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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #5, 2020
Posted on 5 February 2020 by Doug Bostrom
More Thwaites
This past week we heard disturbing news about Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. Helping to fill in the longer term history of Thwaites' behavior and especially helpful in interpreting results of the recent drilling project and what it may say about the future of this unstable mass of ice is Revealing the former bed of Thwaites Glacier using sea-floor bathymetry, by a heavy duty multi-institutional team of authors. Happily this work is open access. Abstract excerpts:
The geometry of the sea floor beyond Thwaites Glacier (TG) is a major control on the routing of warm ocean waters towards the ice stream’s grounding zone, which has led to increased mass loss through sub-ice-shelf melting and resulting accelerated ice flow. Nearshore topographic highs act as pinning points for the Thwaites Ice Shelf and potentially provide barriers to warm water incursions. To date, few vessels have been able to access this area due to persistent sea-ice and iceberg cover. This critical data gap was addressed in 2019 during the first cruise of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) project, with more than 2000 km2 of new multibeam echo-sounder data (MBES) were acquired offshore TG. Here, these data along with legacy MBES datasets are compiled to produce a set of standalone bathymetric grids for the inner Amundsen Sea shelf beyond both Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.
...
Using existing ice-flow theory, we also make a first assessment of the form drag (basal drag contribution) for ice flow over this topography. Ice flowing over the sea-floor troughs and ridges would have been affected by similarly high basal drag to that acting in the grounding zone today. We show that the sea-floor bathymetry is an analogue for extant bed areas of TG and that more can be gleaned from these 3D bathymetric datasets regarding the likely spatial variability of bed roughness and bed composition types underneath TG. Comparisons with existing regional bathymetric compilations for the area show that high-frequency (finer than 5 km) bathymetric variability beyond Antarctic ice shelves can only be resolved by observations such as MBES and that without these data calculations of the capacity of bathymetric troughs, and thus oceanic heat flux, may be significantly underestimated.
64 Articles
Physical science of global warming & effects
A framework for understanding how dynamics shape temperature distributions
Polar amplification due to enhanced heat flux across the halocline
21st century climate change hotspots in the light of a weakening Sun
Assessment of pre-industrial to present-day anthropogenic climate forcing in UKESM1 (open access)
Observations & observational methods of global warming & effects
Modeling & simulation of global warming & global warming effects
Arctic Ocean Surface Energy Flux and the Cold Halocline in Future Climate Projections
Projections of Climatic Extremes in a Data Poor Transboundary River Basin of India and Pakistan
Climate model advancement
Climate sensitivity and the direct effect of carbon dioxide in a limited-area cloud-resolving model
Using Co-Behavior Analysis to Interrogate the Performance of CMIP5 GCMs over Southern Africa
Large difference in aerosol radiative effects from BVOC-SOA treatment in three ESMs (open access)
Biology & global warming
Complexity revealed in the greening of the Arctic
Persistent Quaternary climate refugia are hospices for biodiversity in the Anthropocene
Shifts in migration phenology under climate change: temperature vs. abundance effects in birds
Influence of climate change on flowering season of birch in the Czech Republic
Autumn growth of three perennial weeds at high latitude benefits from climate change
Decadal losses of canopy?forming algae along the warm temperate coastline of Brazil
Hotspots of biotic compositional change in lakes along vast latitudinal transects in northern Canada
Community diversity outweighs effect of warming on plant colonization
Status and trends of tundra birds across the circumpolar Arctic (open access)
Local extinction risk under climate change in a neotropical asymmetrically dispersed epiphyte
GHG sources & sinks, flux
Origin and accumulation of an anthropogenic CO2 and 13C Suess effect in the Arctic Ocean
Generating Spatially Robust Carbon Budgets From Flux Tower Observations
Lower?than?expected CH4 emissions from rice paddies with rising CO2 concentrations
Impact of forest plantation on methane emissions from tropical peatland
Climate change communications & cognition
Broadcast Meteorologists’ views on climate change: A state-of-the-community review
Weather literacy in times of climate change
Climate change knowledge at the grass roots: the case of Bequia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Humans dealing with our global warming
Future interactions between sea level rise, tides and storm surges in the world's largest urban area
Climate change and winter road maintenance (open access)
Global change can make coastal eutrophication control in China more difficult (open access)
Other
Revealing the former bed of Thwaites Glacier using sea-floor bathymetry (open access)
A phase-space consideration of changing climate-PDF
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The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.
Here is news coverage of a study report prepared for the UK Government.
Climate change: Clean tech 'won't solve warming in time', by Roger Harrabin, BBC News, February 6, 2020.
The basic point is that a thoughtful evaluation has concluded that technological developments are unlikely to develop in time for the UK to meet its legal requirement to be Carbon-Neutral by 2050.
My understanding has been that a while ago global leadership in the 'supposedly most advanced nations' negligently passed the point in time where their aggressive encouragement of development of the required alternatives to fossil fuels had a chance of meeting the long established 'understood to be harmful but reasonably safe impact limit of 1.5 C'.
That irresponsible leadership has tried to declare that 2.0 C would be OK and that technological developments would 'be the solution'. They likely did it because the alternative was 'less popular' and certainly 'less profitable for the status quo'.
Reality Bites:
Thanks for that link, Nigel.