The hand of man shows through once again in a major weather catastrophe.

 by Larry Powell

The Green Wattle Creek bushfire moves toward the Southern Highlands township of 

Yanderra, Australia as police evacuate. Dec. 2019.
Photo by Helitak 430.

A new study finds, manmade climate change did, indeed, worsen the bushfires which ravaged much of southeastern Australia late last year and early this year. An international team of seventeen scientists has just concluded, the probability of conditions developing like the ones which kindled the catastrophic blazes “has increased by at least 30% since 1900 as a result of anthropogenic climate change.” 

And that figure could be much higher considering that extreme heat, one of the main factors behind this increase, is underestimated in the models used. The heating of the planet, largely due to human extraction and burning of fossil fuels, has, for some time been shown to be the main factor behind the development of storms that are more intense and frequent than before.

Looking to the future, the study predicts, if the temperature rises 2 ºC over 1900 levels, the kind of fire risk which existed during the recent bushfires "will be at least four times more likely." 

Last year was both the hottest and driest in Australia since records began around 1900. Not only were the fires more frequent and intense, they started earlier than usual. They claimed the lives of more than a billion wild animals, thousands of livestock and 34 humans. Almost six thousand buildings were destroyed. And the smoke - which produced air quality hazards some 20 times beyond what were considered levels safe for humans - lingered for months over much of the country.

To quote from the report, "It is well-established that wildfire smoke exposure is associated with respiratory morbidity. Additionally, fine particulate matter in smoke may act as a triggering factor for acute coronary events (such as heart attack-related deaths) as found for previous fires in southeast Australia. Increased bushfire-related risks in a warming climate have significant implications for the health sector."

The research was done by the scientific group, “World Weather Attribution” (WWA). It's a relatively new, international effort to analyze and communicate the possible influences of climate change on extreme weather events.

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Nitrous oxide levels over China.
Jan. 1st, 2020 (l.). Feb. 25th, 2020.
Nasa images.

NASA satellite images show a dramatic fall in pollution over China that is "partly related" to the economic slowdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, the space agency said. Story here.

Climate Change: Life’s a beach - a disappearing one!

natureresearch

A Pexels photo.

Half of the world's beaches, many of which are in densely populated areas, could disappear by the end of the century under current trends of climate change and sea level rise, suggests a paper published in Nature Climate Change. 

Sandy beaches occupy more than one third of the global coastline and have high socio-economic value. Beaches also provide natural coastal protection from marine storms and cyclones. However, erosion, rising sea levels and changing weather patterns threaten the shoreline, its infrastructure and populations.

Michalis Vousdoukas and colleagues analysed a database of satellite images showing shoreline change from 1984 to 2015. The authors extrapolated historical trends to predict future shoreline dynamics under two different climate change scenarios. They determined the ambient shoreline change, driven by physical factors (geological or anthropogenic) and shoreline retreat due to sea level rise. They also examined how erosion from storms may change under climate change and impact shorelines.  

The results of these analyses indicate that around 50% of the world’s sandy beaches are at risk of severe erosion. The risk for erosion is particularly high in certain countries under both climate scenarios, including The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, where over 60% of sandy coastline may be lost. When the total length of sandy beach projected to be lost is analysed, Australia would be the worst affected with nearly 12,000 km at risk. Canada, Chile, Mexico, China and the United States would also be greatly affected. Additional research could further improve these estimates, which may be impacted by human intervention.

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In the line of fire

Nature Climate Change 

The bushfires burning in Australia have led to widespread local and global calls for increased efforts to mitigate climate change. Details here.

Full impact of mysterious Brazil oil spill remains unknown

BirdLife

International

Last summer, an oil spill of unknown origin hit Brazil’s northeast coast – just as migrating shorebirds arrived in the area. Our Partner SAVE Brasil has been campaigning for action and striving to measure the impact on birds - but more support is urgently needed. More here.

New research shows, human exploitation of fossil fuels may be playing an even bigger role in our climate crisis than earlier thought.

Extraction of Earth's oil, gas and coal reserves is probably unleashing vastly more methane (CH4) into the air than is currently being estimated. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and significant contributor to the dangerous heating of our planet. 

by Larry Powell.

Pump jacks extract crude oil from the Bakken field southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada. Are such operations releasing even more methane than we once thought? A PinP photo.

Using the largest ice drill in the world (below), the researchers “looked back in time” to the 17 hundreds, by drilling deep into the ice in Greenland and Antarctica.  

The Blue Ice Drill, used to collect 

the cores used in this study. 

Photo by B. Hmiel.

                                                                       By analyzing air bubbles trapped, both in the ice cores and the snow, they were able to measure how much methane was escaping into the air at the time. Since this was the “pre-industrial era,” before major human expansion of fossil fuel development began, those emissions would have virtually all come from natural sources like natural gas seeps from beneath the ocean floor and mud volcanoes (below) and ancient, but mostly undisturbed deposits of fossil fuels.

Mud volcanoes on the Nahlin Plateau, BC, Canada. 
Are such sites not quite the "climate culprits" 
they were once considered? Photo by Hkeyser.

The findings were surprising. Methane originating from those natural sources were shown to be minimal - only about 1.6 teragrams per year, or 5.4 teragrams, at most. (A teragram is equal to one trillion grams.) As the study concludes, that was "an order of magnitude lower than the currently used estimates." Put another way, those estimates are probably some ten times higher than these new test results show.

Ice cores from the 1870s, however, tell a different story. They show significantly higher methane levels. By then, the industrial revolution had begun, with major extraction of fossil fuels well under way. While fossil fuel extraction would have been the main factor in the increase, other human activities such as rice farming and domestic livestock production would likely also have played a part.

So, the lesson learned from all of this? Emissions due to human activity have been underestimated by anywhere from 25% to 40%. In other words, they are much larger than previously suggested.

Regardless of whether it springs from manmade or natural origins, methane is still a potent greenhouse gas (GHG), capable of trapping heat and impacting the climate. And it's up to 36 times more efficient at doing so than is carbon dioxide (C02), the most common GHG. Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled since the pre-industrial era. 

"The Global Carbon Project" refers to rising methane levels as "an increasingly important component for managing realistic pathways to mitigate climate change. It's an umbrella group of scientific organizations gathering together a common knowledge base in order to "slow down and ultimately stop the increase of GHGs in the atmosphere."

The lead author of this latest research, Dr. Benjamin Hmiel of the University of Rochester tells PinP that, even after methane is combusted, it still has an impact. While it no longer exists as methane, it transforms into carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.

Dr. Hmiel's international team consisted of 19 scientists from eleven institutions.

The researchers hope their findings will "emphasize the human impact on the atmosphere and climate and will help inform strategies for targeted emissions reductions to mitigate the effects of climate change."

The findings were published in the journal Nature today. 

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