Tag Archives: Ecologic

Will the badger cull cost the Tories the election? It certainly should! Updated for 2026

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We are now just under 50 days from a general election and the badger cull issue has taken centre stage in a wider debate about wildlife protection and animal welfare, which could help decide the outcome.

The Labour Party have even put the badger on the front of their wildlife protection and animal welfare manifesto, as they make a clear election commitment to stop both the pilot culls and a wider national roll out of the policy should they form a Government.

With a recent MORI poll showing that badger culling was the 5th most common issue of complaint to MPs in 2014, both MP’s and prospective candidates know the disastrous policy is political poison on the door step during the election campaign. However, David Cameron is now stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to killing badgers.

Despite recently telling first time voters on Sky News that the badger cull is “probably the most unpopular policy for which I am responsible”, he cannot afford to lose the votes – and money – of landowners and farmers by dumping the policy this side of the election.

The answer? Easy! Let Liz Truss take the flak

So he’s playing for time by letting his Environment Secretary Liz Truss hold out the possibility of an extension of the policy should the Tories form another Government after 7th May, without making any concrete commitment on how this will be achieved.

On 3rd March after almost six months of avoidance and delay and a personal intervention from the Prime Minister, Liz Truss finally sat down with members of the Badger Trust Board to have a frank and open discussion on the badger cull policy.

Just how sensitive the badger cull issue has become was clear from the start, when Liz Truss suggested our discussions should remain private and off the record. This request was ludicrous in view of the level of public interest in our meeting and the fact that both the BBC and ITV News were waiting on the steps of DEFRA’s offices, to interview me the minute I left the building.

The meeting did not deliver any surprise U-turn on killing badgers, but it was noticeable how lacking in confidence and isolated the Secretary of State appeared when it came to defending the disastrous cull policy.

Despite trotting out the now familiar statements about following the advice of her Chief Vet Nigel Gibbens, on the need to control the spread of TB in wildlife as well as cattle, it was clear her heart was not really in it.

Nigel Gibbens, the UK’s Chief Veterinary Officer, was also very noticeable by his absence from the meeting, which sent a clear message that he is unwilling to enter into any further political controversy on the failed culling policy, this side of the General Election.

Policy in paralysis

And despite statements made at the NFU annual conference a few weeks week before, the Secretary of State was unable to give any clear commitment on a national roll out of the policy should the Conservatives form a Government after 7th May.

Bold statements from her predecessor about a 25-year cull rolled out to 40 new areas of England by 2020 were not repeated. With over £15 million being spent on just 2 years of culling in Somerset and Gloucestershire alone, this came as no great surprise.

The fact that Natural England are also considering revoking the Gloucestershire cull licence due to major failures in meeting cull targets, is also no doubt causing a major political headache for the Secretary of State.

The NFU sense the Government is losing its appetite for badger culling and this explains why their President Meurig Raymond, was willing to risk the reputation of the NFU by backing claims by livestock vet Roger Blowey that culling badgers in Gloucestershire has significantly lowered TB in cattle, without any supporting independent scientific evidence.

These claims also fly in the face of public statements from Nigel Gibbens, that any lowering of TB rates in cattle is down to tightening of cattle TB testing and movement controls, not badger culling or vaccination.

Owen Paterson might have been willing to throw caution to the wind to back the NFU’s claims on social media. But Truss knows she would be risking what little is left of DEFRA’s reputation for science based policy making, if she followed his example.

Badger cull has failed tax payers, farmers and wildlife

The level of incompetence, negligence and deceit surrounding the badger cull policy is staggering. The policy has cost huge amounts of public money, free shooting the killing method being tested has proved a disastrous failure, none of the badgers killed have been tested for TB, cull targets have been missed and many badgers have died long painful deaths.

What makes all this worse is that the Government together with the NFU developed a risk register for the badger cull policy in secret in 2010, which accurately foresaw all these failures. However this document was hidden from public view and was only released after a two year fight in the High Court, with the Badger Trust and the Information Commissioner joining forces against the Government on freedom of information grounds.

The badger cull policy has driven a wedge between the public and farming industry, led to a significant increase in the illegal persecution of badgers and proved a dangerous distraction from the need for more effective TB cattle testing systems and the introduction of a TB cattle vaccine.

Playing politics with wildlife has proved a dangerous game with no clear winners. The badger cull policy has failed tax payers, farmers and our wildlife and the vast majority of the public, MPs and scientists with expertise in animal health and disease control, now believe it should come to an end.

However the badger cull was a political policy agreed by David Cameron prior to the 2010 election to help win votes from the farming and landowning community.

Despite its catastrophic failure the Prime Minister is holding on to the wreckage for his political life and he will keep playing the badger blame game, as he needs every vote to remain in office after 7th May.

 

 

Dominic Dyer is CEO of the Badger Trust & Policy Advisor for Care for the Wild.

 




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Algeria: fracking and the Ain Salah uprising Updated for 2026

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The city of Ain Salah lies about 750 miles south of Algiers in the Sahara Desert.

Its location as a desert oasis relies on a sensitive aquifer system that stretches from Southern Algeria to Tunesia and Libya, and overlaps with at least four intensive shale gas fields.

Fracking commenced in the area in 2013, and a mass movement against the practice has rapidly unfolded.

This new turn against resource extraction and exploitation has emerged elsewhere in recent months, such as Burkina Faso, as the global push to extract resources ranging from gold to agricultural commodities to fossil fuels has led to widespread dispossession in Africa since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

It carries with it the revolutionary sentiment the drove Algeria to independence from France, leading a tidal wave of liberation movements throughout Africa.

Since New Years Eve, four days after fracking operations were announced near the city, Ain Salah has effectively stopped functioning in a conventional way. Commerce and administration has moved between business as usual and an extensive occupation / sit-in of the main square, along with several rallies.

Video and photographic evidence has been released exposing harmful pollution and contaminated water supplies, causing an uproar and sense that fracking must be stopped.

Halliburton, Total

The companies primarily involved in exploiting shale gas in Algeria include Halliburton and France’s major oil company, Total.

After settling a major bribery case in Nigeria in 2010, Halliburton, the leading oilfield services company in the world, began looking to Africa for increased gas exploitation in 2012. As fracking began to slow in the US, they made a major play for Algeria, which has the second highest proven gas reserves in Africa.

For its part, Total grabbed oil lands in Libya after the NATO invasion that toppled the government of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, but the collapse of national infrastructure that ensued has significantly hindered the once-strong oil industry.

In December 2013, the National Oil Corporation announced its intensions to bolster the economy by allowing oversees corporations like Total to commence fracking operations.

The outbreak of violence in Libya had severe repercussions in Mali to the south, as armed militants swept into the country and added a surge to the Tuareg separatist uprising the next year. With hundreds of thousands displaced in the ensuing calamity, increased unrest combined with severe drought and the recent Ebola outbreak to create difficult economic conditions.

In an ironic turn, Halliburton was forced to cut 1,000 employees last December, it claimed, due to the turmoil in West Africa caused in no small part by French intervention on behalf of Total’s access to natural resources.

Now the two companies are making plays for Algeria’s gas reserves. The combined total assets of Halliburton and Total comes close to 40% of Algeria’s GDP, and the President of Algeria, the aging Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has not put up any opposition to their extraction efforts.

In his fourth term, Bouteflika, the longest-serving president in Algeria’s history, has weathered substantial protests in 2010 and 2012 calling for his ouster, and today he meets with a movement that extends from Ain Salah to Algiers calling for another way of looking at public control over natural resources.

Back to liberation

This different approach was manifested on February 24, when nearly the entire city of Ain Salah, some 40,000 people, took to the square, which has been renamed Place Somoud, or Resistance Square, to celebrate the 44th Anniversary of the nationalization of hydrocarbons by former-President Boumediene.

But the new approach is not simply in favor of extraction by a state-owned oil company. It’s also playing fast and loose with the aquifer that sustains Ain Salah and its precious oasis – and it’s the threat of groundwater pollution from fracking that most worries people as it imperils their very existence.

And the struggle is not simply about Ain Salah: February 24 saw mass demonstrations touch off from the town of Ouragla to Algiers. These protests challenged Algiers’s ban against protests that has been in place since the end of the terrible Civil War that claimed upwards of 150,000 lives between 1991 and 2002.

Bouteflika is seen by many as a hero who helped put a stop to the war, but now his regime is challenged by the progression of popular opposition to industrial extraction. There is concern that unrest might cause an opening for another civil war (one that Halliburton and Total could attempt to exploit), prompting harsh police reactions.

As police officers pre-empted the protest in Algeria on February 24, arresting some 50 demonstrators while national festivities were held to commemorate the day, Bouteflika’s advisor, M. Boughazi took to national TV to read a 20-minute declaration that included the admonition, “Shale gas is a gift from God, and it is our duty to exploit it.”

Police attacks, arests, insults provoke violent reaction

In the midst of the tensions that loomed over the rest of the week, protests turned violent. When a group of activists arrived at the Halliburton base in Ain Salah to protest, they were met with racist provocations by the police, who continued retaliation measures by conducting forceful arrests.

Protestors reacted to the oppressive measures by rallying at the Gendarme station, and police responded with large quantities of tear gas and rubber bullets. The police violence persisted into Resistance Square, where the rally site was destroyed and tents burned, and over the next few days, hundreds of people were arrested and numerous injuries incurred among the mostly-peaceful protestors.

Finally, as police attempted to seal off the city and lay siege to the city, protestors began throwing stones. Police retreated, and an uprising was in effect; a police barracks, a residence of the mayor, and several police vehicles were set ablaze. The army was called in, and a tense order once again held.

This is the second time serious unrest has been caused in Ain Salah over gas companies – the first having occurred in 2002, due to widespread unemployment and the stringent demands of foreign gas companies.

The economic issue stands side-by-side with the environmental one, as civil society searches for better ways of living sustainably outside of the control of corrupt foreign multinationals and a distant government.

Fracking and resistance against an effective gas grab in Algeria has become an issue for the opposition to utilize in its attempt to develop another kind of politics in the country. However, the opposition, itself, remains fractured and disorganized.

The real issues confronting Algeria are tied to the low petrodollar and the increasing inaccessibility of oil and gas reserves without unconventional practices like fracking, but the gas companies are notoriously unable to carry the weight of unemployment in places like Ain Salah.

So, like many places in the world confronted with the curse of extractive industries, Algeria must find a unique way out of the global land grab.

And now the anti-fracking movement has brought some momentum to thinking broader, long-term solutions in keeping with the revolutionary tradition of decolonization and autogestion.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire. He is the editor of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). His most recent book Against the Fascist Creep is forthcoming through AK Press.

This article originally appeared on CounterPunch

 




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London Assembly votes for £5 bn fossil fuel divestment – listen up, Boris! Updated for 2026

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Some victories are sudden and unexpected. Some take time, planning and weeks upon weeks of hard work. Today’s City Hall divestment victory falls into the latter category.

For months, the campaigners of Divest London have waged a less-than-silent war of persuasion, argument and charm on members of the London Assembly.

With the Green party as an ally, we fought to expand our influence on Labour and the Liberal Democrats. We prepared, we practiced and we convinced. We tweeted, we emailed, we called, we wooed.

And we won!

The London Assembly has voted – with an overwhelming majority of 15-3 – in support of fossil fuel divestment. Specifically, it has called on the Mayor of London to support divestment and on the £4.8bn London Pension Fund Authority to divest over the next five years.

This is no small feat. The motion – drawn up by Divest London and filed by Green Party Assembly Member Jenny Jones – will help to push fossil fuel divestment high up on the agenda for the 2016 mayoral race in the UK capital and square in front of Boris Johnson for the rest of his term. (You can read more about the motion here).

Now it’s over to Boris

This is a key moment for our campaign to get City Hall to go fossil free. The London Assembly is our voice in city government. The 25 elected members examine issues on behalf of Londoners and hold the Mayor to account.

Although Boris gets the final say, this positive vote at the Assembly is a key milestone for the campaign and gives us a strong mandate to put pressure all the way to the top.

Boris does not directly set the agenda for the LFPA, but he does appoint its chair and half of its board. This influence is significant given the political and financial scale of the Fund.

We estimate that the Fund currently invests upwards of £100 million in fossil fuel companies, including Shell and two coal companies – Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton – despite the fact that Goldman Sachs has warned thermal coal is reaching its ‘retirement age’, downgrading its long-term valuation by 18%. Meanwhile Ed Davey has singled out coal as “the short-term biggest worry by a long way.”

Boris Johnson is already behind on his climate adaptation and mitigation targets, receiving a 4.6 out of 10 scorecard from the London Assembly.

Perhaps most outrageously he had been accused by the head of the Met Office’s Climate Monitoring and Attribution Unit of “misleading the public” over spurious claims that global warming is due to solar activity.

Growing risk of ‘stranded’ carbon assets

If the Mayor refuses to divest, he will be forced to justify why City Hall is investing in companies that bank on the Conservative government, at both the city and national level, not enacting their emissions policies and not meaningfully tackling climate change.

This is what the major fossil fuel companies hope will happen. Shell and Exxon Mobil have written letters to shareholders saying they think it “highly unlikely” government will limit emissions in the way they have promised. We’re going to prove them wrong – starting today.

If Boris Johnson refuses to divest, he will be actively ignoring the wishes of the London Assembly, Londoners of all stripes – health workers, teachers, students, clergy members, lawyers and parents. He will also be willfully ignoring the warnings of the Bank of England, the Church of England, the World Bank and the UN.

Divestment campaigners claim that those invested in fossil fuels face serious risk from the prospect of ‘stranded assets’, which mean that the majority of reserves could ultimately be unburnable as governments worldwide consider committing to limit global warming to 2C, with global climate talks in Paris scheduled for December 2015.

Indeed, Carbon Tracker research has found that the London Stock Exchange is exposed to particularly high carbon risk, with a third of the FTSE 100 represented by resource and mining companies. And this exposure is increasing year on year; between 2011-2013, exposure to carbon (particularly coal) rose by seven per cent.

A recent London Assembly report cited the warning that, consequently, ‘London’s role as a global financial centre is at stake’. Over 250,000 individuals have their pension benefits invested in the LPFA. Most of them are unlikely to be aware that their money is invested in what Ed Davey has called ‘the sub prime assets of the future’.

Oslo, Oxford, Bristol – and now London?

This is only the beginning. Divest campaigns are springing up in city and borough councils all over the UK. If any of you have read the Guardian’s recent environmental and divestment coverage (which is excellent by the way) you can see that the divestment movement is going mainstream.

Indeed, it is no accident that this vote follows the massively successful Global Divestment Day – with its army of Boris Johnson lookalikes and 500 citizens rallying outside of City Hall – or the Time to Act! National Climate March last week with 20,000 people marching through London.

It is no accident that the vote comes less than two weeks after Oslo became the first world capital to support fossil fuel divestment, or after Oxford and Bristol City Councils have both divested.

Divestment is an idea whose time has come. More than 39 other cities in five countries worldwide have committed to divest from fossil fuels.  London can be on that list. London will lead on that list.

So – what are you on, Boris? You are in a position to do some real good for the city and to set an example for the UK and for, really, the world. You can be a leader in this fight for our planetary future or you can fall in line behind fracking CEOs and oil money.

Londoners and the London Assembly have sent a clear message. Are you listening?

 

 

Petition: ‘Divest City Hall from fossil fuel investments!‘

Source: Divest London.

 




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Join the politics of the future! Updated for 2026

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This has been a momentous year! A year in which the Green Party has taken its place at the forefront of UK politics. A year in which young people in particular have embraced our message of hope and real change.

A year in which nearly 300,000 people joined together to help ensure we took our place in the national leadership debates. A year in which we are matching, and often exceeding, the Lib Dems, a party of government, in national polls.

And a year in which we have become the third largest political party in England and Wales! In the space of 12 months we have grown from 13,000 members to 55,000. Our membership has quadrupled!   

And one thing that the green surge means is that more than 90% of you will have the chance to vote Green on the 7th of May. For some that means the first ever chance to vote Green. 

Your vote can change the face of Britain!

In just nine weeks’ time, you will have in your hands something miraculous … the possibility of a peaceful political revolution. Your vote can change the face of Britain. It can end the failed austerity experiment, end the spiteful blaming of the poor, the sick, the vulnerable for the mistakes of the wealthy.

This election can be a turning point in history. The moment where we can deliver a better Britain, a Britain which works for all its people … A Britain which cares. 

Vote for what you believe in, vote for the policies of hope not fear, vote for policies that work for the common good not just the few, and Britain could be a very different country on the 8th of May. It is time for Green Politics – the politics of the future – that delivers:

  • a living wage: jobs that workers can build a life on, with support for those who need it;
  • public services run for the good of all – our railways run not for shareholders but for passengers, our NHS not handed over to profiteers but kept in public hands;
  • social housing, council housing, to meet our housing needs;
  • the means for everyone to live within the limits of our one planet – because it’s the only one we’ve got.


A society fit for people and our communities

No one should be living in fear of being unable to put food on the table. No one should be forced into debt just for trying to get an education.

No one should be worrying about a fracking drill burrowing into the heart of their community.  No one should fear being left destitute by Iain Duncan Smith’s punitive benefit sanctions. 

The politics of the future is not a politics of transaction, that discredited politics which offers selected individuals and groups a bribe of short-term, unsustainable personal advantage.

History tells us that is now the old politics, the tired politics, the failed politics. The Green Party is offering instead a society working for all of us; for the many, not just the few; a society in which those who can contribute do so, and no one in need goes without.

It asks voters to make a choice that will deliver a society fit for themselves, their communities, and their children.

#GreenSurge

That’s why the Green surge is much more than just a hash tag – although a highly successful hash tag it has been – the green surge is much more than just membership numbers. That’s why people are becoming engaged with the Green Party. 

I have seen the Green surge on the ground, around the country, from a village hall in Ilkley, Yorkshire, to an enormous, snaking queue of hundreds at Exeter University, to a Valentine’s Eve Friday night crowd at the London School of Economics. 

And of course we saw it last May with the election of Molly Scott Cato as the first Green member of the European Parliament in the South West – and boy, hasn’t she delivered for her voters! 

The Green surge is the result of your hard work as Greens. It’s thanks to you in this hall, and to all of the Green Party members and supporters up and down the country – to your commitment, your belief, your dedication and your hard work – that we approach the General Election as a central player in UK politics. 

And of course, it isn’t just Green Party. Up and down the country, campaigns demanding a new politics are getting stronger, bigger, more effective. There’s People’s Assemblies, Occupy Democracy, the anti-fracking movement and the fossil fuel divestment campaigns: the tide is growing, the demand for change is louder and clearer.

We’re fighting back

At last, the people are fighting back! Five years ago we made a huge breakthrough with the election of Caroline Lucas as the first Green MP, and she’s given Brighton a spectacularly good local voice and a national impact far beyond any other MP. Caroline has led the debate on issues from railway ownership to statutory Personal and Social Education.

She’s led the debate on parliamentary transparency and she has put her freedom on the line to oppose fracking. Because Caroline shows what voting Green delivers: passion, sensitivity and courage. 

On May 8, just imagine, a strong green group of MPs at Westminster – able to build on and expand Caroline’s work. A group which would never, ever support a Conservative Government. A strong group of Green MPs – in a parliament where they could have a huge say, a huge impact – that is a real opportunity to start to deliver a new kind of politics.

We know that the way things are in Britain is not sustainable. Continuing as we are is not an option. Since 2007, food prices have risen 22% but wages have fallen 7%. Almost seven hundred thousand people are listed as ‘in work’, despite having no guaranteed hours week-to-week.

It’s time to end the scourge of zero hours contracts. Almost half the new jobs created since 2010 are for the self-employed, yet nearly 80% of self-employed workers are living in poverty. I applaud the growing number of individuals who contribute to, who volunteer in, who run, food banks.

But individual charity is no substitute for collective justice. This the outcome of the years of Blair, of Brown, of the Cameron / Clegg Coalition and austerity Britain – this is the record of George Osborne’s ‘long term economic plan’.

The Green Party are calling time on the politics of low wages, job insecurity and fearing the food bank. We are calling time on privatisation – the sell-off and the handing over – of public assets into private hands.

We must treasure the natural world – not trash it!

We are calling time on the trashing of our natural world – the world on which everything, depends. Our economy, our lives, our future depend on society, which in turn depends on the Earth and its resources.

That puts a huge weight, a huge responsibility on our shoulders – a responsibility we have to meet in the next few years. We know now the damage we are doing to the Earth, as we didn’t know in the past. We have to be up to the task.

The whole ideology of Thatcher and her successors, be it Blair, Brown or Cameron, has failed. Change has to come. The market is short-sighted and short-term. It is blind. It is senseless. It works for the 1%, it fails the rest of us. All in it together? I don’t think so.

The current model of economics and society has served only those with power and wealth. In austerity Britain, the super rich grabs more than anywhere else in Europe. We must be first and foremost citizens, paying fairly to common funds to look after the poor, the weak, the old and the sick. 

Everybody contributes what they can and everybody benefits from that. This is what the politics of the future will look like, what the Green Party will deliver. The old politics, the failed politics of letting the market rule has to end.

Save our NHS! Save our social care!

There’s nowhere that’s more obvious than in our NHS. The insidious but rapid infiltration of the profit motive into our health service, the dreadful, senseless PFI schemes that have deliver despair and threaten bankruptcy, must be reversed.

The market costs us big time. In 2010 the Health Select Committee reckoned it consumed 9% of total NHS costs – well over £10bn a year. As Caroline has already said – we will repeal the Health and Social Care Act, which is damaging and threatening the health service.

And we will go further – we will replace it with an NHS Reinstatement Bill that removes the market mechanism from our NHS. But of course there is another side to care. Free healthcare is the very cornerstone of our NHS. Whether you are rich or poor you have the right to the best that is available.

That’s something the Green Party will restore – and extend. For that same principle should apply to social care – the support and services that you need to lead a fulfilling life should be available when you need it, free at the point of use. 

We believe that to be a decent, humane, caring society, social care must be free. We believe those who have the most should contribute to help pay for social care. We need a range of new taxes aimed at making Britain a more equal society.

We would introduce a new wealth tax, rigorously clamp down on tax avoidance and evasion and introduce a financial transaction tax – a Robin Hood Tax, and we are not ashamed to say that those on incomes above £100,000 should pay more income tax.

Providing Free Social Care for the Over 65’s means security and freedom from fear, suffering and loneliness for many, and it means 200,000 new jobs and training places. 

We will consult experts, users, and care workers on its exact design – but our manifesto will include this as a core pledge: social care is not a privilege, it is a right! 

Register to vote – now!

We know that the younger generation – many of whom are supporting the Green Party – have it tough. But we acknowledge, we stress, that isn’t the fault of their elders. 

In a Britain of solidarity, in a Britain of community, in a Britain of care, we all need to look out for each other. Of course – and I cannot stress this enough – we can only do this if you, the people of the UK have your say on May the 7th.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of each and every person who can vote registering to do so and making their voice heard. The deadline is April 20th, but please don’t wait – register today. Only then can you deliver the politics of the future, help us deliver for the Common Good.

There are people who want to see business-as-usual politics continue. People who are happy with politicians who learnt nothing from the global economic crash. People who’ve quietly forgotten the scandal of MPs expenses. Who are resigned to the failed austerity experiment, to low wages and to the swift demise of public services.

Those people will probably vote for the parties of yesterday. To counteract them, you need to use your vote. At this election, if we all vote Green, we can change Britain. Together we can create the society we all deserve a society that cares, a society that works for all of us. 

Vote for the party that cares. Vote for the common good. Vote for the politics of the future. Vote Green.   

 

 

Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green Party of England & Wales.

This speech was delivered to the Green Party’s spring conference on Friday 6th March 2015. See original here.

 

 

 




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Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

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Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




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Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

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Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




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