Antarctica

A key sentence to note in this report says: ‘Half of all carbon dioxide bound in the world’s oceans is found in the Southern Ocean.’ What impact does the outgassing have on the total carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, which we’re expected to believe is a matter of huge climate concern requiring drastic and expensive measures for decades to come?
– – –
Storms over the waters around Antarctica drive an outgassing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a new international study with researchers from the University of Gothenburg. — Phys.org reporting.

The research group used advanced ocean robots for the study, which provides a better understanding of climate change and can lead to better global climate models.

The world’s southernmost ocean, the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, plays an important role in the global climate because its waters contain large amounts of carbon dioxide.

A new international study, in which researchers from the University of Gothenburg participated, has examined the complex processes driving air-sea fluxes of gasses, such as carbon dioxide.

Storms bring carbon dioxide-rich waters to the surface

The research group is now delivering new findings that shed light on the area’s important role in climate change.

“We show how the intense storms that often occur in the region increase ocean mixing and bring carbon dioxide-rich waters from the deep to the surface. This drives an outgassing of carbon dioxide from the ocean to the atmosphere. There has been a lack of knowledge about these complex processes, so the study is an important key to understanding the Southern Ocean’s significance for the climate and the global carbon budget”, says Sebastiaan Swart, professor of oceanography at the University of Gothenburg and co-author of the study.

Facilitates better climate models

Half of all carbon dioxide bound in the world’s oceans is found in the Southern Ocean. At the same time, climate change is expected to result in more intense storms in the future. Therefore, it is vital to understand the storms’ impact on the outgassing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the researchers point out.

“This knowledge is necessary to be able to make more accurate predictions about future climate change. Currently, these environmental processes are not captured by global climate models”, says Marcel du Plessis at the University of Gothenburg, who also participated in the study.

Continued here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

https://ift.tt/3gm6DdP

January 28, 2022 at 05:12AM

[Researchers study ecosystems. Wedge in climate change. -cr]

Large herbivores help rare species persist in a warming arctic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS

Being common is rather unusual. It’s far more common for a species to be rare, spending its existence in small densities throughout its range. How such rare species persist, particularly in an environment undergoing rapid climate change, inspired a 15-year study in arctic Greenland from the University of California, Davis.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that caribou and muskoxen helped mitigate the effects of climate change on rare arctic plants, lichens and mushrooms at the study site.

The authors suggest that by constraining the abundance of the two most common plant species — dwarf birch and gray willow — large herbivores may allow other, less common species to persist rather than be shaded or outcompeted for nutrients by the woody shrub’s canopy, or suppressed by leaf litter and cooler soils. 

“This is more evidence that conserving large herbivores is really important to maintaining the compositional integrity of species-poor systems like the arctic tundra,” said lead author Eric Post, director of the UC Davis Polar Forum and a professor in the UC Davis Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology.

A rare find

Recent studies have shown that when rare species risk extinction due to climate change, it is often due to effects on local habitat. Greater numbers of rare species persist in regions with a stable climate than in regions with a changing climate. This study shows that species interactions can also be important in maintaining rare species under climate change. 

For this study, the scientists investigated the effects of warming and the presence or exclusion of large herbivores — caribou and muskoxen — on 14 species of tundra plants, lichens and mushrooms, three of which were common and 11 of which were rare in the study site, looking for trends in commonness or rarity.

They found no predictable pattern related to warming. It made some plants more common and others rarer.

But the presence or absence of caribou and muskoxen made a clear difference. Excluding large herbivores from study plots made seven species —  five of them rare — less common, and two species more common, and led to common species dominating study plots.

Herbivores’ critical role in sustaining biodiversity

Caribou at the study site near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, dropped from several hundred animals in the early 2000s, at the beginning of this study, to a little over 100 by the study’s end. Muskoxen increased from about 20 to 50 over the same period, according to a March 2021 study Post co-authored. Meanwhile, the arctic tundra is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the planet. 

“The conservation of large herbivores will serve a critical role in preserving arctic tundra as it warms,” Post said. “If caribou or muskoxen eventually go locally extinct from parts of the Arctic, or even fall to severely low abundance, what we’ll likely see in response to warming is a tundra increasingly dominated by a few common species, like shrubs.”

Post said that rare species contribute vitally to biodiversity, ecosystem function and resilience, largely because there are so many of them compared to common species.

“Creative solutions to sustaining tundra biodiversity, such as maintaining intact populations of large herbivores, will help buffer this sensitive biome against climate change,” Post said.

This study’s co-authors include Christian Pedersen of the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, and David A. Watts of Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, and Penn State University.

---

JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-022-05388-4 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Large herbivores facilitate the persistence of rare taxa under tundra warming

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2022

From EurekAlert!

via Watts Up With That?

https://ift.tt/3AH4DWU

January 28, 2022 at 04:18AM

Joe Biden has issued more oil drilling permits than Donald Trump, despite gushing climate change promises

Posted: January 28, 2022 | Author: Jamie Spry | Filed under: Climate Change | Tags: Biden, Climate Change, Fossil Fuels, Oil, Trump |

Climate Joe, “Saving the planet”, one election promise at a time…

Politicking turns out to be more important than supposed climate ‘ambition’. As one observer commented: “Objectively, he over-promised and under-…

Joe Biden has issued more oil drilling permits than Donald Trump, despite gushing climate change promises

---

via Climatism

https://ift.tt/3s0YzV0

January 28, 2022 at 03:46AM

Oil extraction [image credit: ewg.org]

Politicking turns out to be more important than supposed climate ‘ambition’. As one observer commented: “Objectively, he over-promised and under-delivered”. Claims to be trying to save the planet from unthinkable climate nasties – which lacked credibility anyway – are left looking even more threadbare.
– – –
Joe Biden issued more oil and gas drilling permits than Donald Trump in his first year as president despite pledging to halt the practice as part of ambitious climate change goals, says The Telegraph .

When he entered the White House, Mr Biden identified climate change as one of four priorities and promised a dramatic reversal after the tenure of Mr Trump, who frequently mocked climate science.

However, federal data shows the Biden administration approved 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first year, far outpacing the Trump administration’s 12-month total of 2,658.

The yawning gulf between Mr Biden’s policies on oil, gas and coal extraction and his initial promises has threatened to throw his climate credentials into disarray.

At November’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, the 79-year-old president called climate change “an existential threat to human existence” and pledged to cut US emissions by half over the next nine years.

Days later, the administration offered 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing and plans to offer more than 300,000 acres of public lands leases in March.

“Biden’s runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires ending new fossil fuel extraction, but Biden is racing in the opposite direction.”

Faced with a fuel shortage, rising petrol prices and increasingly likely defeat at the all-important midterm elections later this year, the White House agreed to increase oil production even as Mr Biden implored world leaders to stop burning fossil fuels.

Continued here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

https://ift.tt/3rWws9E

January 28, 2022 at 03:30AM