Signs From Earth

Pictures Before and During: Red Sky Over Sydney

Residents of Sydney, Australia awoke today Sept. 23 to orange skies filled with dust. This image pair from jujuly25 at flickr also shows a clear-sky view from the same angle on a Sydney balcony a day ago. What a dusty difference a day makes.

The BBC reported that the dust storm is the result of years of drought in eastern parts of Australia. National Geographic published an in-depth story and pictures in April on the region's Murray-Darling basin and the long term drying from climate change in parts of Australia. These changes are increasingly seen as part of a larger pattern of shifts in rainfall in several regions.

At Earth Observatory, NASA has also posted a satellite image of the big dust storm, link here. 

After Borlaug: A New Green Revolution?

Wheat near Dalby, Western Australia. Photo by Raeallen/flickr

Norman Borlaug improved wheat harvests and kept starvation at bay. As population keeps rising what will the world do for a second act?

In the early 1970’s when I was studying agriculture at Oregon State, the name of Norman Borlaug was spoken with great reverence, especially in my cereal grains class, where we learned how Borlaug bred short, stocky wheat plants with big heads that could hold more grain than before. His efforts to improve grain production and stave off starvation in places like Latin America and Asia earned Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize.

Borlaug became known as the father of the “Green Revolution,” a transformation of world grain production that produced better harvests of wheat and rice when irrigation water, nitrogen fertilizers, and weed and insect pesticides were applied to crop fields.

So now Borlaug is gone, but we must continue the hard work of feeding an ever more populous world. World population nears seven billion people, about twice as many as when Borlaug’s Green Revolution began raising grain yields in the 1960s, and it is expected to top nine billion by mid-century.

Rising living standards pressure grain stocks as more people eat meat fed by harvests that otherwise would go to people. We’re also seeing large portions of corn harvests devoted to ethanol as a substitute for gasoline.

In late 2008 we saw severe price spikes for cereal grains and food. Supplies and prices of oil and natural gas have become volatile. Many analysts say we have seen the end of cheap oil. The Green Revolution would not have been green had it not been for cheap oil, and inexpensive natural gas used to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

Then there are the droughts, floods, and heat waves from climate change beginning to affect farm productivity in food growing regions worldwide. We’re seeing soil erosion, aquifer depletion, and loss of glaciers that feed farm irrigation. Nearly half of the world’s people live in tropical and sub-tropical subsistence agriculture regions, increasingly vulnerable to crop loss as rainfall and temperature patterns are disrupted.

So Borlaug's work must continue with even higher stakes. Just as when Borlaug worked to feed the earth, whether we achieve food security ahead remains a daunting challenge, as National Geographic reported this June in its article Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty.

Human Footprint: Aral Sea Keeps Shrinking

 Central Asia's Aral Sea has been drained of its lifeblood water to slake our thirst. Photo: NASA

Formerly the world's fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea in central Asia has become a dustbowl of its former self after more than 40 years of irrigation that has sucked water from the rivers that feed it. These upstream diversions irrigate cotton and other farms in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in central Asia, arid countries surrounding the Aral Sea that use more water per person than any other nations on earth. 

The August 2009 image above from NASA Earth Observatory highlights the Aral Sea's former shorelines and the few areas on its western and northern shores where water remains. A 10-year sequence of the lake's deteriorating condition also has been posted.

Shoreline of desiccated Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, Sept. 5, 2009. Photo: kvitlauk/flickr

Water Cycle Atlas: Crystal Ball for Water's Future

Researchers from Australian National University have released a new atlas of the world's water cycle. 

An Atlas of the Global Water Cycle is freely available as an 11MB downloadable PDF file, as single chapters, or as a print-on-demand order.

The atlas is based on models of future precipitation patterns prepared for the 2007 IPCC AR4 report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By using the projections from the IPCC, the atlas visualizes on maps and tables the current and expected measures of rainfall, evaporation, and runoff across the earth.

Publisher's book description: "What do climate models predict for the rainfall where you live? What about evaporation or runoff? Should your local community consider constructing new dams or do the existing water storages appear adequate? What about the availability of water for irrigation farming? Do the predictions differ between different climate models or do all the models basically predict the same changes in water availability where you live?

What Prospect to Limit Carbon Emissions?

Global Carbon Emissions by Country in 2000: With about four percent of world population, the United States produces a quarter of the planet's heat-trapping carbon emissions. All land areas in map equal 100 percent. In this cartogram larger country size means more carbon emissions as a percentage of total emissions. From worldmapper.org  

Reports this week in Politico and the New York Times indicate prospects are dimming that climate legislation will come out of the U.S. Congress this year. If so, what chance for global agreement in December when negotiators and thousands of climate groupies burn all that carbon to fly to Copenhagen for the big international climate meeting? After all, this COP-15 summit is being billed as the crucial conference to cooperate and agree on common goals to limit planet-warming carbon pollution.

The United States produces the most carbon pollution per person, and until recently led the world in total carbon emissions. So unless the US arrives in Copenhagen with a firm commitment to lead by example, why would other nations, especially China and India, bother to change their ways? After all we burned all that coal, oil, and natural gas to develop our materially rich and highly mobile way of life, who are we to tell developing nations they can't aspire to the same living standards?

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.

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.

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...."

 

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.

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.

Millennium Island, Kiribati

Millennium Island was photographed on July 1, 2009 by astronauts in the International Space Station. Formerly named Caroline, this uninhabited island in the South Pacific at the end of the Line Island chain is part of the Republic of Kiribati.

After Kiribati moved the International Dateline in 1995, Caroline became the first land outpost where the sun would rise on the new millennium on January 1, 2000. The island was renamed to mark the occasion, and celebrants arrived to party and celebrate the arrival of the new year, century, and millennium. 

Whether the current Millennium began on January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001 is another matter.

NASA Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Millennium Island, Kiribati

What Two Degrees Warmer Means

Beyond all the political discussion of limiting carbon emissions in the U.S. or globally, it is useful to keep in mind the potential impact of a two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F.) rise in global temperatures. 

David Archer at RealClimate has summarized:

"... even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, a target of 2°C seems almost cavalier."

RealClimate: Two Degrees

Satellites Show Arctic Ice Thinner, Younger

Trend in Winter Sea Ice Volume: This obscure graphic from NASA show several things: 1.) Top sequence: The decline in red color shows a reduction in the amount of multiyear (MY) ice covering the Arctic Ocean in winter. The size of the red area has declined significantly from 2004 to 2008. 2.) The lower chart (black line) shows an average decline of 900 sq. km. per year in total area of ice cover over the same period. Most significantly, the steep slope of the red line in the lower graph shows the rapid loss of multiyear ice cover from 2004-2008. The rising blue line shows the increasing percentage of thin seasonal ice, or ice that appears in the fall and thaws the next summer. This juvenile ice now dominates.

 

Satellites are showing that the depth and age of Arctic sea ice is in significant decline. Multiyear winter ice has declined by more than 40 percent of its previous area in just five years from 2004 to 2008. Remaining multiyear ice also has thinned significantly, losing more than 0.6 meter depth in four years. Thin seasonal ice, ice less than a year old, has replaced multiyear ice as the dominant ice type covering the Arctic Ocean.

These results were reported July 7 by scientists from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and the University of Washington and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans, a publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU.) This follows on July 6 ice loss reports for summer 2009 from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and similar April reports from NSIDC showing the rise in seasonal ice cover over the Arctic Ocean.

These accelerating ice loss trends are significant in that they bode a year soon when all ice covering the Arctic Ocean melts in summertime. Some scientists have projected that the Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2015.