People’s Climate March – NYC Sept. 20-21

This is an invitation to change everything.

In September, world leaders are coming to New York City for a historic summit on climate change. With our future on the line and the whole world watching, let’s take a weekend and use it to bend the course of history.

Together, we’ll take to the streets to demand the world we know is within our reach: a world with an economy that works for people and the planet. A world safe from the ravages of climate change. A world with good jobs, clean air, and healthy communities for everyone.

To change everything, we need everyone on board. September 20-21 in New York City.

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

West Antarctic Glacier Loss Appears Unstoppable – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-148

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Streamed live on May 12, 2014

NASA will host a media teleconference to discuss new research results on the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential contribution to future sea level rise.

The briefing participants are:

Climate Change: News – West Antarctic glacier loss appears unstoppable

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/1088

May 12, 2014

By Carol Rasmussen, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Alan Buis, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Janet Wilson, University of California, Irvine
and Peter Weiss, American Geophysical Union

A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.

The study presents multiple lines of evidence, incorporating 40 years of observations that indicate the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica “have passed the point of no return,” according to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The new study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise.

“This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come,” Rignot said. “A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea.”

….(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

NASA Antarctic Ice News

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Streamed live on May 12, 2014

NASA will host a media teleconference to discuss new research results on the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential contribution to future sea level rise.

The briefing participants are:

Antarctic ice sheet past ‘point of no return

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU6nN3CaAjI
PBS NewsHour

Published on May 12, 2014

A study released by NASA and others offers the most definitive evidence that parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica are melting and the damage is irreversible. The collapse will take more than a century, and the melting will lead to rising sea levels. Judy Woodruff talks to Thomas Wagner of NASA, one of the team’s lead members, about the larger consequences of these projections.

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

ScienceCasts: No Turning Back – West Antarctic Glaciers in Irreversible Decline | NASA

ScienceAtNASA

Published on May 13, 2014

Visit http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/… for more.

A new study led by NASA researchers shows that half-a-dozen key glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are in irreversible decline. The melting of these sprawling icy giants will affect global sea levels in the centuries ahead.

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

Collapse of Antarctic ice sheet is underway and unstoppable but will take centuries

Video: A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California at Irvine finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.

By Darryl Fears, Published: May 12 E-mail the writer

The collapse of the giant West Antarctica ice sheet is underway, two groups of scientists said Monday. They described the melting as an unstoppable event that will cause global sea levels to rise higher than projected earlier.

Scientists said the rise in sea level, up to 12 feet, will take centuries to reach its peak and cannot be reversed. But they said a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions could slow the melt, while an increase could speed it slightly.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

Federal report details dire effects of climate change on the Northeast

For Northeast, a harsh vision of climate change
By David Abel and Matt Viser  | Globe Staff May 07, 2014

The Northeast is bearing the brunt of climate change in the nation, assaulted by heat waves, torrential rains, and flooding that are the result of human action, according to a federal report released Tuesday.

Over the past century, temperatures in Northeastern states have risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and if heat-trapping gases increase at current rates, warming could spike as much as 10 degrees by the 2080s, prolonging bouts of extreme heat, taxing electrical systems, and disrupting ecosystems.

In the same time, the region’s precipitation has risen by more than 10 percent, and the worst storms here have brought significantly more rain and snow — a surge of more than 70 percent over the past 50 years and significantly more than other parts of the country.

Related

• Graphic: Unabated climate change
• Two generations tracking climate
• Solving climate change with cows?

As Northeast sea levels have climbed by a foot over the past century, coastal flooding has caused billions of dollars in damage and could get much worse as seas are projected to rise 1 to 4 feet by 2100, leaving much of Boston at risk of flooding.

“Heat waves, coastal flooding, and river flooding will pose a growing challenge to the region’s environmental, social, and economic systems,” the authors of the 841-page federal report wrote. “This will increase the vulnerability of the region’s residents, especially its most disadvantaged populations.”

The report provides a detailed look at how the United States is already experiencing grave impacts from increased carbon emissions. It also provides a thorough description of the coming challenges for the 64 million people living in the 12 states of the Northeast.

Congress in 1990 first ordered that scientific reports on climate change be conducted at least every four years. But this is only the third such report, because some administrations failed to comply.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics
Food-Matters

Collapse of parts of West Antarctica ice sheet has begun, scientists say

Researchers say melting appears to be unstoppable

By Justin Gillis

| New York Times May 13, 2014

NEW YORK — A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

“This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research, said in an interview. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

Two scientific papers released by the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters came to similar conclusions by different means. Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades. NASA called a telephone news conference Monday to highlight the urgency of the findings.

The West Antarctic ice sheet sits in a bowl-shaped depression in the Earth, with the base of the ice below sea level. Warm ocean water is causing the ice along the rim of the bowl to thin and retreat. As the front edge of the ice pulls away from the rim and enters deeper water, it can retreat much faster than before.

In one of the new papers, a team led by Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California Irvine, used satellite and air measurements to document an accelerating retreat over the past several decades of six glaciers draining into the Amundsen Sea region. And with updated mapping of the terrain beneath the ice sheet, the team was able to rule out the presence of any mountains or hills significant enough to slow the retreat.

“Today we present observational evidence that a large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into irreversible retreat,” Rignot said in the NASA news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.”

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt: Defending the Drama : The New Yorker

May 13, 2014
Posted by Elizabeth Kolbert

If you hang around climate scientists, you often hear the saying “Uncertainty is not our friend.” It came to mind yesterday, when two teams of scientists released papers that reached the same terrifying conclusion. A significant chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to disintegrate and, owing to the ice sheet’s peculiar topography (much of it lies below sea level), this process, having begun, has now also become unstoppable. “Today we present observational evidence that a large section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has gone into irreversible retreat,” the lead author of one of the papers, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.” Rignot said that melting in the section of West Antarctica that his team had studied could cause global sea levels to rise by four feet over the course of a couple of centuries. Since the disappearance of some of its major glaciers could quite possibly destabilize the entire ice sheet, the ultimate sea level rise from West Antarctica, he said, could be triple that.

“Scary,” Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University, who was not involved in either paper, tweeted. “One of the feared tipping points of the climate system appears to have been crossed.”

“This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like,” read a headline on the Web site of Mother Jones.

The vulnerability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, or WAIS, has been appreciated for a long time; all the way back in 1968, an eccentric Ohio State glaciologist named John Mercer observed that the WAIS was peculiarly unstable, and that it may have melted away in the geologically recent past. But Mercer (who, interestingly enough for a glaciologist, liked to do field work in the nude) published his observations in an obscure journal, and, according to the historian of science Spencer Weart, “did not push his views on colleagues.”

In more recent years, even as forecasts of global sea-level rise have been notched up, most projections have not taken into account the possibility of a significant, near-term ice loss from the West Antarctic. The most recent analysis by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts a global sea-level rise for this century of somewhere between one and three feet; the new findings, according to Rignot, will require these figures to be revised upward.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics