Sea Level Rise: Up, Up and Away!

June 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Sea levels, after several thousand years of little or no change, began to rise steadily in the early 1900s, trailing the Industrial Revolution and the increased use of fossil fuels by decades.  Projections for future rise vary from difficult to catastrophic.  A report released on Friday, June 22, 2010 by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has occasioned  a spate of articles, with only a few making it to the front pages.  SF Chronicle: David Perlman; Newser;  AFP;  NY Times (using AP)

The West Coast papers emphasize the difference in expected sea level rise in the California of the San Andreas fault, and the California north of Cape Mendocino, Oregon and Washington which rides up over the subsiding Juan de Fuca ocean plate.

For the California coast south of Cape Mendocino, the committee projects that sea level will rise 4–30 cm [1.6″-11.8″] by 2030 relative to 2000, 12–61 cm [4.7″- 24″] by 2050, and 42–167 cm [16.5″ – 65.7″] by 2100. For the Washington, Oregon, and California coasts north of Cape Mendocino, sea level is projected to change between -4 cm (sea-level fall) and +23 cm by 2030, -3 cm and +48 cm by 2050, and 10–143 cm by 2100.

 On the East Coast attention is focused on a 600 mile “hot spot“ from Cape Hatteras to Boston where a second report, from the U.S. Geological Service, says the sea is rising 3-4 times faster than the global average.

In absolute figures, sea levels on this stretch of coast have climbed by between 2 and 3.7 millimetres per year since 1980, whereas the global increase over the same period was 0.6–1.0 millimetres per year.

The existence of the hotspot is consistent with the measured slowing of Atlantic Ocean circulation, which may be tied to changes in water temperature, salinity and density in the subpolar north of the ocean.

The researchers predicted that by 2100, sea levels in the hotspot would rise by between 20 and 29 centimetres above the global increase, which most oceanographers predict will be about one metre.

The meat of the NRC report is here:

Sea-level change is one of the most visible consequences of changes in the Earth’s climate.
A warming climate causes global sea level to rise principally by (1) warming the oceans, which
causes sea water to expand, increasing ocean volume, and (2) melting land ice, which transfers
water to the ocean. Tide gage and satellite observations show that global sea level has risen an
average of about 1.7 mm yr over the 20th century (Bindoff et al., 2007), which is a significant
increase over rates of sea-level rise during the past few millennia (Shennan and Horton, 2002;
Gehrels et al., 2004). Projections suggest that sea level will continue to rise in the future (Figure
1.1). However, the rate at which sea level is changing varies from place to place and with time.
Along the west coast of the United States, sea level is influenced by changes in global mean sea
level as well as by regional changes in ocean circulation and climate patterns such as El Niño;
gravitational and deformational effects of ice age and modern ice mass changes; and uplift or
subsidence along the coast. The relative importance of these factors in any given area determines
whether the local sea level will rise or fall and how fast it will change.


FIGURE 1.1 Estimated, observed, and projected global sea-level rise from 1800 to 2100. The pre-1900 record is based on geological evidence, and the observed record is from tide gages (red line) and satellite altimetry (blue line). Example projections of sea-level rise to 2100 are from IPCC (2007) global climate models (pink shaded area) and semi-empirical methods (gray shaded area; Rahmstorf, 2007). SOURCES: Adapted from Shum et al. (2008), Willis et al. (2010), and Shum and Kuo (2011)

The report was requested by ten state and federal agencies including 4 in California (see ix of the report) which want the best information for planning purposes — unlike the North Carolina Senate which recently passed a bill regulating which measurements were to be used in calculating sea-rise.  [It appears that the scorn storm breached the walls of idiocy and the bill has now been re-written, having been resoundingly rejected by the NC House.]

Here’s a handy little map device to drill down to your back yard and see how sea level rise might affect you (This is a linear plot, so it doesn’t take in the variances reported on above.  Interesting nevertheless.]

Filed under Climate Change, Oceans Tagged with , ,

The Ocean is Breaking – and That's Not A Good Thing

June 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The changes to the world’s oceans from warming, acidification and the resultant hypoxia are far greater in magnitude  than previously thought, and are happening much faster than predicted.

This is the conclusion of leading researchers on ocean stress, from an April, 2011 workshop at Oxford University.

The key points needed to drive a common sense rethink are:

 

  • Human actions have resulted in warming and acidification of the oceans and are now causing increased hypoxia.
  • The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst case scenarios from IPCC and other predictions.  Some are as predicted but many are faster than anticipated, and many are still accelerating.
  • The magnitude of the cumulative impacts on the ocean is greater than previously understood.
  • Timelines for action are shrinking.
  • Resilience of the ocean to climate change impacts is severely compromised by the other stressors from human activity, including fisheries, pollution and habitat destruction.
  • Ecosystem collapse is occurring as a result of both current and emerging stressors.
  • The extinction threat to marine species is rapidly increasing.

The workshop was led by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) together with International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

Full report here.

 

More in a Travis Donovan post at HuffPo and by Richard Black at BBC.

 

 

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China's Green Goo

July 8, 2010 by Leave a Comment

The United States has its oil gusher. China, not to be outdone, counters with a massive spread of green goo, and a flotilla to try to clean it up. Canny readers will notice the reference to unprecedented heat waves ….

…a massive tide of algae that is approaching the coast of Qingdao.

The outbreak is thought to be caused by high ocean temperatures and excess nitrogen runoff from agriculture and fish farms.

Scientists involved in the operation say the seaweed known as enteromorpha needs to be cleaned up before it decomposes on beaches and releases noxious gases.

…And more is on the way. Northern China has been experiencing the hottest week of the year – in some areas, such as Beijing, temperatures have reached highs not seen in decades – which was accelerating the growth of the algae.

Green and red tides have become increasingly common across the world since the 1970s. Usually they occur in coastal water near densely populated areas or where there is large-scale runoff of agricultural chemicals from farmland.

China has been particularly affected in recent years. An even bigger outbreak off Qingdao, estimated at 170,000 tonnes, in 2008 threatened to ruin the sailing events for the Olympics, prompting the authorities to call on hundreds of local fishermen to help them in the cleanup operation.

…”At a fundamental level, the way to deal with this should be to combat climate change and control pollution,” said Mao Yunxiang, a professor at the College of Marine Life, Ocean University of China, who is a consultant on the operation.

“We should also consider the possibility that the green tide are inevitable so we should make use of them. The algae can clean water, and be harvested for animal feed and biofertiliser.”

Guardian.UK

Now, if we could only get climate change to stink a little bit in Oklahoma and other denier states!

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Geo Engineering Takes a Hit

March 16, 2010 by Leave a Comment

If you’ve been paying attention to the climate change field of play you’ll have noticed an odd bunch of geeks, some of whom think climate change is a problem and some of whom doubt it, but all of whom turn to enormous, grandiose schemes to deal with it — such as giant space mirrors to reflect back sunlight, or digging up mountains of one kind of stone to react with CO2 and turn it into another kind of stone. Geoengineering is what this is called, and it gets some kinds of people all excited. In fact, President George W. Bush, after pulling the US out of the Kyoto protocol, convened a meeting of just such types to toss around just such ideas. [From which you can sort of guess how comforted you ought to feel.]

Nor will it comfort you to know the Edward Teller, father of the H Bomb, proposed a “sunscreen” for earth back in 1998.

A tiny little nick in one idea appeared this past week. The idea is: sow certain parts of the ocean with iron filings, which will encourage algal blooms, thereby absorbing CO2, which would then sink to the bottom, trapping the the CO2 for eternity less a day. In fact there have been some pilot programs to look into the feasibility of such an endeavor.

It turns out that at least one species of algae responds by upping its output of a neurotoxin [domic acid] which, if absorbed up the food chain, as would be expected, would [and has] damage[d] human beings. You think mercury is a problem!

The amounts of domoic acid produced don’t rise to levels known to be toxic to krill and other species that feed on Pseudonitzschia, Trick notes. And the areas where iron fertilization would typically take place are relatively barren zones far from fisheries. Nevertheless, he notes, the effects of long-term exposure to low levels of the neurotoxin are unknown.

The new study is “less a prediction of ecological doom than it is a lesson about not knowing the consequences of our actions {bold by ed.],” Trick adds.

In nearshore areas where nutrients are plentiful, algae of the genus Pseudonitzschia — diatoms that release domoic acid as they proliferate — sometimes undergo harmful blooms, Trick says. But open-ocean species of Pseudonitzschia have previously been considered nontoxic.

Algae Seeding

More coverage: SF Gate;

Rabbits in Australia were not a great idea. Neurotoxin generating algae seems far worse. It would be great if the small, do-able steps to lessen our output of CO2 were taken now and increased over time, instead of like a hard-drinking and disorganized wagon train we set off into the wild west, hoping the cavalry would come to the rescue if anything [predictably] bad should happen.

It is entirely likely that the current generation will not deal with CO2 accumulation and some extraordinary scheme will have to be used fifty years from now. Thirty foot seawalls may have to be built around Manhattan! And, so I’m glad smart guys are thinking about crazy ideas. It makes me really nervous however, when such ideas are tossed off with nonchalance as Plan A [easy-peasy!] instead of Plan Z to be put into effect when there really is no other choice. You can bet your last tin of sardines that a Teller-like plan to umbrella the earth will not softly land the crisis. Benefits (if any) and pain (surely) will be unevenly and unpredictably distributed. The wealthy, what ever the distribution, will come out better. The Greenwich, CT millionaires, in almost any conceivable scenario, will come out better than the Bangladesh rice farmers….

Filed under Environment, Oceans

Species Invasion

August 14, 2008 by Leave a Comment

“- A maroon-striped marauder with venomous spikes is rapidly multiplying in the Caribbean’s warm waters, swallowing native species, stinging divers and generally wreaking havoc on an ecologically delicate region.

The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere — from the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola to Little Cayman’s pristine Bloody Bay Wall, one of the region’s prime destinations for divers.

Wherever it appears, the adaptable predator corners fish and crustaceans up to half its size with its billowy fins and sucks them down in one violent gulp.

Research teams observed one lionfish eating 20 small fish in less than 30 minutes.

Lionfish

Filed under Environment, Oceans

O2 Starvation

August 14, 2008 by Leave a Comment

“Many coastal areas of the world’s oceans are being starved of oxygen at an alarming rate, with vast stretches along the seafloor depleted of it to the point that they can barely sustain marine life, researchers are reporting.

The main culprit, scientists say, is nitrogen-rich nutrients from crop fertilizers that spill into coastal waters by way of rivers and streams.”

Dead Zones

If global warming is the number one danger, where is this? 2? 3, behind water? What to do about it is fairly obvious: stop with the frickin’ nitrogen fertilizers. How much would food production diminish? What other, less dangerous, technologies could increase food production? What percent of food is wasted and how much could that be reduced?

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A 'Dead Zone' in The Gulf of Mexico

July 30, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Scientists Say Area That Cannot Support Some Marine Life Is Near Record Size

The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area on the seabed with too little oxygen to support fish, shrimp, crabs and other forms of marine life, is nearly the largest on record this year, about 8,000 square miles, researchers said this week.

Only the churning effects of Hurricane Dolly last week, they said, prevented the dead zone from being the largest ever.

The problem of hypoxia, very low levels of dissolved oxygen, is a downstream effect of fertilizers used for agriculture in the Mississippi River watershed. Nitrogen is the major culprit, flowing into the Gulf and spurring the growth of algae. Animals called zooplankton eat the algae, excreting pellets that sink to the bottom like tiny stones. This organic matter decays in a process that depletes the water of oxygen.

Researchers expected the dead zone to set a record — even more than the 8,500 square miles observed in 2002 — after the Mississippi, swollen with floodwaters, carried an extraordinary amount of nitrates into the Gulf, about 37 percent more than last year and the most since these factors began being measured in 1970.

Dead Zone

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Nitrogen Fed Corn for Ethanol Creates Dead Zone

December 20, 2007 by Leave a Comment

The recently passed energy bill in Congress, mandating more ethanol, principally from corn, was oblivious to this sort of news.

Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since World War II. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price.

The nation’s corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing “dead zone” — a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.


Killer Corn

Filed under Environment, Non Fossil Energy, Oceans

South Korean Oil Spill

December 10, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Big oil spill on the coast of South Korea

Oil Spill South Korea

Sea farms and fishing areas on the country’s western coast have been turned into a “sea of oil” following the Friday leakage of oil from a tanker in seas off Taean, South Chungcheong Province, which is believed one of the world’s most devastating sea pollution cases involving oil.

Maritime officials say about 5 percent of the oil has been collected, and about 9,000 soldiers, police, officials and volunteers were struggling to clean up the polluted area, Monday, the fourth day of operations.

The amount of oil spilled _ 10,500 tons _ is more than double the 5,000 tons that leaked from the Sea Prince into seas off Yeosu, South Jeolla Province, Korea’s worst previous oil spill in 1995.

It is also about 28 percent of the 37,000 tons leaked from the Exxon Valdez into Alsaka’s Prince William Sound in 1989, one of the world’s worst sea pollutions by oil. [the recent spill in San Francisco Bay was about 190 tons — 1/55 of Korean spill.]

The Korea Times

More NYTimes

South Korea—Chung Hwan-hyang surveyed the damage from South Korea’s worst oil spill, saddened by the knowledge that the oyster farm she and her husband ran for 30 years was lost.
more stories like this

“My oysters are all dead,” the 70-year-old woman said Sunday as she and thousands of others cleaned foul-smelling oil from Shinduri Beach. “I cried and cried last night. I don’t know what to do.”


Boston.com / AP

Filed under Asia, Energy, Oceans

Black Sea Disaster

November 14, 2007 by 1 Comment

While the Bay Area oil spill of about 65,000 gallons of bunker oil was contained late, it was contained; while oil hit the beaches, volunteers and paid workers were able to get at it in nice weather, stopping for lunches; while birds were covered in oil, dying and struggling not to die the numbers were in the hundreds.

In the Black Sea, matters are entirely different. Different enough, in years of neglect, greed and stupidity, in howling storms that are keeping people off the shore, that one environmentalist said “We could lose the Black Sea if we go on this way.”

Leading Russian environmentalists, meanwhile, said the oil spill was triggered by years of official negligence that allowed oil transport ships to use outdated and inadequate equipment.

“It’s a long-expected disaster,” environmentalist Sergei Golubchikov told journalists in Moscow Tuesday. “We could lose the Black Sea if we go on this way.

Russia has a lot riding on the health of the Black Sea: President Vladimir Putin has pledged to spend $12 billion on developing the port of Sochi as the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Eleven ships sank or ran aground in Sunday’s gale, including the tanker that spilled the fuel and a freighter that carrying sulfur, officials said. The bodies of three crew members from the freighter have been found, and crews were searching for five missing crewmen, said Sergei Kozhemyaka, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry.

High winds have prevented salvage teams from launching an effort to sweep the oil off the water’s surface, officials said, allowing patches of the slick residue to drift to the seabed, where it could linger for years.

Yelena Vavila, an expert with the regional environmental monitoring agency, warned about “increased concentration of oil in the water for at least five years.”

The most important task now is to build a dam to prevent the slick from floating into the Sea of Azov, said Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Russian state environmental safety watchdog Rosprirodnadzor. “We have a real chance to save the ecosystem of the Sea of Azov,” he said.

However, Russia and Ukraine have a long-running argument over which country controls what parts of the waterway. Ukraine has objected in the past to Russian plans to build a similar dam, calling it an attempt to strengthen Moscow’s claim to a disputed island.

Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov visited the region Tuesday and said that most of the oil could be cleaned off the shoreline within three weeks and that all would be gone within 45 days.

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych said he would meet with Zubkov and called for review of bilateral relations. “We definitely need to examine, or, perhaps, re-examine the treaty between Ukraine and Russia,” he told the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Meanwhile, scores of birds — weighed down by thick coatings of the fuel oil — hopped weakly along the shore or perched helplessly in the sand. Workers with pitchforks and shovels collected vast clumps of oil mixed with sand, seaweed and dead birds.

Black Sea Death

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