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It is virtually certain that the retreat of many glaciers around the world has been caused by climate change, a new study suggests.
Using records of glacier length that go back over 400 years, the researchers show that shrinking of mountain glaciers in five continents could almost certainly not have happened if the Earth wasn’t warming up.
The findings suggest that future reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should have stronger conclusions around how human-caused climate change is affecting the world’s glaciers, the researchers say.
The study, just published in Nature Geoscience, is the latest in the relatively new field of attribution, where scientists identify the fingerprints of human influence on observed changes in temperature, rainfall, and other climate parameters.
Attribution studies typically focus on specific extreme events. Recent research has found, for example, that climate change boosted the odds of the UK’s very wet winter in 2013-14 by 43%. Another paper identified how many extra deaths there were in London and Paris during the 2003 summer heatwave because of our warming climate.
Rather than an event of a few hours, weeks or months, the new study looks at how glaciers have changed over the past century.
The near-global retreat of these rivers of ice “seems improbable” without the influence of climate change, the paper says, but most studies to date have only been able to test this theory on a few glaciers at most.
So the researchers collected together records of glacier length for 37 glaciers in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australasia. The records were selected for their length and completeness – the longest goes back to 1534.
Shrinking glaciers are ‘categorical evidence’ of climate change, study says by Robert McSweeney, Carbon Brief, Dec 12, 2016
Using the metric of comments garnered, the three most popular articles posted on SkS during the past week are:
Trump’s Cabinet will serve corporate interests, not the chumps who voted for him, Opinion by David Horsey, Los Angeles Times, Dec 13, 2016
Scientists will need to speak up about their research and the importance of scientific integrity — or risk not being heard by the incoming administration, said US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union today.
Her talk was a carefully worded call to arms for scientists to become part of the political process. “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” she said. Part of that will require learning how to talk about science not only in the kind of language a layperson can understand, but also in the language of dollars and cents. Communicating science’s value will be critical in order to appeal to an increasingly business-oriented administration.
“When you have a President-elect of the United States that’s in the real estate development business, your science matters,” she said. “Nobody wants to build a building in harm’s way if they’ve got good data that tells them where they can build it out of harm’s way.”
Researchers must convince Trump that science matters, interior secretary says by Rachel Becker, The Verge, Dec 14, 2016
NASA, the US space agency, has released an “eye-popping” three-dimensional animation showing carbon dioxide emissions moving through the Earth’s atmosphere over the course of a year.
It says the 3-D visualisation is “one of the most realistic views yet” of the “complex patterns in which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, decreases and moves around the globe”.
The data used to produce the visualisation was collected by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite from September 2014 to September 2015. The data was then modelled and visualised by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Video: NASA produces first 3D animation of global carbon emissions by Leo Hickman, Carbon Brief, Dec 14, 2016
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