Signs From Earth

Human Footprint: Carajás Iron Mine, Brazil

I've been a fan of satellite pictures ever since seeing Landsat images of deserts worldwide when working on a book about deserts of the world 28 years ago. This picture of an iron mine in Brazil is one of the latest images from satellites that look at our earth.

NASA Earth Observatory and other sources regularly post pictures showing the visible hand of man on the land, and this picture initiates an ongoing irregular series of images called "Human Footprint," showing the visible effects we are having on our home planet.

Taken July 26, 2009, this picture from NASA Earth Observatory shows the Carajas Iron Mine in Brazil. The mine exists today because some steel company officials stopped their helicopter on a mountaintop to refuel and saw iron ore on the ground. Four decades later this is what remains.

Public Wary of Carbon Capture Projects for Coal

 

The Sleipner project in Norway is the largest carbon capture and storage project in the world. Each year it sequesters underground about a million tons of carbon dioxide, which equals about 25 percent of the CO2 output from a single coal-fired power plant. The United States has about 600 coal plants.

A couple of reports this week indicate that in Europe the campaign for "clean coal" has a lot of work ahead on the public relations front. The idea that coal can burn "cleanly" for power generation depends on our being able to capture and store deep underground -- without leaking out for centuries -- the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plant smokestacks. The technology to achieve deep carbon storage is called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.

A July 29 report in the Guardian newspaper of London, "Not under our backyards, say Germans, in blow to CO2 plans," says that a CCS demonstration project in Spremberg operated by Swedish power utility Vattenfall has been venting CO2 straight into the atmosphere because the firm cannot secure a permit from German authorities to begin test injections of CO2 into underground storage.

The Financial Times reports July 30 in "Public Wary of Carbon Capture" that a proposed CCS underground storage site in the Netherlands is also getting the cold shoulder from locals, and that the Dutch government and energy company Shell have opened a PR office in Barendrecht in hopes of improving public attitudes about this largely untested technology.

Arctic Sea Ice Melt Trend Near 2007 Level

The graph below from July 28, 2009 and released today from National Snow and Ice Data Center shows Arctic Ocean ice melt trend (blue line) close to 2007 levels (green line), which were a record. 

Last year's melt was the second most severe, and on a week ago the NSIDC reported that this season's ice melt was trending slightly ahead of 2008 levels. See Signs From Earth: Global Temperature Trends for First Half 2009 and Arctic Melt Season in "High Gear."

The summer melt season runs for about another month. The graph below and a more extensive map (above) of sea ice extent and trends are updated daily at the NSIDC website. The orange line on the July 28 map above shows average extent of sea ice for the period from 1979-2000, which is also the top line on the trend graph below.

Whole Earth 2009: First Picture From New Satellite

Released July 28 from NASA, this image of earth is the first picture from a new satellite launched in June 2009. Once testing is complete, the geostationary GOES-14 satellite will be used to track weather and solar activity. 

Caption from NASA website page: "From approximately 35,786 km (22,236 miles) in space, NOAA's newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – GOES-14 – took its first full-disk visible image of the earth on July 27, 2009 at 2:00 p.m. EDT. GOES-14, launched on June 27, 2009, from Cape Canaveral, Fla., joins three other NOAA operational GOES spacecraft that help the agency's forecasters track life-threatening weather and solar activity that can impact the satellite-based electronics and communications industry. After five more months of tests, GOES-14 will be placed in orbital storage mode, ready for activation if any of NOAA's operational GOES spacecraft experiences trouble."

NASA PR

Linking Population and Carbon Emissions: Breathing Earth

Designer David Bleja has produced Breathing Earth, an animated map of the earth showing simulated realtime carbon emissions and birth and death rates. With data from the CIA World Factbook and the UN Statistics Division he has produced a country-by-country look at population, carbon emissions, and per person carbon emissions.

For example, United States residents produce 19.66 tons (give or take) of carbon pollution per person per year. Residents of China produce about 3.7 tons annually, and Indians produce 1.17 tons each. He points to a "land footprint" calculator from Global Footprint Network to help understand how much land area each of us needs to support our "lifestyle."

Linking population growth and carbon emissions occurs more frequently now. According to a July 24 posting at The New Security Beat, "Clinton, Congress Link Family Planning, Climate Change," U.S Secretary of State Clinton recently realized the population-climate link at a forum in India:

"“One of the participants pointed out that it's rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning. That was an incredibly important point. And yet, we talk about these things in very separate and often unconnected ways," said Clinton.

Flash! Secret Ice Images Revealed (As Reported Here 10 Days Ago)

 

For what it is worth, the breathless July 26 headline in the London Observer, "Revealed: The Secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide," seems over the top, and late to the game. 

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One wonders where the major news outlets in the United States have been on this story, which was written about right here at Signs From Earth on July 16 after Jenny Lauren Lee at Science News in Washington posted an item there on July 15. 

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Details and pictures here: Secret Pictures of Arctic Ice Released. Now that the "major" news outlets are picking up this story, we can now believe that it really happened. Thank goodness.

Sea Ice Swirls along Baffin Island, Canada

In this July 11, 2009 satellite image from NASA Earth Observatory, the delicate swirls along the southeast coast of Baffin Island are floating ice moving with the ocean currents. Eddies along the east coast of this large island between North America and Greenland have fashioned the floating ice into interlocking swirls. 

Arctic ice is nearing the peak of its melt season, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that overall ice loss this summer is on par or greater than the 2008 melt, which was the second greatest melt season on record behind 2007. Earlier this month researchers reported that Arctic ice is also younger and thinner.

Global Temperature Trends for First Half of 2009

A page on NOAA's National Climatic Data Center website called "Climate of 2009-June in Historical Perspective" has buried within it this map above showing global temperature trends for the first half of 2009. 

The red dots show warmer than normal, the blue dots show cooler. Except for an area in Canada and a few places in the oceans, the color is all red. The size of dots matters: Large red dots indicate temperature "anomalies" from 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) higher than normal, and they dominate areas of Asia, central Africa, Europe, the southern United States, and southern Greenland.

NOAA also reports that global ocean surface temperatures for June are higher than ever recorded in more than a century of record-keeping, and its Coral Reef Watch group reports that Caribbean coral reefs are vulnerable to significant bleaching this year from thermal stress. The chart at right shows the Caribbean areas most vulnerable (click to enlarge).

The National Snow and Ice Data Center continues to track the summer melting of Arctic ice, and on July 22 reported that 2009 melting is now slightly more significant than last year, which was the second largest on record behind 2007. The light blue line on the chart below shows the area of remaining Arctic ice as of July 21. Ice has been disappearing at the rate of about 37,000 square miles a day in the first half of July.

Warm Winters Threaten California Tree Crops

Cold winter fogs that chill California fruit trees are disappearing. Photo: flickr/junmon603

Cold winter temperatures that fruit and nut trees need for proper spring flowering are disappearing from California's Central Valley. These warmer winters are beginning to adversely affect tree crops like walnuts that depend on this winter "chill" to reset themselves each year.

In a study published July 22 in PLoS One, researchers from the University of California-Davis report that the number of hours of "chill" temperatures have declined about 30 percent in the Central Valley since 1950. Apples, cherries, and pears used to grow in about half the valley's orchards but now only about four percent of the valley's orchard land is cool enough in winter to support these crops.

These rising winter temperatures will force California farmers to find new tree varieties that produce crops without this "winter chill," which trees need to trigger dormancy. 

Other studies already have shown that rising temperature and heat in California are causing changes in the type of wine grapes that can be grown there. Rising temperatures are driving a variety of changes in plant and animal behavior, and these trends for the United States are the focus of Ecological Impacts of Climate Change from the National Academy of Sciences.

Where Went the Sun's Spots?

Kenneth Chang writes in The New York Times on the apparent disappearance of the sun's spots. 

This NASA picture above shows sunspots near maximum (left) on July 19, 2000, and minimum on March 18, 2009. Some think this lack of sun spots now could bode a period of lowered solar output. 

Sunspots typically wax and wane over 11-year cycles. The sun should have reached its sunspot minimum last fall, but this spring when the number of sunspots should have been on the rise, they were still largely absent.  Some sunspots returned in June and July, but have since disappeared.

"...Among some global warming skeptics, there is speculation that the Sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder Minimum, several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that coincided with an extended chilly period...."

 

Climate Catastrophe? A Rational Action Approach

 

Two years ago an Oregon science teacher produced a video called "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See." Greg Craven's schoolroom lecture on how to think about global warming and decide whether action against it is needed became an internet hit with over seven million viewings.

Craven has now turned the movie into a book (isn't it usually the other way around?) called "What's The Worst That Could Happen? A Rational Response to The Climate Change Debate." 

Craven uses tools of risk assessment to help us decide how to think about and approach this issue. The focus is not on what to think about global warming, but how. The graphic above is adapted from his book, and summarizes the core argument: He sees this as a choice between action and no action against something that is true or false. 

If you see global warming as false, we do nothing against it, and nothing happens, then we can "Party!" On the other hand if you see it as false, we do nothing, and all the scientific projections come to pass, then "Global Catastrophe" is our future. 

As Craven points out, taking action against global warming comes with significant costs, but is less expensive than "Global Catastrophe." This is all about making choices and living with consequences.

Greg Craven's Website: What is The Worst That Could Happen?

Good Magazine Water Issue

 Good Magazine's issue 16 is devoted to water: HALF FULL.

From the introduction: “Before the dawn of civilization, there were 326 million trillion gallons of water on Earth. Today, after millennia of population growth, industry, and agriculture, there are still 326 million trillion gallons. Unlike other natural resources, we cannot run out of water.

“But it doesn’t mean that we always will have enough of it when and where we need it or that we can’t make it too dirty to drink. We have altered the water cycle—from ocean to cloud to ground and back to ocean—by putting 6 billion people in the middle of it. Now, the Earth isn’t generating clean, drinkable water as we’ve come to expect.

“But if we start paying attention and change our behavior, there is no need to worry about water. We can use less, limit our effect on the water cycle, and clean and protect our rivers and oceans. We have plenty, as long as we drink responsibly...”

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The online version includes a picture show The Absence of Water by Gigi Cifali.

Anak Krakatau Erupting at Night (Updated)

From Astronomy Picture of the Day and Stromboli Online, this picture of erupting Anak Krakatau by Marco Fulle comes from a series taken June 4-8, 2009. Original caption: "The passing storm has cleared the air: Big Dipper points towards Anak Krakatau in eruption, exactly north of Palau Rakata. The pole star is almost exactly behind the volcano, but just under the horizon." 

Update: The picture below from NASA Earth Observatory was acquired July 7, 2009 and shows this same eruption from NASA's Earth Observing-1 satellite.

Tikehau Atoll, French Polynesia

This dazzling image of the Tikehau Atoll in French Polynesia was posted as Picture of the Day by NASA Earth Observatory on July 14. The picture was taken by the Earth Observing One satellite (EO1.)

Secret Pictures of Arctic Ice Released

 

A large cache of secret U.S. government images showing arctic sea ice during the past decade has been released to the public after a request by the the National Research Council. The U.S. Geological Survey made these images available July 15 through the Global Fiducials Library. The library includes high-resolution satellite images of Barrow Alaska, Beaufort Sea, Canadian Arctic, Canadian Fram Strait, Chukchi Sea, and East Siberian Sea.

The imaging project began in the mid 1990s when environmental scientists teamed with the intelligence community to determine if satellites and airplanes typically used used for military intelligence could be used to gather environmental data. According to a report in Science News, the images could not be made public until a committee determined the images could be of scientific value.

Besides individual images, the library also includes several large side-by-side comparison posters showing ice loss trends at Barrow, the Beaufort Sea, Bering Glacier, and the South Cascade Glacier in Washington State. The image below shows ice conditions at Barrow, Alaska in July 2006 and 2007.