Alister Doyle

As Ice Melts, Greenland Could Become a Potential Sand Exporter: Study

The study, headlined ‘Promises and perils of sand exploitation in Greenland’, said that the Arctic island would have to assess risks of coastal mining, especially to fisheries.

Oslo: Greenland could start to export sand in a rare positive spinoff from global warming that is melting the island’s vast ice sheet and washing large amounts of sediment into the sea, scientists said on Monday.

Mining of sand and gravel, widely used in the construction industry, could boost the economy for Greenland’s 56,000 population who have wide powers of self-rule within Denmark but rely heavily on subsidies from Copenhagen.

By mining sand, “Greenland could benefit from the challenges brought by climate change,” a team of scientists in Denmark and the United States wrote in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The study, headlined ‘Promises and perils of sand exploitation in Greenland’, said that the Arctic island would have to assess risks of coastal mining, especially to fisheries.

Rising global temperatures are melting the Greenland ice sheet, which locks up enough water to raise global sea levels by about seven metres (23 ft) if it ever all thawed, and carrying ever more sand and gravel into coastal fjords.

“You can think of it (the melting ice) as a tap that pours out sediment to the coast,” said lead author Mette Bendixen, a researcher at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Also read: Scientists Using Robots to Reveal Mineral Riches in Deep Sea

Worldwide demand for sand totalled about 9.55 billion tonnes in 2017, with a market value of $99.5 billion and is projected to reach almost $481 billion in 2100, driven by rising demand and likely shortages, the study said.

That meant a rare opportunity for the island.

“Normally the Arctic people are among those who really feel climate change – the eroding coast, less permafrost,” said Bendixen. “This is a unique situation because of the melting ice sheet.”

David Boertmann of Aarhus University, who was not involved in the study, said there was already some local mining of sand for the domestic construction industry in Greenland.

Drawbacks for Greenland, common to other mining projects on the island ranging from uranium to rare earth minerals, include the distance to markets in Europe and North America, he said.

Still, Bendixen said sand was already often transported long distances, such as to Los Angeles from Vancouver or from Australia to Dubai.

“At the moment it is an inexpensive resource but it will become more expensive,” she said.

The study said that sand and gravel might also be used in future to reinforce beaches and coastlines at risk of rising sea levels, caused in part by Greenland’s thaw.

(Reuters)

Oceans Warming Faster Than Expected, Set Heat Record in 2018: Scientists

“Global warming is here, and has major consequences already. There is no doubt, none!”

Oslo: The oceans are warming faster than previously estimated, setting a new temperature record in 2018 in a trend that is damaging marine life, scientists said on Thursday.

New measurements, aided by an international network of 3,900 floats deployed in the oceans since 2000, showed more warming since 1971 than calculated by the latest UN assessment of climate change in 2013, they said.

And “observational records of ocean heat content show that ocean warming is accelerating,” the authors in China and the US wrote in the journal Science of ocean waters down to 2,000 metres (6,600 ft).

Man-made greenhouse gas emissions are warming the atmosphere, according to the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, and a large part of the heat gets absorbed by the oceans. That, in turn, is forcing fish to flee to cooler waters.

“Global warming is here, and has major consequences already. There is no doubt, none!” the authors wrote in a statement.

Almost 200 nations plan to phase out fossil fuels this century under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit warming. US President Donald Trump, who wants to promote US fossil fuels, plans to pull out of the pact in 2020.

Also Read: Tropical Marine Conservation Needs to Change as Coral Reefs Decline

Data due for publication next week will show “2018 was the warmest year on record for the global ocean, surpassing 2017,” said lead author Lijing Cheng, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He told Reuters that records for ocean warming had been broken almost yearly since 2000.

Overall, temperatures in the ocean down to 2,000 metres rose about 0.1 degree Celsius (0.18F) from 1971-2010, he said. The 2013 UN assessment estimated slower rates of heat uptake but did not give a single comparable number.

A separate study on Monday, by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, said 2018 was the fourth warmest year for global surface temperatures in records dating back to the 19th century.

Ocean temperatures are less influenced by year-to-year variations in the weather. It can take more than 1,000 years for deep ocean temperatures to adjust to changes at the surface.

“The deep ocean reflects the climate of the deep and uncertain past,” Kevin Trenberth, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and a co-author of Thursday’s study, told Reuters.

Also Read: Mitigating Climate Change Is Possible, but Only If We Are Serious About It

Among effects, extra warmth can reduce oxygen in the oceans and damages coral reefs that are nurseries for fish, the scientists said. Warmer seas release more moisture that can stoke more powerful storms.

Warmer ocean water also raises sea levels by melting ice, including around the edges of Antarctica and Greenland.

(Reuters)

Illegal Fishing, Harm to Amazon Forest Linked to Tax Havens, Finds Study

The study follows the 2015 leak of the Panama Papers, which showed how wealthy individuals and companies use offshore schemes to reduce their tax bills.

Oslo: Scientists called on Monday for greater transparency over the use of tax havens by companies involved in activities that have harmed the world’s oceans and the Amazon rainforest.

In a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, they said many firms involved in illegal fishing worldwide used tax havens to register their vessels, while investments in farming that has damaged the rainforest often flow via offshore accounts.

The study follows the 2015 leak of the Panama Papers, which showed how wealthy individuals and companies use offshore schemes to reduce their tax bills.

Seventy percent of fishing vessels implicated in illegal, unreported and unregulated catches had been registered at some point in a tax haven, led by Belize and Panama, the scientists wrote in the journal.

By contrast, they said, only about 4% of all the fishing vessels registered worldwide are flagged in tax havens.

The scientists also cited documents from Brazil’s central bank which showed that almost 70% – or $18.4 billion of a total $26.9 billion – of foreign capital invested by major companies in soy and beef farming in Brazil from 2000-2011 had flowed through tax havens.

Deforestation

Land clearances for beef and soy farms have been “key drivers of deforestation”, especially in the early years of the period, they said. Most funds for beef and soy went via the Cayman Islands, Bahamas and Netherlands.

“In the fisheries case … there are examples of illegal uses of tax havens. We are talking about tax avoidance,” lead author Victor Galaz of Stockholm University told Reuters.

By contrast, Galaz said there was nothing illegal about using a tax haven to channel money to farms in Brazil, but he added that this could sometimes act as an indirect subsidy for environmentally damaging practices.

Agents of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or Ibama, check an illegal logging camp during “Operation Green Wave” to combat illegal logging in Apui, in the southern region of the state of Amazonas, Brazil, August 3, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Bruno Kelly/File Photo

The report did not name fishing companies but the scientists wrote to firms listed on the Brazilian central bank documents, which showed Cargill and Bunge had the largest amount of loans or cash flowing via tax havens.

Both companies said they were committed to protecting the environment and supported a 2006 soy moratorium in Brazil, which bans purchases from recently deforested areas.

“We do not ‘hide’ profits or cash in tax havens,” a Cargill official wrote to the authors. “Our company is subject in the U.S. to full disclosure of all our activities and bank accounts associated with non-U.S. holding companies.”Cargill told Reuters it had nothing to add to that statement.

“Our goal is to build sustainable supply chains free of deforestation,” a Bunge spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to Reuters, echoing remarks the company sent to the authors.

(Reuters)

Deep Reefs Won’t Be ‘Twilight Zone’ Refuge for Fish, Corals: Study

Worldwide, coral reefs in shallow waters are among ecosystems most threatened by climate change.

Oslo: Deep coral reefs in a “twilight zone” in the oceans differ sharply from those near the surface, dimming hopes that they can be a refuge for marine life fleeing threats such as climate change and pollution, scientists said on Thursday.

Worldwide, coral reefs in shallow waters are among ecosystems most threatened by climate change. The Great Barrier Reef off Australia suffered severe bleaching, a whitening driven by warm waters that can kill corals, in 2016 and 2017.

A US-led team of divers who studied little-known reefs in the West Atlantic and Pacific Oceans between 30 and 150 metres deep where sunlight fades, found most species of corals and fish were unlike those closer to the surface.

“We were surprised to find little overlap,” lead author Luiz Rocha of the California Academy of Sciences told Reuters of the findings published in the journal science.

Less than 5% of fish and corals were found in both shallow and deep waters against the scientists’ previous estimate of 60-75%, based on historical records, he said.

“The potential for deep reefs to act in a refuge capacity is far less than we have previously hoped,” they wrote. And, like shallow reefs, the deep reefs also faced threats including climate change, storms and pollution.

Divers found, for instance, plastic fishing nets entangled on deep corals off the Philippines and deep corals harmed by warm waters off the Bahamas.

Rocha said the scientists were trying to place temperature sensors in the twilight zone to see how far deep reefs were exposed to rising ocean temperatures, which are most extreme at the surface.

Deep reefs covered at least the same ocean area worldwide as shallow reefs, he estimated. Some reefs, such as those off the mouth of the Amazon River, exist only in the depths.

The authors urged better safeguards for deep reefs, for instance by expanding protected areas and banning bottom trawlers that can scrape the seabed.

Among previous research, a 2016 study by the UN Environment Programme found evidence that some deep reefs could act as what it called ‘lifeboats’ for nearby, connected shallower reefs.

But it said that in other cases, deep reefs “may be just as vulnerable as shallower reefs” to human pressures.

Details of the Science study can be found here.

(Reuters)

Global Warming Leaves Over a Billion People Struggling to Stay Cool

The UN’s health agency says that heat stress linked to climate change is likely to cause 38,000 extra deaths a year worldwide between 2030 and 2050.

Oslo: More than a billion people are at risk from a lack of air conditioning and refrigeration to keep them cool and to preserve food and medicines as global warming brings higher temperatures, a study showed on Monday.

More electricity demand for fridges, fans and other appliances will add to man-made climate change unless power generators shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies, according to the report by the non-profit Sustainable Energy for All group.

About 1.1 billion people in Asia, Africa and Latin America – 470 million in rural areas and 630 million slum dwellers in cities – were at risk among the world’s 7.6 billion people, it said.

“Cooling becomes more and more important” with climate change, Rachel Kyte, head of the group and special representative for the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All, told Reuters.

In a survey of 52 countries, those most at risk included India, China, Mozambique, Sudan, Nigeria, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, it said.

“We have to provide cooling in a super-efficient way,” Kyte said. Companies could find big markets, for instance by developing low-cost, high-efficiency air conditioners to sell to growing middle classes in tropical countries.

And simpler solutions, such as painting roofs white to reflect sunlight or redesigning buildings to allow heat to escape, would also help.

The UN’s health agency says that heat stress linked to climate change is likely to cause 38,000 extra deaths a year worldwide between 2030 and 2050. In a heat-wave in May, more than 60 people died in Karachi, Pakistan, when heat rose above 40 degrees Celsius (104°F).

In remote areas in tropical countries, many people lack electricity and clinics are often unable to store vaccines or medicines that need to be chilled, the study said. And in city slums, electricity supplies are often intermittent.

Many farmers or fishermen, meanwhile, lack access to a “cold chain” to preserve and transport products to markets. Fresh fish goes off within hours if stored at 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) but stays fresh for days when chilled.

Last week, a study by the University of Birmingham in Britain projected that the number of cooling appliances could quadruple by 2050 to 14 billion worldwide, driving a surge in energy consumption.

(Reuters)

Green Climate Fund Chief Quits After ‘Disappointing’ Meeting

Chief Howard Bamsey said “This has been a very difficult and disappointing board meeting for all of us, but most importantly for those people who are most vulnerable to climate change impacts” in the background of US halting all contributions.

Oslo (Norway): Green Climate Fund (GCF) meant to channel billions of dollars to poor nations said it had had a “very difficult and disappointing” meeting ending on Wednesday, in a new setback after US President Donald Trump pulled out US support last year.

Australian climate finance expert Howard Bamsey announced he was stepping down as executive director of the GCF at the end of the four-day meeting in Songdo, South Korea, the GCF said in a statement.

The GCF, whose South Korean headquarters opened in 2013 with backing from almost 200 nations, aims to help poor nations cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt their economies to heatwaves, storms and rising seas.

But it has been bogged down by disputes between rich and poor nations about how and where to invest.

“This has been a very difficult and disappointing board meeting for all of us, but most importantly for those people who are most vulnerable to climate change impacts, and who depend on the activities of the Fund,” GCF chair Lennart Baage said in a statement.

The meeting had “challenging and difficult discussions between Board members”, the GCF said in a statement.

A GCF spokesman said Baage declined further comment.

The meeting failed to add to its portfolio of 76 projects worth $3.7 billion, which range from promoting rooftop solar energy in India to helping Colombia safeguard wetlands.

The fund, which won initial pledges from developing nations totalling $10.3 billion in 2014, including $3 billion from US, has been plagued by red tape and suffered last year when Trump said it was a waste of US taxpayer dollars.

Trump halted US contributions as part of his decision to quit the 2015 Paris climate agreement. That cut the GCF to $8 billion, since former president Barack Obama had paid $1 billion of the planned $3 billion.

The GCF did not give a reason for Bamsey’s departure, which was effective immediately, but Baage said he had done an “exceptional job” since taking over in 2016.

As part of the Paris agreement, rich nations pledged to raise total climate finance, from both private and public sources, to $100 billion a year by 2020 and to raise it further in the 2020s.

(Reuters)

Antarctic Thaw Quickens, Trillions of Tonnes of Ice Raise Sea Levels

Antarctica has enough ice to raise sea levels by 58 metres.

Oslo: An accelerating thaw of Antarctica has pushed up world sea levels by almost a centimetre since the early 1990s in a risk for coasts from Pacific islands to Florida, an international team of scientists said on June 14.

Antarctica has enough ice to raise seas by 58 metres (190 ft) if it ever all melted, dwarfing frozen stores in places from Greenland to the Himalayas and making its future the biggest uncertainty in understanding global warming and ocean levels.

The frozen continent lost almost three trillion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, the 84 scientists said in what they called the most complete overview of Antarctic ice to date.

The thaw, tracked by satellite data and other measurements, contributed 0.76 cm to sea level rise since 1992, they wrote in the journal Nature.

And the ice losses quickened to 219 billion tonnes a year since 2012, from 76 billion previously. “The sharp increase … is a big surprise,” professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds and a leader of the report, told Reuters.

Most ice was being lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, where warmer ocean water is melting floating ice shelves at the end of glaciers, allowing ice pent up on land to slide faster towards the sea, the study said.

A single millimetre of global sea level rise is equivalent to 360 billion tonnes of melted ice, or an imaginary gigantic ice cube with sides about seven kilometres (4.35 miles) long.

Overall, world sea levels have risen about 20 cm in the past century, driven mainly by a natural expansion of water already in the oceans as it warms along with a thaw of glaciers form the Andes to the Alps.

And a major UN assessment in 2014 said seas could rise this century by between about 30 cm and almost a metre.

Shepherd said Antarctica alone is now on track to raise world sea levels by about 15 cm by 2100, above most past estimates.

Such a rise alone sounds little but would make coastal floods during storms at high tides more damaging, he said. Sea level rise is a threat to cities from New York to Shanghai as well as low-lying nations from the Pacific Ocean to the Netherlands.

“We’re watching these reports closely,” said Michiel van den Broeke, professor of Polar Meteorology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, saying they were the guide for defending the Dutch coast.

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, almost 200 governments set a goal of phasing out fossil fuels this century to limit warming. US President Donald Trump plans to pull out of the pact and to focus instead on US jobs and coal.

Chris Rapley, a professor of climate science at University College London who was not involved in the study, wrote in a comment that he had suggested in 2005 that a “slumbering giant (of ice in Antarctica) seemed to be awakening. This paper suggests it is stretching its limbs.”

(Reuters)

Tourism to Blame for 8% of Greenhouse Gases, Finds Study

The trillion-dollar tourism industry will emit 6.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions by 2025.

Bonn: Tourism is responsible for a 12th of world greenhouse gas emissions and a vacation boom is complicating a global drive to slow climate change, scientists said on Monday.

Emissions from tourism, mostly by domestic travelers, were highest in the US, China, Germany and India, according to a review of 160 nations led by the University of Sydney and published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Tourism, including flights, hotels, food and even the production of souvenirs, emitted the equivalent of 4.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2013, the most recent data available, or 8% of all man-made greenhouse gases, up from 3.9 billion in 2009, it said. That was far above many previous estimates, using narrower definitions, that tourism accounts for just 2.5-3% of world emissions, it added.

And on current trends, the trillion-dollar tourism industry will emit 6.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions by 2025, the review said, making it one of the fastest-growing source of the planet-warming gases that governments are trying to cut.

Flights were the biggest single contributor, according to the study by scientists in Australia, Taiwan and Indonesia. “We recommend flying less and staying Earth-bound where possible, e.g. use public transport,” co-author Arunima Malik of the University of Sydney told Reuters in an email.

Lead author Manfred Lenzen said plane tickets would have to be far more expensive to reflect the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning jet fuel. “If I flew from Melbourne to the UK return, I would pay at least an additional A$205 ($150) to offset my emissions; for a return trip between Sydney and Brisbane, about A$18 extra,” he wrote in a news release.

Almost 200 nations are meeting in Bonn this week to write a “rule book” for the 2015 Paris Agreement, which seeks to slash greenhouse gas emissions to avert more heat waves, downpours, droughts and extinctions.

Patricia Espinosa, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat hosting the talks, said the tourism industry itself was making “good progress” to clean up.

“A lot of what the industry is selling depends on the preservation and conservation and the protection of the environment,” she told a news conference.

The study added up all emissions from tourism but did not try to compare how a holiday compared with staying at home, where people also emit greenhouse gases, through everything from heating to commuting.

(Reuters)

Coral Reefs at Risk of Dissolving as Oceans Get More Acidic, Finds Study

Ocean acidification will threaten sediments that are building blocks for reefs.

A man snorkels in an area called the “Coral Gardens” near Lady Elliot Island, on the Great Barrier Reef, northeast of Bundaberg town in Queensland, Australia, June 11, 2015. Credit: Reuters/David Gray/File Photo

Oslo: Coral reefs could start to dissolve before 2100 as man-made climate change drives acidification of the oceans, scientists said on Thursday.

Acidification will threaten sediments that are building blocks for reefs. Corals already face risks from ocean temperatures, pollution and overfishing.

“Coral reefs will transition to net dissolving before end of century,” the Australian-led team of scientists wrote in the US journal Science. “Net dissolving” means reefs would lose more material than they gain from the growth of corals.

Carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas, forms a weak acid in water and threatens to dissolve the reef sediments, made from broken down bits of corals and other carbonate organisms that accumulate over thousands of years, it said.

The sediments are 10 times more vulnerable to acidification than the tiny coral animals that also extract chemicals directly from the sea water to build stony skeletons that form reefs, the study said.

Coral animals will be able to keep growing and replenish reefs long after sandy sediments start to dissolve, lead author Bradley Eyre, of Southern Cross University, told Reuters.

“This probably reflects the corals’ ability to modify their environment and partially adapt to ocean acidification whereas the dissolution of sands is a geo-chemical process that cannot adapt,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The report said it was “unknown if the whole reef will erode once the sediments become net dissolving” and whether reefs “will experience catastrophic destruction” or merely a slow erosion.

Some reef sediments were already starting to dissolve, such as at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii, where other pollutants were contributing.

Eyre said it was unclear if the dissolution of sediments could be a long-term threat to entire islands, from the Pacific to the Caribbean. Other studies say that deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions can limit acidification.

Most studies show that acidification will be overwhelmingly bad for ocean life, also threatening creatures such as oysters, lobsters and crabs. Another study on Thursday, however, found that it might help the growth of some plants.

“An increase of carbon dioxide in the ocean theoretically could stimulate higher growth of kelp and seaweeds,” Kasper Hancke, a biologist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, wrote in a statement.

(Reuters)

Corals at Risk as Marine Heat Waves Strike More Often

High ocean temperatures are harming tropical corals almost five times more often than in the 1980s.

FILE PHOTO: Peter Gash, owner and manager of the Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort, snorkels during an inspection of the reef's condition in an area called the 'Coral Gardens' located at Lady Elliot Island and north-east from the town of Bundaberg in Queensland, Australia, June 11, 2015. Credit: Reuters/David Gray/File Photo

Peter Gash, owner and manager of the Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort, snorkels during an inspection of the reef’s condition in an area called the ‘Coral Gardens’ located at Lady Elliot Island and north-east from the town of Bundaberg in Queensland, Australia, June 11, 2015. Credit: Reuters/David Gray/File Photo

Oslo: High ocean temperatures are harming tropical corals almost five times more often than in the 1980s, undermining reefs’ ability to survive marine heat waves caused by man-made climate change, scientists said on Thursday.

The average time between severe “bleachings”, when heat makes the stony-bodied creatures that makeup coral reefs expel colourful algae, shortened to six years in 2016 from 25-30 years in the early 1980s, the Australian-led team wrote.

Corals die if bleachings are long-lasting, wrecking reefs that are nurseries for fish, a source of food to millions of people and a destination for scuba-diving tourists.

“Tropical reef systems are transitioning to a new era in which the interval between recurrent bouts of coral bleaching is too short for a full recovery” of mature corals that can require ten to fifteen years, the researchers wrote in the journal Science.

Climate change will “inevitably” make underwater heat waves and bleachings more frequent, they wrote.

The worst bleaching was in 2015-16, when record ocean temperatures affected 75% of 100 reefs studied from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the Caribbean.

Lead author professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia, urged more action to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the global 2015 Paris climate agreement.

The main problem for protecting reefs was “weak commitments for reductions in emissions from individual countries like Australia and the US,” he told Reuters in an e-mail.

US President Donald Trump, who doubts climate change is man-made, plans to pull out of the Paris accord and instead promote US fossil fuels. Australia’s goals under the Paris accord are less ambitious than those of some other rich nations.

The Paris pact seeks to limit a rise in average global surface temperatures to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, ideally 1.5C (2.7F) by shifting from fossil fuels.

Corals are already under threat with warming of 1C (1.8F) so far, a UN panel of climate scientists says.

In the 1980s, bleachings happened during local heat waves and then started to occur in the 1980s and 1990s during natural El Nino weather events that release heat from the Pacific Ocean.

“Now we’re seeing the emergence of bleaching in every hot summer,” said Mark Eakin, an author of the study at the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, said in a statement.

Hughes said there was evidence that some corals could adapt to rising temperatures. The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s biggest, was not doomed if governments stepped up action.

“If the … Paris Agreement is successful we will still have a Great Barrier Reef. It will have a different mix of coral species, but it will still function and look like a reef,” he said.

(Reuters)