What's Up In Climate Change? Bye bye winter, acid ocean urgency and 'GoreSat' revived
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2015, 10:55 AM - In this installment of What's Up In Climate Change, we cover three of the latest stories that revolve around the science and issues of global warming and climate change, including an interactive graphic that reveals how our winters will change, an urgent call to halt ocean acidification and Sunday's launch of a long-overdue satellite mission.
"Winter loses its cool"
As the globe warms, the added heat energy invested into Earth's atmosphere is setting up a variety of impacts to our weather, one of which is the reduction in the number of days we can expect to see below freezing temperatures in a year.
An analysis by Climate Central has taken a close look at these projections, and they've put together the following interactive map - currently just of the United States - that gives us real-world examples of just what this kind of climate change is going to look like.
Fewer cold nights will certainly be a welcome change for many Americans (and Canadians too), but as Climate Central points out, "warmer winters can have negative impacts: ski resorts need freezing temperatures for snow, some crops rely on a chill period, and pests can flourish year-round if winter temperatures aren't cold-enough for them to die off."
It's not only that, though. Fewer colder nights means less snow on the ground and less ice forming over water. Snow and ice reflect a good portion of sunlight that falls on it directly back into space. Since this sunlight - both incident and reflected - passes through the atmosphere nearly untouched, it does not contribute to warming. It's only when the light is absorbed by a surface - ground or water - and is re-radiated as infrared light that it contributes to warming (the air, and especially CO2, absorbs infrared). Thus, with less snow and ice, more energy becomes available to go into global warming.
RELATED: How a warmer world leads to more severe snowstorms
'Urgent' action needed on ocean acidification
A new report is drawing more attention to the problem of ocean acidification - global warming's 'evil twin' - specifically due to its current and future impacts on Maine's commercial fishing industry.
Ocean acidification is one of the two major impacts on our planet due to the increased release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, caused as the gas dissolves into water, forms carbonic acid, and lowers the pH of the oceans. Many sea creatures need the oceans to remain at a fairly steady pH of around 8.2 (pure water is pH=7). At any pH lower that, there is a negative impact on the calcium carbonate shells of these creatures, and even at current pH levels (around a global average of 8.0), species are being threatened.
As the report states:
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What does the report propose?
Six goals have been put forward by the report commission, specifying action to reduce carbon emissions, pinpoint specific additional sources of acidification (increased freshwater runoff and additional organic matter washing into coastal waters) and monitor the situation, as well as keeping the people of the state informed and giving them more power to affect change.
Unfortunately, according to Climate Progress, legislation towards these goals is running up against opposition from the state's governor, Paul LePage, who has blocked climate change legislation in the past, and has even said that global warming would be good for the State of Maine.
RELATED: Ocean acidification, global warming's 'evil twin', threatens marine ecosystems
This satellite has been waiting 16 years for the day it will launch...
...and on Sunday, February 8, it will finally get the chance!
The DSCOVR satellite - NASA, NOAA and the USAF's Deep Space Climate Observatory - will orbit Lagrange Point 1 (L1), a point between the Earth and the Sun where the gravitational pull of both are in balance, where it will monitor the solar wind from one side, and take whole-Earth images of our planet on the other (the first satellite to do so).
Credit: NASA/NOAA/USAF
Originally conceived in 1998 as the 'Triana' mission, by none-other than Al Gore himself, the satellite had an all-Earth-observing mission. The stream of images it provided would monitor the effects of climate change, and hopefully inspire the public for action on this important issue. For this reason, Gore's opponents targeted the mission, nicknaming it 'GoreSat' and dismissing its mission as simply an 'expensive screensaver'. The project was shelved and the satellite itself - already completed at the time - was put into storage. Now revived as DSCOVR, re-certified for launch and bound for space on a Falcon 9 rocket, the mission has been partly repurposed to monitor space weather, and provide more information for forecasters on the potential impacts of the solar wind and coronal mass ejections, to protect valuable technologies both in orbit and here on the ground.
The climate science portion of the mission has been preserved, though. EPIC, the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, will be pointing back at us once the satellite is safely in orbit around L1, taking images and providing data on a number of factors that effect climate change - aerosols, cloud heights, dust, ozone and volcanic ash.
Climate Update: CO2 levels at Mona Loa
Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Sources: Climate Central, ClimateProgress, ThinkProgress, NOAA, NASA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
