Climate Letter #1457

A UN negotiating conference ended in an unsatisfactory manner (Climate Home News).  There was very little done in the way of positive accomplishments.  On the downside, there was an agreement to scrub the latest IPCC report, that aimed to limit warming to 1.5C, from consideration by future formal UN climate talks.  This was a win for Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries and a setback for the influence of climate science.

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Some completely unexpected information about how trees contribute to methane emissions has been confirmed (Yale e360).  This is not something we are happy to hear about, but Fred Pearce puts everything into perspective in ways that we can comfortably live with.  It’s an amazing story, one that leaves you wondering, especially about trees that exist in places that are wet, or will be getting wetter.

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A recent study provides new information about climate conditions during the Pliocene, about 4 million years ago, when the CO2 level was established on the low side of what we have in place today.  The study has received no attention by the usual outlets that make reviews but was given notice by the Skeptical Science site.  I believe it has real significance because it provides powerful new evidence of extremely high (up 11C from today) summer temperatures, well-dated, at a site that is about as close to the North Pole as any land on Earth.  Such information serves as confirmation of previous theories about what we can expect Arctic warming to be like when the planet’s climate system has fully responded to the present level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  The full study is available at this link. and you can pick out many interesting revelations if you spend a little time on it.

–Also, the authors of the study made no attempt to draw out implications for the rest of the globe, but we can imagine a few of the more likely possibilities.  For example, because this site is parallel to the northern tip of Greenland we can be quite sure there was no ice sheet on Greenland at that time and thus sea levels would be up 23 feet over today’s from that source alone, never mind Antarctica.  Other researchers think the total was then 25 meters. or more than 75 feet, above the present level, which sounds reasonable, along with an average of 3C for global temperatures.

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By coincidence, this same location on Ellesmere Island came to light today in the fantastic story of an Arctic fox that ran there all the way from Spitsbergen in just 76 days (The Barents Observer).  Don’t miss it.

Carl