The Daily Climate: Drought, Heat, Ice Melt, Sea Rise - Now Worse Than Expected!

Climate news is a-poppin' out of the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is underway in San Francisco. Unfortunately, none of it is good: the findings that researchers are presenting suggest that if anything, last year's downbeat IPCC forecasts regarding rising temperatures and ocean levels, intensifying storms and droughts, and other global warming badness understated the situtation.

I'd rather be timely than wait for Fatalistic Friday to cover this, so here goes:

The most recent accepted predictions of how high the sea level will rise by century's end, due to global warming, peg it at between seven inches and two feet. But these are optimistic predictions, according to research funded by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program: When more recent data and observations are factored in, researchers say the oceans are likely to rise far higher [two to six and a half feet], reports Frank Pope for The Times (UK). And the American West could fall into a permanent, severe drought.

The report's authors are calling for "committed and sustained" monitoring of environmental conditions that could trigger abrupt climate change.

On the Bush-Cheney administration's attempts to spin things positive on its way out of office, Joe Romm comments at Climate Progress,

[W]hat is stunning is that these warnings come from the United States Geological Survey — the Bush Administration (!). This new science-based report, Abrupt Climate Change, is thus a sobering book-end to the fantasy-based talking points released by the Administration today on how the President has “Taken Constructive Steps To Confront Climate Change.”

This is a first-rate report from the USGS’s Climate Change Science Program. I highly recommend reading, Chapter 2, “Rapid Changes in Glaciers and Ice Sheets and their Impacts on Sea Level,” and Chapter 3, “Hydrological Variability and Change.” The chapters are much more readable than the IPCC reports, and the two together will make anyone an expert on what are perhaps the two most dangerous climate impacts that threaten this country.

The USCCSP report also forecasts significant weakening of the northward flow of warm water in the Atlantic Ocean -- although not a complete stop in this important conveyor of heat into Northern Europe, reports Tim Wheeler for The Balitmore Sun. And in a good news/bad news whammy, "It's unliikely that rising temperatures will trigger a catastrophic release of methane into the atmosphere, but the rate at which the powerful greenhouse gas escapes from the sea floor, permafrost and wetlands is likely to increase, potentially accelerating the planet's warming. "

As for the Arctic, where sea ice has already hit record lows in the past few years, climate change only seems to be intensifying, and faster than earlier research had anticipated. "NASA scientists will reveal that more than 2 trillion tons of land ice on Greenland and Alaska, along with in Antarctica, have melted since 2003," says Thomas Omestad in US News and World Report. "Satellite measurements suggest half of the loss has come from Greenland. Melting of land ice slowly raises sea levels." Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at two to three times the overall rate of global temperature increases, according to the NASA researchers.

Special thanks to the indispensible Knight Science Journalism Tracker for today's compilation of AGU links.