Europe Heat Sets All-Time Records Again, Plus More Bad Climate News

Forecast map of the departure from normal in Europe for expected
high temperatures today. Areas that are whitish will be about
30 degrees hotter than normal, which is uncharted territory
for these regions. 

The second super intense heat wave of the summer is now underway in western Europe, and like in the June heat wave, all-time record hot temperature records are falling.

This isn't your grandfather's heat wave. This one is much worse.

Germany broke its national all-time record high Wednesday when one town reached 105 degrees. Belgium had its hottest day on record with a reading of 103.8 degrees. The Netherlands also broke its all time record, reaching 102.7 degrees.

The city of Bordeaux, France, reached its all time record high of 106.1 degrees.

Incredibly, these new records are in danger of falling today as the heat wave, if anything might grow more intense. And expand. Paris, France, might break its all-time heat record. So might the United Kingdom.

Already this summer, 25 percent of France's weather stations have reported all time record high temperatures, according to the Category 6 blog. Forty-four of Germany's 490 stations have also done so, and that will surely increase today.

Most European homes don't have air conditioning, so this is a dangerous situation. Governments have learned from other, recent deadly heat waves and have set up cooling centers, air conditioned places and other options for vulnerable people to go.

By Saturday, cooler air will undercut the heat ridge and push it north into Scandanavia. That would probably make all time record highs fall up there, too.  It's possible the heat dome will extend as far as the North Pole, which isn't exactly great news for the already scant Arctic sea ice pack.

There's other types of climate related trouble and news, too:

ARCTIC FIRES

The center of this heat wave will move to Scandanavia and parts of the
Arctic this weekend, which is bad news for the ice up there. 

Extensive probably unprecedented wildfires burning in Alaska, northern Canada and Siberia and cloaking the Arctic in smoke, Forbes reports. Wildfires in such northern areas are bad to begin with, but these could contribute a bit toward making climate change worse.'

Especially in areas were peat is on fire, the blazes are belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which adds to the surplus that's causing climate change in the first place.

Soot particles from the fire are landing on Arctic ice. Bright white ice reflects sunlight, but darker material draws the sun's warmth in. The soot would therefore make the ice melt faster in the summer than it otherwise would.

ICELAND GLACIER DEATH

An Icelandic glacier dubbed OK is officially dead, the apparent victim of climate change. Summers in Iceland have gotten hotter in recent years and decades. That means the island's 400 or so glaciers are in retreat.

OK is the first of Iceland glaciers to be declared dead but it won't be the least. A glacier "dies" when it becomes so thin that it can't move on its own because it doesn't have enough weight.

According to Slate, the OK glacier probably died several years ago, and there's likely a few other glaciers in Iceland that have also died.

PAST CLIMATE CHANGE SMALLER

People who say climate change doesn't exist point to other climate shifts that happened before we started pushing all that CO2 into the atmosphere. They point to the Roman Warm Period between the years 0 and 300 AD, the Dark Ages cold period around the year 500 AD, the Little Ice Age in the 1300s through 1700s and the Medieval Warm Period around the year 1000 as examples.

According to Science News, these past climate events were regional, covering only sections of the Earth. That's unlike the current global warming, says Science. They report that 98 percent of the Earth is warmer now that it has been at any time in the previous 2,000 years.

This new study appears in the journal Nature.  The scientists conducting this study came to their conclusion by using proxies for temperatures from tree rings, glacier ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, cave deposits and historical documents.

Macabre Effect Of Global Warming: Dead Bodies Emerging From Ice On Mount Everest

Because glaciers are melting, dead bodies of people who passed away
in climbing expeditions have been emerging from the glacier at this
high elevation camp on Mount Everest. Photo via BBC by
Doma Sherpa

Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, is a deadly place.

More than 4,800 have climbed to the top of Mount Everest. Nearly 300 other people died trying, according to the BBC.

In most cases, the people who died were left there, because of the obvious danger of bringing the deceased off the mountain. From there, snow and ice would entombed the fatalities forever.

Or so we thought. As the BBC reports: 

"Because of global warming, the ice sheet and the glaciers are fast melting and the dead bodies that remained buried all these years are now becomeing exposed, said Ang Tshering Sherpa, former president of Nepal Mountaineering Association."

Another person who is a liason officer on Everest said he has personally retrieved about 10 bodies in recent years from different spots on the mountain and more are emerging lately.

While most of the bodies are appearing because of glacial melting on Everest, some are emerging because of natural movements in the Khumbu Glacier, which sometimes exposes long-deceased people.

Climate change is actually creating far bigger risks in the Himalayas than the macabre exposure of dead mountaineers on Mount Everest.  Melting glaciers over time threaten the water supply of perhaps a tenth or more of the world's population.

According to National Geographic:

"The Hindu Kush Himalaya encompass hundreds of the world's most iconic mountains, hold over 30,000 square miles of glacier ice - more than anywhere else in the world besides the poles - and sustain 240 million people in the peaks and valleys. The mountain ranges also cradle the headwaters of rivers like the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra that provide water to billions in the lowlands downstream."

Most of the snow in the highest elevations in much of the Himalayas actually comes during the summer. At that time of year, the monsoons that sometimes cause flooding in the low elevations to the south sneak up to the Himalayas, creating big summer snowstorms.

However, in general, the monsoons have been weakening, meaning less snow falls. That downward trend in snowfall is expected to continue with climate change, so snowfall in the high mountains will continue to decrease, says National Geographic.

Less snowfall eventually means less ice for the glaciers. And global warming threatens to increase melting of those glaciers. A double whammy.

Eventually, the fear is the glaciers will get so small that they'll reduce the amount of water feeding into rivers. These are the rivers that those billions of people rely upon.

On top of all that bad news, there's a shorter term danger, according to the National Geographic article.

Melting glaciers feed into glacial lakes. Rocks, dirt and debris typically hold these lakes back. If melting increases, the lakes will overwhelm these natural dams, sending walls of water into populated areas below.

All this is just another local, and very serious end result of climate change. I'm sure scientists will keep coming up with other reasons why this is all bad. I can't wait to find out more

Antarctic Sea Ice Is Having A Rough Year, Too

A mountain near the western coast of Antarctica with a fractured
ice shelf to the left of it on the water. Ice shelves
are deteriorating in Antarctica, and that could mean
more global sea level rises. 

We've been watching the Arctic sea ice extent off and on all year in this here blog thingy because it's been struggling along at record lows, or near record lows most of the time.

That's not good news, of course, because the sea ice up there has been diminishing for decades, thanks in large part to global warming. That ice loss, in turn, might screw up northern hemispheric weather patterns.

For the record, the Arctic sea ice minimum for the season did not set a record low as some people expected, but after a quick start to the re-freeze season up there in September, lots of warm air has pushed into the Arctic in October, so the re-freeze has slowed down to a disconcerting crawl. 

There's a chance, perversely, that the low sea ice extent might be partly responsible for changes in the jet stream that have brought occasionally brutally cold and snowy winters to parts of North America and western Europe.

And now, let's take a look at the Antarctic, where things this year are not going so great, either. Ice extent there is among the lowest on record, which is a switch because the overall trend has been for increased ice extent around the Antarctic in recent decades.

Oh sure, some of the outer ice shelves have been eroding dangerously, but the overall sea ice has expanded somewhat, thanks to atmospheric circulation changes that caused upwelling of colder water around Antarctica that have promoted more easily freezable waters, notes Bob Henson at Weather Underground. 

Also, summertime melt water has increased from the Antarctic continent, reducing the salinity of the ocean water around there, making it easier to freeze.

This year, though, brought another shift in the weather patterns around Antarctica. It might be a one year deal, but it did break down the ice at the bottom of the Earth, that's for sure.

It remains to be seen if this year's low Antarctic ice extent is a one year shot, or the beginning of a trend.

A more worrisome development around Antarctica is the stability of the ice shelves.

Warmer ocean water seems to be chewing up the undersides of ice shelves along the coasts of Antarctica. These ice shelves act as dams that keep glaciers in place, or at least slow them down so they move at, um, a glacial pace down Antarctic slopes.

In the past, there's been basically an equilibrium. Some glacial ice makes it to the ocean and melts, but new ice is manufactured in the cold Antarctic interior, so all was good.

Since the ice shelves are melting more, that opens the door for the glaciers to move faster, going off into the sea and eventually melting.

The ice that comes down from the land and ends up in the ocean to melt is bad, because that contributes to global sea level rises. The new ice manufacturing process in Antarctica's interior can't keep up with the ice loss created by the newly speedy glaciers.

The problem can keep escalating because the more ice at the bottom of the ice shelf melts, the more is exposed to the warmer ocean water, and the melting just rolls on.

Still, the melting might have recently slowed a little bit, at least temporarily. The most intense ice shelf melting in Antarctica seems to have occurred between 2002 and 2009, notes NPR.

Even so, the fear is the melting will continue and the ice shelves in coastal Antarctic waters will collapse entirely, and the glaciers will flow toward the sea in a gallop. A gallop by glacial standards anyway.

That, in turn would accelerate sea level rises.

So yeah, people in toasty Miami and countless other coastal locations ought to care about what's going on in Antarctica. 

Antarctic Hot Spell Gets The Headlines, But The Real Trouble Is In The Ice

Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the
Antarctic Pennisula just recorded what might be
the warmest temperature on record for
Antarctica. But that's not the
real danger in Antarctica if the world warms.
Thawing ice sheets could cause big problems.  

The climate world was abuzz last week with news that Antarctica had its warmest temperature on record.

Readings of 63.5 degrees were reported at Base Esperanza and 63.3 degrees at Marambio, says Christopher Burt at Weather Underground. 

Both weather stations are on the Antarctic Pennisula, which juts north toward the warmer environments of the southern tip of South America.

The standing record for Antarctica was 59 degrees at Vando in 1974, which is definitely closer to the South Pole than the stations that had readings in the 60s last week.

There's no question that the hot temperatures Esperanza and Marambio were highly unusual for Antarctica.

Since records are spotty and don't go back all that far on Antarctica, and not many people are there to monitor the weather there, there's a good possibility it has been hotter than that 63.5 degrees last week.

The bottom line: If you're talking about those warm temperatures in the context of global warming, it's interesting, but doesn't tell you all that much about it.

A little more buried in the headlines, though, was something more ominous, at least in the long term.

Last year we learned that the West Antarctic ice sheet, a huge mass of ice down there, was less stable than originally thought. As warmng ocean water infiltrates underneath it, the ice sheet could eventually collapse, allowing masses of ice on land to flow toward the oceans and melt.

This would raise sea levels substantially around the world, which of course is not a good thing, especially if you live in a coastal city just a few feet above sea level.

Now, we learn the even bigger, gigantic glacier of East Antarctica is also under the same threat of collapse, says the Washington Post. 

Again, warm ocean water is getting beneath the East Antarctica ice sheet, especially the ice shel of the Totten Glacier, thinning it from below.

Says the Washington Post:

"The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It is losing an amount of ice 'equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbor every year,' notes the Australian Antarctic Division."

That's alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet - which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that's a 'conservative lower limit' says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin."

If ice floating on the ocean melts, it's not THAT big a deal in terms of sea level. If ice floating on the ocean melts, it's like an ice cube melting in a glass. The glass doesn't overflow when the ice melts.

But the ice floating on the ocean on the West and East Antartica Ice shelves is holding back masses and masses of ice on land. If the ice shelves melt, the ice from the land moves toward and into the ocean and melts.

That's why the scientists studying this thing are worried about sea levels rising.

Of course, the combined 22 feet of sea level rise from melting the West and East Antartica ice won't happen by, say, Friday. This will go on over decades and centuries, and be a big problem for future generations.  Greenland in the northern hemisphere is melting, too, so that adds to the sea level rise.

The immediate problem is, a little bit of sea level rise can cause big problems.

Gradually, coastal areas will see increased flooding, erosion from storms and salt water intrusion from sea water on fresh water supplies increase. It's already starting to happen. Just ask anyone in Miami, Florida or Virginia Beach/Norfolk, Virginia, for instance, about the increasing number of floods during many high tides.

As is always the case with these types of scientific studies, experts are going to have to do a lot more poking and prodding and questioning and replicating to make sure the conclusions about the East Antarctica ice shelf melting are true.

Nobody has yet physically gotten any equipment into the water beneath the ice shelf to confirm that it's warming as much as they think it is, and the ice is going as fast as they think it is. Instruments and observations do confirm there is a thinning of the ice, but scientists need to refine the measurements more.

Scientists are busily getting on with that work, we're told.