Worldwide: Over 1,200 laws aim to change weather — need more to limit downpours, seas, storms

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Welcome to paleolithic politics: in this version, the witchdoctors are syndicated and with lap tops.

OSLO (Reuters) – Nations around the world have adopted more than 1,200 laws to curb climate change…

Patricia Espinosa, the U.N.’s climate change chief, … said the findings were “cause for optimism”…

Because more laws are always good.

Forty-seven laws had been added since world leaders adopted a Paris Agreement to combat climate change in late 2015, a slowdown from a previous peak of about 100 a year around 2009-13 when many developed nations passed laws.

All those new laws and global temperatures peak anyway. Must be depressing for legisladocktors.

Too many laws is never enough:

“We don’t want weaklings in the chain,” said Martin Chungong, Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. He urged all countries to adopt laws that help limit downpours, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

I’m with him. Why not speed limits for winds?

h/t Climate Depot

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May 9, 2017 at 05:56AM

Earth may have been born in a huge flare-up of the young sun 

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Credit: NASA

Another alternative to collision theories of Earth’s formation emerges, as New Scientist reports. Where or how the Moon might fit in is not clear.

It’s not easy to make Earth. Most of the explanations for how our planet formed have troubling problems.

But if a new idea is right, we can thank a hyperactive young sun for Earth’s existence, plus solve a long-standing mystery about Mars.

According to standard lore, the planet-building process began when dust particles orbiting the newborn sun stuck together, forming rocks that built still larger objects. But this story is in trouble.

“I’ve been really, really disturbed by the problem of making terrestrial planets,” says Alexander Hubbard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These planets are the first four from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. They’re mostly made of rock and iron – whose particles don’t readily stick together. They could have been sticky enough if they had a coating of snow and organic goo, Hubbard says.

But despite all Earth’s oceans and carbon-based life, our planet has too little water or carbon to support this explanation. Now Hubbard has suggested an intriguing solution to Earth’s difficult birth. 

In 1936, an infant star began to brighten, eventually shining over 100 times more brightly than it did originally. Now named FU Orionis, this star has stayed bright ever since. And several other stellar youngsters have done the same thing.

Here comes the sun

What if the newborn sun also did this? The outburst would have partially melted dust grains, making them sticky enough to become the seeds of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. “You naturally expect a terrestrial planet pattern that looks a lot like our own solar system if you have an FU Orionis-type event,” Hubbard says.

Meanwhile, in solar systems that didn’t experience such an eruption, dust grains would only be molten closer to the star, leading to compact systems like Kepler-11, as other astronomers suggested in 2014.

“It’s an interesting idea,” says Andrew Youdin at the University of Arizona, noting the difficulty of explaining terrestrial planet formation. “There’s clearly a major problem here, and so all ideas need to be looked at.”

Continued here.

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May 9, 2017 at 05:39AM

Resilient Arctic Ice in May

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The MASIE image shows Arctic Ocean ice is resilient and the numbers below will show how well 2017 compares to the decadal average. The only place where ice is below normal is outside the Arctic Ocean, namely Bering and Okhotsk Seas in the Pacific. Claims of disappearing ice pertain not to the Arctic itself, but to marginal Pacific seas that will melt out anyway by September.

I noticed the pattern this April when it became obvious that including Bering and Okhotsk in the Arctic totals gives a misleading picture. For sure they are part of Northern Hemisphere (NH) total sea ice, but currently the Pacific is going its own way, not indicative of the sea ice in the Central and Atlantic Arctic.

The graph below shows ice extents in the Arctic seas, excluding Bering and Okhotsk in the Pacific. Over the last 25 days 2017 Arctic ice has gone from average to a surplus of 400k km2 and is maintaining that advantage in May.  As of May 8, ice in 2007 was 600k km2 behind and 2016 was lower by 700k km2.

While the Arctic ocean ice is persisting, Bering and Okhotsk extents have retreated ahead of schedule, as the graph below shows.  The gap has persisted at 50% of decadal average over the last 3 weeks, going from 600k km2 on day 109 to 500k km2 on day 120, and presently Bering and Okhotsk combined are down by 400k km2.  Of course, eventually both seas will be ice free by September.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Kris Kristofferson song (Me and Bobby McGee)

The distinctive Pacific pattern is evident in the images of changing ice extents.  First, see how ice in Bering and Okhotsk seas has retreated the last 3 weeks..

Meanwhile, on the Atlantic side ice has grown steadily.  Note the persistent ice blocking Newfoundland on the upper left, now retreating and continuing to encase Svalbard on the middle right.

The Chart below shows the traditional view of NH ice extents, which includes the Pacific seas together with the Arctic seas.  2017 started this period 400k km2 below average, then caught up and is now tracking slightly above the decadal average.This is despite a deficit of 400k km2 in Bering and Okhotsk, which obscures the ice surpluses elsewhere.  By comparison 2007 and 2016 are lagging behind by 400k km2..

The table below provides a more detailed description of NH ice by showing extents measured in the various seas on May 8, day 128 of the year.

Clearly 2017 is above average everywhere, including Barents and Kara seas, with quite large surpluses in Greenland Sea and Baffin Bay.  The deficits in the Pacific are also obvious, with Bering sea down the most.

Summary

The details are important to form a proper perception of any natural process, including dynamics of sea ice waxing and waning. On closer inspection, the appearance of declining Arctic sea ice is actually another after effect of the recent El Nino and Blob phenomena, and quite restricted to the Pacific marginal seas.

Meanwhile, on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, we have sightings and reports of ice surges along the coast of Newfoundland, such amounts not seen since the 1980s. Below is a NASA satellite photo of Newfoundland Sea Ice, May 5, 2017 Source: Newsfoundsander

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May 9, 2017 at 05:12AM

Study: Zika virus transmission isn’t as dependent on warmer temperatures as previously thought

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From the University of South Florida and the  “we’ll have to find some other angle to blame it on global warming” department, comes this study.

TAMPA, Fla. (May 9, 2017) — Transmission of mosquito-borne diseases, such as Zika, occur at lower temperatures than previously thought, a recently released study co-authored by two University of South Florida researchers shows.

The study, led by Stanford University and published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, found that transmission of dengue, chikungunya and Zika is highest at around 84 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists had long considered 90 degrees to be the peak-transmission temperature. The finding is significant, especially as climate change causes temperatures to climb.

“This means that future transmission is much more likely to occur in subtropical and even temperate areas, such as the southern United States and northern Mexico,” said Jeremy Cohen, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher studying integrative biology.

He and Jason Rohr, PhD, an associate professor of integrative biology, are coauthors on the study. From 2015-2016, they collected data on the incidences of dengue, chikungunya and Zika, as well as climate, gross domestic product and tourism, in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Their data were used to create a model that shows the potential effects of temperatures and temperature change on the transmission of dengue, chikungunya and Zika around the world, three diseases that are mosquito-vectored and increasing in the United States.

The map at the left depicts the number of months where there is a greater than 97.5 percent chance of disease transmission by the mosquito Aedes albopictus, based on the model. Map at right depicts Aedes aegypti, the species most likely to transmit the Zika virus. The darker the red, the more months per year that transmission is likely. The areas outlined in black delineate the current ranges of the mosquitoes within the United States. CREDIT Image courtesy of study authors

“Our findings should help to predict the areas at the greatest risk of dengue, chikungunya and Zika outbreaks,” said Rohr.

Temperature affects how often mosquitoes bite, the amount of time it takes for them to ingest a virus from one human and inject it into another, and their life cycle. Cohen, Rohr and other members of the research team found that mosquitos posed the greatest risk to humans at 84 degrees and risk declined in cooler and warmer temperatures.

“Given that the predominant thinking was that transmission was most likely to peak at very hot temperatures, which would mostly limit the diseases to the tropics, we were certainly surprised that the model and the field data suggested that high rates of transmission could occur at lower temperatures, possibly impacting more northern regions in the future,” Cohen said.

Pinpointing the optimal temperature for disease transmission is critical for predicting future disease rates and how diseases will spread with climate change, and more effectively implementing mosquito-control measures, said lead author Erin Mordecai of Stanford University.

“If we’re predicting a 29-degree optimum and another model is predicting a 35-degree optimum, the other model will say that climate change will increase transmission,” she said in a Stanford-issued media release, adding that if local temperatures are already near optimal temperature, infections may decline as temperatures rise.

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May 9, 2017 at 05:00AM