Two scientific papers released on Monday 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 sitting 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,” Dr. Rignot said in the NASA news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.”

Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/earth/collapse-of-parts-of-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-has-begun-scientists-say.html?hp&_r=0

Second, the proceeds of the “pain” are not entirely directed at budget repair. They go to roads funding and the new medical research fund and the new emissions reduction fund.

The improvement in the budget bottom line is relatively slow. And despite the collective efforts being imposed upon us the economic outlook is not rosy – with unemployment remaining high and business confidence low.

But it probably wouldn’t have sounded quite as snappy if the treasurer had stood up and said “we are cutting health, education, pensions and family payments so we can spend a lot of that money on new roads and medical research.”

He prefers to keep the two concepts separate, and when he does talk about roads he argues that they will improve economic growth and productivity.

Experts say roads can improve productivity, but only if they are carefully selected and assessed and built alongside public transport. For the roads the Coalition is funding, that has in many cases not happened.

We were promised pain with a purpose. The pain is obvious. The purpose less so.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/13/budget-sales-pitch-of-shared-pain-doesnt-really-live-up-to-reality

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I know roads... The more road you build plus the cheaper the cars (less tariffs and no more cars built in this country) the more traffic jams you encourage. The more pollution you create. The CO2 emission supposedly saved by Tony stupid direct action, is already offset in the wrong direction by Tony's promise of road building. In a single swoop, the emission reduction has become an emission plus by at least 3 per cent of budget decision. Eventually all this will have to be killed off. I mean KILLED OFF by 2022. By 2015 global warming is going to make a leap. It could be as soon as the end of 2014... Don't be fooled by the fools of Abbott's government. Global warming is real and incrementally fast. CO2 is the major culprit despite what some pseudo-climate scientist would tell you... Of course the Abbott regime wants to raise tax on fuel, not so much to pay for investments in alternative energies but to create more roads... slower roads, to oblivion faster...

Welcome to madness. 

...

It is one thing to invite a debate about the best policy to address rising global temperatures, a problem no country can tackle on its own. It is another to dismiss the evidence that “these scientists” have compiled — “a handful of decades of research,” Mr. Rubio derisively called it — to show that humans are driving much of that warming.

Just last week, a fresh federal analysis articulated anew many of the reasons the debate should focus on how to respond to the threat of human-induced climate change, not on whether it is happening. The research, a large panel of experts concluded, “tells an unambiguous story: the planet is warming, and over the last half century, this warming has been driven primarily by human activity.”

Scientists rely on “multiple lines of independent evidence” to reach that conclusion. Beyond the basic physics that more greenhouse gases in the air will tend to intensify the greenhouse effect, researchers can’t explain the temperature record of the past 50 years without adding human influence to the picture. Then there are observable climate “fingerprints,” such as where warming is happening, both on the Earth and in the atmosphere, that implicate human-released greenhouse emissions as a major culprit.

Scientists know that the climate changes naturally, too. “Human-induced warming is superimposed on a background of natural variations in climate,” the federal assessment noted. But other possible drivers, such as changes in the sun’s output, can’t fully explain the warming the planet is seeing. Volcanic eruptions and other factors, they reckoned, would have cooled the Earth if not for human activity reversing that course. 

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marco-rubios-rhetoric-on-climate-change-casts-questions-about-his-judgment/2014/05/12/94f4e9c2-da19-11e3-b745-87d39690c5c0_story.html

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Despite election promises of support for renewable energy and action on climate change, this government has not delivered. In fact, John Connor says they've gone backwards.

IF THERE WAS ANY DOUBT that the election of the Abbott Government might slam the brakes on Australia's climate and clean energy progress, it's now over. With the Government's first budget, it's reversing at full speed.

This is the Backwards Budget - a budget that shifts the burden for pollution reduction from polluters to taxpayers. A budget that slashes renewable energy agencies and funding programs that are helping create the jobs and industries of the 21st century. A budget that rips hundreds of millions of dollars away from climate science, international climate finance and clean technology research programs.

We are back to the dark years of the Howard Government where climate and renewable energy are absent from the Treasurer's speech.

Certainty about the future of Coalitions's 'signature' Emissions Reduction Fund isn't helped by the budget overview saying the $2.55 billion thought to be over the first four years is all we get over 10 years. The Minister's office says this is a misprint. But either way this reinforces concerns that any climate action is set to be hostage to the vagaries of the annual budget ritual. How much confidence can we have in the now four-year-old promise that once the ERF is up and running it will spend an average $1.2 billion a year?

What's most tragic is that Australia was just starting to get on track. Our greenhouse gas emissions, which had been growing steadily for decades, have begun to decline. Emissions from electricity, the single most polluting sector, fell an impressive 8.7 per cent since 2012. Solar and wind energy tripled in the last five years, while solar and wind jobs nearly quadrupled.

http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2014/05/14/4004085.htm

Researcher claims his paper was rejected because it might help climate sceptics advance their case

SCIENTISTS deliberately suppressed research that cast doubt on the rate of global warming because it might be used by climate sceptics to advance their arguments, it has been claimed.

Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, believes his paper was rejected by Environmental Research Letters, one of the world's top academic journals, because of intolerance of dissenting views on climate science.

The paper, co-authored with four other scientists from America and Sweden, was rejected earlier this year after a reviewer privately wrote that publishing it would be "less than helpful".

The unnamed scientist concluded: "Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of 'errors' and worse from the climate sceptics media side."

Bengtsson's paper challenged findings from the UN's Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double.

The paper suggested that the climate might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases and recommended more work be carried out "to reduce the underlying uncertainty".

Following the rejection, Bengtsson said: "The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist."

Bengtsson said he was also forced to step down from the advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate sceptic think-tank, after he was subjected to "McCarthy" style pressure from other scientists.

The claims are a stark reminder of events at the University of East Anglia in 2009, dubbed 'Climategate', when scientists were accused of suppressing inconvenient data that did not support global warming predictions, says The Times. They were later cleared, but the IPCC was found to have misrepresented part of their research.

A spokesman for IOP Publishing, which publishes Environmental Research Letters, said that two independent peer-reviews had reported that the paper contained "errors" and "did not provide a significant advancement in the field", therefore failing to meet the journal's required acceptance criteria.

Antarctica is shedding 160 billion tonnes a year of ice into the ocean, twice the amount of a few years ago, according to new satellite observations. The ice loss is adding to the rising sea levels driven by climate change and even east Antarctica is now losing ice.

The new revelations follows the announcement last week that thecollapse of the western Antarctica ice sheet has already begun and is unstoppable, although it may take many centuries to complete.

Global warming is pushing up sea level by melting the world’s major ice caps and by warming and expanding oceans waters. The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet would eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world.

The new data, published in journal Geophysical Research Letters, comes from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite, which was launched in 2010.

It shows that the western Antarctica ice sheet is where 87% of the lost ice is being shed, with the east Antarctic and the Antarctic peninsula shedding the rest. The data collected from 2010-2013 was compared to that from 2005-2010.

The satellite measures changes in the height of the ice and covers virtually the whole of the frozen continent, far more of than previous altimeter missions.

CryoSat-2 collected five times more data than before in the crucial coastal regions where ice losses are concentrated and found key glaciers were losing many metres in height every year. The Pine Island, Thwaites and Smith Glaciers in west Antarctica were losing between 4m and 8m annually.

“The increased thinning we have detected in west Antarctica is a worrying development,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd, at the University of Leeds and who led the study. “It adds concrete evidence that dramatic changes are underway in this part of our planet.”

Professor David Vaughan, at the British Antarctic Survey and not involved in this research, said: “The increasing contribution of Antarctica to sea-level rise is a global issue, and we need to use every technique available to understand where and how much ice is being lost. Through some very clever technical improvements, [Shepherd’s team] have produced the best maps of Antarctic ice-loss we have ever had. Prediction of the rate of future global sea-level rise must be begin with a thorough understanding of current changes in the ice sheets – this study puts us exactly where we need to be.”

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/19/doubling-of-antarctic-ice-loss-revealed-by-european-satellite

See also: 

thin ice in our whisky...

(nearly) all in the family...

of engineering, carbonising, fracking and politics...

climate change...

newscrap in unlimited supply...

warming up...

global warming is real...

Sydney’s run of warmth continues with 22 degrees expected on Friday, its 27th consecutive day of at least 20 degrees. The previous record in May was 19 such days, set in 1947, the bureau said.

That stretch, though, may end on Sunday with rain and cooler conditions setting in, said Rob Sharpe, a meteorologist with Weatherzone. Parts of the coast may get as much as 50 millimetres of rain, although the wettest areas may be in the Illawarra to Sydney’s south.

“We’ll see the low 20s for Sydney [for the coming week]," Mr Sharpe said. “But that’s still 3-4 degrees above average for this time of year."

Rising sea levels have washed the remains of at least 26 Japanese second world war soldiers from their graves on a low-lying Pacific archipelago, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands has said.

"There are coffins and dead people being washed away from graves. It's that serious," Tony de Brum told reporters on the sidelines of United Nations climate change talks in Germany.

Putting the blame on climate change, which threatens the existence of the islands, which are only 2 metres (6ft) above sea level at their highest, De Brum said: "Even the dead are affected".

Twenty-six skeletons had been found on Santo Island after high tides battered the archipelago from February to April, he said, adding that more may be found.

"We think they are Japanese soldiers. We had the exhumed skeletons sampled by the US Navy in Pearl Harbour [in Hawaii] and they helped identify where they are from, to assist in the repatriation efforts."

Unexploded bombs and other military equipment had also washed up in recent months.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/06/rising-seas-wash-japanese-war-dead-marshall-islands-graves