The climate scientist whose world spun on through war

April 27, 2013 — andyextance
A young Milutin Milanković as a student in Vienna, where he became the first Serb to achieve a doctorate in technical sciences. Image via Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons licence

A young Milutin Milanković as a student in Vienna, where he became the first Serb to achieve a doctorate in technical sciences. Image via Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons licence

On 6 April 1941, a world war left its mark on Milutin Milanković’s life and climate research for a second time. Nazi bombs destroyed the print works where his new book, summarising 30 years’ work, sat half-complete. As German-led forces occupied Serbia a month later, Milutin still had just one finished copy of his “Canon of Insolation and the Ice-Age Problem”.  In it, he brought together his general astronomical theory of climate, which would explain how Earth’s motion in space drives ice sheet advance and retreat over tens of thousands of years.

And when two German officers came to visit the University of Belgrade maths professor, he might have feared no-one else would ever see all his ideas in a single volume. But the officers were geology students, bringing greetings from Wolfgang Soergel at the University of Freiburg, who had previously published studies supporting Milutin’s calculations. Amid the drama unfolding around them, Milutin gave them his only copy to send to Freiburg for safe-keeping. But both Milutin and his work escaped to ultimately make strides forward in understanding what controls Earth’s temperatures.

Milutin fixed his focus on climate after joining the University of Belgrade in 1909, while reading a paper about the Sun’s heat on the Earth’s surface, whose starting equation was wrong. To study how climate could produce dramatic changes like ice ages courted controversy even then because it was unclear the puzzle could ever be solved. So little was known that when Svante Arrhenius correctly identified CO2 in the air as an important factor his findings were ruled out by flawed experiments.

Using heat from the Sun, the incoming solar radiation also known as insolation, Milutin looked at climate both on the Earth and other planets in our solar system. “A connection should be found between planets’ insolation and their atmosphere and surface temperatures,” he wrote. And thanks to the many different complex sciences such an astronomical climate theory combined, Milutin was the only one trying to make that link. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Arctic, climate, environment, Glaciers, Global warming, history, Ice sheets, news, science. Tags: , , , , , . 18 Comments »

Probabilities reveal shape of climate change

April 20, 2013 — andyextance
Planners looking to prepare for floods, like this one in Venice, Italy, would like better local information on climate change - and now David Stainforth and his colleagues are helping deliver it. Image credit: www.WorldIslandInfo.com, Allison Lince-Bentley, via Flickr Creative Commons license.

Planners looking to prepare for floods, like this one in Venice, Italy, would like better local information on climate change – and now David Stainforth and his colleagues are helping deliver it. Image courtesy http://www.WorldIslandInfo.com, Allison Lince-Bentley, used under Flickr Creative Commons license.

If you want to plan for the future, or even for the present, knowing that our climate is changing, what’s the best way to do it? That’s a question that David Stainforth from the London School of Economics, Sandra Chapman from the University of Warwick and Nicholas Watkins from the British Antarctic Survey have puzzled over. And while David is co-founder of the climateprediction.net project that borrows spare time on peoples’ computers to run climate models, he doesn’t feel that models are always the best source of information.

“It’s clear to me that the detailed local information on how climate is changing, and what it will be like in 2050, can’t be had from climate models today,” David told me. “They’re just not that good. And yet I work a lot with the adaptation and impacts community, who are interested in what’s happening ‘here’, on a very local basis.” So together David, Sandra and Nicholas have turned to measured data, devising a simple way to pick the most important local climate changes from it.

Weather stations around the world monitor daily conditions, and combine to create a record containing occasional extremes, lots of ordinary days, and everything in between. Knowing how common these conditions are is important for people who want to prepare for future climate change. “For flood risks, you’re worried about going over certain rainfall amounts in a given time,” David explained. “Managers of overheating buildings are worried about what proportion of the time temperatures pass certain levels.”

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Posted in adaptation, Antarctica, climate, economics, environment, floods, Global warming, IPCC, Mitigation, Modelling, news, Precipitation, science, temperature records. Tags: , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Alternate histories back unique modern warmth claims

April 13, 2013 — andyextance
Tree rings have a light-colored band, or earlywood, that forms in the spring and a dark-colored band, or latewood, that forms in the summer. The width of the band tells how much the tree grew during that period and therefore can be used as a proxy for the climate during that season. That approach has some uncertainties, but Martin Tingley and Peter Huybers have reduced their impact on telling if any year is the warmest. Credit: thaths via Flickr Creative Commons license

Tree rings have a light-colored band, or earlywood, that forms in the spring and a dark-colored band, or latewood, that forms in the summer. The width of the band tells how much the tree grew during that period and therefore can be used as a proxy for the climate during that season. That approach has some uncertainties, but Martin Tingley and Peter Huybers have reduced their impact on telling if any year is the warmest. Credit: thaths via Flickr Creative Commons license

If you build a temperature record going back in time to judge modern warming against, how certain can you be of your answer? That’s a big question for scientists making such records from effects temperatures have had on the natural world. And figuring out if today’s heat is unique is too great a challenge for the methods scientists normally use to calculate uncertainty, according to Harvard University’s Martin Tingley.

But Martin and Peter Huybers have shown the precise chances that northern areas of the world are warmer than any time in rebuilt records reaching back to the year 1400. They have worked out that there’s less than one chance in 20 that 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011’s northern summers weren’t the warmest in that time. They also find that summer 2010 has a 99% chance of being the warmest western Russia has seen. There have already been lots of claims made over the unusualness of recent warmth, Martin pointed out, but his and Peter’s are the most robust yet. “We put these estimates on a much sounder statistical footing,” he told me.

Saying one year’s summer is uniquely warm across a long period is difficult for subtle reasons that Martin explained through his height. “I’m a tall guy, 6 foot 4 inches,” he said. “I’ve never met you, but I’m going to bet I’m taller than you. What’s the intuition behind my bet? We have a sense of the distribution of heights. I’m aware I fall pretty far out on the tail, so the chances are if I meet an average person they don’t fall further out than I do. What if I’m in a room with 1,000 people I’ve never met before? Am I still likely to be the tallest in the room? Probably not.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Arctic, climate, environment, Global warming, history, Ice sheets, Modelling, news, paleoclimate, science, temperature records, Tree rings. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Temperature patterns produce perplexing Pliocene puzzle

April 3, 2013 — andyextance
Lafayette College's Kira Lawrence and her teammates have used ocean bed sediment cores, like this one, to produce a 5 million year climate record. © Intergrated Ocean Drilling Program

Lafayette College’s Kira Lawrence and her teammates have used ocean bed sediment cores, like this one, to produce a 5 million year climate record. © Intergrated Ocean Drilling Program

US, UK and Hong Kong Researchers have produce a unique ‘movie’ of climate reaching back 5 million years, by bringing together data drilled from ocean beds. It reveals three important temperature patterns during the warm early part of the Pliocene period that they couldn’t recreate together in climate models using existing explanations. That’s important because scientists hope the Pliocene could help us know what the future of a warmer Earth might be like. And having uncovered another layer to the Pliocene puzzle, team member Kira Lawrence from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, underlined the value of finding its solution.

“Our community of scientists think of the Pliocene as though it was about 3°C warmer than modern temperatures with CO2 concentration about where we are right now,” Kira told me. “But we haven’t recognised before that the pattern of temperature was a lot different. If that’s where we’re headed in the not too distant future, if the temperature and precipitation patterns change in that way, we should have some significant things to think about.”

The Pliocene period started 5.3 million years ago, during which primates made important evolutionary steps towards humanity. Since 2000, there has been a climate data explosion reaching back through this era. Around the world, international drilling expeditions have pierced ocean beds kilometres below sea level, reaching hundreds of metres into sediment to bring back ‘core’ samples. Tiny fossils within that rock and mud can tell scientists temperatures through history, which can give climate scientists real data to test their models against.

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Posted in Aerosols, Antarctica, Arctic, climate, clouds, environment, Glaciers, Global warming, history, hurricanes, Modelling, news, Oceans, paleoclimate, science, temperature records, wind. Tags: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Diving deep into ocean data uncovers ‘missing heat’ treasure

March 30, 2013 — andyextance
A new ocean reanalysis called ORAS4, here showing the difference between September 2012 sea temperatures and the average for 1989-2009 (not part of the latest study), has helped show that extra heat trapped in the atmosphere by CO2 humans are emitting is buried in the deep ocean. Credit: ECMWF

A new ocean reanalysis called ORAS4, here showing the difference between September 2012 sea temperatures and the average for 1989-2009 (not part of the latest study), has helped show that extra heat trapped in the atmosphere by CO2 humans are emitting is buried in the deep ocean. Credit: ECMWF

A newly-made picture of ocean history has backed a theory that the missing piece of a climate puzzle at the edge of space lies deep in Earth’s waters. The puzzle comes because the amount of heat energy our planet has absorbed should have warmed it more than it seems to have done. But now, using an ocean reanalysis assembled from data gathered from many sources, UK and US researchers have shown especially strong recent warming in oceans below 700m. “We have found some energy buried at depths,” Kevin Trenberth from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. “We also have a plausible explanation for it related to changes in winds.”

In 2010, Kevin went public over his worries about a budget that didn’t balance. But rather than money, that budget tallies heat energy from the Sun entering the top of the atmosphere against energy the Earth radiates back out into space. Satellite measurements show more energy coming in than leaving, which is what causes global warming. But Kevin noticed that existing measurements showed the world hadn’t warmed as much since 2003 as this budget would suggest.

With over nine-tenths of the surplus energy coming into the Earth going into the sea, the deep ocean has always looked the likeliest hiding place for the missing heat. However, temperature data from those depths is scarce, making the theory hard to prove. Yet, in the years since Kevin pointed out the problem, scientists have gathered some clues to back that explanation. For example, some used a model that includes the complex links between the atmosphere, land, oceans, and sea ice to run five simulations of the 21st century. They found warming slowdowns on the Earth’s surface similar to what has happened in the 2000s, with the heat going into the deep oceans. But even this just underlined the importance of using measurements to see the effect directly. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Animals, climate, El Niño, environment, Global warming, Modelling, news, radiative forcing, salinity, satellites, science, temperature records, volcanoes, wind. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Climate change set to bring Western Europe more hurricanes

March 23, 2013 — andyextance
In January 2009 a cyclone called Klaus, which is shown here and boasted hurricane-force winds, hit France, Spain and Italy. Such conditions could become much more common in Europe by the end of the 21st century, according to Rein Haarsma and his KNMI team. Credit: H de C via Flickr Creative Commons license

In January 2009 a cyclone called Klaus, which is shown here and boasted hurricane-force winds, hit France, Spain and Italy. Such conditions could become much more common in Europe by the end of the 21st century, according to Rein Haarsma and his KNMI team. Credit: H de C via Flickr Creative Commons license

Current once-in-a-century hurricane-force winds may become as much as 25 times as likely in parts of Western Europe at the end of the 21st century. That’s what Rein Haarsma and a team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) have shown using one of the highest-resolution climate models around today. Their findings spring from a change in where hurricanes will develop that could also affect western North America, though more research is needed to study this. “The statement that the wind climate in Western Europe will not change significantly is questionable,” Rein told me. “Significant changes in wind climate will have consequences for agriculture – the increased winds are during the autumn – infrastructure and coastal defence.”

With Europe so far from the tropical regions where warmth and unstable atmosphere spawns hurricanes, it rarely sees them today. But when hurricane conditions do happen, like the ‘Great Storm’ in 1987, or Hurricane Floyd in 1993, they live long in the memory. The hurricane remnants that sometimes reach Western Europe usually bring a lot of rain, Rein noted, and only occasionally hurricane-force winds.

The warming Arctic is reducing ocean temperature differences that help create Europe’s traditional storms, meaning they pose less of a threat. But recently findings have shown that a warmer atmosphere raises hurricane risks. “Many model simulations suggest that the strength of hurricanes will increase due to climate change,” Rein explains. “The area where hurricanes develop appears to move poleward and the moisture content in a warmer atmosphere will increase. These factors might alter the possibility that these remnants of hurricanes are still strong enough to produce hurricane-force winds.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in agriculture, climate, Cyclones, environment, Global warming, Modelling, news, science, wind. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

How cold hearts and ice ages kindled the science of warming

March 16, 2013 — andyextance
Svante Arrhenius, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, and also was the first to show that while water plays the largest role in the greenhouse effect, the smaller but forcing effect from CO2 can be important. Image via Wikimedia Commons, PD-US

Svante Arrhenius, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, and also was the first to show that while water plays the largest role in the greenhouse effect, the smaller but forcing effect from CO2 can be important. Image via Wikimedia Commons, PD-US

In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius took off into the atmosphere. Or at least into an immense calculation about the atmosphere that might distract him from having divorced his wife Sofia, who had taken custody of their baby son Olof. He looked to the skies to settle a key argument: How can landscapes around the world show evidence of ice scraping over it?

At the time, the idea of an ice age was controversial, and the world’s great minds struggled to explain the mile-thick sheets clues suggested had existed. For months Svante laboured by hand to calculate how tiny reductions in a gas called carbon dioxide – CO2 – could team up with water vapour to cool down the world. He didn’t produce an immediate answer to the riddle of the ice age, and he may or may not have escaped the woes of his personal life. But Svante Arrhenius did lay a foundation that climate science still rests upon today.

The tools that Svante used had recently been forged in the furnace of scientific progress that was the 19th century. Until then, even an effect as seemingly basic as heat had been poorly understood. Only slowly had the idea that it was a kind of fluid or gas been replaced by the modern understanding that it’s a flow of energy. In the 1820s French mathematician Joseph Fourier helped drive that shift. He also mused on why, when the Sun heats the Earth, doesn’t the Earth get as hot as the Sun?
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Posted in climate, environment, Global warming, history, Methane, Modelling, news, radiative forcing, science. Tags: , , , , , . 21 Comments »

Projected warming set to exceed civilisation’s experience

March 7, 2013 — andyextance
Oregon State University's Shaun Marcott has built a climate record reaching back 11,300 years, showing that today's temperatures are warmer than at least 70% of that period. Credit: Shaun Marcott

Oregon State University’s Shaun Marcott has built a climate record reaching back 11,300 years, showing that today’s temperatures are warmer than at least 70% of that period. Credit: Shaun Marcott

The world is headed for average surface temperatures warmer than it has seen in at least 11,300 years. That’s one conclusion US researchers have reached after bringing together 73 studies of ancient climate from across the world into a single global record. Their work supports previous records for the past 2,000 years built mainly from tree ring data, explained Shaun Marcott from Oregon State University, and gives a much broader view.

“We can put today’s global temperature into context against the entire Holocene period,” Shaun told me. “That’s when human civilisation was born, developed and progressed to today.” Modern temperatures are higher than in around three-quarters of that period, which reaches back to the end of the last ice age. And their comparison against forecasts for 2100 made in models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is even starker. “If those scenarios come to fruition, we’ll be well outside anything human civilisation has seen,” Shaun warned. “We won’t have even have been close.”

Knowing climate’s history helps understand its present, and so researchers have puzzled out temperatures on the Earth’s surface from proxy, or indirect, records for the last 2,000 years. In particular, bringing together measurements from tree rings, ice and coral has showed a sharp recent temperature rise often referred to as the ‘hockey stick’. Meanwhile, studies scattered across the world had reached back across the 11,300 years since the beginning of the Holocene. But they can be influenced by regional effects, and no one had pieced them into a global view that would overcome that. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Arctic, climate, Coral, environment, fossils, Global warming, Greenland, IPCC, Michael Mann, Modelling, news, paleoclimate, Scepticism, science. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 5 Comments »

Evidence rethink puts CO2 and ancient warming back in sync

February 28, 2013 — andyextance
A thin layer of ice from an area of the Antarctic where ancient ice records are collected, in polarized light that reveals ice crystals. Rethinking how ice crystal formation affects ancient data collection is helping to solve an outstanding climate puzzle. © Frédéric Parrenin

A thin layer of ice from an area of the Antarctic where ancient ice records are collected, in polarized light that reveals ice crystals. Rethinking how ice crystal formation affects ancient data collection is helping to solve an outstanding climate puzzle. © Frédéric Parrenin

A different way to dig up links between past levels of CO2 in the air and temperatures could solve a troubling question over the historical climate. Previously, data collected from long cylinders drilled from Antarctica’s ice sheet seemed to show temperatures rising hundreds of years before CO2 levels did. If ancient warming came before a CO2 rise, then the greenhouse gas seemingly couldn’t have caused the warming. Climate skeptics have used this to argue  that the CO2 we produce today isn’t causing global warming.

Now, Frédéric Parrenin at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Grenoble and his teammates have used a different method on these cylindrical ice cores. They say that their approach shows CO2 and temperature rises happened together during the last ‘deglaciation’, when ice sheets retreated during an abrupt warming period 20,000-10,000 years ago. “This makes it possible that CO2 was actually a cause of warming corresponding to the last deglaciation,” Frédéric told me.

Scientists have been using Antarctic ice cores, and bubbles of air from the time the ice formed trapped inside, to study climate history for over 30 years. The time capsule-like bubbles show what chemicals were in the air. Meanwhile, the amounts of different forms, known as isotopes, of elements like hydrogen, carbon and oxygen in the ice reveals the temperature it formed at. And finally, scientists figure out how old the ice and bubbles are from how deep they are in the core – and that’s where Frédéric found problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Antarctica, climate, environment, Glaciers, Global warming, Ice sheets, news, paleoclimate, Scepticism, science. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Cave deposits reveal permafrost concern

February 21, 2013 — andyextance
University of Oxford's Anton Vaks explores a cave, where he could find stalactites and stalagmites that reveal when the soil above was permafrost. Credit: University of Oxford

University of Oxford’s Anton Vaks explores a cave, where he could find stalactites and stalagmites that reveal when the soil above was permafrost. Credit: University of Oxford

Stalagmite and stalactite deposits in Siberian and Mongolian caves have revealed the most accurate permafrost history yet, suggesting that a global 1.5°C temperature rise could trigger a widespread thaw. “The finding shows how vulnerable the permafrost is,” said Anton Vaks from the University of Oxford. “Russian gas facilities in north-western Siberia are located close to the boundary of the continuous permafrost and rely on it as hard ground. Thawing of the permafrost may cause damage both to Russia, as well as its gas trade partners, like the European Union. The melting permafrost may also release part of the organic carbon currently trapped in it as greenhouse gases, CO2 and methane, enhancing global warming.”

Anton first used cave deposits’ power to study climate history during his PhD to build a 350,000 year record for the northern margin of the Saharan-Arabian Desert. “Stalagmites and stalactites grow only when rain or snowmelt water seep into the cave through the ceiling,” Anton explained. “Therefore each layer of growth of stalagmites and stalactites records a humid event in the desert.” He realised that these deposits’ ability to track water flow could equally measure melting of previously permanently frozen soil known as permafrost. “Cave deposits cannot grow when the rock above the cave is frozen,” Anton said. “Thus, each growth layer in a stalagmite forms during warm periods, whereas growth breaks represent cold periods with permafrost. Past periods that were warmer than now are especially important, because they can show what may happen to the permafrost in the future warmer world.”
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Posted in Arctic, climate, environment, Global warming, Ice sheets, news, paleoclimate, Permafrost, Precipitation, science. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »
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