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February 22, 2010 |

Despite Climategate, IPPC Mostly Underestimates Climate Change

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, James McCarthy of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment noted that the IPCC usually errs on the conservative side. Steve Mirsky reports

Lost in the coverage of the so-called climategate email controversy is a key point about the IPCC’s track record of climate change estimates. James McCarthy is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment. He spoke February 21st at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego:

“If you were to go back and map the IPCC projection for sea level rise and temperature in 1990, look at it in 1995, look at it in 2000. In retrospect you would find that they were conservative. So we talk about errors. If you were to do two ledgers—here are IPCC overestimates, here are IPCC underestimates—over the 20 or so years that these assessments have been running, the underestimate ledger would be much larger than the overestimate.

Even with glitches—clearly erroneous editing or sloppy editing that led to these erroneous statements that got us in trouble recently.”

—Steve Mirsky

Zukiwi wrote:Hey ! Happy to see you back on the job - was hoping for your always interesting links on Global Climate Change !

As oxygen-deprived waters increase, they emit more greenhouse gasses into atmosphere

Cambridge, Md. – The increased frequency and intensity of oxygen-deprived "dead zones" along the world's coasts can negatively impact environmental conditions in far more than just local waters. In the March 12 edition of the journal Science, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science oceanographer Dr. Lou Codispoti explains that the increased amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) produced in low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters can elevate concentrations in the atmosphere, further exacerbating the impacts of global warming and contributing to ozone "holes" that cause an increase in our exposure to harmful UV radiation.

"As the volume of hypoxic waters move towards the sea surface and expands along our coasts, their ability to produce the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide increases," explains Dr. Codispoti of the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory. "With low-oxygen waters currently producing about half of the ocean's net nitrous oxide, we could see an additional significant atmospheric increase if these 'dead zones' continue to expand."

Although present in minute concentrations in Earth's atmosphere, nitrous oxide is a highly potent greenhouse gas and is becoming a key factor in stratospheric ozone destruction. For the past 400,000 years, changes in atmospheric N2O appear to have roughly paralleled changes in carbon dioxide CO2 and have had modest impacts on climate, but this may change. Just as human activities may be causing an unprecedented rise in the terrestrial N2O sources, marine N2O production may also rise substantially as a result of nutrient pollution, warming waters and ocean acidification. Because the marine environment is a net producer of N2O, much of this production will be lost to the atmosphere, thus further intensifying its climatic impact.

Increased N2O production occurs as dissolved oxygen levels decline. Under well-oxygenated conditions, microbes produce N2O at low rates. But at oxygen concentrations decrease to hypoxic levels, these waters can increase their production of N2O.

N2O production rates are particularly high in shallow suboxic and hypoxic waters because respiration and biological turnover rates are higher near the sunlit waters where phytoplankton produce the fuel for respiration.

When suboxic waters (oxygen essentially absent) occur at depths of less than 300 feet, the combination of high respiration rates, and the peculiarities of a process called denitrification can cause N2O production rates to be 10,000 times higher than the average for the open ocean. The future of marine N2O production depends critically on what will happen to the roughly ten percent of the ocean volume that is hypoxic and suboxic.

"Nitrous oxide data from many coastal zones that contain low oxygen waters are sparse, including Chesapeake Bay," said Dr. Codispoti. "We should intensify our observations of the relationship between low oxygen concentrations and nitrous oxide in coastal waters."

The article "Interesting Times for Nitrous Oxide" appears in the March 12, 2010 edition of the journal Science.

The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science is the University System of Maryland's environmental research institution. UMCES researchers are helping improve our scientific understanding of Maryland, the region and the world through its three laboratories – Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Appalachian Laboratory in Frostburg, and Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge – and the Maryland Sea Grant College.

Italy to host Europe's biggest solar plant

Posted Thu Mar 11, 2010 11:04am PST
http://green.yahoo.com/news/afp/2010031 ... dison.html

Activists of the environmental group Greenpeace hold banners reading, "Go Solar" during a demonstration in Rome in 2009. Europe's most powerful solar power plant is set to start operations in Italy later this year, the US company building the installation on an area as large as 120 football pitches said on Thursday.(AFP/File/Andreas Solaro)

MILAN (AFP) - Europe's most powerful solar power plant is set to start operations in Italy later this year, the US company building the installation on an area as large as 120 football pitches said on Thursday.

The plant in Rovigo near Venice in northeast Italy will take up 850,000 square metres (9.15 million square feet) and produce 72 megawatts, SunEdison said in a statement announcing the start of construction.

The current biggest plant in Europe, located in Spain, produces 60 megawatts and the second biggest, in Germany, 50 megawatts, SunEdison said.

"The photovoltaic park in Rovigo province is a milestone in the development and establishment of solar energy in Italy," SunEdison's general manager for Italy, Liborio Francesco Nanni, said in a statement.

The total investment will be between 200 million and 250 million euros (273 million and 342 million dollars), the company said.

Energy production will begin in the second half of 2010 and the plant will be fully operational by the end of the year, said SunEdison, which is working on the project in conjunction with Spanish banking giant Santander.

During its first year of operations, the plant will cover the electricity needs of 17,000 households and will prevent the emission of 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

SunEdison, a subsidiary of US company MEMC Electronic Materials, is the top solar power company in the United States and the third biggest in the world.

Italy is second to Germany for solar power production in Europe.

Global cooling, we hardly knew ya
Category: climate
Posted on: March 16, 2010 8:54 AM, by James Hrynyshyn

From our friends at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, in Asheville, N.C., we learn the following:
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for February 2010 was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.1°C (53.9°F). This is the sixth warmest such value on record.

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for December 2009 - February 2010 was the fifth warmest on record for the season, 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20th century average of 12.1°C (53.8°F).

For the year to date, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature of 12.7°C (54.9°F) was the fifth warmest January-February period on record. This value is 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average.

The worldwide ocean surface temperature for February 2010 was the second warmest on record for February, 0.54°C (0.97°F) above the 20th century average of 15.9°C (60.6°F).

The seasonal (December 2009 - February 2010) worldwide ocean surface temperature was also the second warmest on record, 0.54°C (0.97°F) above the 20th century average of 15.8°C (60.5°F).

In the Southern Hemisphere, both the February 2010 average temperature for land areas and the Hemisphere as a whole (land and ocean surface combined), represented the warmest February on record. The Southern Hemisphere ocean temperature tied with 1998 as the warmest February on record.

The Age wrote: City's hot 100 smashes record for run of warm days
ADAM MORTON
March 19, 2010

MELBOURNE'S temperature has topped 20 degrees for the past 100 days straight, the longest stretch of its type in more than 150 years of measurement.

Yesterday's maximum of 31 degrees continued a run of 20-plus degree days that began on December 9 last year.

It has smashed the record of 78 days with a maximum of more than 20 degrees in the summer of December 2000-01.

The Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis and prediction, David Jones, said forecasts suggested the string of days warmer than 20 degrees could extend for at least another seven days.

He said it was part of a longer warm period across the state extending back to last winter.

''The whole of Australia has been exceptionally warm, and the mean temperature across Victoria over the past nine months has been the warmest on record,'' Dr Jones said.

''It continues this storyline of a planet that continues to warm.''

The British Met Office has predicted that it was more likely than not that 2010 would be the world's hottest year on record due to global warming linked to greenhouse gas emissions and a warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean due to El Nino.