OF BOATS AND BUOYS--OCEAN WARMING "HIATUS" MYSTERY SOLVED

Climate-change deniers were thrilled to report about an apparent slow-down in ocean warming noted in a 2013 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. For once, it appeared that they had some actual data on their side. They will now have to switch back to denying the data, demeaning the researchers (or following Trump and blaming China for making up the whole concept of climate change), since first NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and now an independent consortium of researchers from the US and the UK have shown that the slowdown didn't happen.

It turns out that the slowdown or "hiatus" was largely the result of inappropriately combining temperature readings from satellites, ships and buoys. Buoys tend to give cooler readings than measurements made aboard ships, so as more buoys came on line in recent years, they produced a false cooling signal.

An ARGO float at work--one way scientists measure ocean temperatures/Credit: UCSD

When the three data sets--from ships, buoys and satellites--are analyzed separately, each shows continuous warming of the oceans averaging 0.12 degrees C (0.22 degrees F) per decade over the past 75 years.

"Our results mean that essentially NOAA got it right, that they were not cooking the books," said Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group and the lead author of the new study, published today in the open-access journal Science Advances.

Note, 1/11/17: It didn't take long for the denial to kick in. A story in the conservative UK Spectator argues that "their case rests on the El Nino temperature increase and will be destroyed when the El Nino subsides, as it is currently doing. A temporary victory over the ‘pause’."

Environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli promptly destroys that argument by pointing out that if the El Nino years are analyzed separately, they show warming of 0.18 degrees C (0.32 degrees F) per decade over the past fifty years, as do the La Nina years taken separately, with neutral years averaging 0.16 degrees C (0.29 degrees f) per decade.

If you wonder why climate change denial persists in the face of basic physics, decades of research, and a now visibly destabilized climate, please read Naomi Klein's 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein makes the case that conservatives, representatives of the neoliberal market-fundamentalist consensus realized long ago that acceptance of the reality of human-caused climate change would threaten the foundations of the current global economic system. To preserve the system, they have no choice but to deny the reality as long as they can.

NATURE SHOWING WIDESPREAD CHANGES FROM JUST ONE DEGREE OF WARMING--MORE TO COME

A few years ago I was backpacking in California's Sierra Nevada. Sitting by an alpine lake late in the afternoon, I noticed something interesting. On the hillsides rising up from the lake the stands of pine trees showed a striking pattern. On the lower slopes there were only the remains of dead trees--tall, scraggly skeletons with a few bare branches. A bit higher up the slope was populated by clusters of trees, not the age or height of the dead giants below, but a substantial, growing population. And above them were saplings, staking out still higher ground. "Look at that," I said to my hiking buddies, "the trees are migrating up the slope."

June Lake, Sierra Nevada Range/Credit: Don Graham

At the time, we were pretty sure that we had stumbled upon one, small, local impact of climate change, although of course we knew that what we were seeing could be explained in other ways, and that one case doesn't prove anything.

However, our intuition was probably right. A new study in the prestigious journal Science surveys multiple studies from around the world and finds that 82 percent of the vital biological functions they examined showed clear changes in response to the 1 degree C the Earth has warmed since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

"Genes are changing, species' physiology and physical features such as body size are changing, species are shifting their ranges and we see clear signs of entire ecosystems under stress, all in response to changes in climate on land and in the ocean," says wildlife ecologist Brett Scheffers, at the University of Florida.

Climate change impacts on ecological processes in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems/Credit: Scheffers et al., Science, 11 November, 2016

The authors explain that the genetic, physical and population changes they documented represent crucial aspects of the healthy functioning of Earth's ecosystems, biological systems on which human well-being depends. These impacts varied from 60 percent for genetic changes to 100 percent for changes in species distribution. And, these wide-ranging impacts are happening sooner than many experts expected.

"Some people didn't expect this level of change for decades," said environmental researcher James Watson, at the University of Queensland, Australia. "The impacts of climate change are being felt with no ecosystem on Earth being spared."

It's important to recognize that these changes are not just abstractions of interest to scientists and nature lovers. They impact us all directly. The authors write:

Disruptions scale from the gene to the ecosystem and have documented consequences for people, including unpredictable fisheries and crop yields, loss of genetic diversity in wild crop varieties, and increasing impacts of pests and diseases. 

Since we're seeing these across-the-board changes sooner than expected, and with only one degree C of human-caused warming, it becomes all the more urgent to do everything we can to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and to move as quickly as possible to alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro.

With the coming Trump administration threatening to do everything it can to reverse the progress towards climate-change mitigation that the US has made in recent years, we will have to look to the rest of the world to recognize the need to sustain a healthy and habitable planet, and act to preserve it.

OBIT FOR AUSTRALIA'S GREAT BARRIER REEF

The Great Barrier Reef is considered Earth's largest living structure. It has survived and grown for 25 million years, providing shelter for thousands of species and uncountable billions of organisms. In recent years rising ocean temperatures and ocean acidification--both driven by the CO2 that we are pouring into the atmosphere--have caused repeated bleaching events, in which the coral-building organisms expel the photosynthesizing algae that feed them. The longer the water around them remains too warm, the more likely the reef-building corals are to starve and die.

It now appears that with more heating and acidification locked in due to the CO2 we've already pumped into the atmosphere, and with CO2 emissions still soaring, the 25-million-year-old Great Barrier Reef is doomed.

Environmental (and food) writer Rowan Jacobsen has written the reef's obituary. It's a must read for anyone who cares about the future of life on Earth--including our own.

Bleached coral, Keppel Islands, Great Barrier Reef: Credit Wikipedia

As many of you may know, Jacobsen's obituary for the Great Barrier Reef has gone viral. It has raised the ire of many scientists, who point out that the reef--while suffering the worst bleaching event in history and clearly threatened--is not in fact dead, and potentially can be saved. I think we can safely assume that Jacobsen knows all that, and is thrilled that his premature obit may in fact galvanize people to face up to the life-or-death climatic challenges it, and we, face.