14 April 2016

Wasted Food’s Heavy Burden On Climate

April 12, 2016, by Tim Radford
Source: Climate News Network

As obesity levels soar, cutting the vast amount of food we waste could have a major impact on reducing the effects of climate change, as well as alleviating world hunger.

LONDON, 12 April, 2016 − By mid-century, an estimated one-tenth of all greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture could be traced back to food waste, according to new research.

Human use and misuse of land accounts for up to a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and farming directly contributes at least 10%, and perhaps twice as much. Yet roughly one-third of all food produced never makes it to the plate.

“Reducing food waste can contribute to fighting hunger, but to some extent also prevent climate impacts like more intense weather extremes and sea-level rise,” says lead author Ceren Hic, a scientific assistant at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Her PIK colleague, Prajal Pradhan, a researcher in climate impacts and vulnerabilities, adds: “At the same time, agriculture is a major driver of climate change, accounting for more than 20% of overall global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2010. Avoiding food loss and waste would therefore avoid unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions and help mitigate climate change.”

Weight increases

The news comes little more than a week after researchers at Imperial College London calculated that obesity levels among men have tripled, and among women, worldwide, have doubled to a new total of 640 million. More ominously, the average weight of humans has been increasing by 1.5 kilograms a decade since 1975. That means that humankind is growing not just in numbers, but in mass.

The two Imperial scientists and colleagues report in the journal Environmental Science and Technology that they analysed body type, food needs, food availability, economic development and greenhouse emissions for the past and the future, under a number of possible scenarios.

“It is quite astounding that up to 14% of overall agricultural emissions in 2050 could easily
be avoided by better management
of food utilisation and distribution”

This kind of thinking ahead is not new, nor confined to any one country. Researchers worldwide have been thinking about the links between food security and climate, and the consequence of global dietary change on emissions has been a consistent calculation in the analysis of climate change. So much food is wasted that researchers have identified it as a potential energy source.

What the Potsdam scientists found was that although global average food demand per person remained almost constant, food availability had increased rapidly in the last 50 years. And, Dr Pradhan says, this availability kept in step with development, which in turn suggested that rich countries consumed more food than was healthy, or simply wasted it.

Right now, humans discard 1.3 billion tonnes of food every year. In turn, that suggests that greenhouse gas emissions linked to food waste could soar from 500 million tonnes now to somewhere between 1.95 and 2.5 billion tonnes by 2050.

Agricultural emissions

Lifestyle changes and population growth – ever more people with seemingly ever larger appetites – could push emissions from agriculture alone to 18 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050.

“Thus, emissions related to discarded food are just the tip of the iceberg,” Dr Pradhan says. “However, it is quite astounding that up to 14% of overall agricultural emissions in 2050 could easily be avoided by better management of food utilisation and distribution. Changing individual behaviour could be one key towards mitigating the climate crisis.”

As traditionally once-frugal communities develop, so the problems multiply.

Jürgen Kropp, a co-author of the report and head of climate change and development research at PIK, says: “As many emerging economies like China or India are projected to rapidly increase their food waste as a consequence of changing lifestyle, increasing welfare and dietary habits towards a larger share of animal-based products, this could over proportionally increase greenhouse gas emissions associated with food waste − at the same time undermining efforts for an ambitious climate protection.” – Climate News Network

28 March 2016

Carbon Emissions Highest They Have Been in 66 Million Years

Environmentalists burn a symbol of carbon dioxide during a 2008 demonstration in front of the Klingenberg power plant in Berlin. (photo: Theo Heimann/AFP/Getty Images)
(And they create more CO2….)

By Alister Doyle, Scientific American – 27 March 16
Source: Reader Supported News

Outpouring of CO2 is 10 times higher than it was when the dinosaurs lived

The rate of carbon emissions is higher than at any time in fossil records stretching back 66 million years to the age of the dinosaurs, according to a study on Monday that sounds an alarm about risks to nature from man-made global warming.

Scientists wrote that the pace of emissions even eclipses the onset of the biggest-known natural surge in fossil records, 56 million years ago, that was perhaps driven by a release of frozen stores of greenhouse gases beneath the seabed.

That ancient release, which drove temperatures up by an estimated 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) and damaged marine life by making the oceans acidic, is often seen as a parallel to the risks from the current build-up of carbon in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

“Given currently available records, the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years,” the scientists wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago, perhaps after a giant asteroid struck the Earth.

Lead author Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii said geological records were vague and “it’s not well known if/how much carbon was released” in that cataclysm.

Current carbon emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are about 10 billion tonnes a year, against 1.1 billion a year spread over 4,000 years at the onset of the fast warming 56 million years ago, the study found.

The scientists examined the chemical makeup of fossils of tiny marine organisms in the seabed off the New Jersey in the United States to gauge that ancient warming, known as the Paleoeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).

U.N. studies project that temperatures could rise by up to 4.8C this century, causing floods, droughts and more powerful storms, if emissions rise unchecked. Carbon dioxide forms a weak acid in seawater, threatening the ability of creatures such as lobsters or oysters to build protective shells.

“Our results suggest that future ocean acidification and possible effects on marine calcifying organisms will be more severe than during the PETM,” Zeebe said.

“Future ecosystem disruptions are likely to exceed the relatively limited extinctions observed at the PETM,” he said. During the PETM, fish and other creatures may have had longer time to adapt to warming waters through evolution.

Peter Stassen, of the University of Leuven who was not involved in the study, said the study was a step to unravel what happened in the PETM.

The PETM “is a crucial part of our understanding of how the climate system can react to carbon dioxide increases,” he told Reuters.

17 May 2015

CO2 Reached 400ppm – What scientists say

Source: NASA Global Climate Change

The global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the primary driver of recent climate change – has reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in recorded history, according to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Since 1958, the Mauna Loa Observatory has been gathering data on how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has increased by about 24 percent since the beginning of this record. (Source: NOAA)

We rounded up a few scientists here at NASA and asked them what passing 400 ppm means to them.

Passing the 400 mark reminds me that we are on an inexorable march to 450 ppm and much higher levels. These were the targets for ‘stabilization’ suggested not too long ago. The world is quickening the rate of accumulation of CO2, and has shown no signs of slowing this down. It should be a psychological tripwire for everyone.

– Dr. Michael Gunson

Global Change & Energy Program Manager; Project Scientist, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite mission – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
CO2 concentrations haven’t been this high in millions of years. Even more alarming is the rate of increase in the last five decades and the fact that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years. This milestone is a wake up call that our actions in response to climate change need to match the persistent rise in CO2. Climate change is a threat to life on Earth and we can no longer afford to be spectators.

– Dr. Erika Podest

Carbon and water cycle research scientist
We are a society that has inadvertently chosen the double-black diamond run without having learned to ski first. It will be a bumpy ride.

– Dr. Gavin Schmidt

Climatologist and climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Scary scorecard: catastrophic climate change 400, humanity zero. Listen to the scientists, vote wisely, beat carbon addiction and put humanity into the game.

– Dr. William Patzert

Research Oceanographer
In some ways, 400 ppm is just a number, another milestone that we are blasting past at a rate that is now exceeding 2 ppm per year. Over time, this number takes on greater weight. It brings home the fact that fossil fuel combustion, land use practices, and human activities have increased the CO2 concentration in Earth’s atmosphere by more the 20 percent since I was born. Wow!

– Dr. David Crisp

Principal Investigator, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite mission; works on the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) Project, a joint effort with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency
We’ve put the planet on a high-carb diet for over a century. Time to get lean and go green.

– Dr. Josh Willis

Project Scientist, JASON-3 ocean satellite mission; Ocean warming and sea level rise expert
Reaching 400pm is a stark reminder that the world is still not on a track to limit CO2 emissions and therefore climate impacts. We’re still on the ‘business-as-usual’ path, and adding more and more CO2, which will impact the generations ahead of us. Passing this mark should motivate us to advocate for focused efforts to reduce emissions across the globe.

– Dr. Annmarie Eldering

Deputy Project Scientist, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite mission – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Current [atmospheric] CO2 values are more than 100 ppm higher than at any time in the last one million years (and maybe higher than any time in the last 25 million years). This new record represents an increase of 85 ppm in the 55 years since David Keeling began making measurements at Mauna Loa. Even more disturbing than the magnitude of this change is the fact that the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing over the last few decades, meaning that future increases will happen faster. When averaged over 55 years, the increase has been about 1.55 ppm CO2 per year. However, the most recent data suggest that the annual increase is more than 2.75 ppm CO2 per year.

These increases in atmospheric CO2 are causing real, significant changes in the Earth system now, not in some distant future climate, and will continue to be felt for centuries to come. We can study these impacts to better understand the way the Earth will respond to future changes, but unless serious actions are taken immediately, we risk the next threshold being a point of no return in mankind’s unintended global-scale geoengineering experiment.

– Dr. Charles Miller

Researcher specializing in the remote sensing of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; Principal investigator, Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) mission
As a college professor who lectures on climate change, I will have to find a way to look into those 70 sets of eyes that have learned all semester long to trust me and somehow explain to those students, my students – who still believe in their young minds that success mostly depends on good grades and hard work, who believe in fairness, evenhandedness and opportunity – how much we as people have altered our environment, and that they will end up facing the consequences of our inability to act.

– Laura Faye Tenenbaum

Oceanography Professor, Glendale Community College; Communications Specialist for NASA’s Global Climate Change Website
Reaching the 400 ppm mark should be a reminder for us that carbon dioxide levels have been shooting up at an alarming rate in the recent past due to human activity. Levels that high have only been reached during the Pliocene era, when temperatures and sea level were higher. However, Earth’s climate had never had to deal with such a drastic change as the current increase, which is, therefore, likely to have unexpected implications for our environment.

– Dr. Carmen Boening

Scientist, Climate Physics Group – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Also by NASA:

Latest resources

30 April 2015

Climate Time Mashine by NASA Climate

I felt like sharing when I found it, but either because there is not any or because I can’t find a share link, I urge you from here to visit the spectacular, awakening and beautifully structured interactive project:
Climate Time Machine – Global Climate Change, Vital Signs of the Planet by NASA Climate, a “series of visualizations which shows how some of Earth’s key climate indicators are changing over time.”

So, you can find it here, enjoy (and worry).

Just in case you’d be carried away by the images and the issues, see here the credits for the people behind this work as mentioned in the project:

Credits
This interactive is a feature of NASA’s Global Climate Change website
Design and programming by Moore Boeck
Concept and Research by Randal Jackson and Holly Shaftel
Animations by Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio, Moore Boeck,CReSIS

6 April 2015

The Shoking Climate Threat Nobody’s Even Talking About

Arctic baffin_bay_jpg_size_xxlarge_promo

There is a crucial factor to have in mind while reading this and any other information about recent and forthcoming disasters:
With regard to Arctic, there are several countries (USA, Canada, Norway, Russia, Denmark) eager, impatient and looking forward to the melting of the arctic ice in order to exploit the oil and gas -no matter what science, official reports, common knowledge and public opinion say.
They have already raised claims.
If you are interested, I included a few links.

By Chris Mooney, Washington Post, 06 April 15

When we think about the Arctic in a warming world, we tend to think about sharp declines in sea ice and — that powerful symbol — the polar bear. But that’s far from the only problem that a melting Arctic brings.

In the past decade, scientists have been training more attention on another deeply troubling consequence. Rapid Arctic warming is expected to lead to the thawing of a great deal of frozen soil or permafrost, which, as it thaws, will begin to emit carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. And if this occurs in the amounts that some scientists are predicting, it could significantly undermine efforts to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Indeed, scientists have discovered a simple statistic that underscores the scale of the potential problem: There may be more than twice as much carbon contained in northern permafrost as there is in the atmosphere itself. That’s a staggering thought.

Permafrost is simply defined as ground that stays frozen all year round. There’s a lot of it – it covers 24 percent of the surface of the northern hemisphere land masses, according to the International Permafrost Association. But more and more of it is thawing as the Arctic warms, and these frozen soils contain a vast amount of organic material — largely dead plant life — in a kind of suspended animation.

“It’s built up over thousand and thousands of years,” says Robert Max Holmes, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. “It’s all stored away in a freezer, and as we’re warming the Earth, and warming the Arctic, it’s starting to thaw.”

As permafrost thaws, microbes start to chow down on the organic material that it contains, and as that material decomposes, it emits either carbon dioxide or methane. Experts think most of the release will take the form of carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas driving global warming — but even a small fraction released as methane can have major consequences. Although it doesn’t last nearly as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane has a short-term warming effect that is many times more powerful.

Among the potential mega-problems brought on by climate change, including melting ice caps to the slowdown of the ocean conveyor system, permafrost emissions are unique. For it’s not merely about sea level rise or weather changes — it’s about amplifying the root problem behind it all, atmospheric carbon levels.

The emission of carbon from thawing permafrost is what scientists call a “positive feedback.” More global warming could cause more thawing of Arctic permafrost, leading to more emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, leading to more warming and more thawing of Arctic permafrost — this does not end in a good place.

Moreover, in a year in which the world will train its attention on Paris and the hope for a new global climate agreement, permafrost emissions could potentially undermine global climate policies. Even as the world starts to cut back on emissions, the planet itself might start replacing our emissions cuts with brand new carbon outputs.

All of this, and the Arctic permafrost problem hasn’t received much attention — yet. “The concept is actually relatively new,” says Kevin Schaefer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “It was first proposed in 2005. And the first estimates came out in 2011.” Indeed, the problem is so new that it has not yet made its way into major climate projections, Schaefer says.

“None of the climate projections in the last IPCC report account for permafrost,” says Schaefer. “So all of them underestimate, or are biased low.”

To understand why northern soils contain so much carbon it helps to understand why southern or tropical soils don’t. It all comes down to temperature, and how that affects how quickly microorganisms break down dead organic material (plant and animal life), causing it to release its carbon back into the atmosphere.

In temperate latitudes, it’s simple: Plants grow and pull carbon dioxide from the air — then they die, decompose and emit it back again. “In warmer temperatures, microbial activity will go on over all of the year,” says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “So even if productivity in warmer climates [is] larger, there’s not much sequestration of carbon in the soil.”

But in permafrost regions, it’s very different. Plants grow much more slowly, and there are fewer of them — but their decomposition is also much slower, explains Romanovsky. So a large amount of organic material gets stored in the frozen ground. And this has been happening, in some cases, over tens of thousands of years since the last ice age, leading to a truly vast carbon store that is stuck in place — or, at least, it used to be.

“As long as the carbon stays frozen in permafrost, it’s stable,” says Schaefer. “It’s kind of like broccoli in your freezer. But if you take that out, it eventually thaws out and goes bad.”

The problem, in this case, is the size of the freezer. Just consider some basic numbers. According to a 2013 report from the National Academy of Sciences, northern permafrost contains 1,700 to 1,850 gigatons of carbon — a gigaton is a billion metric tons — which is more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere (730 gigatons, says the NAS). And over 1,000 of those gigatons are thought to be stored in the top three meters of permafrost soil.

Nobody’s saying all of that is going to come out — certainly not immediately, and maybe not ever. However, as the Arctic continues to warm over the course of the century, emissions from permafrost could ramp up, and they could eventually reach a scale that could begin to offset climate gains. “It’s certainly not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that over the coming decades, we could lose a couple of gigatons per year from thawing permafrost,” says Holmes.

So far, permafrost emissions, if any, are pretty small. But by 2100, the “mean” estimate for total emissions from permafrost right now is 120 gigatons, says Schaefer. That’s no small matter, considering that according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences (see above), the world can only emit about 1000 total gigatons of carbon if we want to have a good chance of limiting the temperature rise to less 2 degrees Celsius of warming since 1860-1880.

According to the IPCC, the world had already emitted 515 gigatons by 2011, leaving a pretty tight remaining carbon “budget.” Permafrost emissions, if they’re big enough, could lead to busting the budget a lot quicker.

The world has been focused on some Arctic emissions problems lately that sound a lot like the thawing permafrost emissions problem, but should probably be distinguished from it. For instance, there is the concern about weird craters that have been found in northern Siberia, and the idea that these might be the result of methane explosions from permafrost.

While there’s still debate over how the craters were formed, though, it’s not clear that we’re talking about the same phenomenon. One reason? The craters are very far to the north in the area around the Yamal Peninsula, and that’s not where the thawing permafrost emissions problem is expected to first emerge. Rather, it should be the opposite — at the southern rim of where permafrost is found.

“The further south you go, the warmer it is, so the more vulnerable the permafrost is to thawing,” says Schaefer. “So all the emissions will be dominated by the southern margins, southern Alaska, Hudson Bay.”

Nonetheless, the craters have gotten vastly more media attention — because they’re mysterious, and because they’re thought to reflect dramatic methane explosions. But ultimately, the steady, long-term problem of carbon loss from permafrost may be scarier.

Later this month — on April 24 — the United States takes over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, a group of eight nations with Arctic territories that helps to coordinate policy for the region. The State Department has specifically indicated that one of the focuses of the two-year chairmanship will be the issue of climate change. So, will permafrost emissions enter into policy considerations?

“This is a dangerous feedback loop as Arctic warming drives permafrost thaw, and the permafrost releases more GHGs into the atmosphere, accelerating change,” said a State Department official. “However, many questions remain about the processes by and time scales over which such emissions could be released into the atmosphere.”

The official said that through the Arctic Council, the United States will emphasize better monitoring and observation systems to detect emissions from permafrost. But the officials also underscored the importance of “an ambitious international climate agreement in Paris – this is where we need action to slow climate change.”

The concern is whether such an agreement will arrive soon enough to stop or at least blunt the permafrost problem. It’s “a true climatic tipping point, because it’s completely irreversible,” says Schaefer. “Once you thaw the permafrost, there’s no way to refreeze it.”

Source: Reader Supported News