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A new study has concluded that methane emissions from the U.S. oil and natural gas supply chain in 2015 amounted to about 2.3% of gross U.S. gas production. Emissions of this magnitude significantly increase the GHG footprint of natural gas power generation and erode the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.
Between 2005 and 2017 the U.S. economy as measured by real GDP expanded by about 20 %. Over this same period, emissions from power generation dropped which is evidence of a decoupling between economic growth and power generation.
Northern permafrost soils represent the largest terrestrial organic carbon pool on Earth. A study the northern circumpolar permafrost zones reveals that landscapes susceptible to abrupt thawing with the release of significant quantities of carbon dioxide and methane cover 20% of the northern permafrost region and store up to half its soil organic carbon.
A seminal book by Milankovitch in 1941 proposed that the sequence of ice ages that has characterized long term changes in the Earth’s climate over the past hundreds of thousands of years was due to changes in the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth as a result of small variations in the Earth’s orientation and orbit with respect to the sun. Since then research has shown that Milankovitch cycles by themselves do not determine the timing of glacial and interglacial cycles and that we still lack a unified mechanism that links changes in Earth’s orbit to ice ages.
Evidence from Antarctic ice cores have revealed a close correlation between surface temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration for the past 800,000 years (excluding the immediate present.) A recent analysis of Antarctic blue ice has found that the close correlation between temperature CO2 extends to 1.5 million years ago during the time when the glacial/interglacial period was 40,000 years.
In contrast to West Antarctica where several large glaciers have been losing ice for decades, East Antarctica glaciers have exhibited little evidence of ice loss but NASA’s latest detailed maps of East Antarctica ice velocity and elevation show that a number of glaciers have begun to lose ice over the past decade.
June 5, 2017
Approximately 800,000 years ago something changed in the Earth’s climate system that led to the climate then following a series of approximately 100,000 year cycles. Small, predictable changes in the Earth’s orbit about the Sun act as triggers for the glacial and interglacial periods, but other factors such as ice sheet volume, CO2 concentration, and biological feedback mechanisms are also involved.
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This study reports measurements from ocean floor sediments that provide the first direct evidence that not only do variations in the primary North/South Atlantic current correlate with periods of rapid warming and slower cooling in the Northern Hemisphere during the last ice age, but that the changes in the Atlantic overturning current occurred before and likely initiated these warming/cooling cycles.
In 2009 a widely used dataset indicated that the average temperature of the Earth’s surface may have stopped warming, or that it was warming at a lower rate than the long term average. A new analysis shows that the trend for 1998–2012 is indistinguishable from the best estimate of the long trend for 1951–2012.
Air bubbles in Greenland ice cores are analyzed to compare changes in Greenland surface temperature and atmospheric methane concentration during a rapid warming event lasting 200 years during the last deglaciation. It is found that changes in Greenland surface temperature and atmospheric methane emissions occurred essentially synchronously indicating that this warming event included the tropics.
Between 2005 and 2017 the U.S. economy as measured by real GDP expanded by about 20 %. Over this same period, emissions from power generation dropped which is evidence of a decoupling between economic growth and power generation.