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Bob Bingham Blog page.

A series of opinion pieces on, mostly climate change and related subjects to do with New Zealand.

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Infrastructure loss in New Zealand due to sea level rise.

25/11/2014

15 Comments

 
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There is a substantial gap in assessment between the latest IPCC report on sea level rise and what scientists, who contributed to the report, believe is going to happen, especially in relation to the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica. The problem is that sea level can change rapidly if there is a sudden collapse of an ice sheet and this is very difficult to forecast accurately. With the absence of reliable forecasting the IPCC opted to predict only what can be proven and this has resulted in a conservative figure of 0.8 metres by the end of the century with middle of the road CO2 level scenario. 
They have also forecast what will happen in a worst case scenario which is where we always are and many scientists working in the field believe that this is a much more realistic forecast. 

The melting of Greenland is accelerating and this alone could add 1.2 metres during this century and Jason Box who studies Greenland has indicated the trend is already evident. Stefan Rahmstorf and other scientists agree.

West Antarctica consists of a string of islands covered in thick ice which is melting from below with warmer sea water, and from above with a warmer atmosphere. The sea ice buttressing the Pine Island and Thwaite’s glaciers has retreated 32 Kilometre’s and is now past the tipping point and will continue to disintegrate. These glaciers and many others in Antarctica are melting at a much faster rate than predicted and can add many metres to sea level.


All this means that we can expect a metre of sea level rise much sooner than the IPCC mid-range report indicates.

With this in mind it would be prudent to start looking at how much infrastructure is going to be flooded with a one metre sea level rise. Our two international airports are both within one metre of sea level and moving them to higher ground is not at all easy, it is exceptionally expensive and needs long term planning, especially with all the related infrastructure.

New Zealand has some of the best climate scientists in the world and has gained valuable knowledge from their research in Antarctica. We should be asking people like Tim Naish of the Victoria University, Wellington and his colleagues for a frank opinion as to when we are likely to have a sea level rise of one metre so that we can make a risk assessment of our infrastructure.

The maps below illustrate some of the threats to four of our major cities.


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Auckland has a low lying section between the airport and Panmure including Sylvia Park which must be borderline to flooding. The runway of the airport is definitely at the one metre level and will be one of the first casualties of the city, should we be building a railway to such a short term resource? Is it wise to build a tunnel to the North Shore or would a bridge have a longer life?

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Wellington airport is also very vulnerable and there is a lot of infrastructure associated with the port which might need to be looked at.

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Tauranga has a lot of port infrastructure and development on the low lying coast which needs to be assessed.

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Christchurch is very low lying and even before the earthquake had many areas which are vulnerable.
Around the country there are many valuable parts of our infrastructure on low lying land, such as the Marsden Point oil terminal and refinery, where we should have a realistic assessment of its future and when we should plan to replace it.

Politicians are notoriously short term planners but climate change is a much bigger event than World War 2 and it is relentless in its advance. The only thing in doubt is the timing.




15 Comments

UN climate change negotiations

14/11/2014

13 Comments

 
Leave the CRUA countries out of the equation.

The UN has been trying since 1992 to get the 196 countries of the world to recognise the extreme dangers of global warming caused by burning fossil fuels. At that time there were 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere and as the science was quite clear that if CO2 levels continued to rise we would be facing an extremely dangerous rate of climate change. There were high expectations that the world’s nations would recognise the problem and sign up to a solution.

What was not recognised was the political and big business influence from the main oil and coal producing countries that did not sign and the number of smaller nations that just ignored the agreement.


We are now in a situation 22 years later where the CO2 levels are at 400 parts per million, which the world last had 3.5 million years ago. We are committed to a minimum of 20 metres of sea level rise and a temperature increase of at least 2⁰C at current CO2 levels. If we keep going with ‘business as usual’ we will have a 5⁰C temperature rise. The current CO2 emissions level is around 35 billion tons a year, this is increasing the CO2 levels at about two ppm a year.

Time and repeatedly failed negotiations have shown that there are four main oil and coal producing nations who are committed to their industries, and committed to disrupting the efforts of the rest of the world to reach an agreement.

We will call these the CRUA countries; Canada, Russia, the USA and Australia. To put it into context the CRUA countries have per capita CO2 emissions of around 20 tons per year, Europe and China are at about 8 tons and India is at 2 tons. There are other players, such as Saudi and Ireland, but these much smaller countries have less influence.

To hold a UN meeting with the aim of reaching an agreement on how to limit the output of CO2 is doomed to failure while the CRUA countries are involved. Each wants to protect its industries and the lifestyle it supports. The science is clear, the only way to prevent CO2 levels from increasing is to stop burning fossil fuels in the quantities we currently do.


I believe the solution is to leave the CRUA countries out of negotiations and the rest of the world can reach an agreement on how to reduce CO2 output. Europe, which is an economic block of 700 million people, have already committed to change and two very large countries, India and China are making big strides to change their energy sources, so we have nearly half of the world’s population already in agreement.

Even though President Obama has signed a commendable agreement with China, the rest of the USA government, Congress and the Senate, are committed to a fossil fuel economy. As are most of industry, the state governors and the American media. China was already changing to renewable energy to clean its atmosphere and reduce imports while the USA, apart from Obama and his supporters, has yet to show any enthusiasm.

Deliberately excluding the CRUA countries would send a strong message that this is a serious matter and those countries roles as major polluters is recognised by the rest of the planet. Slowly but surely, we will stop buying coal and oil from the CRUA countries, and the problem will begin to be resolved.

We will still have to deal with major global problems such as mass population movement and wars but we will at least be trying.


13 Comments

Temperature measurements of the deep oceans.

4/11/2014

2 Comments

 
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There have been some recent reports  about research on ocean temperatures and how corrections are being made to the overall world temperatures as new information comes from better records. We have fairly good records of the land but, apart from the last ten years, there have only been temperature records of the seas surface and then only along regular shipping routes and at some ports. This has left the vast majority unrecorded.

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Since 2004 we have had the Argo programme where 3500 floats have been placed in the oceans around the world and these are recording temperature and salinity from the surface down to 700 metres. For deeper levels there are no comprehensive records due to the extreme pressure and with total darkness there are no  sources of energy to power monitoring equipment. It is easier to monitor the surface of Mars than the deep areas of our oceans. This proves to be the case as we have three surface rovers on Mars and none on the bottom of the deep oceans.

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There has been a recent scientific report that the deep oceans have not warmed, but with no long term records how it was measured? Much of it was  done with calculations of thermal expansion taken from satellite measurements of sea level.  If the temperature of the upper levels of the oceans are known from the Argo float records, then calculations can be made of the expansion or contraction of that region of the sea and therefore a calculation can be made of the deeper parts. A bit tenuous? Well yes, but if you don’t have a thermometer down there you have to use a proxy method. The new Argo Deep program will add to the knowledge but that will not be deployed for some years yet...

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A typical problem here is that water from the Gulf Stream sinks off the coast of Norway and reappears some 15 to 1000 years later in the Southern Ocean.  What happened to it? Did its CO2 laden content and warmer temperature do any damage? We have no idea but I doubt if it will be good news.

The big action with climate change is in the deep oceans but the harsh facts are that we know very little about them

2 Comments

    Bob Bingham 

    Occasional blog posts on topical news items concerning the climate.  Please click the RSS feed to receive updates.

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