump and the nominee for Secretary of Energy oppose action to address climate change.Any request for information on particular Department employees must be considered threatening under these circumstances.
(In passing, it should be noted that part of the answer to Question 15 is that the current Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, is a nuclear physicist who left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become the Secretary.He was directly involved at the highest levels of the negotiations leading to the Iran nuclear agreements.)
On December 13, 2016 the Department of Energy responded to the questionnaire by refusing to provide information on the personal activities of its staff to the Trump transition team.The Department will limit its responses to information that is already available to the public.
Propagandizing Science. Personnel in Federal agencies are hired because of their technical expertise in their fields, not for their political views.They are career government employees, who serve under administrations of both parties, carrying out their duties and responsibilities as professionals, not as political appointees.The requests for information in this questionnaire undermine this premise of federal employment.Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said the questionnaire “suggests the Trump administration plans a witch hunt for civil servants who’ve simply been doing their jobs….Democrats and Republicans alike should unite to condemn any action that intimidates, threatens or retaliates against civil servants” professionally carrying out the duties of their positions.
The troublesome questions above are easily interpreted as attempts to intimidate the Department’s employees, perhaps leading to a purge of their positions with the Department.This cannot be tolerated.Our government can never be run as a propagandistic enterprise that dismisses meritocracy in its employment policies.Career departmental employees must be respected for the professional expertise they bring to their work.
I recently came across an old email (sorry, it got lost in the bustle) from a reader who asked me to review the work of a particular climate-change denier – Nir Shaviv. What makes this request interesting is that this individual is scientifically qualified. He is a full professor of astrophysics at the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has numerous awards.
“I started this website in 2006 after I realized that I need a venue unrelated to the university where I can express my non-standared (but correct) views on global warming.”
So, let’s take a look at some of his claims and see just how correct they really are. I was only able to locate two postings directly addressing his claims on climate change and comment on both of them below.
Dr. Shaviv addresses the question of whether changes in the global temperature are the result of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases or from natural variability in the solar output, stating,
“As I try to demonstrate below, the truth is probably somewhere in between, with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the nextcentury. Following empirical evidence I describe below, about 2/3's (give or take a third or so) of the warming should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes.”
Later, in the same posting, he states,
“Such a link is potentially important for global warming because over the 20thcentury, solar activity has been increasing.”
“…the total solar irradiance variations are relatively small (a few 0.1%), the latter are most likely not the explanation of climate variability.”
A heart of Dr. Shaviv’s claim concerns the incoming flux of galactic cosmic rays varies as a function of solar activity and is, therefore, responsible for climate change. It is true that cosmic rays affect our climate and cosmic ray flux is affected by solar activity. This was part of a submission to my $10,000 Global Warming Skeptic Challenge and I addressed it in the submission The Cloud Mystery (Cosmic Rays) where I made the observation,
“They claim (correctly) that as solar activity goes down, more GCRs reach the planet and create more clouds. As more clouds are made, temperature goes down. The problem is that solar activity is dropping, we are seeing more GCRs, but the temperature is going up.”
Dr. Shaviv produces a plot of the number of sunspots to support his claim that solar activity has been increasing, resulting in decreasing numbers of cosmic rays, which results in fewer clouds and increasing temperatures. Unfortunately, his plot actually shows the sunspot numbers have been decreasing since the mid-20thcentury. Hence, by his claims, global temperatures should have been going down since the 1960s, but they have actually been climbing.
He concludes with the claim that AGW isn’t real because there is a likely alternative explanation, stating, “Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th century global warming, on condition that there is a strong solar/climate link through modulation of the cosmic ray flux and the atmospheric ionization. Evidence for such a link has been accumulating over the past decade, and by now, it is unlikely that it does not exist.”
I agree with Dr. Shaviv that there is a link between solar activity and the climate. However, he is certainly wrong in his claim that solar activity has been increasing. By his very argument, we can rule out solar activity as the cause of global warming. Poetically, Dr. Shaviv proved this point himself with the data he provided.
Sorry, Nir, your claims on this topic are not correct.
This is more of Shaviv’s effort to make the case that global warming is due to galactic cosmic rays. This time, he claims there is a 140-million year cycle to ice ages and this correlates with the solar system passing through spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. As we pass through these arms, the amount of galactic rays reaching Earth varies, leading to changes in the climate. There are a number of issues, the biggest being that the solar system doesn’t pass through spiral arms every 140-million years. There is no such correlation between spiral arm passages and ice ages. Oops. You can read a nice summation of the issue here.
Another issue is the fact that we don’t enter and exit spiral arms on the scale of decades. It takes the solar system at least 225 million years to orbit the galaxy one time. The orbital velocity of spiral arms is different from the rest of the galaxy because they are not structures, but regions. Basically, spiral arms are waves of star formation. As new stars are made in these regions, the biggest and brightest stars light up the region. But, these stars are also the shortest-lived and come to an end relatively quickly in supernovae explosions, leaving behind the longer-lived, but dimmer stars. As the area of star formation advances, the spiral arm advances.
Because they are regions, and not structures, spiral arms do not rotate around the center of the galaxy as the same speed as the stars (including our’s). Since there is a difference in speed, it is, at least in theory, possible to enter and/or leave spiral arms. Shaviv’s claim is that as we approach the spiral arms, the amount of cosmic rays will increase because they come from supernovae and we will be getting closer to those cosmic events.
The Milky Way galaxy has two main spiral arms and we are nowhere near either of them. However, there are spurs to these arms and we are located in the Orion Arm, which is a spur of the main Perseus Arm. In order for Shaviv’s claim to be accurate, we would have had to have made a significant approach to this arm in the last 60 years and we know that isn’t the case. I can’t find any reference to when we might have entered the Orion Arm, but it didn’t happen recently. We can tell this by looking at the constellations. Many of our most recognizable constellations are located in the Orion Arm, including the constellation Orion (hence, the name), and these constellations have been mapped for thousands of years and there has been very little change over the course of recorded history and the amount of change that has occurred since 1960 is so small it can be detected only with very accurate scientific instruments. In fact, it is possible our solar system was created in the Orion Arm and we have been in it all along.
In any event, I cannot find any evidence to suggest our location in the cosmos has changed so much over the last 60 years that is has led to a change in the cosmic ray flux large enough to change the climate as much as has been witnessed.
The whole issue of solar activity and cosmic rays has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. Here is one such excellent review. There are also tabs on that page for intermediate and basic level discussions. I particularly love the statement at the end:
“That’s a coffin with so many nails in it already that the hard part is finding a place to hammer in a new one.”
Again, the science doesn’t support Dr. Shaviv’s claims. I'm sure he's a capable astrophysicist, but he needs to leave climate change alone.
As I said, these were the only two postings I could find on his blog that addressed climate change. There might be more, but these two are most certainly not scientifically valid. Which goes to demonstrate the point, once again, that there is no scientifically credible evidence to suggest manmade climate change is not happening.
By the end of the present century, 2100, man-made global warming could be a major existential threat to humanity’s way of life on earth, and to the broad ecological balance underpinning our lives and those of future generations.
Everyone will feel the consequences of worsening global warming.I’m a scientist who is deeply concerned for the welfare not only of our planet’s present inhabitants, but especially for our progeny:those whom we already know, and those yet to be born.You and your family, including your children and your several grandchildren, as well as the members of your incoming administration and their families, will be among those who will be impacted as warming continues.
Why should we care about global warming?Here’s a montage of images showing a sampling of damage and harm already brought on by warming, both domestically and abroad:
The Paris Agreement of December 2015 to limit global greenhouse gas emissions is a landmark accord. The U. S., China and other major emitters of greenhouse gases provided important leadership in reaching agreement.197 member states of the United Nations signed the accord, and by mid-November 2016 115 nations have ratified it.It entered into force on November 4, 2016, with U. S. participation.
President-elect Trump, in your interview with the New York Times on Nov. 22, 2016 you stated “I have an open mind to [climate change]. We’re going to look very carefully.” The nations signing the Paris Agreement look to the U.S. for continued leadership in its implementation, and are apprehensive about the possibility that you will pull the U. S.out of the agreement.
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Science provides an objective view by which we see the world.We humans can’t change the scientific framework underlying the causes of global warming, its worsening, and its harmful effects.Denying the present egregious climate patterns cannot change them or make them disappear.
Climate scientists understand that excess man-made CO2 leads to increased warming of the Earth system due to the greenhouse effect.The relevant facts and scientific data are summarized here:
·Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an important atmospheric greenhouse gas (one that traps heat leaving the surface of the earth and returns some of it to the surface.Other man-made chemicals are also greenhouse gases, but in this letter I focus on CO2).
·CO2is a main product formed by burning fossil fuels; the excess CO2 formed when humans use fossil fuels for energy has been accumulating in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began.
·Physical scientists recognized the greenhouse activity of CO2 as early as the nineteenth century, and understood even then that continued burning of fossil fuels could lead to warming of the earth.
·A particular property of CO2 (carbon isotope ratios) measured over time shows categorically and irrefutably that the increasing amount of CO2in the atmosphere originates from humans’ use of fossil fuels, and not from any other possible source.
·For the last 800,000 years atmospheric CO2 has never exceeded 280 volumes per million volumes of air (parts per million, ppm).Humanity’s burning of fossil fuels has now pushed that above 400 ppm (www. CO2.earth).The rate that we are adding new CO2is far faster than at any time in the last 800,000 years.
·Most CO2we add to the air stays in the atmosphere for centuries or longer.So the coal burned in the nineteenth century produced CO2 that’s still in the air today.This is why man-made CO2 is such a problem.
·Because of the greenhouse activity of CO2 the earth’s temperature has been increasing, following the same long-term trend as the increase in CO2.
·Climate models show that the recent increase in global average temperature is due to the increasing excess man-made CO2 in the air, not simply to natural physical processes of the earth system.
·Annual global average surface temperatures in 2014 and 2015 reached record highsnever seen in the historical record (beginning 1880). This record-setting trend continues through August 2016.
Historical global warming up to the present has already caused major damage and visited significant harms on humans the world over.President-elect Trump, the extreme events presented in the graphic montage above are just a small, unrepresentative set of examples of damaging, destructive and or disruptive events already brought on by global warming.The damages and disruptions brought by these events require significant fiscal outlays at the local, state and federal levels to repair damage and to construct adaptive infrastructure in the hope of averting future damage.These expenses have been unforeseen and so not included in budgets.Ultimately they are borne by our taxpayers.In addition, insurance companies will need to include new, and higher, risk premiums due from insured clients to account for the increased likelihood of future claims.These expenses, consequences of burning fossil fuels, are not built into the sales price of the fuels, which reflect only the costs of extraction, processing and distribution of the fuels.
President-elect Trump, the demand for fossil fuels and resulting further global warming will only increase in future decades unless we intervene.The rapidly increasing global population clearly adds to energy demand.As developing countries grow economically they demand more energy to sustain their progress.
If future energy demand is fulfilled using fossil fuels models project that the resulting global warming will cause more intense heat waves, intensified drought, crop failures and forest wildfires in certain regions of the world; more extreme precipitation and resulting severe flooding in other regions; and continued sea level rise with worsening coastal flooding.Thus harms and damages already experienced will grow more severe.
·Climate models successfully reproduce past historical climate trends.This provides confidence that they can illustrate future developments.
·These models show that future excess global warming depends in almost a straight-line fashion on the excess addition of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere.Limiting CO2 emissions will minimize the future temperature increase.
·In the absence of measures adopted worldwide to constrain further CO2emissions by 2100 the global average temperature could reach about 8.5ºF (4.7ºC) above the average temperature during the interval 1861-1880.Presently that average has already increased by about 1.6ºF (0.9ºC).
·The kinds of harms and damages already identified would become much worse in the absence of emission constraints.
·Rising sea levels are already irreversible because, averaged over a full year, the temperatures in polar regions, and over mountain glaciers, are warm enough to yield net melting of ice.Also, as water warms, it expands, further contributing to rising seas.
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President-elect Trump, the Paris Agreement affords your administration the opportunity to expand investment in renewable energy, creating large numbers of new jobs.In the coming decades it has been estimated that US$20 trillion will be needed to provide expanded global energy demand. Your administration should enthusiastically embrace the Agreement, using it as an incentive to promote profitable new investments in renewable energy that will expand employment among America’s workers.
There is a lot of spin that Trump's election will be a good thing for coal. For instance, he has nominated the coal-industry backed anti-science stooge Myron Ebell to head the EPA and dismantle regulations and programs that protect the environment, which is what the EPA is supposed to be all about. However, the facts seem to indicate even this won't save the coal industry.
Coal's problem with Trump is that he's a businessman and coal simply doesn't make good business sense. In fact, the only possible way any power company can afford to use coal is to receive massive government subsidies and pass the cost of operations on to others. Besides the actual cost of coal (subsidized by the taxpayer), other costs include the cost of acid rain, particulate pollution, mercury emissions, coal sludge and greenhouse gas emissions. More and more, the coal industry is being forced to pay its way and it is becoming economically unfeasible as a power source. 'Cheap' coal is a myth and market forces are demonstrating this. Nothing Ebell or Trump can do will change that.
As an example, steps to reduce the amount of mercury emitted by coal-burning power plants has resulted in 19% lower levels of mercury poisoning in Atlantic fish. This reduction has occurred more quickly than expected and was the result of EPA regulations. The evidence this is true is the fact that fish from the Pacific Ocean, a region polluted by Asia power plants, have not experienced the same improvement. Ebell will have a hard time allowing power plants to ramp-up mercury emissions. Even if they try, the courts will have something to say about it.
And then there was this interesting piece of news - the largest ever shale oil deposit has been discovered in Texas, containing at least 20 billion, and possibly 100 billion, barrels of oil recoverable with today's technology. Why is that bad for coal? Because, along with the oil is 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, possibly even as much as 160 trillion cubic feet. How much is that? The US consumed about 27 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2015. This one discovery stands to supply at least six months of the entire country's natural gas needs all by itself. Cheap, plentiful natural gas has been a real problem for coal. Burning natural gas is much cleaner than burning coal, thus, much cheaper. Discovering large deposits of more cheap, easily recovered gas isn't good for coal. Nothing Ebell or Trump does will change that.
Even worse for coal is the fact that renewable energies are becoming cheaper than coal. Critics say this is because of subsidies. This isn't true, but even if it was, don't forget all of those subsidies coal gets. Again, nothing Trump of Ebell will be able to do will change this fact of the business environment.
The outgoing head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, recently stated "there is no bigger threat to American progress and prosperity" than climate change. Again, there is nothing Ebell and Trump can do to change this. Even if they try to deny it with their anti-science logic, the courts have some authority to protect the American people. And, don't count out Congress completely. The Republicans may control both chambers, but many Republicans are admitting manmade climate change is real and the hold that party has is weak. The pro-science group may still carry the day.
These are the economic and business facts. Ebell and Trump can't change them, although I'm sure they will both try their best. In any event, the days of decline for the coal industry will continue while the boom in the renewable industry will continue. The market place demands it.
This writer submitted the following Letter to the Editor of the Hartford (CT) Courant, which was published November 16, 2016.The text is shown below, followed by a screen shotof the letter from the Courant’s website.
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LettersTrump is Global Warming Danger
NOVEMBER 16, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump has tweeted that "global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive". He has appointed a global warming denier, Myron Ebell, to lead the transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he will oversee dismantling federal policies directed toward reducing emission rates.
Undoing America's leadership role in the world's 2015 agreement to battle global warming would not only unleash further U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but also unravel the worldwide agreement.
Scientists around the globe have clearly shown that human burning of fossil fuels causes increased carbon dioxide emissions, and that the added carbon dioxide causes warming of the planet and its resulting environmental harms. Continued unconstrained emissions will wreak worsening environmental damage, leaving our children to contend with the consequences.
I spoke about the science of global warming to high school students two days after the election. They thanked me profusely. It's clear they understood the dangers that continued warming would present for their future. Especially for their sakes, we should oppose Trump's policies.
Henry E. Auer, New Haven
The writer, who holds a Ph.D. in physical biochemistry, has published the Global Warming Blog at warmgloblog.blogspot.com since 2010.
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Screen shot of writer's letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant, accessed November 17, 2016.
