A coalition of small island nations behind the case hailed the long-awaited legal opinion issued by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) as a “historic” victory.

The court found that greenhouse gas emissions absorbed by oceans can be considered pollutants and states must do whatever they can to reduce them.

The opinion is not legally binding but supporters of the case hope it can help influence climate negotiations and be used as a precedent in future court cases. 

Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda said the decision “marks a historic milestone in our collective journey towards environmental justice and climate governance”.

“The ITLOS opinion will inform our future legal and diplomatic work in putting an end to the inaction that has brought us to the brink of an irreversible disaster”, he added. 

Landmark case

Antigua and Barbuda is among nine small island states that last year asked Hamburg-based tribunal ITLOS to clarify the state responsibilities on climate change under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

The 1982 convention has 164 countries as parties, with the notable exception of the United States.

Africa must reap the benefits of its energy transition minerals

The treaty requires its signatories to prevent, reduce and control marine pollution. But it does not explicitly identify greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants, prompting island nations to seek an opinion on whether that would qualify.

They also asked the tribunal to spell out what the countries should do to cut down emissions given their impact on the oceans. 

In submissions to the proceedings, most countries acknowledged that greenhouse gas emissions pollute the oceans, but they disagreed on what obligations the maritime treaty imposed on their actions related to climate change.

Polluters pushback

China and India challenged the tribunal’s jurisdiction, arguing that issues relating to climate change should be handled within the UN climate change (UNFCCC) regime. 

While accepting the tribunal’s authority to give an opinion on the matter, wealthy nations including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia said the Paris Agreement lays out the rules and procedures necessary to address climate change and comply with the requirements of UNCLOS. 

The tribunal’s opinion should not be “imposing more stringent obligations than those already agreed” under the Paris Agreement, the EU statement said.

Azerbaijan pursues clean energy to export more ‘god-given’ gas to Europe

But the tribunal took a different view. It said “complying with the obligations and commitments under the Paris Agreement” would not be enough to satisfy the country’s duty to protect the oceans.

That is because the Paris Agreement does not require countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “to any specific level according to a mandatory timeline”, but leaves them freedom to set their own climate goals.

The tribunal’s opinion “confirmed that the obligations under the Paris Agreement set a floor, not a ceiling for states to act to prevent greenhouse gas emissions”, said Tiffanie Chan, Policy Officer at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Existential threat

One of the planet’s greatest carbon sinks, the ocean absorbs about 25% of all carbon dioxide emitted by human activities and has captured 90% of the excess heat generated by those emissions. Global oceans are experiencing unprecedented heat, with surface temperature records broken every day since March 2023.

For small island states, combatting global warming is a matter of survival. The South Pacific nation of Tuvalu could be completely submerged by the end of the century at current rates of emissions and without extensive measures to adjust to climate change.

Payam Akhavan, lead counsel for the nine island nations, poses with other lawyers after The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) gave its advisory opinion. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer

Eselealofa Apinelu, Tuvalu’s Attorney General, said she had travelled for over 24 hours to reach Hamburg but did not want to miss this “historic moment”.

“We have to do everything that we can to make sure that we can find a solution to our challenges”, she said. “This is an important first step in holding the major polluters accountable, for the sake of all humankind”.

Next steps

Climate lawyers and campaigners said the tribunal’s opinion could influence climate negotiations and push the countries most responsible for the climate crisis to raise their ambition to cut emissions when they submit the next round of national climate plans due in early 2025.

Payam Akhavan, the legal counsel for the nine island nations, said the case was borne out of “frustration with the failure of the COP process” to achieve its objectives. “The turn to international law should simply shape future negotiations to ensure that the climate change regime is more robust and that it has more teeth than it presently does”, he added.

Legal experts are also hoping that the decision could form a significant precedent and influence upcoming legal opinions by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights and the International Court of Justice, which are also considering countries’ climate obligations.

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It’s the first time this proposal will be formally discussed at a UN international body.

For the past three weeks, governments gathered in Kingston, Jamaica, at a little-known UN agency called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), to discuss a moratorium on mining on the deep seabed in international waters. No companies are currently carrying out such projects yet.

A coalition of nations pushed for a ban to be placed on the agenda but were opposed by Mexico, Nauru and most persistently by China. Towards the end of the meeting though, they won a concession agreeing that it be put provisonally on the agenda next year.

Greenpeace campaigner Louisa Casson was at the talks and said this was “incredibly exciting” and that deep-sea mining has now become”less likely” while Costa Rica’s negotiator Gina Guillen-Grillo tweeted that there will be a discussion on a temporary ban next year.

Proud of the results of hard work led by likeminded countries with the support of many others,this week at the ISA.
We achieved that next ISA Assembly will have stand alone discussion of General Policy for the application of Precautionary Principle @CRcancilleria pic.twitter.com/YMwA427BSy

— Gina Guillen-Grillo (@GinaGGCR) July 29, 2023

But other environmentalists were less upbeat. Bobbi-Jo Dobush from The Ocean Foundation told Mongabay that China’s blocking of talks on a ban “squandered hours of much needed discussion time” and deep sea scientist Patricia Esquete said the blocking of talks was “very concerning”.

The mining companies claim that minerals like nickel and cobalt are needed in batteries and will help speed up the energy transition but environmental campaigners like Casson dispute this, saying that more mining isn’t necessary and deepsea mining will damage ecosystems we still know little about.

Agenda fight

In Kingston, a coalition of over a dozen countries spearheaded by Chile, France and Costa Rica tried to officially debate for the first time in history the possibility to ban deep-sea mining until its full impact on the ocean’s biodiversity is understood.

Hervè Berville, the French Minister for Marine Affairs, told the Assembly on Wednesday that the world “must not and cannot embark on a new industrial activity without measuring the consequences and taking the risk of irreversible damage”.

The French minister for Marine Affairs speaking at the ISA Assembly. Photo: IISD/ENB | Diego Noguera

But China, Mexico and the Pacific island of Nauru opposed a halt. While Mexico and Nauru relented, China continued to oppose even putting a moratorium on the official agenda saying it was “not suitable” for discussion.

Gina Guillén, head of the Costa Rican delegation said “just one country is opposing [the agenda item on the discussion]. We hope it does happen. One country can’t hijack the most important body of the [ISA] just for being a big economy. That goes against all principles of multilateralism.”

In a bad-tempered last day of talks, China’s negotiator Wenting Zhao defended herself, saying that if the agenda isn’t agreed “everyone will know who is responsible for this”.

France’s negotiator hit back, saying that those “who blame others are the responsible for this situation” and “if there is a responsibility, it is not ours, we have made concessions”.

Brazil seeks European trade advantages in return for Amazon protection

Eventually, governments agreed a compromise. They would not discuss a ban at this meeting but would put a discussion on the provisional agenda next year. This year it was only proposed for the supplementary agenda.

Casson said the discussion “would still need to be adopted by governments so [there] may well be pushback” but she said that moving it from the supplementary agenda to the provisional shows “substantive arguments against it have conceded”.

“This compromise does in effect accept that the ISA Assembly does have the authority to debate the development of a general policy of the ISA, including the possibility of a establishing moratorium on deep-sea mining. So arguably a small step forward but only the beginning of the debate in the Assembly,” Casson explained.

Time pressure

On the other side to Casson is Gerrard Barron, the outspoken CEO of the leading deep sea mining hopeful The Metals Company (TMC). In a statement targetted at investors in his troubled company, he celebrated the ISA’s decision to keep drawing up rules for deep-sea mining.

“It is now a question of when — rather than if — commercial-scale nodule collection will begin”, he said.

The ISA had been pressured into this by the government of Nauru, which is sponsoring TMC. In July 2011, the government of the tiny Pacific nation triggered a mechanism which gave the ISA two years to write up regulations for mining.

That deadline passed this July. Barron said he was “obviously disappointed” that they didn’t finish writing the rules on time but said he believes “the finishing line is within sight”.

But Barron’s investors were less impressed, as TMC’s share price nearly halved between the start of the meeting and its end.

Casson said that the meeting had showed how politically controversial deep sea mining had become and that, as it needs to be signed off by governments at the ISA, it was unlikely to start soon.

Critical minerals

The International Energy Agency has warned that there are likely to be shortages in minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel which will hold back the energy transition.

But, with more investment in mining on land, the IEA’s fears are easing and Casson said that companies like Tesla are cuttinb back on the amount of these minerals they use.

Germany plans to keep funding new gas projects overseas despite pledge

Casson said that these minerals and batteries should be recylcled “rather than looking to repeat the problems of mining on land in the ocean”.

The ISA’s power only covers parts of the sea which are more than 200 miles from the coast and more than 200 metres deep.

Mining on the seabed closer to the coast is allowed under international rules but no government has started doing it yet.

The Norwegian government has proposed mining its northern waters and will put their proposals to parliament this autumn.

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Governments had been due to agree a global treaty in April to safeguard life in seas beyond the national jurisdiction of coastal states, a poorly regulated region accounting for two-thirds of the global ocean.

Over-fishing, shipping, plastic pollution and the potential of seabed mining are among the threats already affecting marine ecosystems. Meanwhile, climate impacts such as warming waters, rising acidity and shifting current patterns are also undermining the resilience of marine biodiversity.

A resolution adopted by consensus by the plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday agreed to postpone the talks to “the earliest possible available date” because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The fourth and final round of government negotiations had been due to take place at the UN headquarters in New York from 23 March to 3 April.

“Very sad but this is the right thing to do. We will be back and conclude our negotiations of this important new treaty to protect our oceans,” Catherine Boucher, legal advisor to Canada’s mission to the UN, wrote in a tweet.

Coronavirus delays global efforts for climate and biodiversity action

This is the latest of a number of climate and biodiversity meeting to be cancelled or postponed because of the virus.

Observers and delegates previously expressed concerns the March session would be unable to break deadlock between nations and that at least one more negotiating round would be needed. A UN document from February listing governments’ proposed changes to a draft treaty text runs to 350 pages.

There are currently few guidelines, for instance, for setting up marine protected areas in the high seas, which conservation experts say are necessary to prevent biodiversity losses. The Marine Conservation Institute estimates that only 1.2% of the high seas are in protected areas.

The negotiations, which started in September 2018, have so far made little progress on some of the most important issues. This includes the governance process to ensure rules on state and companies’ activities in the high seas are respected.

Sandra Schoettne, of Greenpeace’s Protect the Oceans campaign, told Climate Home News she hoped the postponement “doesn’t slow political momentum” and urged governments to “use the additional time wisely to adopt a treaty as robust as possible”.

“A bit more time to resolve some of the differences on the more tricky aspects of the negotiations is not a bad thing,” Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of York, UK, told CHN.

“We don’t want to botch it by rushing,” he said. “And a poorly attended meeting wouldn’t help.”

Power structures over gender make women more vulnerable to climate change

One of the sticking points in the negotiations is about how to share any benefits from genetic resources found in the high seas, such as health supplements developed from Antarctic krill, or cosmetics from creatures found around thermal vents on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

Developed nations generally favour allowing companies to benefit most from the findings since they are the ones taking the investment risks. Poorer nations say they should get a share of the benefits.

For Peggy Kalas, director of the High Seas Alliance, a network of organisations working to protect the high seas, one of the key questions is who will be responsible for taking management decisions in protected areas in the high seas.

“We cannot even predict or expect what will happen in the high seas in the future,” she said, citing a number of geoengineering activities and plans. “We want this agreement to be future-proof.”

“We would like the Conference of the Parties to take these decisions,” she told CHN, adding some countries preferred for sectoral authorities to be responsible for governance.

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Despite the number of issues left unresolved, Kalas said that if governments are able to advance their positions before the talks resume later this year, “this fourth meeting could be the final one”.

But the delay also means the re-scheduled meetings risks running into an already packed UN timetable on biodiversity this year.

This includes preparations for UN biodiversity talks in Kunming, China, in October when countries are due to agree on a global framework to protect the world’s plants and wildlife beyond 2020.

A number of countries have backed calls to protect at least 30% of the Earth’s lands and seas to halt the destruction of the planet’s biodiversity.

“The way to protect at least 30% of global oceans is by including the high seas,” Kalas said. “And to do that, you need this global ocean treaty.”

The post Coronavirus: UN delays talks on global ocean biodiversity treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

But a UN meeting this week about climate change and oceans reminds us a related crisis is unfolding largely away public attention: the one-two punch of ocean warming and acidification.

With record temperatures sweeping over continents year after year, it is easy to overlook that the ocean has absorbed some 90% of the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution; and how much of that CO2 has dissolved into seawater as carbonic acid, altering its basic chemistry.

The UN meeting follows on the heels of a new secretary general report that investigates the impacts of these changes and the findings are concerning, to say the least.

The report describes record ocean temperatures pushing fish species toward cooler latitudes and out of reach of artisanal fishers; it documents widespread coral bleaching across the tropical belt and how most reefs could enter a state of permanent decline by 2040; it shows how ocean acidification has damaged a range of calcifying marine life, such as corals and shellfish; and it raises fears that the cumulative effects of the impacts are degrading phytoplankton, zooplankton, and krill, the foundation of the ocean’s food chain.

Estimated change in annual mean sea surface pH between the pre-industrial period (1700s) and the present day (1990s). (Source: Global Ocean Data Analysis Project)

Perhaps most ominously, it warns that the ocean system could be reaching the limits of its ability to store all that excess carbon and heat released by human activities.

The timing of the meeting and report are not accidental. On 5-6 June the UN will host the first ever Oceans Conference, which will focus on accelerating the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal targets designed to restore and conserve marine environments.

One of the targets calls on the international community to cut emissions and address the impacts of ocean acidification.

But even under the best-case scenario global emissions are unlikely to peak before midcentury. That means in the short-term we must take action locally to help build resilience in our fisheries, coral reefs, and coastal ecosystems and give them a chance to adapt to the unprecedented changes.

Pacific islands are already leading the world in these efforts. In just the past few years, Palau, Kiribati, Fiji, and others have created or expanded marine protected areas – zones that prohibit activities known to damage or slow an ecosystem’s recovery.

We also manage the parties to the Nauru Agreement, the world’s largest sustainable purse seine tuna fishery, with a combination of the latest science and strict controls to prevent overfishing and harm to sharks, sea turtles and birds. The approach has led to an increase in the value of the tuna harvest and can serve as a model for fisheries management elsewhere in the Pacific and around the world.

Of course, much more needs to be done. A good start would be for the international community to provide the means of implementation needed to establish more MPAs and support ecosystem-based approaches to marine governance that have proven so successful in the Pacific and elsewhere. The private sector also has a role to play in developing new partnerships and sources of finance to support these goals.

The reality is we possess many of the tools we need to take care of our fish, coral reefs and coastal habitats. But, as with climate change, we lack the political motivation to deploy the solutions as fast and broadly as required. For now, the most important step we can take might be to encourage our leaders to attend the Oceans Conference, listen to what is happening to our oceans, and take action before its too late.

Ambassador Marlene Moses is Nauru’s permanent representative to the UN and chair of the Pacific Small Island Developing States 

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And the proportion of storms that meet the classification of category 4, with winds at 200 kilometres per hour, and category 5, with gusts of more than 250 kph, has at least doubled and may have tripled.

The good news for mariners is that those tropical cyclones that stay over the open ocean have not got significantly worse. The windstorms that pound the land, though, are potentially more destructive.

The cause of the intensity is an overall warming of ocean surface waters in the northwest Pacific.

And the researchers say: “The projected ocean surface warming pattern under increasing greenhouse gas forcing suggests that typhoons striking eastern mainland China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan will intensify further.

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“Given disproportionate damages by intense typhoons, this represents a heightened threat to people and properties in the region.”

The study was published in Nature Geoscience on the same day as theInternational Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) study of the state of the oceans.

It confirms that the number of severe hurricanes has increased by 25% to 30% for each degree of global warming so far. And, once again, greenhouse gas emissions are to blame.

“Most of the heat from human-induced warming since the 1970s – a staggering 93% – has been absorbed by the ocean, which acts as a buffer against climate change, but this comes at a price,” says Dan Laffoley, marine vice-chair of theWorld Commission on Protected Areas at IUCN, and one of the study’s authors.

“We were astounded by the scale and extent of ocean warming effects on entire ecosystems made clear by this report.”

https://twitter.com/wxpete75/status/775681356655366148

The IUCN study was compiled by 80 scientists from 12 nations and it highlights the scientific evidence of impacts on marine life – from microbes to the great sea mammals – that are likely to increase significantly even if humans drastically reduce fossil fuel combustion and cut the carbon dioxide emissions that drive global warming.

The scientists say ocean warming is already affecting ecosystems from the poles to the Equator, driving plankton, jellyfish, seabirds and turtles up to 10 degrees of latitude nearer to the poles.

In East Africa, ocean warming has reduced fish numbers by destroying parts of the reefs the fish depend upon. If humans go on releasing carbon dioxide emissions at the current rate, marine fisheries harvests in southeast Asia are expected, by 2050, to be up to 30% lower than the average for the years 1970-2000.

Both studies are confirmatory rather than ground-breaking. Researchers have repeatedly warned that Pacific tropical cyclones and Atlantic hurricanes are likely to become more destructive.

Landfalling storms

Atmospheric scientists Now Wei Mei and Professor Shang-Ping Xie, of theScripps Institution of Oceanography in California, report that they looked again at the data, to confirm first that landfalling storms – about half of all typhoons hit the coasts – have intensified, and secondly that rising sea surface temperatures are the cause.

The IUCN research, too, is a re-examination: other studies have confirmed thelink between ocean warming and climate change, and between ocean warming and ecosystem destruction. But, on a planet that is 70% ocean, nobody can be sure of the consequences.

“Ocean warming is one of this generation’s greatest hidden challenges – and one for which we are completely unprepared,” says Inger Andersen, director general of the IUCN.

“The only way to preserve the rich diversity of marine life, and to safeguard the protection and resources the ocean provides us with, is to cut greenhouse emissions rapidly and substantially.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Snow covered mountain, South Shetland Islands. (Pic: NOAA/Flickr)

By Ed King

“Just ridiculous”.

That’s how Deke Arndt, climate monitoring chief of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) described warming seas in 2014.

Ocean surface temperatures were the warmest in 135 years said the body’s annual State of the Climate report.

Global sea levels also broke records, hitting the “highest yearly average in the satellite record,” it said. Based on data from 58 countries and over 400 scientists, the study said that over 90% of the heat generated as a result of burning fossil fuels had been absorbed by the seas, with likely side effects for centuries to come.

Addis cash

The year’s first main development summit (ahead of September’s mooted Sustainable Development Goals and December’s COP21 UN climate conference) ended with agreement on plans for a new technology transfer system from rich to poor countries, as well as provisions for ‘worldwide safety net systems’.

No new money was placed on the table, but given the SDGs will run until 2030, this was not seen as a major issue. More urgently, developed countries still have to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 in climate finance, and observers said this was not addressed.

For more read Leo Barasi’s analysis from Addis Ababa.

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Paris outline

Top climate envoys from the US, China, Brazil, Russia and 18 other countries have offered the clearest signal yet they feel a UN climate deal will be reached in Paris this year. That’s the finding from a new study by the Washington DC-based C2ES group.

Former South Africa environment minister Valli Moosa, who helped coordinate discussions, said they had left him convinced failure in Paris would be “seizing defeat from the jaws of victory”.

Legal deal?

Will the mooted Paris deal be binding on all countries, and if so what will it compel them to do? Influential figures involved in the process believe it could end up looking like a credit rating agency, where keeping your AAA status is seen as economically beneficial.

Huge week

The next 7 days are likely to be critical for the success of the Paris climate pact. On 18 and 19 July, the 17-strong Major Economies Forum – which includes the US, EU, China, India, Brazil and Russia – meets in Luxembourg for two days of talks, chaired by senior US climate envoy Todd Stern.

On 20 and 21 July, there’s a ministerial meeting of senior climate envoys in Paris, while on Friday July 24 we’re expecting a revised version of the Paris negotiating text to be released by the co-chairs.

INDC watch

Quiet week, but Japan’s is set to be submitted on Friday, targeting 26% greenhouse gas cuts on 2013 levels by 2030. India and Australia are likely to follow suit next month. Follow all the updates on our Paris tracker.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I have yet to see any element of Lord Lawson’s budgets which suggested the poor were high on the list of priorities,” – Lord Deben questions his fellow peer’s concern for the poor when railing against climate policies.

Climate risk

A study backed by experts from the UK, US, India and China with funding from the UK Foreign Office warned this week of a nightmare scenario of more floods, droughts and storms should climate change intensify. Pakistan and Bangladesh are among countries that could “fail” under extremes, said security analysts.

EU masterplan

The European Commission issued its summer energy plan this week, confirming the central role it hopes the region’s carbon market will play in lowering emissions post 2020. But will it actually lead to more rewards for polluters? Megan Darby reported.

STAT OF THE WEEK

50%. That’s the increase in illegal timber shipped to Vietnam, China and India between 2006 and 2013, said new research from Chatham House.

Brazil tribes protest

The $11 billion Belo Monte dam on the Amazon has met just 30% of the social and environmental safeguards demanded by government, say NGOs. An estimated 2000 people will relocated as flood waters rise – but concerns over rainforest damage mean a smaller area will be reserved for water storage, meaning it will only operate at 40% of capacity.

Groupthink

Does a lack of diversity on boards make US oil majors particularly liable to ignore carbon risk? Yes, said Oxford University researchers this week. ExxonMobil has only one board member who is not a US citizen. Chevron has none. At each US oil major, the age range between the youngest and oldest board member is just 16 years.

Off on holiday?

Just be aware a brewing El Nino could make your journey a little longer, if you’re flying along the US West Coast.

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The post Global warming hits oceans, Addis cash and outline climate deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Oceans are absorbing heat, disguising the rising temperatures (source: NOAA)

By Tim Radford

Global warming is likely to drive marine creatures away from the equator in search of new and cooler habitats − and  is likely to limit the safest options for many migrant fish, crabs and corals.

One problem for marine life is that warmer waters hold less oxygen, so the corals that move to higher latitudes will have to settle in shallower water to take advantage of the diminishing light. This, too, creates hazards.

Curtis Deutsch, an oceanographer at the University of Washington in the US, and colleagues report in the journal Science that the ocean’s denizens could be heading for respiratory stress. Warmer waters speed up the metabolic need for oxygen, but those same warmer waters hold lower levels of dissolved gases.

“If your metabolism goes up, you need more food and you need more oxygen,” Dr Deutsch says. “This means that aquatic animals could become oxygen-starved in the warmer future, even if oxygen doesn’t change. We know that oxygen levels in the ocean are going down now, and will decrease more with climate warming.”

Shifting habitats

His co-author, Hans-Otto Pörtner, head of the Department of Integrative Ecophysiology at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, says: “If the oxygen level in a given region of the ocean drops below a species’ minimum requirements, it forces the animals to abandon their native habitat. This combines with the effect of warmer temperatures.

“Since animals evade to cooler regions, their habitat shifts towards the poles or to greater water depths. In Atlantic cod and many other fish species, we can already observe the shift now.”

That change is undoubtedly on the way. One group has just calculated that between 50% and 70% of the world’s oceans could see changes in biodiversity as the sea surface temperatures creep upwards.

The next question is: what kinds of change and what kinds of habitat will be available for submarine climate refugees? The researchers chose four well-studied marine species for their simulations of the impact of climate change on the maritime world.

Combined stress

These are the open ocean-dweller Atlantic cod, the coastal water-dwelling Atlantic rock crab, the sharp snout sea bream of the sub-tropical Atlantic and Mediterranean, and the common eelpout, a bottom-dwelling fish that lives in the shallow waters of the high northern latitudes.

The study suggests that, for many species, the combined stress of higher metabolic rates and lower levels of dissolved oxygen will mean that possible habitats will contract by between 14% and 26% because at the present species’ ranges nearer the equator, peak oxygen demand would become greater than the supply.

Also in Science journal, a team led by Paul Muir, acting curator for corals at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Australia, reports on the potential future for 104 species of staghorn corals – the tiny creatures whose skeletons make up the reefs that offer the richest habitats in the tropical seas.

Corals are sensitive to extremes of temperature. As the mercury levels climb, they can “bleach” and reject the algae on which they depend for survival. And if conditions are too hot for too long, they can perish.

Little sunlight

But the Australian team found that these animals, too, are caught in a kind of habitat trap. As they migrate away from the equator, they must nest in shallower water to take advantage of the lower levels of winter sunlight that penetrate the waters at higher latitudes.

The corals are likely to have to rise 0.6 metres for every one degree of latitude of migration. But there is a limit to how high in the water they can rise because, at a certain point, temperature, salinity and wave damage will start to take their toll.

“The two studies remind us that climate change will reshape marine species’ habitats, but not necessarily expand them,” warns Joan Kleypas, a marine ecologist/geologist at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in the same journal.

“Both studies highlight little-recognised barriers to future range expansions in the oceans,” he says. “Each is based on physiological limitations of marine organisms that are quantifiable, and thus increase our ability to predict species habitats into the future.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Dense school of brown striped snapper (Xenocys jessiae), Galapagos Islands, Ecuador (Pic: WWF)

By Ed King

The Earth’s oceans are worth an estimated US$ 24 trillion and offer annual economic services of $2.5 trillion, according to research published on Thursday by the green campaign group WWF.

It ranks the annual gross domestic product of the Atlantic, Pacific and other oceans seventh in the world, just behind the UK and ahead of Brazil, Russia and Canada.

But the study warns this “economy” is on the brink of collapse, with falling fish stocks, acidification due to rises in global carbon emissions and degradation of coastlines accelerating.

Fishermen gather seine nets from the water on the Ilha de Mafamede, Mozambique.(Pic; WWF)

“The ocean is at greater risk now than at any other time in recorded history,” said lead author Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a scientist at Queensland University.

“We are pulling out too many fish, dumping in too many pollutants, and warming and acidifying the ocean to a point that essential natural systems will simply stop functioning.”

Boys in boat, Mozambique (Pic: WWF)

Hoegh-Guldberg and his colleagues outline an 8-point plan to save the oceans, including an ambitious climate change pact in Paris later this year, and a specific UN Sustainable Development Goal for oceans.

Other steps they want governments to take include declaring 30% of marine areas protected by 2030 (up from 10% in 2020), accounting mechanisms to work out the value of ocean services and the formation of a “blue alliance” of concerned maritime countries.

A fisherman carries a tuna at the Jacana tuna fish landing. Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines (Pic; WWF)

WWF International chief Marco Lambertini said he hoped an economic focus on the oceans would ram home the need for action to governments and corporate executives.

“While they may have some knowledge of declining fish stocks, coral bleaching or mangrove deforestation, the implications and the scale of the impact on our well-being and prosperity have not sunk in,” he said.

“We believe this new economic analysis, coupled with the scientific evidence, makes an undeniable case to move urgently beyond rhetoric to action.”

According to WWF, marine fisheries, mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass alone have a value of $6.9 trillion. Neglecting to protect these assets is the same as ignoring a fund that delivers a 10% annual return, the study said.

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Pic: U.S. Geological Survey

By Sophie Yeo

2015 could see coral bleaching on a global scale for the third time in history – and the first in the absence of an El Niño.

This is the latest prediction from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has just launched a model to forecast threats facing the colourful reefs.

“It started in 2014 – we had severe bleaching from July to October in the northern Marianas, bad bleaching in Guam, really severe bleaching in the north western Hawaiian Islands, and the first ever mass bleaching in the main Hawaiian Islands,” said said Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator.

“It then moved south, with severe bleaching in the Marshall Islands and it has moved south into many of the areas in the western south Pacific.

“Bleaching just now is starting in American Samoa. In Fiji we’re starting to see some, the Solomon Islands have seen some. We’ve already seen a big event.”

Bleaching takes place when corals are stressed due to changes in light, nutrients or temperature – though only the latter can cause events of this magnitude. This causes them to release algae, lose their colour and in some cases die off.

It is a relatively rare occurrence. Large-scale bleaching was recorded in 1983, followed by the first global scale event in 1998. A second global wave came in 2010.

The latest global event appears to be following the path of the earlier two, with bleaching starting in the Pacific and expected to sweep through the Indian Ocean, south east Asia and the Caribbean.

Worst ever?

The bleaching seen last year is expected to spread into 2015, added Eakin.

This week, NOAA launched an updated version of its Coral Reef Watch, which provides a four month forecast of how ocean ecosystems will be affected by high temperatures.

Normally, these are expected to show no bleaching. But high ocean temperatures throughout 2014 and into 2015 means that bleaching is predicted on a mass scale.

This is in spite of the fact that an El Niño – a natural phenomenon that raises ocean temperatures – did not develop as expected.

Instead, the ocean warming which is damaging the reefs has been caused by climate change.

Scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that 90% of the energy accumulated on the planet between 1971 and 2010 was stored in the ocean.

In 2014, oceans reached their highest temperature on record.

“The amount of heat that has been absorbed in the oceans and the warming that has gone on has resulted in the oceans being primed to reach levels that can cause coral bleaching even without big El Niño events,” said Eakin.

Maps released by NOAA of coral bleaching predictions between February and June show a 60% chance that almost all the coral reefs in the southern hemisphere – where it is summer – will experience at least some stress.

It is likely that this trend will move into the northern hemisphere as the seasons change, said Eakin, although the models do not forecast this far.

It remains difficult to predict how severe the bleaching this year will be, he added, but some ecosystems are already under pressure.

“I doubt it’s going to be worse than 1998, and it may not even be worse than 2010 – we don’t know,” he said.

“But in some areas it has already been worse. What happened in the Marianas Islands, in the Marshall Islands, in the north western Hawaiian islands, those were the worst they’ve ever seen.”

In a large scale bleaching event, the damage caused could last for decades – and in some cases, the reefs never recover. Those that do become more susceptible to diseases.

But NOAA’s four month forecasts can help reef managers to prepare, and also to assess which reefs are more resilient, and which require more protection when a large scale bleaching is on the horizon.

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Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska (Pic: Flickr/jjjj56cp)

By Tim Radford

Researchers in the US have calculated that, thanks to climate change, melting glaciers will have spilled an extra 15 million tonnes of organic carbon into the seas by 2050.

The consequences for the ecosystems that depend on glacial meltwater are uncertain, but this burden of biological soot and sediment has implications for the global carbon cycle as well.

The researchers estimate that the dissolved organic carbon released by melting glaciers will be an increase of half as much again on the current flow − the equivalent of about half the annual flow of dissolved carbon down the Amazon River. And their calculations have identified another puzzle for climate scientists trying to understand the carbon cycle.

The planet’s glaciers and ice sheets cover about 11% of the planet’s surface and hold about 70% of the world’s fresh water. Spread thinly through this frozen water is a significant amount of biological carbon, with the Antarctic ice sheet alone hosting 6 billion tonnes of it.

Increased meltwater

It is safe for the time being, but mountain glaciers almost everywhere in the world are in retreat, and meltwater flow from the glaciers that drain the Greenland icecap is on the increase.

Eran Hood, professor of environmental science at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, and colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that they developed a database of dissolved organic carbon found in 300 samples collected from glaciers on five continents.

Some of it was clearly preserved from living things on the ice itself, some of was scraped up as the glaciers moved over old soils, and some of it was soot from fossil fuel combustion or distant forest fires.

There was a wide spread of carbon concentrations in the samples, but it was enough to estimate a global average.

They also knew that Greenland and Antarctic icebergs delivered 4,250 billion tonnes of water to the oceans each year, and that the run-off from retreating mountain glaciers was somewhere between 369-905 billion tonnes.

So they could begin to make an estimate of the rate at which dissolved organic carbon is re-entering the planetary system, and perhaps augmenting the carbon cycle.

The carbon cycle underwrites all life: plants and microbes withdraw carbon from the atmosphere and some of it gets stored in the soils, preserved as peat, or locked away as rock, or frozen as ice to be returned to the planetary system in all sorts of ways,

New questions

Research like this is basic: it adds another detail or two to an understanding of how the planet works. It starts to answer existing questions − but it also raises new ones.

“This research makes it clear that glaciers represent a substantial reservoir of organic carbon,” said Hood. “As a result, the loss of glacier mass worldwide, along with the corresponding release of carbon, will affect high latitude marine ecosystems, particularly those surrounding the major ice sheets that now receive fairly limited land-to-ocean fluxes of carbon.”

His co-author Robert Spencer, assistant professor of oceanography at Florida State University, said: “The thing people have to think about is what this means for the Earth. We know we are losing glaciers, but what does that mean for marine life, fisheries, things downstream that we care about?”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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(Pic: UNMIT/Martine Perret)

By Tim Radford

The warming oceans could start to return more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the planet warms, according to new research. 

And since 70% of the planet is covered by clear blue water, anything that reduces the oceans’ capacity to soak up and sequester carbon could only make climate change more certain and more swift.

It is a process that engineers call “positive feedback”. And under such a cycle of feedback, the world will continue to get even warmer, accelerating the process yet again.

Many such studies are, in essence, computer simulations. But Chris Marsay − a marine biochemist at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton − and colleagues based their results on experiments at sea.

Sediment traps

They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they examined sediment traps in the North Atlantic to work out what happens to organic carbon – the tissue of the living things that exploit photosynthesis, directly or indirectly, to convert carbon dioxide – as it sinks to the depths.

Sooner or later, much of this stuff gets released into the sea water as carbon dioxide. This is sometimes called the ocean’s biological carbon pump. In deep, cold waters, the process is slow. In warmer, shallower waters, it accelerates.

And as there is evidence that the ocean is responding to atmospheric changes in temperature, both at the surface and at depth, the study suggests that “predicted future increases in ocean temperatures will result in reduced CO2 storage by the oceans”.

The research was conducted on a small scale, in a limited stretch of ocean, so the conclusion is still provisional − and, like all good science, will be confirmed by replication. But it is yet another instance of the self-sustaining momentum of global warming.

Report: 2014 “warmest” year since 1891

Such positive feedbacks are already at work in high latitudes. Ice reflects sunlight, and therefore the sun’s heat. So as the Arctic ice sheet steadily diminishes over the decades, more and more blue water is available to absorb heat − and accelerate warming.

The same gradual warming has started to release another greenhouse gas trapped at the ocean’s edge. Natural “marsh gas”, or methane, is stored in huge masses, “frozen” as methane hydrate in cold continental shelves.

Methane exists in much smaller quantities than carbon dioxide, and has a shorter life in the atmosphere, but is far more potent, volume for volume, as a greenhouse gas.

Researchers at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromso reported last month in Geophysical Research Letters that once-frozen methane gas was leaking from thawing ocean floor off Siberia.

Some of this thaw is natural, and perhaps inevitable. But some is connected with human influence and could accelerate.

Alexei Portnov, a geophysicists at the university’s Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Climate and Environment says: “If the temperature of the oceans increases by two degrees, as suggested by some reports, it will accelerate the thawing to the extreme. A warming climate could lead to an explosive gas release from the shallow areas.”

Biological origin

Arctic methane, like ocean organic carbon, has a biological origin. It is released by decaying vegetation under marshy conditions and tends to form as a kind of ice at low temperatures and high pressures, much of it along continental shelves that, at the height of the Ice Ages, were above sea level.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature also reminded the world last month that the ocean plays a vital role in climate, and that plankton, fish and crustaceans could be considered as “mobile carbon units”.

In this sense, the fish in the sea are not just suppers waiting to be caught, but are important parts of the planetary climate system. The healthier the oceans, and the richer they are in living things, the more effective they become at soaking up atmospheric carbon.

“The world is at a crossroads in terms of climate health and climate change,” said Dan Laffoley, vice-chairman of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, introducing a new report on the marine role in the carbon cycle.

“Neglect the ocean and wonder why our actions are not effective, or manage and restore the ocean to boost food security and reduce the impact of climate change. The choice should be an easy one.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Pic: nate2b/Flickr

By Sophie Yeo

Oceans are the hottest they have ever been, putting an apparent end to the global warming pause of the last 14 years.

Analysis of new data by Axel Timmermann, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, found that this summer saw the highest global sea surface temperatures since records began.

The temperatures even exceeded those of 1998, when a particularly intense El Nino killed off 16% of the world’s coral.

“The 2014 global ocean warming is mostly due to the North Pacific, which has warmed far beyond any recorded value and has shifted hurricane tracks, weakened trade winds, and produced coral bleaching in the Hawaiian Islands,” said Timmermann.

Along with atmospheric temperatures, sea surface temperatures have slowed over the last 14 years, despite increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This has led some climate sceptics to question the impact of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere.

While acknowledging the paradox, scientists have repeatedly confirmed that the pause can be explained by natural variability, where long term trends are hidden in the natural swings of the climate across decades.

The new analysis suggests that this period of relative stability in ocean temperatures came to an end in April this year, when warming picked up speed again.

Explaining why the oceans have warmed so dramatically this year, Timmerman said: “Record-breaking greenhouse gas concentrations and anomalously weak North Pacific summer trade winds, which usually cool the ocean surface, have contributed further to the rise in sea surface temperatures.

“The warm temperatures now extend in a wide swath from just north of Papua New Guinea to the Gulf of Alaska.”

Hottest 2014?

According to the UN’s IPCC science panel, the oceans are where most of the heat caused by climate change is stored.

Scientists at the IPCC says 90% of the energy accumulated on the planet between 1971 and 2010 was stored in the ocean. Only 1% went into the atmosphere.

They add that the upper 75 metres of the ocean warmed by 0.11C in the same period.

The expansion of the water due to this heat, along with the melting of the glaciers, has caused the oceans to rise, with damaging effects on small island states and coastal communities, which have caused their land to erode.

Warmer waters can also affect marine ecosystems, causing coral bleaching and habitat loss.

But the ocean is not the only place to break the heat records this year.

2014 is currently on track to be the warmest year ever, according to NOAA, the US federal weather agency.

May, June, August and September were all the warmest on record, it said.

Pic: NOAA

“Scientists can’t know for certain how the final months of 2014 will play out in terms of temperature patterns, but there are good reasons to suspect this year may well set a new record for warmth,” the agency said in a review.

The Japan Meteorological Agency recorded the country’s hottest October on record, coming in at 0.67C above the 20th century average.

But as to whether the global warming pause was over in terms of atmospheric temperatures, Met Office climate scientist Richard Betts said it was too early to say.

“Even if this year ends up with a record global average surface temperatures, which is possible, that would just be one year. We’d need more than that,” he told RTCC.

Betts added: “‘Has the pause ended?’ will be an important research question for some years.”

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Tropical coral reefs support some 400 million livelihoods
(Pic: Andrew K/Flickr)

By Megan Darby

As well as warming the atmosphere, carbon dioxide emissions from power stations and cars dissolve in the ocean, making it more acidic.

While it is driven by the same human activities as climate change, ocean acidification tends to have a lower profile, perhaps because the economic impacts are less well understood.

But the phenomenon causes nearly US$1 trillion worth of damage to coral reefs a year, in tandem with other human-caused environmental changes.

That is according to a report collated by British scientists from the work of thirty experts worldwide, to be launched at a UN biodiversity conference on Wednesday.

Murray Roberts, co-editor of the report and professor at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, said: “At the end of the day, the only way to deal with ocean acidification is to reduce CO2 emissions.

“But for this to happen people first need to be aware that ocean acidification is an important issue.”

Report: Extra heat found in oceans explains global warming ‘pause’

Oceans cover two thirds of the planet and absorb much of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, both through direct warming and acidification.

Yet they were largely absent from the high-level UN climate summit in New York last month, to the dismay of Global Ocean Commission co-chair David Miliband.

“There can be no solution to the climate challenge without a healthy ocean,” Miliband warned.

Today’s report brings together the latest modelling, laboratory and field studies in an attempt to focus attention on the issues.

It will be presented in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where scientists, policymakers and politicians are meeting to consider some of the global threats to biodiversity.

Ocean acidification has increased by around 26% since pre-industrial times, according to the report.

Marine fossil records show such trends have occurred before, but the speed at which it is happening is unprecedented in at least 66 million years.

And it is “nearly inevitable” that carbon dioxide emissions will further increase the ocean’s acidity, with a “deleterious” impact on wildlife.

Coral reefs are particularly sensitive to the changing pH level.

Some 400 million people depend on tropical coral reefs for their livelihoods, the report said, while cold-water corals in Europe support endangered sharks and commercially valuable fish species.

Sebastian Hennige, lead editor of the report, said research carried out from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University had shown the vulnerability of cold-water corals.

“There is a risk that their habitat will literally dissolve away, since living corals grow on structures made by their dead ancestors,” said Hennige.

“These structures will be subject to chemical erosion over very large ocean areas if current trends continue.”

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Southern oceans are warming faster than previously thought
(Source: NOAA Photo Library)

By Alex Kirby

Has global warming “paused”? It is one of the most hotly debated questions in climate science.

Air temperature rises seem to have slowed down in recent years, prompting some to claim the dangers of climate change are overstated.

But scientists have found much of the extra heat trapped on earth by greenhouse gas emissions has gone into the oceans, not the skies. Fresh data shows this is happening more rapidly than previously understood.

In some regions the water appears to have been warming, for over 40 years, more than twice as quickly as thought, for instance in the upper 2,300 feet (700 metres) of the southern hemisphere’s oceans.

Paul Durack from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and colleagues compared direct and inferred sea temperature measurements with the results of climate models. Together the three sets of measurements suggest estimates of northern hemisphere ocean warming are about right.

Serious under-estimate

But the team report in Nature Climate Change warming in the southern seas since 1970 could be far higher than scientists have been able to deduce from the limited direct measurements from this under-researched region. Globally, they conclude the oceans are absorbing between 24% and 58% more energy than thought.

The researchers were able to use data from satellites and from a new source: Argo floats, a fleet of more than 3,000 free-floating monitors which drift through the water and measure the temperature and salinity of the upper 6,500 feet (2,000 m) of the ocean.

A year ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Fifth Assessment Report. Professor Chris Rapley, a former director of both the British Antarctic Survey and  the Science Museum in London, told the Climate News Network then of his alarm at what the IPCC said about the oceans.

He said the Earth’s energy imbalance, and evidence that the 93% of the energy build-up absorbed by the oceans continued to accumulate, meant the slow-down in the rise of surface temperatures appeared “a minor and temporary fluctuation”.

Speaking of the latest research, Profesor Rapley told the Network: “The newly reported results of a combination of satellite altimetry measurements of globally mapped sea level rise combined with ocean heat modelling, and a further analysis of the in situ measurements from the Argo buoys, add to the evidence that the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming is confined to surface temperature data, whilst the planet’s energy imbalance continues unabated.

Cold depths

“Once more we need to assess our appetite for risk, and consider seriously what measures we should take to minimise the threats to food and water supplies, the impacts of extreme weather, and the consequences of these to the world economic system and human wellbeing.”

A second study, also published in Nature Climate Change, by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, concluded tentatively that all ocean warming from 2005 to 2013 had occurred above depths of 6,500 feet, and that it was not possible to detect any contribution by the deep oceans to sea level rise or energy absorption.

Josh Willis, a co-author of this study (which like that by Dr Durack and his colleagues results from the work of NASA’s newly-formed Sea Level Change Team)  said the findings did not throw suspicion on climate change itself. He said: “The sea level is still rising. We’re just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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By Ed King

World leaders will have to expand ocean protection zones as climate change kills coral reefs and forces species to migrate to cooler waters, says a UN report.

Four years ago ministers from nearly 200 countries signed a deal in Japan to safeguard around 10% of marine areas, restricting fishing rights and targeting marine pollution levels.

Progress has been slow, with just over 2% of the world’s oceans and coastal waters currently protected, according to the Marine Conservation Institute.

The Global Biodiversity Outlook 4, a UN progress report released on the first day of an international biodiversity summit in Pyeongchang, South Korea, calls for “additional efforts” to safeguard what it terms “diverse ecologies” from global warming.

“Today’s protected areas will not be adequate to conserve many species whose distributions will shift in the future due to climate change,” it reads.

Open ocean and deep sea areas, including the high seas are “much less covered” it says, in contrast to coastal areas.

Warming waters are already leading some species of fish to migrate to cooler areas, while ocean acidification, caused by carbon dioxide dissolving in water, is killing off coral reefs.

The report says that concerted efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and control overfishing and sewage leakage could allow some reefs to regenerate by the end of the century.

In a statement UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called on member states to adopt the report’s conclusions, and “recognize that biodiversity contributes to solving the sustainable development challenges we face.”

Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme said countries would feel the economic consequences if they failed to act.

“Without healthy biodiversity, livelihoods, ecosystem services, habitats and food security will be compromised,” he said.

A separate study published in the journal Science also confirmed governments are on course to miss their 2020 biodiversity goals.

Based on 55 sets of indicators scientists said the world was off track to slow the destruction of habitats and valued species.

“On current trajectories, results suggest that despite accelerating policy and management responses to the biodiversity crisis, the impacts of these efforts are unlikely to be reflected in improved trends in the state of biodiversity by 2020,” they said.

Last week WWF said wildlife populations had plummeted 50% in the past 40 years, due to habitat exploitation, climate change and pollution.

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(Pic: NOAA)

By Ed King

The former head of one of India’s top multinational companies is leading calls for the UN to adopt tougher rules to prevent ocean pollution.

Ratan Tata, who led the US$100 billion Tata Group from 1991 to 2012, says governments must target protecting a “healthy, living planet” when they gather at the UN General Assembly next week.

He wants leaders to “extend the rule of law” to the oceans, with a new UN convention on the law of the sea, specifically focusing on ocean health.

“Marine and coastal resources are worth US$3 trillion a year – around 5% of the world’s GDP – and worldwide, 350 million jobs are linked to the ocean while 97% of fishers live in developing countries,” writes Tata.

“But without the enforcement of strong laws to protect a living ocean, a minority will continue to abuse the freedom of the high seas, plunder the riches that lie beneath the waves, take more than a fair share, and benefit at the expense of the rest of us, especially the poorest.”

Tata’s call comes at a time when leading ocean scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about the levels of manmade pollution seeping into the planet’s oceans.

This week the World Meteorological Organisation said levels of ocean acidification linked to manmade carbon emissions were at “unprecedented” levels.

Last year researchers working for the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) warned the health of oceans was “spiralling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought”.

Its report said the “deadly trio” of ocean warming, acidification and hypoxia/anoxia were now being joined by a “cocktail” of chemical contaminants such microplastics, nanomaterials and recreational drugs.

According to a recent report by the Global Ocean Commission, “habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, overfishing, pollution, climate change and ocean acidification are pushing the ocean system to the point of collapse”.

The Commission, headed up by former Costa Rica president Jose Manuel Figueres, says “anarchy” currently rules the oceans and warns this is impacting the livelihoods of poor communities that solely rely on the sea for food and incomes.

Only last month Australia’s environment minister Greg Hunt admitted the iconic Great Barrier Reef was facing some “real negatives”, after a government study said climate change and other human activities were causing its health to “deteriorate”.

A working group set up by the UN is set to present plans for a new legal instrument to govern the oceans when the General Assembly meets in New York next week, with a final decision expected in September 2015.

Ocean protection is also likely to be enshrined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals when they are agreed next year.

It is currently goal 14 of 17: aiming to “attain conservation and sustainable use of oceans, seas and marine resources”.

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Heat is drawn deep into the northern Atlantic near Iceland
(Pic: Flickr/Helgi Halldórsson)

By Megan Darby

It is the question most vexing climate scientists right now: if the world is warming, why have air temperatures flatlined since the late 1990s?

Seized on by climate sceptics as proof the whole thing is a hoax, the global warming “pause” has many possible explanations.

The latest data analysis locates most of that missing heat deep in the Atlantic Ocean. While average surface temperatures hold steady, deep seawater is warming up.

Scientists at the University of Washington (UW) and Ocean University of China have found raised temperatures 2km below the surface.

“Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus,” said study author Ka-Kit Tung, professor of applied mathematics and adjunct faculty member in atmospheric sciences at UW.

“Many of the earlier papers had necessarily focused on symptoms at the surface of the Earth, where we see many different and related phenomena. We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause.”

Previous studies showed the Pacific Ocean has warmed up since the 1950s. Tung’s study suggests the Atlantic could be a more significant heat sink.

“This stored heat is the main reason for the surface temperature having flatlined,” he told RTCC.

“The finding is a surprise, since the current theories had pointed to the Pacific Ocean as the culprit for hiding heat. But the data are quite convincing and they show otherwise.”

(Top) Global average surface temperatures, where black dots are yearly averages. Two flat periods (hiatus) are separated by rapid warming from 1976-1999. (Middle) Observations of heat content, compared to the average, in the north Atlantic Ocean. (Bottom) Salinity of the seawater in the same part of the Atlantic. Higher salinity is seen to coincide with more ocean heat storage.
(Source: K Tung / University of Washington)

There are currents in the Arctic driven by changes in salt levels, that the researchers found are storing heat.

Salty, dense water sinks below the surface in the northern Atlantic, near Iceland, drawing heat down with it.

“When it’s heavy water on top of light water, it just plunges very fast and takes heat with it,” explained Tung.

This current normally moves slowly, but speeded up earlier this century. At the same time as surface warming slowed down, more heat was sinking into the ocean.

While it is warming up now, the Atlantic also goes through cooler phases. Historic data shows it switches roughly every 30 years.

If that pattern continues, it could continue to absorb heat for the next ten years, slowing down the rise in average air temperatures. Then the atmosphere will start to warm rapidly again.

However, Tung said the complex effects of climate change made it hard to predict. “We are not talking about a normal situation because there are so many other things happening due to climate change.”

Evolving debate

The paper adds fresh evidence to the debate, which is evolving all the time.

A study published in Nature Geoscience just a few days before concluded solar cycles and natural climate fluctuations were the main factors behind the warming hiatus.

There are also gaps in the measured data that mean average global temperatures don’t give the full picture, according to Reto Knutti, climate physics professor at ETH Zurich.

Weather phenomena El Nino and La Nina in the Pacific cause fluctuations in temperature year on year, Knutti said. “1998 was a strong El Niño year, which is why it was so warm that year.”

In the past few years, La Nina has had the opposite effect, lowering temperatures.

Solar irradiation had also been weaker than predicted.

This did not alter the long-term trend, Knutti said. “Short-term climate fluctuations can easily be explained. They do not alter the fact that the climate will become considerably warmer in the long term as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.”

This agrees with a major study by the UK’s Met Office, which found fluctuations in the rate of warming were to be expected.

Periods of rapid warming are likely to be interspersed with three or four 15-year “slowdowns” each century, it found.

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Pic: Andrew K/Flickr

By Gerard Wynn

One common coral species survived higher temperatures through a process of acclimatisation over several months, showed a study published in the journal Science on Thursday, raising the possibility of a smaller climate impact than previously feared.

Corals are primitive animals which harbour plant-like algae which they also depend on to trap sunlight and feed them sugars.

As temperatures rise, corals eject the algae, causing coral bleaching and ultimately death if the algae do not quickly return.

The impact of climate change on corals is of great interest, firstly because of their role as the foundation for huge natural reefs teeming with fish life, and secondly because they appear vulnerable even to slight increases in ocean temperatures.

However, one common species can acclimatise to higher temperatures, Thursday’s study found.

“Our results show both short-term acclimatory and longer-term adaptive acquisition of climate resistance. Adding these adaptive abilities to ecosystem models is likely to substantially slow predictions of demise for coral reef ecosystems,” said the Stanford University authors.

The study left open the important question of what upper temperature limit there may be on such acclimatisation, and whether this ability applied to other coral species. They also allowed  that ongoing ocean acidification as a result of manmade carbon emissions may reduce the ability of corals to acclimatise in this way.

A recent report by the UN panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ranked coral bleaching alongside melting Arctic sea ice as one of the first major climate impacts.

Heat resistant

Corals acquire their vivid colours from the algae which they harbour, and the chlorophyll pigment they contain and use for photosynthesis.

The scientists analysed the performance of the common, so-called table top coral, which comprises a large percentage of hard coral cover on Pacific reefs.

“We chose Acropora hyacinthus for this study because it is a dominant reef-builder and especially sensitive to environmental stress, making its ability to acclimate or adapt extremely important to the future of coral reef ecosystems as climate change proceeds,” they said.

They compared the heat tolerance of the same coral species in shallower pools, where temperatures rose higher at low tide, with those inhabiting deeper water.

They showed that corals native to the shallower pools could better survive a ramp up in temperatures.

They then tested for acclimatisation by transplanting corals from shallower into deeper water and vice versa.

They found that the bleaching resistance of corals transplanted from deeper to shallower water improved, which they termed moderately variable (MV) and highly variable (HV) pools respectively.

“The experiments showed higher chlorophyll-a retention during heat stress in colonies transplanted to the HV Pool than in the same colony transplanted to the MV Pool.”

“Although the MV Pool corals acquired heat resistance when moved to the HV Pool, they did not achieve the resistance of native HV corals.”

They concluded that corals native to the warmer water had built up a superior heat resistance over generations, but that even individuals used to cooler waters could produce at least some heat tolerance in the short term.

They traced the acclimatisation to the greater use of heat resistant proteins.

In its report last month, the IPCC documented widespread damage to corals in recent decades, linked both with the trend in rising sea temperatures, and particular warming events such as the regular El Nino weather phenomenon.

Average sea surface temperatures of the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans rose by 0.65, 0.41 and 0.31C over the period 1950–2009, it found.

“The conclusion based on outputs from a wide range of emissions scenarios and models is that preserving more than 10 percent of coral reefs worldwide would require limiting warming to less than (an average of) 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels,” the report said.

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Source: Flickr/Kim Seng

By Gerard Wynn

A cooler phase in a natural Atlantic Ocean cycle has helped offset warming caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions, a US study found on Tuesday.

This helps to explain slower warming of surface temperatures in the northern hemisphere in the past decade. The natural ocean cycle, sometimes called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), has been studied since the 1980s.

Various studies have found that the AMO can change sea surface temperatures in the north Atlantic, and have a smaller, knock-on impact on land and sea surface temperatures across the whole northern hemisphere.

The paper, published on Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, estimated the impact of the AMO, after accounting for other influences on northern hemisphere temperature including natural factors such as the sun and volcanoes, and manmade factors including air pollution and carbon emissions.

These other factors were termed “forcings”, to distinguish them as additional influences on northern hemisphere surface temperature besides the AMO.

The study authors concluded that they had successfully modelled the impacts on the northern hemisphere climate, by comparing their model results with observed northern hemisphere surface temperatures.

In addition, they found that the AMO was presently in a cooler phase, after removing the influence of the outside factors, or forcings.

“A positive peak is now observed during the 1990s, with a subsequent decline through to the present,” said the authors, from the Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University.

“That decline is associated with the much-discussed deficit of observed vs. model-predicted warming over the past decade. It is thus reasonable to infer that the real AMO has played at least a modest role in that deficit.

“To the extent that the AMO is an oscillatory mode, it is furthermore reasonable to assume that this cooling effect is fleeting, and that the AMO is likely to instead add to anthropogenic warming in the decades ahead.”

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By John McGarrity

Last year was the among the top ten warmest on record, further evidence of a “undeniable” underlying warming trend as record high temperatures were recorded in Australia and the US, said the UN-run World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in a report today.

 The WMO said 2013 was the sixth warmest year on record, as the global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.50°C (0.90°F) above the 1961–1990 average, adding that the Arctic Ocean was far warmer than usual last year.

“The global temperature for the year 2013 is consistent with the long term warming trend,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

He added: “The rate of warming is not uniform but the underlying trend is undeniable. Given the record amounts of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, global temperatures will continue to rise for generations to come,” said Mr Jarraud.

Without big cuts to the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere, runaway climate change could lead to widespread drought, famine, and mass migrations impacting hundreds of millions or even billions of people, the UN and other international institutions such as the World Bank have warned.

In brief: latest IPCC report condensed to 12 key tweets

The WMO’s report comes against the backdrop of claims last year by climate sceptics that temperature data suggested a pause in global warming from 1998 onwards.

However scientists who accept that manmade greenhouse emissions are changing the world’s climate have explained away the apparent anomaly by pointing to the extra amounts of heat that deep oceans are soaking up.

“More than 90 percent of the excess heat being caused by human activities is being absorbed by the ocean,” the WMO statement said.

The International Panel on Climate Change warned last year that warming oceans are likely to raise sea levels, potentially causing huge economic damage and loss of life to coastal populations in future decades.

“Our action – or inaction – to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases will shape the state of our planet for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” said Mr Jarraud.

Meanwhile marine experts warn that fish stocks that are an important food source for billions of people could collapse because of rapidly warming oceans.

Extremes

The UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon is making a strong push this year for countries to commit to deep cuts in carbon emissions from 2020 and agree a global deal in Paris at the end of 2015.

Some industries and politicians that oppose tough targets in a new climate treaty have argued that the pace of global warming may have been exaggerated, or that extreme temperatures are the result of natural variations in the world’s weather patterns.

US President Barack Obama in his annual State of the Union address last week refrained from linking recent weird weather such as Janaury’s ‘Polar Vortex’ to climate change, but chose to remind sceptics that climate change is a “fact”.

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London’s Thames Barrier could be tested by ever increasing high tides due to sea level rise (Pic: David Holt/Flickr)

By John McGarrity

The worst of climate change could mean that one in 20 of the world’s inhabitants experience regular flooding by the end of the century, underlining the immediate need for deep carbon emissions cuts and major investment in flood defences, a report published on Tuesday said.

The study, authored by Germany’s Potsdam Institute and the Global Climate Forum, said rising temperatures, melting of polar icecaps and glaciers and increasingly violent storms could swamp densely-inhabited coastal areas, wiping out around 10% of the world’s wealth by the end of the century.

“While coastal protection can reduce sea-level damages significantly, the corresponding adaptation costs get bigger and bigger the longer we wait with our mitigation efforts,” said Anders Levermann, a scientist with the Potsdam Institute who initiated the study.

He added: “Adaptation, as necessary as it is, by no means can be a substitute for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.”

The report added that estimates of future damages and adaptation costs are essential for supporting efforts to cut carbon that are blamed for raising sea-levels and help design ways to adapt to the increasing risk of floods.

In the worst case scenario, an eye-watering $71 billion a year would need to be spent on flood barriers and defences by the end of the century, although the economic impact of doing nothing would be much more, the report’s authors said.

At the lower end of the scale, a less serious rise in sea levels could still impact 1 in 200 of the world’s population every year, or tens of millions of people, and lower GDP by still significant 1% by the end of the century, the report added.

New York: the new frontline for climate change

The wide range in the paper’s scenarios are mainly the result of uncertainty among scientists  about how much the world’s oceans will rise, which was acknowledged  in a 2013 report by an influential UN scientific panel.

The German academic study comes as concern grows in both rich and relatively poorer countries about the impact that rising sea levels could have on the world’s biggest cities, with major urban centres such as Shanghai, Mumbai, Ho Chi Minh City and New York among those seen as particularly vulnerable.

Current UN climate envoy Michael Bloomberg, a former New York mayor, has pointed to the widespread flooding of the US’ largest city by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as the type of event that could become increasingly regular and severe as sea levels rise.

Tomorrow, Bloomberg and mayors from the C40 group of the world’s biggest cities will gather for a summit in Johannesburg to discuss how to reduce the contribution of urban areas to greenhouse gas emissions and how best to adapt to a changing climate.

While flooding of cities in poorer countries often causes much less economic damage than in rich ones,  as many are uninsured and lack infrastructure, the human cost of flooding in developing nations is much higher, reinsurer Munich Re said in a report last month.

Severe coastal and inland flooding in Europe during the past 12 months, and a devastating storm surge from Supertyphoon Haiyan in the Philippines are the type of weather events that could be linked to the warming of the world’s oceans, some scientists suggest.

However many acknowledge that its difficult to blame one particular weather event on climate change.

VIDEO: Philippine climate chief on adaptation funding needs

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(Pic: Elsie esq.)

By Tim Radford

Far below the surface, the waters of south-east Asia are heating up. A region of the Pacific is now warming at least 15 times faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years.

If this finding – so far limited to the depths where the Pacific and Indian Oceans wash into each other – is true for the blue planet as a whole, then the questions of climate change take on a new urgency.

Yair Rosenthal of Rutgers University in New Brunswick and colleagues from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, report in the journal Science that deep ocean warming could right now be taking much of the heat that meteorologists had expected to find in the atmosphere.

In the last few years, even though greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere have gone up, the rate of increase in global average temperatures has slowed and there is evidence that much of the expected heat is being absorbed by the oceans and carried beneath the surface.

Shells

But records of ocean temperatures are patchy, and in any case date back only half a century. Rosenthal and his colleagues decided that they could reliably calculate a pattern of temperature changes by looking at a record of deposition through time.

One little single-celled organism called Hyalinea balthica has evolved to live only at depths of 500 to 1,000 metres.

H.balthica makes a microscopic shell, and when it dies, this shell falls to the ocean bottom. It takes the ingredients for the shell from the elements dissolved in the water around it, and the chemical mix available varies with temperature: the warmer the water, the greater the ratio of magnesium to calcium – and this difference is then recorded in the surviving shell.

So the marine sediments around Indonesia preserve a thermal record of changes with time.

The scientists studied ocean cores to “read” a pattern of climate change over the last 10,000 years, since the end of the Ice Age.

The readings from the sediments mirror a series of already-known climate shifts – a very warm spell at the end of the Ice Age, a “medieval warm period” when vineyards flourished in Britain, and a “Little Ice Age” when rivers like the Thames of London routinely froze.

So equipped with a reliable guide to change the scientists were able to make sense of the changes in the last 60 years.

They found that ocean temperatures, at such depths, had warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years that they did during the natural warming cycles of the last 10,000.

The research is incomplete, and its chief value may be in helping to improve the models used by climate scientists. But the implication is that the heat that should be registered in the atmosphere is now being absorbed by the deep oceans.

Complacency

This does not mean that climate scientists can stop worrying about global warming. “We may have underestimated the efficiency of the oceans as a storehouse for heat and energy,” Rosenthal said. “It may buy us some time – how much time I don’t really know – to come to terms with climate change. But it’s not going to stop climate change.”

His colleague Braddock Linsley of Lamont-Doherty said: “Our work showed that the intermediate waters in the Pacific had been cooling steadily from about 10,000 years ago.

“This places the recent warming of the Pacific intermediate waters in temporal context. The trend has now reversed in a big way and the deep ocean is warming.”

This article first appeared on the Climate News Network.

The post Slowing global temperatures linked to warming oceans appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: NOAA)

By Ed King

Areas of the Pacific are warming faster than at any time in the past 10,000 years, adding weight to theories that global warming may be ‘hiding’ in the world’s oceans.

In a paper published in the journal Science, scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution say water temperatures up to 2,200ft deep have increased by around 0.18 degrees C since the 1950s.

Their findings will be seen as significant because climate experts have struggled to explain why the rising trajectory of global surface temperatures slowed markedly in the past 15 years, leading many to question the accuracy of longer term climate change predictions.

A major climate science assessment by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published last month offered a variety of hypotheses for this slowdown, suggesting a decrease in solar activity, a rise in atmospheric airborne particles and ocean absorption could be to blame.

Models run by the team at Columbia based on an analysis of marine samples and a network of scientific buoys dotted across the seas indicate that warming in the past 60 years is 15 times faster than natural cycles in the previous 10,000.

“We’re experimenting by putting all this heat in the ocean without quite knowing how it’s going to come back out and affect climate,” said study co-author Braddock Linsley, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

“It’s not so much the magnitude of the change, but the rate of change.”

According to NASA, average global temperatures on Earth have increased by about 0.8°Celsius (1.4°Fahrenheit) since 1880, with two thirds of that warming occurring since 1975, at 0.15-0.20°C per decade.

Those readings have been based on surface measurements, which have guided scientific and political decisions related to climate change in the past two decades.

Drew Shindell, a scientist at Columbia and NASA says this research suggests it may be time to recognise there are a variety of temperature indicators that need to be taken into account, arguing that the warming pause may simply reflect “random variations in heat going between atmosphere and ocean”.

“Surface temperature is only one indicator of climate change,” he said. “Looking at the total energy stored by the climate system or multiple indicators–glacier melting, water vapor in the atmosphere, snow cover, and so on—may be more useful than looking at surface temperature alone.”

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(Pic: NOAA/Flickr)

Increasing levels of greenhouse gases are likely to ‘cascade’ through marine ecosystems, leaving few areas of the world’s untouched by the end of the century.

That’s the finding of a new study by scientists at the University of Hawai’i in Manoa, published in the journal PLOS Biology.

They warn the combination of ocean acidification, depleted oxygen levels and a resulting decline in the productivity of marine organisms could affect 470 to 870 million of the world’s poorest people.

Communities that rely on fishing and tourism are likely to be worst affected by what the scientists term as ‘multiple ocean biogeochemical changes’.

“When you look at the world ocean, there are few places that will be free of changes; most will suffer the simultaneous effects of warming, acidification, and reductions in oxygen and productivity,” says lead author Camilo Mora.

Polar regions are likely to experience increased levels of oxygen and productivity, although they are likely to warm and become more acidic in time.

Of specific concern to researchers is the resilience of many marine habitats, which have not experienced significant change for thousands of years.

“Because many deep-sea ecosystems are so stable, even small changes in temperature, oxygen, and pH may lower the resilience of deep-sea communities,” says co-author Lisa Levin, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

“This is a growing concern as humans extract more resources and create more disturbances in the deep ocean.”

Last week a study compiled by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature suggested oceans are deteriorating faster than anyone previously thought.

It warned there is growing evidence that the oceans are losing oxygen. Predictions for ocean oxygen content suggest a decline of between 1% and 7% by 2100.

Recently the Global Ocean Commission claimed that acidification could make up to half of the Arctic Ocean uninhabitable for shelled animals by 2050.

Overfishing, pollution from ships and coral dieback were also blamed for placing added stress on sealife.

The post Climate change could ‘undermine’ oceans by 2100 appeared first on Climate Home News.

By Alex Kirby

Marine scientists say the state of the world’s oceans is deteriorating more rapidly than anyone had realised, and is worse than that described in last month’s UN climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They say the rate, speed and impacts of ocean change are greater, faster and more imminent than previously thought – and they expect summertime Arctic sea ice cover will have disappeared in around 25 years.

Their review, produced by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO)  and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, agrees with the IPCC that the oceans are absorbing much of the warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

But it says the impact of this warming, when combined with other stresses, is far graver than previous estimates. The stresses include decreasing oxygen levels caused by climate change and nitrogen run-off, other forms of chemical pollution, and serious overfishing.

Professor Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford, IPSO’s scientific director, says: “The health of the ocean is spiralling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought. We are seeing greater change, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated.”

The IUCN’s Professor Dan Laffoley says: “What these latest reports make absolutely clear is that deferring action will increase costs in the future and lead to even greater, perhaps irreversible, losses.”

Damaged molluscs

The review says there is growing evidence that the oceans are losing oxygen. Predictions for ocean oxygen content suggest a decline of between 1% and 7% by 2100.

The loss is occurring in two ways: through the broad trend of decreasing oxygen levels in tropical oceans and areas of the North Pacific over the last 50 years, and because of the “dramatic” increase in coastal hypoxia (low oxygen) associated with eutrophication, when excessive nutrient levels cause blooms of algae and plankton.

The first is caused by global warming, the second by increased nutrient runoff from agriculture and sewage.

The authors are also concerned about the growing acidity of the oceans, which means “extremely serious consequences for ocean life, and in turn for food and coastal protection”. The Global Ocean Commission reported recently that acidification would make up to half of the Arctic Ocean uninhabitable for shelled animals by 2050.

Professor Rogers told the Climate News Network: “At high latitudes pH levels are decreasing faster than anywhere else because water temperatures are lower, and the water is becoming more acidic. Last year, for the first time, molluscs called sea butterflies were caught with corroded shells.”

When atmospheric CO2 concentrations reach 450-500 parts per million (ppm) coral reefs will be eroded faster than they can grow, and some species will become extinct. Projections are for concentrations to reach that level by 2030-2050: in May they passed 400 ppm for the first time since measurements began in 1958.

Methane a concern

With the ocean bearing the brunt of warming in the climate system, the review says, the impacts of continued warming until 2050 include reduced seasonal ice zones and increasing stratification of ocean layers, leading to oxygen depletion.

It also expects increased releases from the Arctic seabed of methane, a greenhouse gas at least 23% more potent than CO2 (the releases were not not considered by the IPCC); and more low oxygen problems.

Another stress identified is overfishing. Contrary to claims, the review says, and despite some improvements, fisheries management is still failing to halt the decline of key species and damage to ecosystems. In 2012 the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said 70% of world fish populations were unsustainably exploited.

The scientists say world governments must urgently reduce global CO2 emissions to limit temperature rise to under 2°C – something which would mean limiting all greenhouse gas emissions to 450 ppm.

They say current targets for carbon emission reductions are not enough to ensure coral reef survival and to counter other biological effects of acidification, especially as there is a time lag of several decades between atmospheric CO2 emissions and the detection of dissolved oceanic CO2.

Potential knock-on effects of climate change, such as methane release from melting permafrost, and coral dieback, mean the consequences for human and ocean life could be even worse than presently calculated. The scientists also urge better fisheries management and an effective global infrastructure for high seas governance.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Plankton form the basis of marine ecosystems – changes in their habits are linked to warming oceans

Warming oceans are causing nature’s calendar to go awry, a study has found.

As the temperature in the oceans rise, marine species are altering their breeding times and shifting homes, with consequences that researchers expect will impact upon the broader marine landscape.

The report, which was researched over three years, will form part of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change Assessment Report, which is due for publication in 2014. The research was undertaken by scientists from 17 institutions from across the world.

Professor Camille Parmesan of Plymouth University’s Marine Institute says that this is the first comprehensive documentation of what is happening in the world’s marine systems in relation to climate change, and that the overall message is simple but important.

“What it reveals is that the changes that are occurring on land are being matched by the oceans. And far from being a buffer and displaying more minor changes, what we’re seeing is a far stronger response from the oceans,” she says.

The research showed that marine species such as phytoplankton, zooplankton and bony fish were moving towards the poles at an average rate of 72km per decade – considerably faster than the terrestrial average of 6km per decade – in spite of the fact that sea surface temperatures are warming three times slower than land temperatures.

Professor Mike Burrows at the Scottish Association for Marine Science said: “Most of the effects we saw were as expected from changes in climate. So, most shifts in the distributions of, say, fishes and corals, were towards the poles, and most events in springtime, like spawning, were earlier.”

According to Pippa Moore of Aberystwyth University, the findings demonstrate the need for renewed strength of purpose on the subject of the warming oceans.

She said, “These results highlight the urgent need for governments around the globe to develop adaptive management plans to ensure the continued sustainability of the world’s oceans and the goods and services they provide to human society.”

The post Warming oceans drive marine life towards poles appeared first on Climate Home News.

Canadian scientists have devised a new scale for measuring ocean change – the fish. They have used the changing make-up of the global fisheries catch to detect the signature of global warming.

In a warming world, fish that find the sea temperatures too hot for comfort could move north or south, away from the tropics, or to deeper and therefore cooler waters.

Although oceans are warming, and the chemistry of the seas gradually changing, William Cheung and colleagues at the University of British Columbia report in Nature that it has not been easy so far to detect any evidence of change for these reasons: because over-exploitation of the traditional fishing grounds, and greater pressure on more distant and deeper waters, made it difficult to identify any climatic effect.

Scientists have tracked the migration of fish to uncover rising temperatures in the oceans (Source: Flickr/Andre Pinho)

But the researchers tried a different approach: they calculated the temperature preferences of fish species – confusingly, they called this the mean temperature of catch – and then they analysed the annual haul of 990 species across 52 large marine ecosystems between 1970 and 2006.

They accounted for possible confounding factors (overfishing being one of them) and then came up with a “fish thermometer”, on the argument that, just as changes in the pattern of tree growth rings would expose the climate history of a forest, so changes in the pattern of fish catches would tell them something about ocean temperatures.

Their new scale of measurement revealed that overall, oceans were warming at a rate of 0.19°C per decade, and in the non-tropical regions even faster: at 0.23°C per decade.

Fewer fish, more hunger

In some regions, the rate of change was much faster. The north-east Atlantic, for instance, has been warming at 0.49°C a decade as measured by the fish-scale thermometer, even though sea surface temperatures showed only a 0.26°C rise as measured by other instruments. Warm water species are on the move, to what were once considered cooler seas.

One indicator of such change has been for instance the red mullet, Mullus barbatus, a staple of the warm Mediterranean: this has lately been caught in the North Sea off Great Britain, where it could be replacing the Atlantic cod, and even in Norwegian waters.

Atlantic surf clams (Spisula solidissima) are harder to find off the coasts of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in the US, but can still be found in deeper waters off northern New England.

But such change is very bad news for fishermen in the tropics, where many of the world’s poorer people are concentrated. The more temperate zones will see a migration of species from the equatorial zones, but no fish are likely to migrate towards the tropics. So as global warming makes the equatorial seas too hot for comfort, fish catches are likely to fall, and another source of nutrition will dwindle.

“This study shows that ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in the past four decades, highlighting the immediate need to develop adaptation plans to minimise the effect of such warming on the economy and food security of coastal communities, particularly in tropical regions,” the authors say.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Here is the puzzle: humans continue to pump increasing quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the world has warmed accordingly.

Eleven of the 12 warmest years ever recorded have fallen in this century – but the rate of warming seems to have slowed rather than increased. So what has been taking the heat?

Climate scientists from Barcelona in Spain and Toulouse in France think they have the answer.

They report in Nature Climate Change that instead of going into the near-surface atmosphere where meteorologists could easily measure it, much of the extra heat has been absorbed by the oceans.

This may not be the only explanation. There have also been arguments that volcanic eruptions might have put enough aerosols into the upper atmosphere to dim the sunlight and counter global warming a little.

Warming oceans have implications for the atmosphere and for communities who rely on catching fish for food and money (Martine Perret/UNMIT)

Stratospheric water vapour might also have damped things down, and some say the solar minimum – the spell of least activity in the Sun’s 11-year cycle – has been prolonged.

But Virginie Guemas of the Catalan Institute of Climate Science in Barcelona and colleagues propose more than speculation.

They used a technique sometimes called “hindcasting” and in their case labeled “retrospective prediction” to argue what ought to have happened – and then checked the evidence.

This is the basis of science: frame a hypothesis, make a prediction from it and then check the evidence to see if the hypothesis is wrong. The advantage of doing it retrospectively is that it doesn’t take so long to find out whether you are right or wrong.

Trouble ahead

Guemas and her colleagues believe they were right. They argue that they successfully (and retrospectively) predicted the warming slowdown five years before it started around 2000.

And their conclusion is that the extra heat has been absorbed in the top 700 metres of the planet’s oceans below the surface layer, and more than half of this has been concentrated in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans: enough to explain at least a three-year pause in the apparent rate of global warming.

Water in circulating oceans eventually delivers its heat back to the atmosphere, so the logic is that there is more and faster warming to come.

“Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown”, the scientists claim.

“The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal climate predictions.”

This story was produced by the Climate News Network

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Plankton in warm waters were found to be almost twice as rich in carbon than previously estimated.

Prochlorococcus and other tiny microbes in the seas are an important long term store of carbon.

The researchers have upended a decades-old core principle of marine science known as the Redfield ratio, named for famed oceanographer Alfred Redfield.

Plankton could be twice as rich in carbon as previously thought (Source: Flickr/eelke dekker)

He concluded in 1934 that from the top of the world’s oceans to their cool, dark depths, both plankton and the materials they excrete contain the same ratio (106:16:1) of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous.

“The Redfield concept remains a central tenet in ocean biology and chemistry. However, we clearly show that the nutrient content ratio in plankton is not constant and so reject this longstanding central theory for ocean science,” said lead author Adam Martiny, associate professor of Earth system science and ecology & evolutionary biology at UC Irvine.

By comparing samples from numerous depths and at locations including the Bering Sea and the Caribbean, the researchers found carbon content increases in warm, nutrient starved waters nearer the equator.

Proponents of geoengineering have suggested that fertilising the oceans to encourage the growth of tiny marine life could help to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.

The new study, published in Nature Geosciences would suggest geoengineering could be more potent than previously thought, if the techniques can be perfected and approved.

Recent work at Harvard and Oxford Universities has suggested the ethical and political problems of geoengineering could be greater than the scientific challenges.

The post Plankton twice as carbon hungry as thought appeared first on Climate Home News.

6°C has often been described as the ‘doomsday scenario’ of climate change.

Forests could burn, seas could rise and life could become a battle for survival as food and water resources steadily diminish.

Scientists are warning this could be closer to reality than previously thought. Since the industrial revolution, the world has warmed by around 0.7°C. Most scientists believe we have committed ourselves to at least the same again given current emissions

But a recent report from consultancy PwC warned current emission reduction pledges must be drastically increased to keep the world below 6°C. Some suggest an average global warming of 6°C could be seen as early as 2100.

This echoes the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) whose Chief Economist, Fatih Birol warned: “With current policies in place global temperatures are set to increase by 6°C, which has catastrophic implications.”

6°C is often described as the doomsday scenario where forests will burn and oceans will rise (Source: giumaiolini/Creative Commons)

How much do we know about 6°C?

Very little is currently known about what the world might look like 6°C warmer. Most climate models to date have focused on 2°C and 4°C rises, and even these involve some guesswork.

There are also few comparable events in the past to learn from, making it harder for scientists to predict potential changes.

So what do we know?

“There are some very basic rules,” Corinne Le Quéré, Director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre told RTCC. “Like more heatwaves… More floods and more droughts are [also] typical of a warmer climate because you have essentially more energy in the system.”

To an extent we already know how a 2°C temperature rise will affect life. Arid regions will get drier, wet ones wetter. At 6°C, scientists say all of these will still occur, but they will be more extreme.

“When you are talking about this level of warming, I think tipping points are a very serious possibility; especially if the six degrees happens very quickly,” said Le Quéré.

Such tipping points include the disintegration of the polar ice sheets, causing sea level rises and methane discharges, and the collapse of forests, one of the world’s vital carbon sinks. Once these have been passed there is little chance of turning back the clock.

In the Arctic, warming could see tree types suited to more temperate climates replace Boreal forests. If this happens rapidly it could lead to fires, diseases or pests which could drive the forests to destruction.

With any warming from 2°C to 6°C, it is expected that desertification will become a greater problem, since the movement of water between the earth and the atmosphere will be intensified and biodiversity and ecosystems will be adversely hit.

6°C average

At 6°C forest fires, pests and diseases could spread and destroy the world’s woodlands, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere (Source: Jaako/Creative Commons)

It is important to note 6°C refers to the average temperature. This does not mean a 6°C rise in the US would also mean a 6°C rise in Africa.

Much of the land temperatures will actually be higher. Air over water warms at a slower rate than over land, so ocean temperatures are likely to be at the lower range of the scale.

The UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre has mapped this change in the 4°C world, where they estimate much of Africa could see 6°C to 7°C rises, and northern latitudes could see anything from 8°C to 14°C temperature rises.

“Normally the high latitude, Russia and Canada for instance, would warm twice as much as the global average,” said Le Quéré. “You can’t say for sure but you would be looking at 12°C of warming over and around the Arctic and surrounding countries [with a 6°C average].”

These variations would also differ throughout the year. It is usual to experience above-average hot days and the same could be expected in a 6°C world.

Take for instance the 2003 heatwave across Europe (the UK witnessed temperatures over 38°C) which caused 35,000 deaths on the continent. Those above average days in a 4°C world could be 6 to 8°C hotter than they were in 2003, warn scientists.

In Beijing or New York, this could be even more extreme, taking temperatures 8°C to 12°C higher than the hottest day in Europe in 2003.

While much of the developed world can hide away in air-conditioned offices, in the developing world working life is expected to become much more difficult.

Working outside during the summer months would be impossible, and manual workers would have to start working through the night or seasonally.

Waterworld

Higher concentrations of CO2 will mean more ocean acidification.

This is a relatively new area of research, but scientists say the pH of the oceans has already decreased by 30% since the industrial revolution (the lower the pH the more acidic a substance is). They predict the oceans could become 150% more acidic by 2100.

This could have dire consequences for life in the sea. Current studies suggest that ocean acidification causes calcium carbonate – the stuff of shells, skeletons, corals and much of the ocean’s phytoplankton – to dissolve.

This could impact the formation of coral ecosystems and disrupt ocean food webs, as the phytoplankton which forms its base is removed.

A combination of melting ice caps and the expansion of oceans as they warm will also mean a hotter planet could also experience sea level rises.

How high the seas could rise involves a significant amount of guess work, but Le Quéré is more certain on what this could mean.

Warming waters and ocean acidification could both break down coral ecosystems, which one billion people currently rely on for their food and livelihoods (Source: Prilfish/Creative Commons)

“It is very very difficult to adapt to high levels of sea level rise. Above a metre it becomes really difficult,” she said. “Even in richer countries. We have seen what happened in New York last week – where you had storm surges of 11 to 12 feet (three metres) and if the sea level is a metre higher than that you would easily get half of your infrastructure flooded.”

One recent study predicted sea levels could rise by one metre by the year 3000, although other studies have predicted a much more rapid rise in levels.

And with drier conditions on land, rising sea levels and a potential wasteland in the oceans, life on Earth will be harder for its inhabitants.

Life on Mars

The world population is expected to hit nine billion by 2050, and worsening climate change will make feeding this population much more difficult as the land on which to grow food shrinks.

Today the world already has one billion people going hungry, while another two billion are what is termed the ‘hidden hungry’ where they do not have the right balance of nutrients.

Water will also become scarcer – with consequences both for agricultural systems and daily life for many communities.

“It become more problematic,” said Le Quéré. “A warmer climate means that the water cycle is intensified. You get more rainfall and you get more evaporation – everything goes a bit faster.

“So if you live in a dry area, it is likely that it will get drier. So in drier areas you have less water access. A lot of places live on one river, like the Nile River Basin. If you are reliant on a particular storage to have your fresh water availability then when that runs out it simply runs out.”

Le Quéré said that these impacts will disproportionately affect the poor, who have less resources to help them adapt, and are often much more reliant on the natural world.

An apocalypse?

There is one episode in history which shows what 6°C may look like, but this takes us back 251 million years ago to the end of what is called the Permian era.

Here, a 6°C rise in temperatures resulted in the extinction of 95% of the planet’s species, and is considered the worst event ever endured by life on Earth.

Sea-levels are said to have risen 20 metres, and flash floods engulfed many coasts. Only one large land animal species was left alive and it took 100 million years for the variety of the planet’s species to return to normal level.

How the planet will react to such a warming, and how far people can adapt is still widely debated amongst circles of scientists, analysts and environmentalists alike.

“If you add all these things together, then it becomes really difficult to maintain our current level of wealth and our capacity to provide food for the citizens,” said Le Quéré.

One thing is widely agreed on; life in a world that has warmed by 6°C will be tough for all living organisms on the planet.

Related Articles:

Next UN climate science report will “scare the wits out of everyone”

World headed for 6°C of warming, says new study

World’s coral reefs at risk from warming waters

The post Planet 6°C: Will climate change turn Planet Earth into Mars? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Over 120 ecologically and biologically significant areas (EBSAs) in the world’s oceans could gain the protection of the UN later this week.

These biodiversity ‘hotspots’ are located in the Western South Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and Western Mid-Atlantic, and have been certified using criteria laid out by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2010.

RTCC understands there is widespread support from parties at the talks for a text that would provide enhanced conservation and management measures to EBSAs. If this gets the green light, a motion will be passed to the UN General Assembly.

EBSAs are evaluated on the rarity of the area in question, its importance for threatened, endangered or declining species and its naturalness.

Experts from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are calling for a legal agreement to conserve these areas. Patricio Bernal, IUCN Coordinator for the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative said degradation of the High Seas has to be taken seriously.

“We now know that 41-42% of the world’s oceans have been affected by heavy human impact and degradation,” he said. “We have the term above ground; land degradation. Ocean degradation is pretty much invisible and we have to bring it to light. This new process allows us to do that.”

Around 80% of the world’s biodiversity is said to live in the oceans – from the smallest to some of the largest species in the world.

Oceans are also vitally important for humans. They provide us with food, water, oxygen and help regulate the climate. But these vital serives are under increasing threat.

Unsustainable human use, pollution, climate change and ocean acidification all make life for the seas’ residents increasingly difficult.

The IUCN says greater protection of the oceans biodiversity ‘hotspots’ could help ensure the survival of some of the species on the Red List for Critically Endangered Species

Ocean acidification – a direct consequence of climate change – breaks down the shells and skeletons that form the basis for the ocean’s coral reef systems, as well as phytoplankton. These tiny organisms make up the majority of marine food webs and could causes problems much higher up the chain.

It is expected that the oceans could become 150% more acidic by 2100.

While the oceans cover around 70% of the world’s surface, only 2% of them are protected. Half of this is in international waters.

“What IUCN and the others involved in this project are calling for is a legal framework to address biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction,” said Kristina Gjerde, Senior High Seas Advisor, IUCN Global Marine and Polar Programme. “This would help to establish marine protected areas and it would help ensure the sustainable use of marine resources.”

She warned that there was a major gap in environmental law beyond the areas of the oceans covered by national jurisdiction. While the CBD says countries should cooperate to protect these areas, how that could be achieved is still unknown.

“We are seeing increasing degradation of our oceans…[they] have degraded more in the past 30 years than they had in the whole of human history,” she said.

Under the  Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative (GOBI) scientists have used new data to locate some of the oceans’ most valuable areas. It is the first time the oceans – particular international waters outside any country’s jurisdiction – have been examined in this depth.

In the Sargasso Sea, for example, scientists found the floating Sargassum seaweeds provide shelter to many species such as the Sargassum angerfish that is unique to the area. Thirty species were also found to migrate through the sea including tuna, turtles, sharks, rays, whales and dolphins.

Bernal says the criteria are flexible enough to allow for both biodiversity – one single species – and ecology – a complex ecosystem of different species – to be assessed. ‘Hotspots’ can be based on either one or several of the criteria.

“The flexibility of the methodology allows us to be flexible and to use it in a complex way – we can use it to assess anything from a single species to whole ecosystems,” he said.

RTCC Video: Kristina M. Gjerde, Senior High Seas Advisor at the IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Programme, outlines the biodiversity and conservation challenges faced on the High Seas.

The post UN poised to protect 120 marine ‘hotspots’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated from 0830-1700 BST (GMT+1)

Latest news: Wednesday 3 October

Last updated: 1700

Japan: Following Tokyo’s decision to phase out nuclear power over the next three decades, cleantech advisers question whether it could become the next big centre for renewable energy growth. (Financial Times)

UK: After omitting talk of the environment from his keynote speech, Labour leader, Ed Miliband used his Q&A session at the Labour Conference today to talk of the party’s commitment to the issue, and arguing that their views on climate change and the green economy is what sets them apart from the Conservative party. (BusinessGreen)

US: The Interior Department of the US government is creating a panel of outside experts to help steer its scientific work on the effects of climate change on natural resources. They are seeking roughly 25 members for the new committee. (The Hill)

RTCC: We offer a round-up of this week’s UNFCCC climate change finance workshop from those who were tweeting from inside the event.

As the sunsets over the Arctic and winter arrives, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado has put together two animations observing the record breaking conditions seen in both the Arctic and Antarctic this year.

This week’s youth group profiles young people in Costa Rica. Following in the footsteps of former President Jose Maria Figueres, now chairman of the Carbon War Room, and UN climate chief Christiana Figueres the group are supporting the countries aim to go carbon neutral by 2021 and are pushing for more collaboration in Central America.

UK: Brighton University’s city centre campus will become home to the UK’s first building made onsite entirely out of waste this autumn. Designed by Brighton-based architect Duncan Baker Brown, it will be built from waste and surplus material from local building sites and other local industries. (Guardian)

Poland: Shale gas exploration is a priority for the Polish government, according to Deputy Environment Minister, Piotr Wozniak. He wants a new shale gas law to come into force next year. Poland granted 111 shale exploration licences to ExxonMobil , Chevron and other firms, but reports that it could have enough gas to last 300 years now appear exaggerated. (Reuters)

Wind: Danish manufacturer Vestas has revealed that its giant offshore wind turbine will be even bigger than anticipated, offering 8MW of capacity – 1MW bigger than previously announced. The turbine will weigh 800 tonnes, 187 metres tall and with 80 metre long blades and the company has said they will start producing test blades at its Isle of Wight facility before the end of the year. (BusinessGreen)

EU: The European Commission has drawn up plans to outlaw hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in domestic refrigerators and freezers by 2015, and commercial coolers by 2020. (EurActiv)

Finland: Latest plans to phase out coal by 2025 could make Finland the first country to phase out the energy source. (Huffington Post)

Oceans: Scientists have warned that ocean acidification could be messing with the minds of fish. At a symposium called the Ocean in a High-CO2 World they said that more acidic waters caused clown fish to leave their home waters, and caused sea snails to ignore potential predators. (Scientific American)

UK: Campaigners have said they are disappointed that UK Labour Party chief Ed Miliband failed to mention the environment or the green economy in his keynote speech at the party’s conference. Craig Bennett from Friends of the Earth tweeted: “Where was the green bit? He needs a one planet approach to complement his one nation vision”. (Business Green)

US: Will President Barack Obama or his challenger Mitt Romney mention climate change or the environment in tonight’s debate, the first of three ahead of the US Presidential Election? 160,000 petitions have been delivered to chair Jim Lehrer. (The Hartford Guardian)

EU: A leaked draft report has revealed that hundreds of problems found at European nuclear plants could cost €25 billion to fix. The report was commissioned after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster and examines how Europe’s reactors would cope during extreme emergencies. (BBC)

EU: Opposition to the inclusion of aviation in the EU-ETS is rumbling on. The head of the aviation industry’s trade body IATA has become the latest person to speak out against the inclusion of international airlines in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme, claiming it will spark a trade war with the USA, India and China.

Oceans: Greenhouse gas emissions up to the present day have triggered an irreversible warming that will cause sea levels to rise for thousands of years, scientists have warned. A study, published in Environmental Research Letters, finds that the world could already be committed to a sea level rise of 1.1 metres by the year 3000.

The post Pressure grows on Romney and Obama to mention climate change in debate appeared first on Climate Home News.

– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated from 0830-1700 BST (GMT+1)

Latest news: Monday 1 October

Last updated: 1720

Global: New research suggests that estimates of how much CO2 the land can absorb must be cut by almost a quarter. Climate models typically assume that oceans, soils and plant life would absorb around half of all the additional carbon that humans emit. However, a study in Nature suggests that a limited supply of nutrients will limit the extent to which additional CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere. (Nature)

USA: A social media platform has been established to allow the public to make sure their pension and investment funds are accounting for climate change. Fund managers are legally obliged to protect investors from major risk, under which the effects of climate change fall. It is estimated that 55% of pensions are invested in high carbon assets. (The Australian)

UK: Government plans to merge its Antarctic research division, the British Antarctic Survey, with the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, has triggered protests from scientists who say the move would cut studies of polar climate change and rising sea levels. (Reuters)

Worldwide: It pays to be a forerunner in climate change mitigation, according to new research. The study found industrialised countries can profit from taking early action on greenhouse has emission cuts, even if the rest of the world delays. (PIK)

The Netherlands:Amsterdam is set to go green with Europe’s first electric scooter-taxi. Ruben Beugels, the brains behind the new form of public transport says he sees the scooters bridging the gap, helping people get from using public transport to arriving at their final destination. (Reuters)

USA: Climate change deniers have been offered a $5000 bounty to prove that more than 5% of ‘credible’ American scientists dispute global climate change. The website TruthMarket, which says it aim to ‘publicly expose false political, commercial and activist claims and reinforce true claims’ has put up the cash. To win you need to: Provide verifiable evidence that significantly less than 95% of American scientists believe in the reality of Global Climate Change and that humans are a likely cause.

Australia: Secretary for climate change and energy efficiency, Mark Creyfus said the country has agreed to work with the US state of California to promote global emissions markets. (Bloomberg)

UK: Speaking at the Labour Party’s Conference, Ed Miliband has said that the party would scrap energy regulator Ofgem and replace it with a new watchdog, which would have the power to force energy companies to pass cuts in wholesale energy prices to customers. The Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Caroline Flint, has said the move would help drive green investment. (Business Green)

UK: A network of rapid charging points that can recharge an electric car in around 15-30 minutes are to be installed in motorway service stations around the country. With a half hour charge filling 80% of most cars’ batteries – around 80 miles of power – the move could open up a new market for electric vehicles. (Telegraph)

RTCC: This week we’re focusing on the role forests play in regulating the climate, soaking up CO2 emissions and providing a home to vast numbers of flora and fauna. Our partners at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) have written some fascinating reports that we will feature over the next six days.

Today: What role do forests play in addressing climate change; five facts you may have forgotten about forests; communities from the Amazon and Congo basin in pictures

Australia: Julia Gillard’s government has announced it will join the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, a UN led initiative aimed at cutting down on short-lived pollutants such as soot and methane. (Reuters)

Japan: The government in Tokyo has announced it will introduce an environment tax aimed at curbing the use of fossil fuels. The tax, which will be imposed on fossil fuels, including crude oil and natural gas, is in line with the government’s aims to cut emissions by 25% by 2020 – on 1990 levels. (New Kerala)

Oceans: Fish species could shrink in size by up to 25% because of climate change. Researchers modelled the impact of rising temperatures on more than 600 species between 2001 and 2050. (BBC)

UK: Scientists from Scotland suggest that a giant dust cloud in space, blasted off an asteroid could act like a sunshade for Earth and help combat climate change. The researchers calculated that the largest near-Earth asteroid, 1036 Ganymed, could maintain a dust cloud large enough to block out over 6% of the solar radiation that would normally reach the planet. (Space.com)

USA: New research has warned that a warmer and drier climate in the future could cause widespread tree death in the Southwest US and could cause major changes in the distribution of forests and species. (e! Science News)

UK: Campaign groups, including Greenpeace and Oxfam, are warning the UK government that ignoring global warming would be ‘reckless’. They warn that just 50 months remain to prevent a critical threshold in combating climate change being breached. (Guardian)

The post Australia joins Climate and Clean Air Coalition appeared first on Climate Home News.

– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated from 0830-1700 BST (GMT+1)

Latest news: Thursday 27 September

Last updated: 1740

UAE: A new exhibition demonstrating the UAE’s plans for a low(er) carbon future has opened in Abu Dhabi. The Eco Future exhibition will showcase the country’s solar energy plans and raises awareness on issues of food and of course, as you would expect from a desert nation, water security. (The National)

Australia: The starting pistol has been fired on Australian carbon trading with the first free emissions allowances worth A$150m allocated. A$138m of the total was awarded to Aluminium firm Alcoa. It marks the start of trading proper for the scheme, which recently announced plans to integrate with the EU system. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Namibia: A huge underground geological find created much optimism in Namibia this July. The reservoir is full of freshwater not oil, but now geologists say it must be tapped carefully to ensure its long-term future. The find has enough water for 1m Namibians for 400 years, based on current consumption rates. (SciDev)

India: North India and the Himalayas will be the regions of the country most affected by climate change according to a report carried out by the Indian Environment and Forests Ministry and the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change. Warming of 4°C is anticipated in those regions by the 2080s. (DNAIndia/PTI)

Nigeria: The Rafto Prize for Human Rights has been awarded to Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey. The awards panel said he “links human rights to the climate by demonstrating how climate change has the greatest effect on the world’s most vulnerable people, the very people who have contributed least to the problem”. (AFP)

UK: New figures from the UK government show that renewable energy capacity has grown by 42.4% for the second quarter of 2012 compared to the same period last year. (BusinessGreen)

UN/Kiribati: President Anote Tong of Kiribati has told the UN General Assembly that the low-lying islands of his country, threatened by rising sea levels, must be made habitable for as long as possible. However, he also said that work has begun to prepare the nation’s young people for the international job market so they can “migrate with dignity”. (UN)

UK: The world land speed record for an electric car has been broken. The team behind the Nemesis car smashed the current record of 137mph hitting 148mph. They hope to push that figure higher as the day continues. (BBC)

148.419 MPH! We broke the UK EV speed record Well done Nick & team!!!^PS

— ecotricity (@ecotricity) September 27, 2012

US: An opinion piece in the influential science journal Nature has called on whoever wins the US Presidential Election to find a way to cut emissions while protecting the nation’s economic interests. The piece calls for Obama to tackle fierce political opposition to environmental policies should he win and for Romney to return to his centrist past if he triumphs. (Nature)

Worldwide: Plastic debris has been detected in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. It was thought to have been one of the last pristine environments but new research found 50,000 fragments per square kilometre. (The Guardian)

France: The French government has confirmed it will use the revenue generated by the sale of its spare EU carbon credits, worth around €600m to fund energy efficiency improvements for as many as 1m homes a year. (EurActiv)

UK: The UK could be a net energy exporter by 2020 according to a report released by the country’s grid operator. With increased renewables output and more interconnections being made with other markets, the country could reverse its current net importer status. (Reuters)

Kenya and UK: The UK is to launch a trade mission to Kenya next month in order to help kick-start the geothermal energy sector in the African rift valley. (Bloomberg)

Canada: Green groups are suing the Canadian Government in an effort to force it to block the proposed Northern Gateway crude oil pipeline and protect biodiversity along its route. Although the Enbridge Inc pipeline would transport crude rather than bitumen-like tar sands, the oil is derived from tar sand deposits originally, giving it a higher impact on emissions. The Ecojustice coalition is seeking to protect white sturgeon, humpback whales and caribou. (Environmental News Service)

EU: Europe’s total wind energy capacity has hit 100GW, according to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). This is the equivalent to 39 nuclear power plants, according to the industry group. (EWEA)

The post Carbon trading officially under way in Australia as nation ramps-up climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

Island nations could face a food crisis as climate change and ocean acidification destroy their fish stocks.

A new study released today by environmental group Oceana ranks the Cook Islands in the South Pacific as the country most vulnerable to food insecurity caused by increasingly acidic oceans. New Caledonia, Turks and Caicos Islands, Comoros and Kiribati complete the report’s top five ‘most at risk’.

The increasing acidity of the oceans – a consequence of increased CO2 levels – is threatening habitats such as coral reefs and the future of shellfish including oysters, clams and mussels. Under business-as-usual scenarios scientists say oceans could be 150% more acidic by 2100.

More than a billion of the poorest people in the world rely on fish for their primary source of protein.

It is predicted that oceans could be 150% more acidic by 2100, threatening the survival of many coral reef habitats (Source: USFWS Pacific/Creative Commons)

Oceana says coastal and small island nations are likely to suffer as they have fewer resources to replace destroyed fisheries with.

“For most of these island nations, seafood is the cheapest and most readily available source of protein,” Matthew Huelsenbeck, a marine scientist at Oceana says. “Most small-scale fisherman simply aren’t capable of following fish into distant waters as climate change and ocean acidification wreaks havoc on coastal resources.”

The study also examined the impact rising ocean temperatures – another effect of climate change – could have on fish stocks. Along with the Maldives and Comoros island nations, several larger oil-producing countries were also found to be vulnerable.

Iran (4), Kuwait (7) and the United Arab Emirates (10) could be affected as fish driven into deeper, colder waters and migrate to the poles.

Recommendations

The report notes several steps can be taken to minimise the impact of climate change and acidification, including:

– Reducing carbon dioxide emissions

– Ending fossil fuel subsidies

–  Stopping overfishing, bycatch and destructive fishing practices

– Establishing marine protected areas

– Managing fisheries with climate change in mind

Related Articles:

World’s coral reefs at risk from warming waters

RTCC Q&A: Climate Change and the Oceans

Oceans could be 150% more acidic by 2100

Coral reefs could recover, but action is needed, say experts

The post Cook Islands’ fisheries at risk from ocean acidification appeared first on Climate Home News.

Two of the world’s smallest countries have announced two of the largest marine parks to date, at the Pacific Islands’ Forum being held on the Cook Islands.

The host nation, made up of 15 islands, announced the creation of a marine park covering nearly 1.1 million square kilometres – an area bigger than France and Germany.

Speaking at the opening of the Forum, Henry Puna, Prime Minister of the Cook Islands said: “The Marine Park will provide the necessary framework to promote sustainable development by balancing economic growth interests such as tourism, fishing and deep-sea mining, with conserving core biodiversity and natural assets, in the ocean, reefs and islands.”

2.5 million square kilometers would make it the largest protected area in the world (Source: USFWS Pacific/Creative Commons)

“The Cook Islands is proud, and especially honoured to join Kiribati and Tokelau, in our commitment to the Pacific Oceanscape. In this regard, we also note the steps by Australia to establish a significant network of marine reserves,” he added.

The Pacific Oceanscape, launched in 2008 by island nation Kiribati, with their own 400,000 square kilometre protected area on the Phoenix Island, commits them to a new integrated approach to ocean management including adaptation to climate change.

It covers the 40 million square kilometres inside the Pacific Islands’ exclusive economic zones.

So far Kiribati has been joined by Palau and Tokelau in creating vast whale, dolphin and shark sanctuaries, and Australia which in June announced the expansion of the country’s marine protection reserves.

Related Articles:

New Ocean Health Index shows “room for improvement”

Good news: We have four environmental winners from Rio+20

Oceans, forests and ecosystems continue to soak up rising man-made carbon emissions, for now, say scientists

Neighbouring country New Caledonia also pledged to create a marine protected area in its exclusive economic zone.

The areas will cover 1.4 million square kilometres – an area half the size of India– in the next two to three years.

The two pledges combined will mean 2.5 million square kilometres of ocean are protected.

To date, the world’s largest marine reserve is 545,000 square kilometres and was established by the UK around the Chagos Islands in the India Ocean.

Ocean conservation was seen as one of the major wins of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development held in Brazil this June. Many believe the oceans were given unprecedented focus throughout the two week summit, resulting in significant attention given to it in the conference’s “Future We Want” document.

RTCC Video: Wendy Watson-Wright at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at UNESCO talks about her optimism in seeing so much focus on oceans at Rio…

The post The Cook Islands open Pacific Island Forum with announcement of world’s largest marine park appeared first on Climate Home News.

Giant floating shade cloths could be placed over coral reefs to slow the warming of oceans, according to new research.

Scientists say buoyant umbrellas could help reduce the extent of coral bleaching – shielding it from the light which exacerbates the effects of heat stress.

The oceans act as a huge carbon sink, but as a result of absorbing vast quantities of CO2 acidity levels are rising, which in turn kills coral reefs.

Could floating shade cloths help reduce coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef (Source: eutrophication&hypoxia/Creative Commons)

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute warns that current trends would see atmospheric carbon dioxide increase more than 80% by 2050.

The expected resultant rise in ocean temperatures and acidity could leave marine species unable to survive, he says.

In a paper published in Nature Climate Change, Hoegh-Guldberg and fellow researchers say current actions set out in national and international policy may not be enough to counter the impacts of rising CO2 emissions.

Other methods suggested in the research include using low-voltage electric currents to stimulate coral growth, and genetic engineering to help marine life cope.

The researchers also set out a plan to add base minerals – such as carbonates and silicates – to the waters around the reefs to help offset higher levels of acidity.

RTCC VIDEO: Carole Turley from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory says the oceans are becoming: “Hot, sour and breathless”

Rio+20: Carol Turley, Plymouth Marine Laboratory from Responding to Climate Change on Vimeo.

The post Giant ‘shade cloths’ could be used to save coral from climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated from 0900-1700 BST (GMT+1)

Latest news – Monday 20 August

1700: Bill McKibben talks to the Huffington Post about fracking, Keystone XL and continuing the fight against climate change. He says:

“Given the math of climate change, fracking’s no help. We don’t need a bridge—we need to make the leap to renewable energy.” 

1630: RTCC’s John Parnell argues that the recent CO2 emissions cuts – such as the fall in the US which saw the country’s emissions more in line with those in 1995 – mask the dangers of relying too heavily on gas.

1600: Ecotricity’s Dale Vince says the low carbon sector in the UK is in turmoil because of a lack of policy certainty from central government.

1500: As board member of the UN Green Climate Fund get ready to meet for the first time later this week, Farrukh Khan, an alternate member of the board representing Pakistan has said the board member must rise above politics and act as a springboard for a global climate deal in 2015.

He told Reuters: “The role of the fund is extremely important. It has to show the world it is looking beyond political bickeringS of the UNFCCC.”

1400: Turns out making the case for sustainable actions for reasons of self-interest – for example saving you money – could backfire. New research finds telling people about carpooling’s money-saving benefits could make them less likely to recycle.

1300: The Isle of Wight will be at the heart of global efforts to decarbonise island communities, as it hosts the inaugural Ecoislands Global Summit this October.

It’s own Ecoisland partnership aims to see the Island become self-sufficient on renewable energy by 2020. David Green, Ecoisland founder talked to RTCC’s John Parnell about why the Island is pressing ahead with sustainability:

“People have spent too much time trying to agree whole heartedly with everything that has to happen, without doing anything. The result is similar to hill walking; you end up going at the rate of the slowest. We decided we’d start out at the front and see if we can get people to catch up with us.”

1240: It seems everyone wants a piece of the co-operative energy action as shares in the world’s largest community owned solar farm – Westmill Farm near Swindon in the UK – has been over-subscribed by almost 50%.

1130: The row over biofuels is likely to flare again as German researchers claim they have found evidence that European-produced biodiesel does not meet the sustainability targets set out by the EU.

1030: The US administration is expected to announce new fuel economy standards for cars which would cut consumption of petrol and diesel by 18% over coming decades. Some car makers are warning, however, that the new rules will distort theUSmarket and will not deliver expected reductions.

0930: Plans for a £30 billion barrage across the UK’s Severn estuary – between the Vale of Glamorgan and Somerset– have been given a boost after Prime Minister David Cameron instructed officials to look into them.

Supporters say the project could provide 5% of the UK’s electricity – as well as creating thousands of jobs – but environmentalists object saying it could harm local wildlife.

Cameron has asked Letwin & Davey to look at Peter Hain-backed Severn barrage proposal: ft.com/cms/s/0/c181a5… Govt dropped plan in 2010

— Adam Vaughan (@adamvaughan_uk) August 20, 2012

0910: Harry Verhaar at Philips Lighting has posted his reflections on the Rio+20 summit. A key message is that we need to think about ‘Green Budgeting’ – here’s how he explains it…

Transforming our business models will include altering the way we think about budgeting. The current quarterly and annual budgeting and reporting system rewards linear behavior and is based on short-term objectives. We need transparent budgeting procedures that account for long-term investment and returns in value creation. Capital expenditure may be higher in the short-term, but operating expenditure will be lower and the payoffs higher if we invest now in sustainable products, systems, energy and in our people.  For example, efficient lighting solutions will save €128 billion per year, with a return on investment period of 4-5 years. (A switch from incandescent bulbs results in a return on investment within a few months.) However, we need a way to account for long-term solutions that will be understood by investors, shareholders, and the public.

0849: Could a new Greenhouse gas measurement system bring clarity to UN climate talks? John Parnell finds out…

0830: Could giant shade cloths be the answer to protecting coral reefs from heat stress? Climate change scientists say ew and novel waysmust be found to protect ocean regions like the Great Barrier Reef.

Businesses and environmental campaigners are expected today to call on the government to strengthen plans for greater resource efficiency, for materials such as steel and rubber. They warn the UK is facing a looming natural resource crisis.

0816: Scientists warn that climate change is running on ‘fast forward’ along the US Atlantic Coast. The US Geological Survey says the coastline is a hotspot for sea-level rise and has seen waters rise at double the rate of most places around the world.

Ecotricity owner Dale Vince talks to RTCC about how football and sport at large can be run in a sustainable way and can become an example for other businesses to follow.

Top Tweets

Chart: Forest loss in Latin America ow.ly/1m2WZL

— Mongabay (@mongabay) August 20, 2012

The US #drought represents an opportunity to re-imagine how we manage, use & even think about water. ht.ly/d4u3Q#GROW

— Oxfam International (@Oxfam) August 20, 2012

Reading List

How could computer games help to drive change towards a sustainable world?

The post Climate Live: Could a giant umbrella protect the Great Barrier Reef, US Atlantic coast is sea-level rise ‘hotspot’ & UK is urged to improve resource efficiency appeared first on Climate Home News.

A new “Ocean Health Index” designed to score every coastal nation in the world on their contribution to the health of the world’s oceans shows “room for improvement” with global oceans scoring an average 60 out of 100.

The index, published in Nature, was designed to evaluate the ecological, social, economic and political condition of every coastal country in the world.

A collaboration of 30 universities, non-profit organisations and government agencies it pulls together data on the current status and likely future conditions of the oceans.

Global map of index scores per country. All waters within 171 Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) were assessed (Source: Ben Halpern and colleagues, NCEAS 2012)

Each region was marked against 10 goals; clean water, biodiversity, food provision, carbon storage, coastal protection, coastal economies, tourism and recreation, sense of place, natural products and artisan fishing opportunities.

Each goal was then tested against sustainable development criteria with many incorporating penalties for pursuing them in a way that would hamper future delivery.

Key Findings

Globally oceans scored an average of 60 out of 100 with countries varying widely – between 36 and 86 – showing “substantial room for improvement” according to the report.

Thirty-two percent of countries scored less than 50 on the index while only 5% scored more than 70.

Generally, developed countries did better on the index than developing countries and scores correlated with the Human Development Index.

While many West African, Middle Eastern and Central American countries scored poorly; Northern Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and various tropical islands and uninhabited regions scored highly.

There were, however, noticeable exceptions. Poland and Singapore scored low on the index (42 and 48 respectively) whereas Suriname (69) and the Seychelles (73) scored highly.

Scores for individual goals also varied widely within countries.

The scientists warned scores on half of the goals are getting worse, and that the current assessment could be overly optimistic if existing regulations are not effectively implemented.

The index aims to assess both the natural and human conditions of the oceans (Source: © Conservation International/photo by Mark Erdmann)

Baseline for the future

The researchers say the current analysis is meant as more of a baseline for the future than as a conclusion about the health of the oceans.

“When we conclude that the health of the oceans is 60 on the scale of 100, that doesn’t mean we are failing,” said Karen McLeod, a lead author on the report from Oregon State University.

“Instead, it shows there’s room for improvement, suggests where strategic actions can make the biggest difference and gives us a benchmark against which to evaluate progress over time. The index allows us to track what’s happening to the whole ocean health instead of just parts of it.”

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Oceans swamped by fresh water from rivers and rain could make hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones 50% more intense according to new research.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analysed a decade’s worth of tropical cyclones. It found that when hurricanes blow over areas of ocean filled with fresh water, the conditions can unexpectedly intensify the storm.

Scientists predict that global warming will affect the ‘ocean water cycle’, which refers to the movement of water between the atmosphere and the oceans.

Research into the water cycle earlier this year found that the difference between the saltier and fresher areas have become more marked in the past 50 years – leading to the conclusion that climate change is causing this phenomena to accelerate.

The more rain that falls in a particular part of the ocean, the more freshwater and the lower the salinity. The more evaporation there is, the higher the ocean’s salinity. Increased rain, inputs from rivers and streams and melting ice can all impact the freshwater content of the ocean.

Oceans swamped with fresh water could make hurricanes and tropical storms more intense (Source: NASA/International Space Station crew)

Under normal circumstances, say researchers, tropical storms travel across oceans, sucking up heat and building in intensity. The heat loss from the ocean’s surface layer drags colder water from the ocean below, cooling the surface temperature and providing less energy to the storm.

In areas where fresh water has been released into the ocean, however, a barrier is created between the surface water, and deeper, cooler water. When the storm forces water from the ocean’s depths, it comes from this ‘barrier layer’ of fresh water rather than the colder and saltier water beneath it.

The researchers found tropical storms travelling over a thick barrier layer of fresh water cooled 36% less than those travelling across areas without it – making them more intense.

Although the probability of hurricanes hitting fresh water conditions is slim (10-23% according to the study) the effects can be catastrophic.

“60% of the world’s population live in areas affected by tropical cyclones,” writes Karthik Balaguru, author of the report. “Cyclone Nargis killed more than 130 thousand people in Burma in 2008. We can predict the paths cyclones take, but we need to predict their intensity better to predict people susceptible to their destructive power.

“A 50% increase in intensity can result in a much larger amount of destruction and death.”

Researchers say the results could help to improve storm predictions in regions where fresh water pours into the ocean, such as the mouth of the Ganges or the Amazon.

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