Climate Change Is Making the Whole Planet Tip

Climate change is changing the planet. Yes, it’s doing it in all those ways that you already know about: rising seas, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, more extreme weather. But climate change is changing the planet in another dramatic way, too: It’s actually causing the entire crust of the Earth to shift. According to new research by Jianli Chen and colleagues, climate change–induced glacier melt and sea level rise have thrown the whole planet off-kilter.

The Earth is a ball that floats in space, and the Earth’s surface—the tectonic plates that make up the land—are like a shell that floats on the mantle below. Just like the hard chocolate coating can slip and slide on your soft serve ice cream, the crust of the Earth can slide over the mantle. This is different than continental drift. This is the whole surface of the planet moving as one. The rotation axis of the Earth stays steady, the land masses shift around it. The idea is known as “true polar wander,” and its occurrence is a part of the planet’s history.

The Earth is not a perfect sphere—it’s kind of fat at the middle—and changing how the mass on the surface is distributed changes how the tectonic plates sit in relation to the planet’s rotation axis. By melting Greenland and other glaciers, say the researchers, the Earth’s geographic North Pole has drifted to the east at around 2.4 inches each year since 2005. Nature:

From 1982 to 2005, the pole drifted southeast towards northern Labrador, Canada, at a rate of about 2 milliarcseconds — or roughly 6 centimetres — per year. But in 2005, the pole changed course and began galloping east towards Greenland at a rate of more than 7 milliarcseconds per year.

Seasonal shifts in how ice and water are spread around the world mean that the North Pole is always sort of wandering around. But drift triggered by climate change is new. It’s a sign that global warming isn’t just changing how we might live in the world, but the very face of the world itself.

How Climate Change and Your Wine Habit Threaten Endangered Pandas

One group that’s been keeping a close eye on climate change is wine growers. Since a 2006 study predicted global warming could fry over 80 percent of the US’s wine grapes, vinters have been planning new heat-resistant varietals, adopting big-data-driven water saving techniques, and mapping out what could become the new Napa Valleys of a warming world.

That last trend is the focus of a new study out today that examines how shifting wine cultivation geography could have implications for endangered species. Lee Hannah, an ecologist at Conservational International, used a suite of global climate models to plot where ideal wine conditions will migrate to as temperatures warm and precipitation patterns fluctuate.

“In a lot of these places, what’s there now is good wildlife habitat,” Hannah said.

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Scientists link frozen spring to dramatic Arctic sea ice loss

Climate scientists have linked the massive snowstorms and bitter spring weather now being experienced across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss ofArctic sea ice.

Both the extent and the volume of the sea ice that forms and melts each year in the Arctic Ocean fell to an historic low last autumn, and satellite records published on Monday by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, show the ice extent is close to the minimum recorded for this time of year.

“The sea ice is going rapidly. It’s 80% less than it was just 30 years ago. There has been a dramatic loss. This is a symptom of global warming and it contributes to enhanced warming of the Arctic,” said Jennifer Francis, research professor with the Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Science.

According to Francis and a growing body of other researchers, the Arctic ice loss adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere which shifts the position of the jet stream – the high-altitude river of air that steers storm systems and governs most weather in northern hemisphere.

“This is what is affecting the jet stream and leading to the extreme weather we are seeing in mid-latitudes,” she said. “It allows the cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. The pattern can be slow to change because the [southern] wave of the jet stream is getting bigger. It’s now at a near record position, so whatever weather you have now is going to stick around,” she said.

Francis linked the Arctic temperature rises to extreme weather in mid latitudes last year and warned in September that 2012’s record sea ice melt could lead to a cold winter in the UK and northern Europe.

She was backed by Vladimir Petoukhov, professor of Earth system analysis at Potsdam Institute in Germany, whose research suggests the loss of ice this year could be changing the direction of the jet stream.

“The ice was at a record low last year and is now exceptionally low in some parts of the Arctic like the Labrador and Greenland seas. This could be one reason why anticyclones are developing,” he said.

The heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures which have marked March 2013 across the northern hemisphere are in stark contrast to March 2012 when many countries experienced their warmest ever springs. The hypothesis that wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere would explain both the extremes of heat and cold, say the scientists.

A recent paper by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also found that enhanced warming of the Arctic influenced weather across the northern hemisphere.

“With more solar energy going into the Arctic Ocean because of lost ice, there is reason to expect more extreme weather events, such as heavy snowfall, heat waves, and flooding in North America and Europe,” said the researchers.

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Earth Hour is being held on March 23, 2013, from 8:30 to 9:30 pm! You can join the millions of other people participating across the globe by turning off all non-essential lights, appliances and other electrical devices in your household during this time period in your timezone.

Earth hour has an impact beyond the measurable decrease in electricity consumption (up to 10% lower, as measured in Sydney, Australia in 2007 (x)).  It raises awareness of environmental issues such as climate change and energy consumption, and it encourages individuals, businesses and governments to take responsibility for their ecological footprint, opening dialog regarding environmental challenges.

Read more at the Earth Hour website.

Why geoengineering has immediate appeal to China:

The political dilemma over geoengineering – deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming or offset some of its effects – will perhaps be most acute in China.

In December, the country listed geoengineering among its Earth science research priorities, in a marked shift in the international climate change landscape noticed by China specialists Kingsley Edney and Jonathan Symons.

On the one hand, China’s rapid economic growth has seen a huge escalation in its greenhouse gas emissions, which on an annual basis overtook those of the United States five years ago. Sustained GDP growth provides China’s Communist party with its only claim to legitimacy, its “mandate of heaven”. China’s efforts to constrain the growth of its emissions have been substantial, and certainly put to shame those of many developed nations.

Yet neither China’s efforts nor those of other countries over the next two or three decades are likely to do much to slow the warming of the globe, nor halt the climate disruption that will follow. Global emissions have not been declining or even slowing. In fact, global emissions are accelerating. Even the World Bank, which for years has been criticized for promoting carbon-intensive development, now warns that we are on track for 4C of warming, which would change everything.

China is highly vulnerable to water shortages in the north, with declining crop yields and food price rises expected, and storms and flooding in the east and south. Climate-related disasters in China are already a major source of social unrest so there is a well-founded fear in Beijing that the impacts of climate change in the provinces could topple the government in the capital. Natural disasters jeopardise its mandate.

So what can the Chinese government do? Continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions is a condition for its hold on power, but climate disruption in response to emissions growth threatens to destabilise it.

Geoengineering has immediate appeal as a way out of this catch-22. While a variety of technologies to take carbon out of the air or to regulate sunlight are being researched, at present by far the most likely intervention would involve blanketing the Earth with a layer of sulphate particles to block some incoming solar radiation.

Spraying sulphate aerosols could mask warming and cool the planet within weeks, although it would not solve the core problem of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans.

Scientists and policy-makers in China have been watching the debate over geoengineering unfold in the US and Europe where there has been a boom in discussion and research since the taboo was lifted in 2006, following an intervention by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen calling for investigation of “plan B”.

In the US, there have been several high-level reports arguing for more research into geoengineering — the National Research Council, the House of Representatives’ committee on science and technology and the Government Accountability Office. Influential Beltway thinktanks, like the Bipartisan Policy Center, have joined the fray. Plan B is being discussed in the White House, and the military is keeping a watching brief, and maybe doing more.

China’s decision to initiate a research programme could be motivated by no more than a desire to develop a national capacity to keep abreast of what is happening in the rest of the world. Certainly, there is a good deal of scepticism about geoengineering within China’s scientific community.

Yet as the world remains paralysed by the scale of the warming crisis, and watches while it becomes locked-in, the capacity to implement an emergency response will become ever-more attractive. And in a global emergency — a crippling drought, the Amazon ablaze, Greenland collapsing — the gaze becomes focused on the urgent to the exclusion of all else, including the interests of other, less-powerful nations whose plight may be worsened if a major power decided to regulate the Earth’s climate system.

While western nations are not ruled by one-party states determined to maintain power at all costs, in truth the tyranny of the economic system is no less absolute. The 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath demonstrated that the structures of power that underpin the system — the banks, the markets, the major corporations and their ties to the political system — are extremely resilient, perhaps every bit as resistant to change as China’s Communist party.

After all, when it comes to responding to climate disruption every report and recommendation — from the Stern report to the IPCC — assumes that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must accommodate the first imperative, maintaining the rate of economic growth, even though it is GDP growth that escalates greenhouse gas emissions.

So here is a plausible scenario for 2035. Facing a revolt from a population under extreme climate stress, the Chinese government seeks the US government’s consent to cool the planet by spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere. Popular protests prevent Washington endorsing the plan but it tacitly agrees not to shoot down China’s planes. That would be enough, and from that point there would be no going back.