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<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SantaCruz-LosGlaciares-Tempano02.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></div></div>STOCKHOLM (AP) - Scientists can now say with extreme confidence that human activity is the dominant cause of the <keyword id="6366055" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword> observed since the 1950s, a new report by an international scientific group said Friday.
Calling man-made warming "extremely likely," the Intergovernmental Panel on <keyword id="6361617" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Climate-Change">Climate Change</keyword> used the strongest words yet on the issue as it adopted its assessment on the state of the climate system.
In its previous assessment, in 2007, the U.N.-sponsored panel said it was "very likely" that global warming was man-made.
It now says the evidence has grown thanks to more and better observations, a clearer understanding of the climate system and improved models to analyze the impact of rising temperatures.
"Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased," said Qin Dahe, co-chair of the working group that wrote the report.
The full 2,000-page report isn't going to be released until Monday, but a summary for policymakers with the key findings was published Friday. It contained few surprises as many of the findings had been leaked in advance.
As expected, the IPCC raised its projections of the rise in sea levels to 10-32 inches (26-82 centimeters) by the end of the century. The previous report predicted a rise of 7-23 inches (18-59 centimeters).
The IPCC assessments are important because they form the scientific basis of U.N. negotiations on a new climate deal. Governments are supposed to finish that agreement in 2015, but it's unclear whether they will commit to the emissions cuts that scientists say will be necessary to keep the temperature below a limit at which the worst effects of climate change can be avoided.
Using four scenarios with different emissions controls, the report projected that global average temperatures would rise by 0.3 to 4.8 degrees C by the end of the century. That's 0.5-8.6 F.
Only the two lower scenarios, which were based on significant cuts in CO2 emissions, came in below the 2-degree C (3.6 F) limit that countries have set as their target in the climate talks to avoid the worst impacts of warming.
At this point, emissions keep rising mainly due to rapid growth in China and other emerging economies. They say rich countries should take the lead on emissions cuts because they've pumped carbon into the atmosphere for longer.
Climate activists said the report should spur governments to action.
"There are few surprises in this report but the increase in the confidence around many observations just validates what we are seeing happening around us," said Samantha Smith, of the World Wildlife Fund.
One of the most controversial subjects in the report was how to deal with a purported slowdown in warming in the past 15 years. Climate skeptics say this "hiatus" casts doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change.
Many governments had objections over how the issue was treated in earlier drafts and some had called for it to be deleted altogether.
In the end, the IPCC made only a brief mention of the issue in the summary for policymakers, stressing that short-term records are sensitive to natural variability and don't in general reflect long-term trends.
<div class="nc_footer">
Copyright (2013) Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
</div>

UN Report Uses Its Strongest Language Ever To Say That Humans Are The Cause Of Global Warming

We all have been hearing of about <keyword id="6366055" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword> for long, and the state is going worse. You would be surprised to know that the world’s cities account for 60- 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This clearly shows how we are getting closer to our DOOM, but we can reverse the situation if we can reduce our carbon footprint and become an energy-efficient city like Reykjavik, Oslo, and others listed in the infographic below. 
 
 
 
Image credit: <a href="http://www.halfprice.com.au/">Halfprice.com.au</a>

Meet the
10 most energy efficient cities of the world

<div class="image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/">Henry Blodget / Business Insider</a>The <keyword id="15263" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Seal">seal</keyword> on the beach.</div></div></div>For most of this month, I'm working from Business Insider's beach office, which is located on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts (Nantucket).
It's hot here, which means it must be absolutely miserable back at BI headquarters in New York City. So my gratitude and sympathy goes out to my colleagues and tens of millions of other folks who are working in the city and stifling mainland instead of here.
(There's no air conditioning here, if that's any consolation. At least not at the BI office.)
There has been some local news here that I figured you might find interesting.
For example, the beach erosion on a small section of the island, which many people assume is exacerbated by climate change, has become so severe that a bunch of $5-$10 million houses are about to fall into the Atlantic.
The folks who own these houses, who are mostly summer residents who draw their salaries from global economy, have been begging the town to let them spend millions of dollars of their own money to build a "hard armor" seawall on the beach to slow or stop the erosion. But year-round residents, who draw their salaries from the local economy, are opposed to that idea, in part, some suspect, because the year-round residents see cosmic justice in the idea that the folks who invade their island every summer are finally being confronted with something that they can't buy or control.
Vanity Fair's William Cohan, who lives on the affected bluff, and whose own house will soon plunge into the Atlantic if the erosion isn't stopped, wrote an impressively restrained story about this confrontation in this month's issue. If you're interested, <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/08/end-of-malibu-nantucket-erosion">you can check that out here</a>.
Another thing that happened here recently is that, during a community beach potluck a couple of nights ago, a seal hopped up out of the surf.
It was a grey seal, Google said. 
The seal pulled itself up out of the waves, flopped down on the dry sand above the water line, and then began to stretch and yawn.
Naturally, a crowd of adults and kids immediately gathered around the seal. The seal looked at several faces in the crowd, stretched and yawned some more, and then began rubbing its face with its absurdly dexterous, anthropomorphic, and charismatic flippers. If you've ever stopped by the Central Park Zoo and watched the sea lion show, you'll know exactly what the seal was doing. And you'll also know how cute the seal was.
Someone soon spoiled the moment by theorizing that the seal was obviously sick or dying--why else would it crawl up on to a beach full of people and seem unperturbed by them?
So someone else called a seal expert on a cell phone.
No, the seal expert said, the seal probably just wanted to take a nap.
That mollified the concerned crowd for a while, but after another hour went by, and the seal's fur dried out, and the seal still seemed listless and unbothered by the people around it, some of the kids at the potluck got anxious again. This time, the seal expert could not be located to reassure the kids that the seal wasn't about to die. In the end, one of the kids couldn't bear to watch anymore and went home in tears.
In any event...
This seal thing has exploded into another major controversy on the island, one that represents another hurdle in the ongoing interaction between man and nature.
Thirty years ago, there were no seals on Nantucket. There were just waves and fish.
The seals came back a decade or two ago. And now, on some parts of the island, if you watch the ocean carefully, you'll see one float by every once in a while, with its head sticking out of the water like a dog's.
If you go to a remote section of the island called "Great Point," meanwhile, you'll see hundreds of seals. The seals love Great Point, because there's a huge rip-tide that attracts and traps fish, making the surf off the point a veritable cafeteria.
When they're not wolfing down fish in the rip, the seals at Great Point are napping on the beach. And, of course, these seals are cute--the very definition of "charismatic mega-fauna" whose prosperity and freedom armchair environmentalists everywhere love to champion. But there are hundreds of them now--in a small, popular location. And, of course, they're peeing and crapping all over the place.
Great Point also used to be one of the most popular human-fishing spots on the island. But now that the seals have taken over, the fish are scarcer and hard to catch. And when you do hook one, frequent fisherman say, you'd better hope a seal isn't floating nearby. Because there's no easier meal for a seal than gulping down a striped bass or bluefish that a fisherman has distracted by trying to haul it up on the beach.
And, of course, the proliferation of seals in the waters around the island has also attracted the attention of the next rung of the aquatic food chain--namely, Great White Sharks. And human swimmers on the island aren't wild about that.
So now there's this big fight going on about the seals.
Some commercial fishermen and others regard them as a polluting, dangerous menace.
Others think they're a sign that man and nature are once again living in greater harmony.
It's not clear what will happen to the seals.
Or the houses on the bluff.
I am happy to report, however, that the seal that flopped up on the sand during the beach potluck the other night did not expire in the middle of it.
A couple of hours after he (she?) showed up, he/she flopped back down to the waves, hesitated for a moment (the water's cold!), and then plunged back in.
The seal expert, it appears, was right.
That particular grey seal, who has apparently gotten used to being the center of attention, just wanted to take a nap.
So this one small interaction between man and nature, at least, turned out okay.

The Other Night During Dinner A Seal Flopped Up On The Beach

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Climate scientists Deepti Singh and Ben Cook debunk 13 <keyword id="25945" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="myths">myths</keyword> about <keyword id="6366055" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword>.</li><li>They talk about the relationship between climate and weather and renewable energy.</li><li>Singh and Cook dive deep into the role of carbon dioxide and more on this episode of "Debunked."</li></ul>Benjamin Cook: "Global warming is caused by cow farts."Deepti Singh: It's not by their farts, but it's by belching.Cook: "A few degrees' difference is not a big deal." And the way I always like to think about it too is like your body's temperature. If your temperature is three or four degrees warmer, then you're seriously sick."It's too late to do anything about it." Unless you're Elon Musk and gonna head off towards Mars, we're all stuck here, so we should try to figure out how we can make it the best planet we can.Singh: I'm Deepti Singh. I'm an assistant professor in the School of the <keyword id="6356826" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="ENVIRONMENT">Environment</keyword> at Washington State University. I've been studying <keyword id="6361617" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="climate-change">climate change</keyword> for about 11 years, and I study extreme weather events and how human activities are influencing them.Cook: My name is Benjamin Cook, and I'm a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. I've been working there for about 14 years now. And I study how droughts are changing with global warming and climate change.Singh: And today we'll be debunking myths about global warming.Cook: Myths from pop culture. Oh, boy, I'm glad you got this one, Deepti. "The sun is causing global warming."Singh: Changes in the amount of energy we get from the sun do affect our climate. But over the last 150 years, we know that because the amount of energy we're getting from the sun has not changed significantly over this period. Satellites have been recording the amount of solar radiation that our planet receives. I think Ben has a graph that shows that.Cook: And what we're looking at here on the yellow is the amount of energy that's coming from the sun, and red is global temperatures. It's pretty clear that the amount of energy we're getting from the sun has been more or less flat for the last several decades, even as temperatures continue to go up and up.Singh: "Scientists don't agree on what causes climate change."Cook: 100% of the climate scientists on this Skype call agree.Singh: If you review the published literature in reputable journals by reputable scientists, all those papers agree that climate change is caused by human activities.Cook: There's really no other explanation that fits the data. We've looked at the sun. We've looked at just natural variations in circulation in the ocean, in the atmosphere. We've looked at volcanoes. We've looked at changes in ecosystems. And at the end of the day, the only thing that can adequately explain the degree of warming that we've seen over the last 150 years is human greenhouse gas emissions, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels. There's a real clear incentive for people to find some other explanation. Nobody can come up with even a plausible alternative hypothesis."Global warming is caused by cow farts."Singh: It's not by their farts, but it's by belching. Agriculture is a pretty substantial contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, close to 25%. It's not the whole 25%, but it's a good chunk.Cook: It's important to note, too, that even the cow burps that are producing this methane is not natural. It's all part of a kind of human agricultural system. So blaming it all on cows doesn't take people off the hook.Singh: "Plants and animals will adapt."Cook: So, we know that in the past, plants and animals have adapted to climate change, but there's a few fundamental different things now that are very likely to make it quite difficult. In addition, it's not just climate change that's threatening plants and animals, it's habitat fragmentation, it's pollution, it's a variety of other environmental stressors. And so once you kind of put climate change on top of pollution, on top of habitat loss, then it becomes much, much more difficult.Singh: And just to add to that, I think the extinction rate of species is much higher than the natural extinction rate. And it's partly driven by the processes that Ben just mentioned.Cook: Myths from social media.Singh: "Global warming is natural."Cook: So, we know in the past that climate can change really dramatically from natural causes. The climate during the time of the dinosaurs is very different from the climate during the time of the last ice age. But the changes that we're seeing right now for the most part are not natural. The warming that we're seeing is very likely the fastest warming we've seen anytime in the last several thousand years. It coincides directly with the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels and widespread deforestation. You can look at almost any natural cause, and none of them are sufficient to explain the warming that we've seen in recent decades.Singh: "Carbon dioxide is the problem."So, CO2 isn't the problem. It's the increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that is resulting in the rapid warming we're seeing over the last century, which is the problem.Cook: So, carbon dioxide is one of these gases that we call greenhouse gases, because they're responsible for the greenhouse effect, which basically helps trap energy on Earth and make things much, much warmer than it otherwise would have been. It's not a big stretch then to observe that if we start increasing CO2 concentrations, we're gonna trap more energy and we're gonna warm up.Singh: Before the industrial revolution, CO2 levels were close to, like, 280 parts per million. And now we're at close to 418 parts per million. So that's a pretty large change in the concentration.Cook: And the fact is that pretty much anytime the world was warmer, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were higher. And anytime the world was cooler, CO2 concentrations were lower."A few degrees' difference is not a big deal." And the way I always like to think about it too is like your body's temperature. We're all supposed to be about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Even one degree or two degrees of warming is considered a low-grade fever. And if your temperature is three or four degrees warmer, then you're seriously sick.Singh: So, just to give you a sense, the Earth has warmed by about one degree over the last century. That one degree is an average temperature around our planet. That means some parts of our planet are warming faster than others. I come from India. We have a lot of people that live below poverty in the country. And most of those people, for example, don't have an air conditioner to deal with extreme heat events. So it depends on who we're talking about when we say it's not a big deal, because there are some people around the planet that have the capacity to adapt or cope with these kind of extreme events and with the warming that we've experienced, and then there are billions of people that do not have the capacity to cope with even small changes.Myths that we, climate scientists, hear the most."Global warming will destroy the planet by 2030."Cook: Just like there's kind of climate deniers who don't know what they're talking about, there's climate doomists who also don't know what they're talking about. This whole idea of the planet being destroyed by 2030 comes out of discussion about, how much time do we have to keep global warming under two degrees? And so it's very likely that we need to kind of get emissions under control by 2030 to keep it under two degrees. It doesn't mean that the world is going to explode or we're all going to be consigned to a fiery "Mad Max" kind of hellscape. It just means that it'll be warmer than we maybe wanted it to be.Singh: When they say it's gonna destroy the planet, well, the planet's not going to blow up. But it does mean that the way of life and the livelihoods and the things people depend on are going to be affected. There are already people who have been displaced because of sea-level rise, people that are experiencing life-threatening heat conditions.Cook: The impacts of climate change are not going to be equally felt. These kind of blanket statements are very, very dismissive. And I think they can take attention away from the people who are likely to be most vulnerable to climate change.Singh: It's not really helpful to put a date on it. I think we just need to know that delaying action on climate change is going to just cost more to society.Cook: "Global warming is China's fault."Singh: So, to address that myth, I think there's one important fact we need to understand. When CO2 is emitted, it can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The CO2 concentrations we're seeing today are a consequence of emissions that have happened over a much longer period, over the last century. And most of those emissions are associated with the industrial revolution and development of countries like the US and industrialized nations in Europe. If we look at emissions this year specifically, sure, the emissions from China are close to what the emissions from the US are. But those emissions are being used to produce products and goods that are being used in other parts of the world. So I don't think it's fair to say that China's responsible when we're all benefiting from the products that are produced there.Cook: I think even today, it's worth thinking not just about how much is a country emitting, but how much are they emitting per person? And I have another visual aid here. You can pretty clearly see the highest-intensity emitters are places like Australia, the US, Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia. China isn't even in the top 10.Singh: It's also a complicated problem because the well-being of people is tied to their consumption of energy. So as long as we're doing that in a sustainable, cleaner way, I think we all have to benefit from it."Renewable energy is too expensive to be realistic."Cook: Renewable energy is getting cheaper all the time, even faster than we expected. And there's a lot of places where it actually can outcompete some fossil fuel sources. For example, I believe wind and solar is more cost-effective than coal in pretty much the entire United States.Singh: The cost of producing solar panels today is a fraction of what it was just a decade ago. I keep going back to India because that's another region I'm very familiar with. There are a lot of villages there that have been provided energy because they're using solar and wind, which would not have been possible if we were still depending upon CO2. Now, there's still challenges.Cook: We're not going to kind of be able to switch everything overnight, but it's like any other technology. It's getting cheaper over time. It's getting more efficient. And the more we kind of invest in it, then the faster we'll get to the point that we'll be able to use it for most of our needs."Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming."Singh: So, the right question to ask is not whether an extreme event would have been possible without warming, but it's to ask how the event itself was affected by warming. For example, a tropical storm or a tropical cyclone might result in heavier precipitation because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. And so there's more moisture, more fuel in the storm, which results in heavier precipitation and likely more flooding.Cook: I think a good analogy is a professional athlete on steroids. Athletes need to have some kind of innate fitness and ability, but if you go on steroids, you're a bit more likely to hit a home run. So CO2 is kind of like the steroids of the climate system, and it's just intensifying everything that's already there.Singh: "The temperature record is unreliable." What do you have to say about that, Ben?Cook: The record we have of warming for the last 150 years is constructed from basically thousands of thermometer records from around the world. Climate scientists often get accused of modifying the temperature record to make it look like it's warming more than it actually is. At least half a dozen groups around the world who are all independently putting together these records and estimating the global temperature changes that we've seen over the last two centuries, and they're all basically getting the same answer. All this data is publicly available! Anybody can go and get this data and come up with their own calculation. And the fact is that nobody has shown one that is credibly different."It's too late to do anything about it."Singh: It's easy for us to say, "Well, it's too late to do anything about it. Let's throw our hands up and not do anything about it." But there is a lot we can do about it, both individually as well as at the international level. It doesn't have to be a major change, but reducing our consumption of certain meat products that are extremely energy-intensive is one way in which we can affect greenhouse emissions.Cook: The decisions we make today, we are going to have to deal with, our children are going to have to live with. I will never say that people should not recycle or reduce their car use or eat less meat. But at the end of the day, the big lever is just going to be government. And 'cause the government can set policies that can incentivize actions.Singh: It's also a weird time to say that it's too late to do anything about it, because we're at a point in time when we have so much information. There are people working on technologies to address climate change and to make our environment cleaner and better. So this is not a time for us to put our hands up. It's our time to take action.Cook: Climate change itself is not pass-fail. Keeping warming to three degrees is better than four degrees. Keeping warming to two and a half degrees is better than three degrees. Keeping warming to two degrees is better than all of those things. We're all stuck here, so we should try to figure out how we can make it the best planet we can. Climate change is a global problem, and it's going to require a global solution and people to actually kind of work together.

Climate scientists debunk 13 myths about global warming

On Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on <keyword id="6361617" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Climate-Change">Climate Change</keyword> (IPCC) released a summary of the biggest <a href="http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> on climate change since 2007. The final draft will be unveiled Monday. 
The world's top climate scientists are more certain than ever that climate change is real and humans are causing it. 
"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia," the report said. "The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased."
The new report says with at least 95% confidence that human-emitted greenhouse gases are responsible for most of the Earth's warming since 1951. Scientists were only 90% confident in 2007, and the human contribution to <keyword id="6366055" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword> wasn't even mentioned in the first report, published in 1990. 
Here are some of the key findings: 
Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased by 40%since the industrial revolution, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image">IPCC</div></div>Most of that carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, but about 30% of emissions are absorbed by the ocean. The pH of sea water is lowered as it takes in more carbon, making the world's oceans more acidic. Ocean acidification is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-the-great-barrier-reef-died-30-years-2012-10">blamed for killing coral reefs</a> and other <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ocean-acidification-dissolves-sea-life-2012-11">sea creatures</a>. 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">IPCC</div></div></div>
As concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased, so have land and ocean surface temperatures. Combined global land and ocean surface temperature show an average warming of 0.85 degrees Celsius between 1880 and 2012. 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">IPCC</div></div></div>
Due to natural variability, trends based on short records do not accurately reflect long-term climate trends. Scientists point out that the rate of warming in the past 15 years has been small compared to the rate since 1951. 
A long view, however, shows that each of the past three decades have been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850. 
If carbon emissions continue unchecked, scientists predict that average temperatures between 2080 and 2010 will be 2.6-4.8 degrees Celsius higher than today. 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image">IPCC</div></div>
Warming temperatures will lead to changes in the global water cycle. 
"The contrast in precipitation between wet and dry regions and between wet and dry seasons will increase, although there may be regional exceptions," the report said.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image">IPCC</div></div>
As global surface temperatures rise, it is very likely that spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere will continue to decline and Arctic ice will continue to shrink and thin.
Northern Hemisphere snow cover has fallen by 11% each decade since 1967, while Arctic sea ice has been melting by 9-14% each decade since 1979. 
 <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">IPCC</div></div></div>
Melting sea ice will cause sea levels to rise. Global seal levels have risen by roughly 8 inches in the last century. One model suggests that sea levels could further rise by 3 feet in the next one hundred years if nothing is done to curb CO2 emissions. 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">IPCC </div></div></div>
 
Even if CO2 emissions are stopped, the effects of climate change will continue for many centuries. <div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image">IPCC</div></div>

The Most Alarming Findings From A Monster Report On Climate Change

<ul><li><keyword id="7561057" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="cyclone-fani">Cyclone Fani</keyword> is shaping up to be the biggest storm to pass through the Bay of Bengal since 2008.</li><li>An image of Cyclone Fani capture by NASA shows the storm growing in size and heading north-east along India’s eastern coast. </li><li>The growing intensity and frequency of cyclones is indicative global climate change.</li></ul>As Cyclone Fani strengthens and people are evacuated from India’s eastern coast, the evidence of <keyword id="6366055" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword> can be seen in the images captured from outer space. 
 
 <div type="image" title="thumbnail_Fani-768x625" msid="69138904" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;On May 1, 2019, the MODIS instrument aboard NASA&amp;#8217;s Terra satellite provided a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Fani in the Northern Indian Ocean, off the coast southeastern India&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>





 The picture captured using the MODIS instrument aboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Terra satellite — launched on 18 December, 1999 — shows how the storm is growing in size. 
 
 <div type="image" title="Global_tropical_cyclone_tracks-edit2" msid="69138925" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Cyclones intensifying from 1985 to 2005, the map was created with the WPTC track map generator by Nilfanion&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>





 According to <a href="https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/fani-is-indias-strongest-april-cyclone-in-43-years-say-meteorologists/article26995965.ece">meteorologists</a>, Cyclone Fani is the strongest April cyclone to hit India in 43 years. In fact, severe cyclones like Fani — although they can form at any time — normally occur in November, once the monsoon season is over. In fact, looking at cyclonic storms that have hit the Bay of Bengal between 1965 to 2017, only two of 46 ‘severe’ storms occurred in April. 
 
 <div type="image" title="42bd87f57ad298666f6b057505424ff6" msid="69138951" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Cyclone Fani is very likely to move northwestwards during next 12 hours and thereafter re-curve north-northeastwards and cross Odisha Coast between Gopalpur and Chandbali, to the south of Puri around 3rd May afternoon with maximum sustained wind of speed 175-185 kmph gusting to 205 kmph&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>





 The head of the Indian Meteorological Department told <a href="https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/fani-is-indias-strongest-april-cyclone-in-43-years-say-meteorologists/article26995965.ece">The Hindu</a>, “This is a cyclone that’s forming due to the warming of the Bay of Bengal basin…with global warming we have to be prepared for such occurrences and take precaution accordingly.” Cyclone Fani is shaping up to be the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal since 2008 according to the <a href="https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2019-04-30-cyclone-fani-live-extremely-severe-storm-odisha-west-bengal">Weather Channel.</a> And, it’s heading towards the state of Odisha at 190 kilometers per hour. Sarat Chandra Sahu, the Director of the Center for Environment and Climate at the SOA University told <a href="https://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2018/10/17/cyclones-buffet-odisha-as-temperatures-rise/">indiaclimatedialogue</a>, “Because of global warming, sea surface temperature remains higher in the Bay of Bengal leading to generation and intensification of cyclonic systems. The southern coasts of Odisha experience cyclonic storms more frequently since Phailin cyclone of 2013.” 
 
 <div type="image" title="earth simulator_edited" msid="69138974" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Cyclone Fani as visualised by the Earth Simulator&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>





 Ajay Singh, a climate change researcher with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, agrees in his study published in <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212670812000437#">Science Direct</a> stating, “Overall, the impact of global warming on the climate of India is clearly visible in the form of increased frequency and intensity of most of the extreme weather events.” The Indian Ocean, in particular has been warming faster than any tropical region on the planet over the past century according to the <a href="http://www.climate.rocksea.org/research/indian-ocean-warming/">Climate Research Lab</a> in IIT Madras . And, so it ends up that the Indian Ocean is also the largest contributor to global ocean surface warming. 
 
 <div type="image" title="A5A27780-6D81-4DAC-99EC-5B5A0DA57B7D" msid="69138983" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Fishermen&amp;#39;s taking rest in front of fishes painting because of Cyclone Fani influence over Bay of Bengal at Bheemili in Visakhapatnam on Wednesday&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>





 In preparation for the incoming storm, the navy, coast guard and National Disaster Response Force has been put on round the clock alert. Over 80 trains have been cancelled and 800 shelters have been set up. See also: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/cyclone-fani-expected-to-make-landfall-in-odisha-on-may-3/articleshow/69138234.cms">Cyclone Fani expected to make landfall in Odisha on May 3</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/what-is-cyclone-fani-fony-phoni-that-the-met-dept-called-very-severe-in-the-latest-update/articleshow/69107984.cms">Cyclone Fani, a 'very severe' natural disaster is set to hit India's eastern coast</a>

Cyclone Fani and the impact of global warming captured by NASA

<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right" style="width:365px"><div class="image">The Economist</div></div>The slowdown in rising temperatures over the past 15 years goes from being unexplained to overexplained.
BETWEEN 1998 and 2013, the Earth's surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18°C increase in the 1990s. Meanwhile, emissions of carbon dioxide (which would be expected to push temperatures up) rose uninterruptedly. This pause in warming has raised doubts in the public mind about climate change. A few sceptics say flatly that global warming has stopped. Others argue that scientists' understanding of the climate is so flawed that their judgments about it cannot be accepted with any confidence. A convincing explanation of the pause therefore matters both to a proper understanding of the climate and to the credibility of climate science--and papers published over the past few weeks do their best to provide one. Indeed, they do almost too good a job. If all were correct, the pause would now be explained twice over.
This is the opposite of what happened at first. As evidence piled up that temperatures were not rising much, some scientists dismissed it as a blip. The temperature, they pointed out, had fallen for much longer periods twice in the past century or so, in 1880-1910 and again in 1945-75 (see chart), even though the general trend was up. Variability is part of the climate system and a 15-year hiatus, they suggested, was not worth getting excited about.
An alternative way of looking at the pause's significance was to say that there had been a slowdown but not a big one. Most records, including one of the best known (kept by Britain's Meteorological Office), do not include measurements from the Arctic, which has been warming faster than anywhere else in the world. Using satellite data to fill in the missing Arctic numbers, Kevin Cowtan of the University of York, in Britain, and Robert Way of the University of Ottawa, in Canada, put the overall rate of global warming at 0.12°C a decade between 1998 and 2012--not far from the 1990s rate. A study by NASA puts the "Arctic effect" over the same period somewhat lower, at 0.07°C a decade, but that is still not negligible.
It is also worth remembering that average warming is not the only measure of climate change. According to a study just published by Sonia Seneviratne of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, in Zurich, the number of hot days, the number of extremely hot days and the length of warm periods all increased during the pause (1998-2012). A more stable average temperature hides wider extremes.
Still, attempts to explain away that stable average have not been convincing, partly because of the conflict between flat temperatures and rising CO{-2} emissions, and partly because observed temperatures are now falling outside the range climate models predict. The models embody the state of climate knowledge. If they are wrong, the knowledge is probably faulty, too. Hence attempts to explain the pause.
<h3>Chilling news</h3>
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did so in terms of fluctuating solar output, atmospheric pollution and volcanoes. All three, it thought, were unusually influential.
The sun's power output fluctuates slightly over a cycle that lasts about 11 years. The current cycle seems to have gone on longer than normal and may have started from a lower base, so for the past decade less heat has been reaching Earth than usual. Pollution throws aerosols (particles such as soot, and suspended droplets of things like sulphuric acid) into the air, where they reflect sunlight back into space. The more there are, the greater their cooling effect--and pollution from Chinese coal-fired power plants, in particular, has been rising. Volcanoes do the same thing, so increased volcanic activity tends to reduce temperatures.
Gavin Schmidt and two colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute quantify the effects of these trends in Nature Geoscience. They argue that climate models underplay the delayed and subdued solar cycle. They think the models do not fully account for the effects of pollution (specifically, nitrate pollution and indirect effects like interactions between aerosols and clouds). And they claim that the impact of volcanic activity since 2000 has been greater than previously thought. Adjusting for all this, they find that the difference between actual temperature readings and computer-generated ones largely disappears. The implication is that the solar cycle and aerosols explain much of the pause.
<h3>Blowing hot and cold</h3>
There is, however, another type of explanation. Much of the incoming heat is absorbed by oceans, especially the largest, the Pacific. Several new studies link the pause with changes in the Pacific and in the trade winds that influence the circulation of water within it.
Trade winds blow east-west at tropical latitudes. In so doing they push warm surface water towards Asia and draw cooler, deep water to the surface in the central and eastern Pacific, which chills the atmosphere. Water movement at the surface also speeds up a giant churn in the ocean. This pulls some warm water downwards, sequestering heat at greater depth. In a study published in Nature in 2013, Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in San Diego, argued that much of the difference between climate models and actual temperatures could be accounted for by cooling in the eastern Pacific.
Every few years, as Dr Kosaka and Dr Xie observe, the trade winds slacken and the warm water in the western Pacific sloshes back to replace the cool surface layer of the central and eastern parts of the ocean. This weather pattern is called El Niño and it warms the whole atmosphere. There was an exceptionally strong Niño in 1997-98, an unusually hot year. The opposite pattern, with cooler temperatures and stronger trade winds, is called La Niña. The 1997-98 Niño was followed by a series of Niñas, explaining part of the pause.
Switches between El Niño and La Niña are frequent. But there is also a long-term cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which switches from a warm (or positive) phase to a cool (negative) one every 20 or 30 years. The positive phase encourages more frequent, powerful Niños. According to Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of America's National Centre for Atmospheric Research, the PDO was positive in 1976-98--a period of rising temperatures--and negative in 1943-76 and since 2000, producing a series of cooling Niñas.
But that is not the end of it. Laid on top of these cyclical patterns is what looks like a one-off increase in the strength of trade winds during the past 20 years. According to a study in Nature Climate Change, by Matthew England of the University of New South Wales and others, record trade winds have produced a sort of super-Niña. On average, sea levels have risen by about 3mm a year in the past 30 years. But those in the eastern Pacific have barely budged, whereas those near the Philippines have risen by 20cm since the late 1990s. A wall of warm water, in other words, is being held in place by powerful winds, with cool water rising behind it. According to Dr England, the effect of the trade winds explains most of the temperature pause.
If so, the pause has gone from being not explained to explained twice over--once by aerosols and the solar cycle, and again by ocean winds and currents. These two accounts are not contradictory. The processes at work are understood, but their relative contributions are not.
Nor is the answer to what is, from the human point of view, the biggest question of all, namely what these explanations imply about how long the pause might continue. On the face of it, if some heat is being sucked into the deep ocean, the process could simply carry on: the ocean has a huge capacity to absorb heat as long as the pump sending it to the bottom remains in working order. But that is not all there is to it. Gravity wants the western-Pacific water wall to slosh back; it is held in place only by exceptionally strong trade winds. If those winds slacken, temperatures will start to rise again.
The solar cycle is already turning. And aerosol cooling is likely to be reined in by China's anti-pollution laws. Most of the circumstances that have put the planet's temperature rise on "pause" look temporary. Like the Terminator, global warming will be back.
Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist

Global Warming: Who Pressed The Pause Button?

<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image"><a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/">Courtesy James Powell</a></div></div>
The next time someone tries to tell you that there's a legitimate scientific debate about man-made global warming, point them to this chart.
It was created by <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/" target="_blank">James Powell</a>, an MIT-trained geochemist, longtime Oberlin professor, and former member of the National <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword> Board (under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush). He searched for all studies published in 2013 that mentioned "global warming," "global climate change," or "climate change," and found 10,885.
Powell combed through the papers and found <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/Avakyan/Avakyan.html" target="_blank">only</a> <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/Hug/hug.html" target="_blank">two</a> that rejected the idea that humans are responsible for climate change. 
"On the one side, we have a mountain of scientific evidence, on the other, ideology and arm-waving," Powell <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/" target="_blank">writes</a>.
His analyses of the research in <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/Original%20study/originaltsudy.html" target="_blank">earlier</a> <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/Second%20study/secondstudy.html" target="_blank">years</a> found similar results. (He <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/methodology/method.html" target="_blank">describes his methodology here</a> and even invites skeptics to <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/resources/Nov2012thruDec2013.xlsx" target="_blank">download the data for themselves</a>.)
Some climate change deniers refuse to be moved by the ever-growing "mountain of scientific evidence." But before having a knee-jerk reaction to Powell's findings, consider what they mean, <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2014/01/10/about-that-consensus-on-global-warming-9136-agree-one-disagrees/" target="_blank">suggests Ashutosh Jogalekar at Scientific American</a>:
<blockquote class="blockquote">
I understand as well as anyone else that consensus does not imply truth but I find it odd how there aren't even a handful of scientists who deny global warming presumably because the global warming mafia threatens to throttle them if they do. It's not like we are seeing a 70-30% split, or even a 90-10% split. No, the split is more like 99.99-0.01%.
Isn't it remarkable that among the legions of scientists working around the world, many with tenured positions, secure reputations and largely nothing to lose, not even a hundred out of ten thousand come forward to deny the phenomenon in the scientific literature? Should it be that hard for them to publish papers if the evidence is really good enough? Even detractors of the peer review system would disagree that the system is that broken; after all, studies challenging consensus are quite common in other disciplines. So are contrarian climate scientists around the world so utterly terrified of their colleagues and world opinion that they would not dare to hazard a contrarian explanation at all, especially if it were based on sound science? The belief stretches your imagination to new lengths.
</blockquote>
Anyone who points to this cold, long winter as evidence that global warming is a myth may be <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cold-weather-doesnt-discredit-global-warming-2014-1">confusing unpredictable short-term weather patterns with the long-term behavior of the atmosphere</a>. Where you live may have seen a lot of snow this year, but when scientists look at the whole planet, this past decade is still <a href="http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html" target="_blank">the hottest on record</a>.
And that's exactly why Powell is sounding the alarm, urging people to stop pretending that there's confusion on this issue among serious climate scientists. As the chart above so clearly shows: There's not.
"Very few of the most vocal global warming deniers, those who write op-eds and blogs and testify to congressional committees, have ever written a peer-reviewed article in which they say explicitly that anthropogenic [man-made] global warming is false," Powell <a href="http://www.jamespowell.org/" target="_blank">writes</a>. "Why? Because then they would have to provide the evidence and, evidently, they don't have it."

The Scientific Debate On Global Warming In One Chart

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The Atlantic <keyword id="16422" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="hurricane">hurricane</keyword> season begins June 1.</li><li>Forecasts project 2020 will see an 'above-average' or 'extremely active' hurricane season, with three to six major storms.</li><li>The odds that a cyclone will become a major hurricane have increased 8% each decade for the last 40 years, according to a study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-hurricanes-why-storms-are-wetter-stronger-slower-2019-7">Rising global temperatures are making these storms stronger</a> as oceans warm.</li></ul>Hurricanes are getting stronger and more devastating by the decade, and this season is expected to continue the trend.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expects the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which begins June 1, to be "above-normal," the agency announced on Thursday. That means six to 10 hurricanes, with three to six of those reaching Category 3 or higher (that's considered a "major hurricane").An average season sees roughly six hurricanes, with three becoming major. But the Atlantic Ocean has been producing highly active hurricane seasons since 1995, <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/busy-atlantic-hurricane-season-predicted-for-2020">according to NOAA</a>.In fact, the odds of any tropical cyclone becoming a major hurricane are increasing as human activity warms the globe. A study from researchers at NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that each new decade over the last 40 years has brought an 8% increase in the chance that a storm turns into a major hurricane."We have a significantly building body of evidence that these storms have already changed in very substantial ways, and all of them are dangerous," James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and the study's lead author, told the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/18/hurricanes-stronger-climate-change/">Washington Post</a>.The <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/12/1920849117">findings</a>, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are based on 40 years of satellite data.<div type="image" title="Hurricane Dorian" height="1200" width="1600" msid="75894251" hostid="261"></div>Hurricanes are getting stronger and wetter because because <keyword id="6361617" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="climate-change">climate change</keyword> is causing ocean and air temperatures to climb — 2019 was the <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/news/2019-was-2nd-hottest-year-on-record-for-earth-say-noaa-nasa">second-hottest</a> year on record, and it closed the hottest decade ever recorded. Hurricanes feed on warm water.What's more, higher water temperatures lead to sea-level rise, which increases the risk of flooding during high tides and storms surges. Warmer air also holds more atmospheric water vapor, which enables tropical storms to strengthen and unleash more precipitation."Almost all of the damage and mortality caused by hurricanes is done by major hurricanes," Kossin told <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/weather/climate-change-hurricane-tropical-cyclone/index.html">CNN</a>. "Increasing the likelihood of having a major hurricane will certainly increase this risk."<h2>Forecasts project an 'above-average' or 'extremely active' hurricane season</h2><div type="image" title="hurricane eye dorian iss" height="1367" width="1822" msid="75894254" hostid="261"></div>More than a dozen forecasts from government agencies, research institutions, and private companies have projected that the 2020 hurricane season will be "above average," with at least six hurricanes, according to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/08/weather/hurricane-season-2020-forecast-above-average/index.html">CNN</a>. Some are even expecting an "extremely active" season, with more than nine hurricanes.NOAA's announcement Thursday aligned with those other forecasts."In general, the consensus between seasonal hurricane forecasts this year is greater than it has been the past few years," Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword>, told CNN.Storms have already begun to appear, even though the season hasn't started yet. This week, Tropical Storm Arthur, the first named storm in the Atlantic this year, skimmed past the North Carolina coast.On the other side of the globe, Super Cyclone Amphan reached wind speeds equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane on Monday — the strongest storm the Bay of Bengal has ever seen, <a href="https://twitter.com/philklotzbach/status/1262396666214264833">according to Klotzbach</a>.The NOAA researchers' findings are yet another piece of evidence that <keyword id="6366055" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword> is making these storms more devastating."We've just increased our confidence of our understanding of the link between hurricane intensity and climate change," Kossin told the Post. "We have high confidence that there is a human fingerprint on these changes."Read the original article on <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/atlantic-hurricane-season-start-forecast-above-average-2020-5">Business Insider</a>

Experts forecast a highly active Atlantic hurricane season, with up to 6 major storms. The season starts June 1.

Glaciers in the <keyword id="982087" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="Qinghai-Tibet-Plateau">Qinghai-Tibet Plateau</keyword>, home to several Himalayan rivers including the Brahamaputra, have shrunk 15% due to <keyword id="6366055" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword>, Chinese researchers said. 
 
Glaciers have shrunk from 53,000 to 45,000 sq km in the past 30 years, the scientists added. 
 
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the highest place in the world's mid-latitude regions, is more likely to get affected by global warming, they said. 
 
Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute of CAS, said glaciers started to shrink since the 20th century and speeded up since the 1990s. 
 
Retreating glaciers can increase water flow of major rivers in the short term, he said. 
 
A continuation of the retreat will eventually deplete the glacial ice and substantially reduce or eliminate runoff, he added. 
 
China has more than 46,000 glaciers, mainly in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Glaciers In Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Shrinking Due To Global Warming

The <keyword id="6375923" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Climate">climate</keyword> may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away.
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, "the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade."
<table class="image-container float_right" width="200"><tr><td><div class="image"></div>The EconomistChart 1. </td></tr></table>Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.
The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean <keyword id="6366055" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword> is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.
The mismatch might mean that--for some unexplained reason--there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.
<h3>The insensitive planet</h3>
The term scientists use to describe the way the climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels is "climate sensitivity". This is usually defined as how much hotter the Earth will get for each doubling of CO2 concentrations. So-called equilibrium sensitivity, the commonest measure, refers to the temperature rise after allowing all feedback mechanisms to work (but without accounting for changes in vegetation and ice sheets).
Carbon dioxide itself absorbs infra-red at a consistent rate. For each doubling of CO2 levels you get roughly 1°C of warming. A rise in concentrations from preindustrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to 560ppm would thus warm the Earth by 1°C. If that were all there was to worry about, there would, as it were, be nothing to worry about. A 1°C rise could be shrugged off. But things are not that simple, for two reasons. One is that rising CO2 levels directly influence phenomena such as the amount of water vapour (also a greenhouse gas) and clouds that amplify or diminish the temperature rise. This affects equilibrium sensitivity directly, meaning doubling carbon concentrations would produce more than a 1°C rise in temperature. The second is that other things, such as adding soot and other aerosols to the atmosphere, add to or subtract from the effect of CO2. All serious climate scientists agree on these two lines of reasoning. But they disagree on the size of the change that is predicted.
The Intergovernmental Panel on <keyword id="6361617" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Climate-Change">Climate Change</keyword> (IPCC), which embodies the mainstream of climate science, reckons the answer is about 3°C, plus or minus a degree or so. In its most recent assessment (in 2007), it wrote that "the equilibrium climate sensitivity…is likely to be in the range 2°C to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded." The IPCC’s next assessment is due in September. A draft version was recently leaked. It gave the same range of likely outcomes and added an upper limit of sensitivity of 6°C to 7°C.
A rise of around 3°C could be extremely damaging. The IPCC’s earlier assessment said such a rise could mean that more areas would be affected by drought; that up to 30% of species could be at greater risk of extinction; that most corals would face significant biodiversity losses; and that there would be likely increases of intense tropical cyclones and much higher sea levels.
<h3>New Model Army</h3>
Other recent studies, though, paint a different picture. An unpublished report by the Research Council of Norway, a government-funded body, which was compiled by a team led by Terje Berntsen of the University of Oslo, uses a different method from the IPCC’s. It concludes there is a 90% probability that doubling CO2 emissions will increase temperatures by only 1.2-2.9°C, with the most likely figure being 1.9°C. The top of the study’s range is well below the IPCC’s upper estimates of likely sensitivity.
This study has not been peer-reviewed; it may be unreliable. But its projections are not unique. Work by Julia Hargreaves of the Research Institute for Global Change in Yokohama, which was published in 2012, suggests a 90% chance of the actual change being in the range of 0.5-4.0°C, with a mean of 2.3°C. This is based on the way the climate behaved about 20,000 years ago, at the peak of the last ice age, a period when carbon-dioxide concentrations leapt. Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist, got an even lower range in a study accepted for publication: 1.0-3.0°C, with a mean of 1.6°C. His calculations reanalysed work cited by the IPCC and took account of more recent temperature data. In all these calculations, the chances of climate sensitivity above 4.5°C become vanishingly small.
If such estimates were right, they would require revisions to the science of climate change and, possibly, to public policies. If, as conventional wisdom has it, global temperatures could rise by 3°C or more in response to a doubling of emissions, then the correct response would be the one to which most of the world pays lip service: rein in the warming and the greenhouse gases causing it. This is called "mitigation", in the jargon. Moreover, if there were an outside possibility of something catastrophic, such as a 6°C rise, that could justify drastic interventions. This would be similar to taking out disaster insurance. It may seem an unnecessary expense when you are forking out for the premiums, but when you need it, you really need it. Many economists, including William Nordhaus of Yale University, have made this case.
If, however, temperatures are likely to rise by only 2°C in response to a doubling of carbon emissions (and if the likelihood of a 6°C increase is trivial), the calculation might change. Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse-gas splurge. There is no point buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone. In this case more adaptation rather than more mitigation might be the right policy at the margin. But that would be good advice only if these new estimates really were more reliable than the old ones. And different results come from different models.
One type of model--general-circulation models, or GCMs--use a bottom-up approach. These divide the Earth and its atmosphere into a grid which generates an enormous number of calculations in order to imitate the climate system and the multiple influences upon it. The advantage of such complex models is that they are extremely detailed. Their disadvantage is that they do not respond to new temperature readings. They simulate the way the climate works over the long run, without taking account of what current observations are. Their sensitivity is based upon how accurately they describe the processes and feedbacks in the climate system.
The other type--energy-balance models--are simpler. They are top-down, treating the Earth as a single unit or as two hemispheres, and representing the whole climate with a few equations reflecting things such as changes in greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols and global temperatures. Such models do not try to describe the complexities of the climate. That is a drawback. But they have an advantage, too: unlike the GCMs, they explicitly use temperature data to estimate the sensitivity of the climate system, so they respond to actual climate observations.
The IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity are based partly on GCMs. Because these reflect scientists’ understanding of how the climate works, and that understanding has not changed much, the models have not changed either and do not reflect the recent hiatus in rising temperatures. In contrast, the Norwegian study was based on an energy-balance model. So were earlier influential ones by Reto Knutti of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich; by Piers Forster of the University of Leeds and Jonathan Gregory of the University of Reading; by Natalia Andronova and Michael Schlesinger, both of the University of Illinois; and by Magne Aldrin of the Norwegian Computing Centre (who is also a co-author of the new Norwegian study). All these found lower climate sensitivities. The paper by Drs Forster and Gregory found a central estimate of 1.6°C for equilibrium sensitivity, with a 95% likelihood of a 1.0-4.1°C range. That by Dr Aldrin and others found a 90% likelihood of a 1.2-3.5°C range.
It might seem obvious that energy-balance models are better: do they not fit what is actually happening? Yes, but that is not the whole story. Myles Allen of Oxford University points out that energy-balance models are better at representing simple and direct climate feedback mechanisms than indirect and dynamic ones. Most greenhouse gases are straightforward: they warm the climate. The direct impact of volcanoes is also straightforward: they cool it by reflecting sunlight back. But volcanoes also change circulation patterns in the atmosphere, which can then warm the climate indirectly, partially offsetting the direct cooling. Simple energy-balance models cannot capture this indirect feedback. So they may exaggerate volcanic cooling.
This means that if, for some reason, there were factors that temporarily muffled the impact of greenhouse-gas emissions on global temperatures, the simple energy-balance models might not pick them up. They will be too responsive to passing slowdowns. In short, the different sorts of climate model measure somewhat different things.
<h3>Clouds of uncertainty</h3>
This also means the case for saying the climate is less sensitive to CO2 emissions than previously believed cannot rest on models alone. There must be other explanations--and, as it happens, there are: individual climatic influences and feedback loops that amplify (and sometimes moderate) climate change.
Begin with aerosols, such as those from sulphates. These stop the atmosphere from warming by reflecting sunlight. Some heat it, too. But on balance aerosols offset the warming impact of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Most climate models reckon that aerosols cool the atmosphere by about 0.3-0.5°C. If that underestimated aerosols’ effects, perhaps it might explain the lack of recent warming.
Yet it does not. In fact, it may actually be an overestimate. Over the past few years, measurements of aerosols have improved enormously. Detailed data from satellites and balloons suggest their cooling effect is lower (and their warming greater, where that occurs). The leaked assessment from the IPCC (which is still subject to review and revision) suggested that aerosols’ estimated radiative "forcing"--their warming or cooling effect--had changed from minus 1.2 watts per square metre of the Earth’s surface in the 2007 assessment to minus 0.7W/m{+2} now: ie, less cooling.
One of the commonest and most important aerosols is soot (also known as black carbon). This warms the atmosphere because it absorbs sunlight, as black things do. The most detailed study of soot was published in January and also found more net warming than had previously been thought. It reckoned black carbon had a direct warming effect of around 1.1W/m{+2}. Though indirect effects offset some of this, the effect is still greater than an earlier estimate by the United Nations <keyword id="6356826" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="environment">Environment</keyword> Programme of 0.3-0.6W/m{+2}.
All this makes the recent period of flat temperatures even more puzzling. If aerosols are not cooling the Earth as much as was thought, then global warming ought to be gathering pace. But it is not. Something must be reining it back. One candidate is lower climate sensitivity.
A related possibility is that general-circulation climate models may be overestimating the impact of clouds (which are themselves influenced by aerosols). In all such models, clouds amplify global warming, sometimes by a lot. But as the leaked IPCC assessment says, "the cloud feedback remains the most uncertain radiative feedback in climate models." It is even possible that some clouds may dampen, not amplify global warming--which may also help explain the hiatus in rising temperatures. If clouds have less of an effect, climate sensitivity would be lower.
<table class="image-container float_left" width="200"><tr><td><div class="image"></div>The Economist</td></tr></table>So the explanation may lie in the air--but then again it may not. Perhaps it lies in the oceans. But here, too, facts get in the way. Over the past decade the long-term rise in surface seawater temperatures seems to have stalled (see chart 2), which suggests that the oceans are not absorbing as much heat from the atmosphere.
As with aerosols, this conclusion is based on better data from new measuring devices. But it applies only to the upper 700 metres of the sea. What is going on below that--particularly at depths of 2km or more--is obscure. A study in Geophysical Research Letters by Kevin Trenberth of America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research and others found that 30% of the ocean warming in the past decade has occurred in the deep ocean (below 700 metres). The study says a substantial amount of global warming is going into the oceans, and the deep oceans are heating up in an unprecedented way. If so, that would also help explain the temperature hiatus.
<h3>Double-A minus</h3>
Lastly, there is some evidence that the natural (ie, non-man-made) variability of temperatures may be somewhat greater than the IPCC has thought. A recent paper by Ka-Kit Tung and Jiansong Zhou in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences links temperature changes from 1750 to natural changes (such as sea temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean) and suggests that "the anthropogenic global-warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century." It is possible, therefore, that both the rise in temperatures in the 1990s and the flattening in the 2000s have been caused in part by natural variability.
So what does all this amount to? The scientists are cautious about interpreting their findings. As Dr Knutti puts it, "the bottom line is that there are several lines of evidence, where the observed trends are pushing down, whereas the models are pushing up, so my personal view is that the overall assessment hasn’t changed much."
But given the hiatus in warming and all the new evidence, a small reduction in estimates of climate sensitivity would seem to be justified: a downwards nudge on various best estimates from 3°C to 2.5°C, perhaps; a lower ceiling (around 4.5°C), certainly. If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch. But it would not yet be downgraded.
Equilibrium climate sensitivity is a benchmark in climate science. But it is a very specific measure. It attempts to describe what would happen to the climate once all the feedback mechanisms have worked through; equilibrium in this sense takes centuries--too long for most policymakers. As Gerard Roe of the University of Washington argues, even if climate sensitivity were very high (above, say 7°C), its economic effects would be minuscule under any plausible discount rate because it operates over such long periods. So it is one thing to ask how climate sensitivity might be changing; a different question is to ask what the policy consequences might be.
For that, a more useful measure is the transient climate response (TCR), the temperature you reach after doubling CO2 gradually over 70 years. Unlike the equilibrium response, the transient one can be observed directly; there is much less controversy about it. Most estimates put the TCR at about 1.5°C, with a range of 1-2°C. Isaac Held of America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently calculated his "personal best estimate" for the TCR: 1.4°C, reflecting the new estimates for aerosols and natural variability.
That sounds reassuring: the TCR is below estimates for equilibrium climate sensitivity. But the TCR captures only some of the warming that those 70 years of emissions would eventually generate because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for much longer.
As a rule of thumb, global temperatures rise by about 1.5°C for each trillion tonnes of carbon put into the atmosphere. The world has pumped out half a trillion tonnes of carbon since 1750, and temperatures have risen by 0.8°C. At current rates, the next half-trillion tonnes will be emitted by 2045; the one after that before 2080.
Since CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, this could increase temperatures compared with pre-industrial levels by around 2°C even with a lower sensitivity and perhaps nearer to 4°C at the top end of the estimates. Despite all the work on sensitivity, no one really knows how the climate would react if temperatures rose by as much as 4°C. Hardly reassuring.
Click <a href="http://www.economist.com/products/subscribe/CUR22/noreg">here</a> to subscribe to <keyword id="425741" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="The-Economist">The Economist</keyword>

Climatologists Can't Explain Why Global Warming Has Slowed Down

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The <keyword id="462030" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="green-economy">green economy</keyword> looks set to grow in the coming decade, as governments and businesses strive to address <keyword id="6366055" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="global-warming">global warming</keyword>.</li><li>At the moment, it's hard to have enough expertise to invest in the opportunity, given how complicated it is.</li><li><keyword id="107096" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Tesla">Tesla</keyword>, however, is directly involved in the green sector because it builds and sells only green technologies.</li><li>As a result, it looks like a nice, easy way to do some green investing.</li><li>And Tesla has a track record: investors who bought and held shares after the 2010 IPO have seen a 9,200% return.</li></ul>Investing in the green economy is tricky, mainly because environmentally-responsible investments are still fairly esoteric, to people who aren't professionals or committed to doing a lot of research.The opportunity is set to grow over the next decade, although the rate of that development is open for debate. If Joe Biden wins the Presidential election in November and the Democrats take the Senate and hold the House, a program of global-warming-fighting legislation could be the biggest story of 2021.Outside the US, green opportunities are also picking up. In Europe, both the giant Volkswagen Group and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler are committing to widespread electrification of new vehicles, anticipating regulatory changes that could spell the beginning of the end for gas-burning cars and trucks.Meanwhile, in China, most automakers expect the coming decade to bring market growth that could make the country the world's leader in electrified <keyword id="34991" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="100" keywordseo="transportation">transportation</keyword>.If you want to invest in this changeover, however, your best bet could be Tesla. <h2>Tesla has a track record and has shed risk in the past year</h2><div type="image" title="Elon Musk" height="1763" width="2500" msid="78733788" hostid="261"></div>First, Tesla has a track record of rewarding investors. If you'd bought shares after the company's 2010 IPO, you'd be sitting on a 9,200% return today. And that's if you'd simply used your own money. If you'd bought with leverage, even at a relatively high rate of interest, the prospective amplified return is staggering.This all happened with Tesla minting risk at a furious clip, with the stock pitching up and down like a dinghy in a hurricane, and CEO <keyword id="6355315" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="elon-musk">Elon Musk</keyword>'s Twitter habit adding to the chaos. It also happened when Tesla was operating essentially one factory, selling one or two models at a time, struggling to validate a home-solar business, and delivering fewer than 500,000 cars a year.Over the next couple of years, Tesla should cross that 500,000 mark, have four assembly plants online (a new US factory in Texas could join the flagship in California, as well as a plant in China and one under construction in Germany). Tesla could also be operating several battery factories by then.The valley of mega-risk has been crossed, and because the company sells nothing but green technologies, buying shares is the obvious way to invest in a global warming solution. I'm not saying you should, mind you — just that the strategy is obvious.<h2>Risky startups and risky traditional automakers</h2><div type="image" title="GM EV Barra" height="1333" width="2000" msid="78733796" hostid="261"></div>Other electric-car startups like Rivian, Nikola, and Lucid Motors are far riskier because they haven't brought vehicles to market yet. On the other hand, their shares, if and when they go public, should be cheaper.What about established automakers with electric ambitions? Investment professionals have been arguing for years that General Motors, now aiming to produce 22 new electrified vehicles by 2023, is horribly undervalued. But the play there is perhaps to buy GM stock with the hope that the company decides to spin off its electric business, something Wall Street has agitated for but that GM's management has been avoiding.Tesla was starting to look pretty expensive after a huge rally at the beginning of the year took shares above $2,000. But a five-for-one stock split in August has brought shares back into reach. Remember, the point here isn't that you're buying an electric automaker or a solar-panel manufacturer. You'd have to think hard about that, as carmakers are great at incinerating capital and, if you survey the sector, it's tough to find anything that's outperformed the markets (save Ferrari). Solar has a history of countries such as China flooding the market with cheap panels and turning the business into a low-margin commodity-like affair.The point is that you want to invest in the emergence of a future green economy, and you want to do it without having to sort through green bond funds or socially-responsible ETFs or delving into the complexities of carbon-credit trading.<h2>Investing in one company and one stock rather than in an entire sector</h2><div type="image" title="TSLA Chart" height="846" width="1944" msid="78733799" hostid="261"></div>Tesla offers a straightforward way to do this, with enough risk still embedded in the business to make a substantial return a possibility while not weighing down the opportunity with so much risk that you'd be tempted to bail out if the stock takes a nosedive at some point in the next five years.On the other hand, putting all your eggs in one basket carries its own risk. You clearly aren't hedging by investing in the entire sector, taking advantage of broad ingenuity and discounted prices for companies that haven't really broken cover yet.I should point out that I've never owned a single share of Tesla. And to be honest, I'd doubt I'd buy shares of Tesla if journalistic best practices didn't bar me from doings so. I think there are better companies to invest in outside the transportation industry that have more solid revenue and profitability prospects and that aren't attractive due to big swings in their stock prices. However, if you think the future could be greener than the past or present, and you want to wager a few bucks on your hunch, Tesla appears to be one of the best ways to invest in a single company that's representative of the developing green economy.

The Tesla trade is the best way to invest in a solution to global warming

<div class="image-container" style="width:620px"><div class="image"></div><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4897630939/sizes/l/in/photostream/">NASA Goddard Photo and Video</a>Plankton Bloom off the Coast of Newfoundland</div>
Greenland is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/antarctica-and-greenland-are-melting-2012-11">slowly, but surely</a>, melting. And though we aren't sure of all the varied effects that this will have on local and global climate, the iron within this ice could cause a boom of tiny plants and animals in our oceans, a new study suggests.
<keyword id="6366055" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="global-warming">Global warming</keyword> has many climate scientists worried that rising <keyword id="53745" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="60" keywordseo="Ocean">ocean</keyword> temperatures and acidity will kill off all kinds of marine life, but these tiny algae, called phytoplankton, form the base of the food chain in the Ocean, and increasing their numbers could have a large impact on ocean life.
That's according to <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1746.html">research published</a> March 10 in the journal Nature Geoscience. In the study researcher Maya Bhatia from the University of British Columbia and her colleagues found that melting glaciers near the Arctic are releasing significant amounts of iron.
"Glacial runoff has only recently been considered a potentially important source of nutrients that are usable, or bioavailable, to downstream ecosystems," <a href="http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/Iron_Glaciers">Bhatia said in a press release</a> from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "We believe our study now adds iron to that list of nutrients, and underscores the potential for a unique but as-yet-undetermined chemical impact from increasing ice sheet meltwater runoff."
In the paper the scientists theorized that the high levels of iron running off of the Ice Sheet may be connected to recent phytoplankton blooms near Greenland. As the climate warms and ice continues to melt, the ice sheet could continue to release iron.
It is not certain what the long-term effects will be, but it is known that phytoplankton — tiny drifting algae, are at the very bottom of the ocean’s food chain, which means that larger creatures need these small guys to survive.
<a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature09268.html">Previous studies published</a> in journals such as Nature, had suggested that phytoplankton levels had begun to decrease over the last century, which has had many scientists worried about whether much of the other life in the ocean would vanish along with it.
When they examined water samples taken from streams and rivers running off the ice sheet, the scientists found about half of the iron was bioavailable — meaning it came in a form that could be used as a nutrient for budding phytoplankton.
<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:400px"><div class="image"></div><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4736726369/sizes/l/in/photostream/">NASA Goddard Photo and Video</a></div>
Microscopic algae use this iron along with other minerals to grow and reproduce. Other tiny "animal" plankton consume the phytoplankton that grows, larger creatures in turn eat those plankton, and so on. 
The researchers estimated that the increasing meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet could double the amount of iron entering the ocean currently — and could be an important source of bigger phytoplankton blooms. Currently, iron in the water is a limiting factor for how much plankton can grow.
If melting glacial ice sheets can produce enough iron to boost plankton growth in the ocean, there could be downstream effects on all ocean species.
"We don’t have enough historical measurements to say that this iron contribution is an increase over past conditions, but if it is working the way we think it is, the contribution would be greater as meltwater discharge increases," Bhatia says. "It is interesting to think that, as ice sheets melt, there are biogeochemical considerations beyond changing sea level."
Large plankton blooms have been known to suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and some have even proposed <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/a-california-businessman-has-attempted-the-worlds-largest-geoengineering-project-in-the-pacific-2012-10">adding iron to the ocean</a> as a way to mediate the effects of <keyword id="6361617" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Climate-Change">climate change</keyword>. Researchers can't be sure how big the effects of Greenland's iron melt may be, but it's possible the plankton bloom could mediate climate change in a small way.

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