Attenborough first visited and documented the reef 60 years ago. Part one of the three part series contains an allegorical story from the Cairns area about sea level rise from the aboriginal dreamtime.
The Great Barrier Reef, geologically speaking, is a relatively recent phenomena. Sea levels were 70 to 90 metres lower during the Ice Age period with a narrow and steep shoreline where the east coast of Australia fell sharply to deeper waters. Sea levels started to rise at the end of the last ice age about 14,000 years ago.
Australia's Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has made a joke of Pacific Nations facing rising sea levels due to climate change. The Australian Prime Minister, recently returned from meeting with Pacific Island Nations in Port Moresby, laughed at the joke, before Social Services Minister Scott Morrison pointed out the boom microphone overhead.
Now there are calls for Peter Dutton to resign and Tony Abbott to apologize to the people of the Pacific and the world for the insensitive nature of the comments. The President of Kiribati Anote Tong, Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony De Brum and PNG Governor of Oro Province Gary Juffa, among others, have all condemned the comments and called for a public apology.
A lunchtime press conference on Abbott's decision to accept 12,000 Syrian refugees went awry today. As the press conference was running late Immigration Minister Peter Dutton remarked that it was running to "Cape York time". Tony Abbott responded, "we had a bit of that up in Port Moresby".
Dutton then added, "time doesn't mean anything when you're about to have water lapping at your door". to watch the Prime Minister laughed.
Then Social Services Minister Scott Morrison pointed out to both men that there was a microphone overhead. You could see Dutton face change...
It may have been a private conversation but it revealed the disdain that Abbott and Dutton feel for our neighboring countries and their leaders and for the people of the Pacific.
Once the video was published condemnation from all sides was swift.
See: Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton Joke About Flooding Of Small Island Nations
The conversation begins with Peter Dutton insulting Aboriginal people – and ethnic and Muslim leaders who were attending the roundtable summit – about their perceived indifference to punctuality.
DUTTON: It’s Cape York time.
ABBOTT: (laughs) What’s this mate?
DUTTON: It’s Cape York time.
ABBOTT: We had a bit of that up in Port Moresby.
DUTTON: Oh yeah.
ABBOTT: Yeah, yeah.
ABBOTT: Anyway, it was a good meeting. It was a good meeting.
MORRISON: When was… was it in Moresby?
ABBOTT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DUTTON: Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to be, you know, have water lapping at your door.
ABBOTT: (laughs) Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Morrison interrupts with a warning.
MORRISON: There’s a boom (microphone) up there.
ABBOTT: Yeah, yeah.
Former Prime Minister Abbott has labeled climate change ‘crap’, and made Australia the only nation on earth to abolish a price on carbon.
Labor and Green political leaders and Environmental leaders such as Greenpeace's CEO Kumi Naidoo have condemned the comments and called for an apology. Pacific Islanders with 350Pacific have called for Minister Dutton to resign over the offensive climate remarks.
Reaction and condemnation by the Twitterati was swift
@bencubby@joshgnosis These people could not care less about anyone but themselves - recording is an insight into how much they care
The Labor Party responded with both Federal Opposition leader Bill Shorten and Richard Marles, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, tweeting derogatory comments on the interaction.
Greens spokeperson on Climate Change Senator Larissa Waters issued the following statement:
“These people are not governing for the good of Australia. They smoke cigars to celebrate their cruel budget, then they laugh about the effect their policies are having on people and our planet,” Senator Waters said.
“It’s disgusting and they know it’s wrong. Why else would they be scared of a boom mic?”
“What else are these clowns saying when the microphones are off? Imagine what Cabinet meetings must be like.
“What we’ve seen today is raw contempt for the survival and safety of our Pacific Island neighbours and our own coastal communities.
“We’re talking about peoples’ lives, and this government is laughing.
“It’s a huge diplomatic blunder that will enrage our Pacific Island neighbours, who have been calling on Australia to save their homes. What an insult for them to now hear the Australian Prime Minister laughing at the prospect of their homes going underwater.
“The mask has absolutely come off today. The government knows what it will cost to deliver for their fossil fuel donors, and they’re intent on doing it anyway.
“It’s now clear to everyone how impossible it will be for Abbott’s Australia to have any credibility at the UN climate talks in Paris later this year.
“This is the man we sent to the UN in Geneva this week to negotiate about refugees’ lives, for goodness sake.
“Abbott and Dutton are clowns, but they’re the only ones laughing,” Senator Waters said.
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowing much faster than expected
It seems that the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster disaster movie The Day after Tommorrow, while highly exaggerated, had the seed of scientific fact based upon the possible disruption that could occur from the slowdown or catastrophic cessation of the Atlantic ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as the thermohaline circulation or Great ocean conveyor belt.
A new study by Rahmstorf et al (2015) published in Nature Climate Change has found evidence for a slowdown of the overturning circulation. This is based upon multiple lines of observation suggesting that over recent decades the current system has been weaker than ever before in the last century, or even in the last millennium.
The Gulf Stream is part of this circulation system with warm waters, which are naturally lighter, flowing north, and responsible for the mild climate of north western Europe. In the sub-polar region these waters cool, become more dense, and sink to the bottom before they start flowing south along the ocean bottom towards the tropics, then the South Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. The conveyor belt of currents connects the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Southern Oceans providing heat transfer and mixing throughout the globe.
Within a generation or two sea level rise is going to really start to affect most coastal nations. Alreadyit is having an affect on small island nations with coral atolls being inundated and their fresh water lenses being contaminated by salt water. But developed countries will also feel the pain such as the predicament facing Miami in Florida. This is a timely article on what the future holds for Miami:
It is amazing for me to see the very aggressive building boom underway in south Florida; on the beaches and barrier islands, throughout downtown and in the low western areas bordering the Everglades. They are building like there is no tomorrow. Unfortunately, they are right.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published its assessment of sea level rise in 2012 as part of the National Climate Assessment. Including estimates based on limited and maximum melt of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, it anticipated a raise of 4.1 to 6.6ft (1.25 to 2m) by 2100, reaching 2ft (0.6m) by around 2050 and 3ft (0.9m) by around 2075.
This degree of sea level rise would make nearly all the barrier islands of the world uninhabitable, inundate a major portion of the world’s deltas, upon which hundreds of millions of people live, and leave low-lying coastal zones like southeast Florida increasingly difficult to maintain infrastructure services for and increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes and storms.
Rising sea level should concern us all. Sea levels will not rise evenly: it will vary from region to region. In Eastern and southern Australia sea levels are rising at about the global average, but in Northern Australia the rate is three times or more above the average. It poses difficult decisions of climate adaptation now about whether to defend coastal infrastructure or a managed retreat.
This article by Andrew Campbell, Charles Darwin University and Stephen Garnett, Charles Darwin University, highlights the planning dilemmas involved with rapidly rising sea levels.
A "glacial pace" can no longer be used to describe the speed of the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland. The latest study of Jakobshavn Isbræ (Jakobshavn Glacier) from Greenland reveals the glacier is setting new speed records. In the summer of 2012 the glacier reached a record speed of more than 17 kilometres per year, or over 46 metres per day. This is an unprecedented speed for a glacier and appears to be the fastest ever recorded for any glacier or ice stream in Greenland or Antarctica, according to a new study published in The Cryosphere.
The glacier discharges ice bergs in calving events from West Greenland and it's calving face continues to retreat over a deep depression in the fjord, which adds to it's instability.
“We are now seeing summer speeds more than 4 times what they were in the 1990s on a glacier which at that time was believed to be one of the fastest, if not the fastest, glacier in Greenland,” says Ian Joughin, a researcher at the Polar Science Center, University of Washington and lead-author of the study: Brief Communication: Further summer speedup of Jakobshavn Isbræ.
Watch this informative video By Peter Sinclair and the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media on ice sheet collapse and sea level rise and past climates.
"We are still potentially underestimating the instability of the ice sheets" informs Stefen Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the oceans from Postdam University. "The IPCC has greatly revised it's estimates of how unstable the Greenland ice sheet was"
Dr Richard Alley in a graph illuminates that on current CO2 levels we can expect sea level rise to impact 10 per cent of the Earth's population, hundreds of millions of people. He says in the video that "Greenland is very tightly tied to temperature, and if it gets too hot, it goes away".
Sea level rise is perhaps one of the greatest perils of climate change over the long term according to Dr Peter Ward. The rate of rise will start relatively small and accelerate over this century and the following ones. The latest IPCC report projects sea level rise at 28-98 centimeters by the year 2100, and while this is more than the previous report, there is considerable doubt that this may be still unduly conservative. We simply do not know and understand the complexities of ice sheet disintegration - a non-linear process.
The Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said in a media release:
The experts were also asked for a “high-end” estimate below which they expect sea-level to stay with 95 percent certainty until the year 2100. This high-end value is relevant for coastal planning. For unmitigated emissions, half of the experts (51%) gave 1.5 meters or more and a quarter (27%) 2 meters or more. The high-end value in the year 2300 was given as 4.0 meters or higher by the majority of experts (58%).
And yet here in Australia we see the Federal Government dropping the ball in co-ordinating coastal planning, and State Governments also withdrawing, leaving planning up to local Government which largely lacks the resources and cannot afford to carry the risk of inappropriate planning and development on our coasts. Queensland is just the latest Government to absolve itself of this planning responsibility.
"Continuous sea-level rise is something we cannot avoid unless global temperatures go down again," said climate scientist Anders Levermann from the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "Thus we can be absolutely certain that we need to adapt. Sea-level rise might be slow on time scales on which we elect governments, but it is inevitable and therefore highly relevant for almost everything we build along our coastlines, for many generations to come."
Anders Levermann was taking about the implications of a new study he is a co-author of - The multi-millennial sea-level commitment of global warming. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online during July 2013. It is one of the first studies to combine analyses of four major contributors to potential sea level rise into a collective estimate, and compare it with evidence of past sea-level responses to global temperature changes.
The result is a longterm estimate that global sea levels will rise about 2.3 meters, or more than seven feet, over the next two thousand years for every degree (Celsius) the planet warms. "the total sea-level commitment after 2,000 y is quasi-linear, with a sensitivity of 2.3 m °C" reports the study.
"The study did not seek to estimate how much the planet will warm, or how rapidly sea levels will rise," noted Professor Peter Clark, an Oregon State University paleo-climatologist and co-author on the PNAS article. "Instead, we were trying to pin down the 'sea-level commitment' of global warming on a multi-millennial time scale. In other words, how much would sea levels rise over long periods of time for each degree the planet warms and holds that warmth?"
To most of us, what is hidden beneath the waves of our coastal environment remains invisible and is little thought about or cared about. Yet seagrass meadows, though hidden from our direct view, contribute valuable ecological services supporting valuable fish nurseries, as food for dugongs and turtles, and as a highly efficient blue carbon sink sequestering carbon.
A new study of the seagrass meadows in Moreton Bay, Queensland found that a significant proportion of valuable seagrass habitats would be lost without action to offset the affects of climate change. "The area of seagrass habitat was predicted to decline by 17% by 2100 under a scenario of SLR of 1.1 m." said the study.
Lead author Dr Megan Saunders from UQ's Global Change Institute said "Seagrass meadows not only help to slow climate change by sucking up a large portion of the world's plant-stored carbon, but they also benefit livelihoods, food security, fisheries, biodiversity, shoreline protection and other ecosystem services,"
Did you know that during 2011 sea level rise went into reverse and lost 5mm from the global oceans? No? How about that since then, much to the chagrin of climate deniers, sea level rise has accelerated from 3.18mm per year - the rate from 1993 to 2010 - to increase to 10mm per year over the last two years. This acceleration more than makes up for the pothole. The primary cause of this sea level 'speed bump' was the back to back La Nina which moved a phenomenal amount of water from the global oceans to the land. The water has since been making it's way back into the world's oceans.
The question arises, does this explain the 10mm per year increase in sea level rise over the last 2 years? Is ocean thermal expansion or ice sheet melting perhaps contributing more? This may also be the start to an exponential sea level rise which NASA climatologist James Hansen has argued is a possibility. Rob Painting on Skeptical Science says that there is no evidence yet to suggest that ice loss from Greenland or Antarctica has added to the speed bump in any significant manner. We will have to wait and see what the impact of future El Nino or La Nina's will be on sea level rise, and keep watching the rate of mass loss from the ice sheets.
I came across this lecture by climatologist Kevin Trenbeth in which he talks about this sea level speed bump as a unique occurrence in recorded history. While previously there has been slight reductions in sea level rise corresponding to La Nina years, this event is a prominent change. Trenbeth discusses this extreme event near the end of his lecture on October 15, 2012. It is well worth watching the Youtube video if you have a spare 1 hour and 5 minutes. He provides an excellent introduction to climate change and extreme weather events and he is an animated speaker with clear and informative graphical and text slides.
Climate change induced sea level rise of one metre is likely to destroy 60 per cent of the developing world's wetlands says a new World Bank research working paper. The economic loss of these wetlands is estimated at approximately $630 million US dollars per year.
The study found that about 99% of the coastal wetlands at elevations of one meter or less in the Middle East and North Africa could disappear, as well as 77% in sub-Saharan Africa, 66% in East Asia and 39% in Latin America and the Caribbean. Places like the iconic Sundarbans of Bangladesh and India, a major home and refuge to the Bengal tiger, are under threat.
One of the impacts of the Greenland Ice sheet melt is the increase in cold fresh water impacting on the themohaline circulation, the great ocean conveyor belt. There are signs the Gulf Stream has slowed down by a third due to this influx of melt water. The Gulf Stream acts to drag water away from the coast of North America, so a slowing current will add to greater sea level rise along the east coast of north America: increasing sea level rise by up to 4 times the global average.
Scientists from the US Geological Survey (USGS) identified that since about 1990, sea-level rise in the 1,000-km (600 mile) stretch of coastal zone from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to north of Boston, Massachusetts is a sea level rise hotspot. This is based on tide gauge data and concurs with sea level rise modelling.
Figure 2: Mean cumulative mass balance of all reported glaciers (blue line) and the reference glaciers (red line), from glaciers in the Americas and Eurasia.
Preliminary figures for glacier mass balance for 2010/2011 have just been released and show that data from more than 100 mountain glaciers from around the world continue a strong trend of losing mass. The melt water from glaciers flows into the oceans and adds to sea level rise.
The report says:
"The average mass balance of the glaciers with available long-term observation series around the world continues to be negative, with tentative figures indicating a further thickness reduction of one metre water equivalent (m w.e.) during the hydrological year 2011. The new data continues the global trend in strong ice loss over the past few decades and brings the cumulative average thickness loss of the reference glaciers since 1980 at more than 15 m w.e."
Climate scientist James Hansen and his colleague Makiko Sato have released a new discussion paper with updated data on ice sheet mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica, with implications for possible multi-metre sea level rise this century. It makes for some interesting reading - there is a link to Hansen's website and the paper at the end.
The thesis that Hansen has put forward for several years is that Ice Sheet collapse is a non-linear process: that with the inclusion of amplifying climate feedbacks it is likely to follow an exponential rate of acceleration - a doubling rate. It might be a 10 year doubling time, or less. This will lead to extensive sea level rise, perhaps in the order of 5 metres this century.
But accurate data measurements of ice mass loss via laboriously estimating mass input and output has only been available since the early 1990s, and accurate satellite measurements (Gravimetry) via the GRACE satellites since 2000.
What these measurements show is that ice mass loss from both Greenland and Antarctica are accelerating, but the data for the time period is still too short to determine whether ice sheet mass loss will follow a somewhat linear path, or an exponential path doubling every 10 years or shorter time period.
Caption: Figure 2: Greenland (a) and Antarctic (b) mass change deduced from gravitational field measurements by Velicogna (2009) and best-fits with 5-year and 10-year mass loss doubling times. From NASA: Earth's Climate History: Implications for Tomorrow Hansen and Sato July 2011
Sea Level is rising 60% faster than IPCC projections according to a new climate change related study comparing the actual rise in CO2 concentration, global temperature and sea level with past projections done by the IPCC.
Rising Global temperatures are consistent with past projections made by the IPCC fourth assessment report. But Projections for sea level rise amounted to 2 mm a year, while sea-levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year.
Lead author of the study, Stefan Rahmstorf, said: "This study shows once again that the IPCC is far from alarmist, but in fact has under-estimated the problem of climate change. That applies not just for sea-level rise, but also to extreme events and the Arctic sea-ice loss."
Figure 2: Sea level measured by satellite altimeter (red with linear trend line; AVISO data from (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales) and reconstructed from tide gauges (orange, monthly data from Church and White (2011)). Tide gauge data were aligned to give the same mean during 1993–2010 as the altimeter data. The scenarios of the IPCC are again shown in blue (third assessment) and green (fourth assessment); the former have been published starting in the year 1990 and the latter from 2000. From Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011 Stefan Rahmstorf et al 2012 Environ. Res. Lett. 7 044035 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044035
There is a rapid response connection between polar temperature changes, ice volume and sea leavel according to a new method of dating of sea level records and comparing them with temperature data and ice core records for the last 150,000 years.
Previously the dating of ice-volume changes relied on the ‘Red Sea relative sea-level (RSL) record’. However this dating method did not have independent age control which inhibited detailed comparison with other well-dated climate parameters, such as temperature or CO2 records from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The new method of dating the RSL record used Mediterranean data from radiometric (Uranium-series) dating of cave deposits which could be applied to the last glacial cycle reaching back 150,000 years, providing a continuous sea-level record with excellent independent age control.
According to the study sea level rise reached speeds of "at least 1.2 metres per century during all major episodes of ice-volume reduction" in the last 150,000 years.
One of the study authors, Professor Elco Rohling from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton said: "This is the first time that these rates could be measured for any other period than the end-of-ice age 'terminations/deglaciations'. Although it is always hard to step from palaeo reconstructions to future projections, it suggests that when significant ice-volume adjustments happen, they are rarely slow."
Well this is a nice pickle! It seems that sea level rise won't stop even if we aggressively mitigate global warming and keep global average atmospheric temperatures beneath 2 degrees celsius. The reason, it seems, is there is enormous inertia in the world's oceans and we are now warming the deeper ocean which will continue for hundreds of years.
Simple physics really. You heat a liquid and it expands. This thermal expansion is responsible for about a third of the currently observed rate of sea level rise. And it will continue for several hundred years as deeper cooler layers of the ocean take up the heat from the upper layers. Even if we take aggressive action to reduce carbon emissions, and go carbon negative, such action may only slow the rate of sea level rise as the deeper ocean continues to expand.
A US National Research Council report released June 22 concluded that average global sea level is likely to rise two to three times higher within this century than previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, with the US west coast being particularly affected at greater than the global average for sea level rise.
The study confirms that sea level rise is accelerating and is in accord with other recent studies estimating global sea level rise at a metre or more by the end of the century, with the melting of land ice now the largest component of global sea-level rise (about 65%). Scientists say that Global Warming means 20 Metre sea level rise is in the pipeline.
Scientists studying the geological record have determined that at slightly above current temperatures we are about 20 metres below what the sea level equilibrium should be. Sea levels are increasing and forecast to rise at least a metre this century (although there is a low probability they could be higher than this), much of the change in sea level will occur over several hundred or thousands of years.
Scientists looking at the Pliocene period from 2.7 to 3.2 million years ago, the last time temperatures were at a similar range of 2 degrees C above average, estimated peak sea level was 22 ± 10 m higher than modern levels (extreme likelihood). This rise in sea level would require the equivalent of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets disintegrating, and some volume loss from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. We are already seeing substantial mass loss from Greenland and West Antarctic Ice sheets.
