Climate change causing deep ocean churning

The oceans around Hawai`i are changing in many ways—and the latest to be detected is how fast the great currents flow.

Certainly the seas are warming, are acidifying, are rising, but now thereʻs evidence they are churning in ways that had not been predicted.

The evidence has been building. Five years ago, a paper in Science by Scripps researchers Dean Roemmich and John Gilson reported the great South Pacific Gyre had been increasing in speed, driven by increased surface winds. 

Those winds drive currents, and the currents have been speeding up for the past quarter-century, says a new report in Science Advances. 

"We have found a strong acceleration in the global mean ocean circulation over the past two decades. The acceleration is deep-reaching and particularly prominent in the global tropical oceans and can be attributed to the planetary intensification of surface winds since the 1990s," the authors wrote.

The currents not only are increasing in energy by 15 percent a decade, but they are also driving ocean mixing between shallow and deep waters.

"The increasing trend in kinetic energy is particularly prominent in the global tropical oceans, reaching depths of thousands of meters," say the authors, Chinese, American and Australian researchers Shijian Hu, Janet Sprintall, Cong Guan, Michael J. McPhaden, Fan Wang, Dunxin Hu and Wenju Cai. The paper is entitled "Deep-reaching acceleration of global mean ocean circulation over the past two decades."

What that means is complicated. It can mean that more atmospheric heating can be trapped and delivered into the deep oceans, reducing some of the immediate surface impacts of global warming, but also changing conditions for marine life in the deep oceans. It can change weather patterns on land and over the seas.

There is still a lot to know. Most of this paper is based on observations that go down 2000 meters (a little more than a mile), and it is still uncertain whatʻs happening in the very deep oceans.

"The data-void abyssal ocean is likely to be important. Thus, intensive observations that monitor the deep global ocean circulation are urgently needed not only for understanding past conditions but also for reducing uncertainty in future projections of the global ocean circulation," the authors say.

Wind speed is driving the increased water speed, and wind speeds are expected to continue to increase.

As little as 10 years ago, scientists were concerned that climate change was quieting the worldʻs winds, but even as they were writing those papers, the winds were picking up, dramatically.

©Jan TenBruggencate 2020

Fiddling as the planet burns. Climate change is upon us.

We saw it coming, but we did not know it would come so fast.

Climate change, long a threat for future decades, for the grandchildren, is here now.

In part, after a century of comparatively stable climate, the very concept of sudden dramatic change seemed so bizarre that many scientists have underplayed the possibilities.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in early years issued conservative predictions. Some say the authors felt nobody would pay attention to the more alarmist predictions. Bizarrely, when scientists couldnʻt agree on how much Antarctic and Greenland ice melting would add to sea level, they just left those contributions out of their calculations entirely, vastly understating possible sea level rise.

In the Hawaiian Islands, king tides now regularly flood low coastal areas that 50 years ago and 25 years ago were always dry. Thatʻs going to keep getting worse.

The IPCC is getting up to speed and has been more realistic in its 2018 report. It has had to: "One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1 degree of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes," said Panmao Zhai, co-chair of IPPCʻs Working Group 1.

In Hawai`i, as temperatures rise, mosquitoes are able to survive at higher and higher elevations—where they carry fatal diseases to Hawaiian forest birds. I attended a meeting last week at which a bird researcher, when asked what was happening right now with Kaua`i forest birds, he said "theyʻre quietly dying of malaria."

Recently 11,000 scientists, exhausted with inaccurately conservative predictions, raised the alarm in a paper in Bioscience Magazine. There is an "urgent need for action," they said. 

Our planet has a fever, itʻs just starting on a long uphill trajectory, and so far, weʻre doing virtually nothing about it.

In our Hawaiian Islands, reduced rainfall associated with climate change has parched forests, and exacerbated wildfires that have burned thousands of acres on all the major islands. 

So, if we continue doing too little, itʻll get a little hotter and weʻll just to adapt, right? Wrong. All the evidence suggests it will keep getting worse, keep getting hotter, keep getting less tolerable.

The central Pacific—our part of the ocean—is seeing corals bleaching and dying. They are impacted by changes in water temperature, changes in ocean acidity, changes in current patterns, all related to climate change.

Here is the summary for policymakers issued by the IPCC in October 2018.

Little blogs like this one have been raising the alarm for years, with little apparent impact on policymakers. Examples? Here from January this year, here from 2016,  here from 2015, here from 2012, here from 2010, here from 2009. And those are just a few of the articles. 

But itʻs hard to feel isolated, because mainstream science has been suggesting ever more alarming scenarios. And while smaller responses to climate change might have worked in the past, what is now required is perhaps more alarming than the threat.

"Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values."

That is from a paper, "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene," published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

It suggests that if we donʻt act fast and now, the warming instead of stabilizing, will run out of control. That we are on a path to a tipping point, a threshhold, that will keep driving despite our intervention: "If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies."

In the Hawaiian Islands, on several islands, coastal roads are already being eroded away, forcing highway engineers to consider alternative routes, or extraordinary coastal armoring scenarios.

Here is the list of the more than 10,000 scientists who signed the extraordinary paper in Bioscience. They represent 153 countries, including the U.S., China, Russia, Canada, India, France, most of the nations on the planet, and all the major nations.

Their message is stark: "Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate. An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."

It is not a long paper. Please consider reading it. Hereʻs the link again.

And yet globally, human populations continue to rise. Our energy use continues to rise. Weʻre raising more ruminant animals. Our forest cover is dropping.  In Hawai`i, we celebrate increased air travel as a good thing, we keep buying gas guzzler vehicles, we buy our air conditioners as we complain about the heat.

The first rule about holes is that if youʻre in one, stop digging.

Our Legislature this year started the session with a laudable array of bills to address climate change, and then killed almost all of them. Nathan Eagle at Honolulu Civil Beat reviewed the distressing result. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

A chance to experience life on Mars. Interested?

Want to experience life on Mars?

 

The University of Hawai`i, through a NASA-funded research project, is offering the opportunity to be a mock Barsoomian.

But consider carefully.

(Image: Bedrock in the central uplift area of an impact crater on Mars. Credit: NASA.)

There will be isolation. There will be space suits. But there are unlikely to be blasters, little green men or much in the way of excitement.

The Hawai`i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) program at the Hawai`i state university is looking for people willing to spend eight months in relative isolation, as part of a program to figure out how humans respond to extreme conditions. 

Participants would spend most of their eight-month mock-Martian period in a geodesic dome at 8,200 feet on the side of Mauna Loa. The program calls it “an isolated Mars-like environment.”

A group of people will live together in tight quarters, separated from humanity, to help our space agency understand for a real Mars mission what kinds of people they should pick, what mixes of sexes they need, what kinds of stuff they need to help keep them sane, and so forth.

“These types of studies are essential for NASA to understand how teams of astronauts will perform on long-duration space exploration missions, such as those that will be required for human travel to Mars. The studies will also allow researchers to recommend strategies for crew composition for such missions, and to determine how best to support such crews while they are working in space,” HI-SEAS says.

It’s not for everyone, but in many ways, it’s not a whole lot different than the ocean voyages that brought foreigners to Hawai`i two centuries ago. Missionary Lucy Thurston spent 157 days on her 1819-1820 voyage from New England to Kawaihae. A little over 5 months. 

HI-SEAS is currently planning two eight-month missions, one January to September 2017 and one January to September 2018.

Actually, eight months isn’t all that long. A group of mock Martians is, as this is written, completing a 12-month stay at the dome. It is HI-SEAS Mission Four. They get out at the end of August 2016.

The first such long-stay experiment was for four months, then another four-monther, then eight months, followed by the current year-long stay. Right now, there are six folks living in the 1200-square-foot dome.

Interested? A preliminary application form is here.

Some of the preliminary requirements are these:

“Applicants must be between 21 and 65 years of age. They must be tobacco-free, able to pass a class 2 flight physical examination, and able to understand, speak and write fluently in English. They must meet the basic requirements of the NASA astronaut program (i.e. an undergraduate degree in a science or engineering discipline, three years of experience or graduate study, etc.); in addition, they will be evaluated for experience considered valuable in the program, such as experience in complex operational environments.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

Need to abandon Earth? Here are 49 alternative planets.

If we needed to abandon the planet we now know where to go—or at least where to look.

University of Hawai`i astronomers have helped identify dozens of planets that are the right size and the right distance from the sun, to potentially sustain life as we know it.

(Image: Habitable zones around different suns. Credit: Chester Harman. View a large version here.)

Astronomers from the Kepler Habitable Zone Working Group, which includes Nader Haghighipour of the University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy, writing in the Astrophysical Journal, have described 49 such planets.

Each is within a sun’s habitable zone—not too hot, not too cold—and is less than twice the radius of the Earth, which is required to have a rocky planet. The habitable zone is defined as that zone in which a rocky planet can have liquid water on its surface—something many Earth life forms require.

The team used NASA’s Kepler space observatory to identify the potential new human home planets. But they are also very cautious—just because it’s the right size and in the right zone doesn’t necessarily mean it actually is habitable. But it provides a first step.

“The HZ is primarily a target selection tool rather than any guarantee regarding habitability,” the authors write.

This also doesn’t address how we’d get there. Most such planets, even with technology far advanced from ours, could not be reached within the lifetimes of humans.

An abstract of the paper is here.

A press release on the report is here.

The authors of the paper are Stephen R. Kane, Michelle L. Hill, James F. Kasting, Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Elisa V. Quintana, Thomas Barclay, Natalie M. Batalha, William J. Borucki, David R. Ciardi, Natalie R. Hinkel, Lisa Kaltenegger, Franck Selsis, Guillermo Torres and Hachichipour. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

Of science, mulberries and Leonardo da Vinci

There is a lot to be said for figuring things out.

Which is to say, something very different than what we find in a lot of our public discourse. Likes and copying links are cheerleading, not informed conversation.

Figuring things out is science: You have problem, you test and probe and try looking at it from different perspectives, and you try to develop a solution. And then you test the solution.

Picking berries off my mulberry tree, I was frustrated that I’d circle the tree clockwise and pick every ripe berry I saw, then turn around and see there were lots more I’d missed.

So I went back around and picked counterclockwise, now seeing berries that had previously been hidden by leaves. 

But there were still unpicked berries. How was I missing them? I went into the canopy and looked out, and now there were more ripe berries that had been hidden from the outside, but visible from the inside. 

To do a good harvest, I needed to also pick backwards and inside-out. Look at things from different perspectives.

I’d figured something out.

(Image: Mulberries on teak leaves in a blue bucket.)

 

Which recalls the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s 72 page reflection on stuff he’d figured out in the early 1500s. Microsoft’s Bill Gates in 1994 paid $30.8 million for the Codex—more than anyone had ever paid for any book.

If you could afford it, and he could, why wouldn’t you want to own a document half a millenium old, and by, well, Leonardo da Vinci? 

(Image: A page from the da Vinci document sometimes known as Codex Leicester, sometimes Codex Hammer, which perhaps now ought to be Codex Gates. Credit: Leonardo da Vinci.)

I keep a warm thought for Bill Gates, because on top of all the tech and charitable work he does, he took the codex, scanned it and made it available to the world.

Leonardo Da Vinci was and is best known as a painter (“Mona Lisa,” “The Last Supper")

But he was also one of the most figure-it-out people our little blue planet has ever produced.

In the Codex, among diverse other things, he figures out earthshine. This is that dim image of a full moon you see when the moon is in crescent. It is caused by the sun’s reflection off the earth—earthshine. It was proven a century later, but he figured it out and wrote about it.

NASA talks about that, crediting da Vinci with “a wild kind of imagination…one thing Leonardo had in abundance.”

One of the cool things about the Codex is that da Vinci wrote it in mirror script—he wrote it inside-out and backwards. Was it code to make it harder for others to read, or did he simply have the left-handed kind of brain that made it easier to write that way? That’s still debated.

I doubt that this was his message, but he might have been trying to say that you need to look at stuff inside out and backwards if you’re going to understand it.

We need more of that kind of thinking.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

Circling the globe on the power of the sun: Solar Impulse II ready to leave Honolulu

There’s so much going on in the solar world, but the concept of flying around the world in a plane powered by solar cells is one step beyond.

Hawai`i has some solar flying cred. (Image, the Helios flying wing off Kaua`i. Credit: NASA.)

AeroVironment’s  solar plane Helios flew off Kaua`i’s Pacific Missile Range Facility early in the last decade. Ultimately, the experimental unmanned aircraft crashed in June 2003 in rough weather, but not until it had set some records, including a world record altitude in 2001 for non-rocket-powered flight.

The Helios flying wing reached 96,863 feet on the back of some solar cells and propellers.

Its other mission was to prove that solar planes could fly continuously, using fuel cells to store energy during the day, which could be used to power the plane at night.

(Image: Solar Impulse II over Hawai`i. Credit: Solar Impulse.)

It was Solar Impulse I that accomplished that goal in 2010, staying aloft for 26 hours.

That was then. Today, another solar aircraft, Solar Impulse II is parked in Honolulu, ready for the next leg of its flight around the world. That mission was delayed last year when its flight across the western Pacific damaged some of its batteries.

Solar Impulse II is an idea 15 or more years old, and in some ways it is a descendant of the Helios. While Helios was flying, back in 2002, Solar Impulse pilot Bertrand Piccard consulted with AeroVironment’s late Paul McCready, one of the visionaries in solar-powered flight.

The new Solar Impulse, completed in 2014, is a feather-light but gangly aircraft, with honeycombed wings that stretch 236 feet tip to tip. Its upper surfaces are covered by photovoltaic cells. It has four electric motors powering four propellers, each powered by lithium-ion batteries.

Looks a bit like a giant dragonfly.

SI II launched on its global tour in 2015 from Abu Dhabi. Pilots Piccard and André Borschberg took turns flying the one-seat aircraft. They crossed Asia, hopping to stops in Oman, India, Myanmar, China and finally Japan, and then made their longest flight, from Japan to Hawai`i, last year.

The Japan-Hawai`i leg was the world’s longest-ever solar-powered flight. Pilot Borschberg stayed aloft 8 minutes short of 118 hours. But in doing so, his batteries overheated and were damaged, requiring replacement. That, and weather, kept SI II grounded on O`ahu for most of a year.

But the organizers say they are days from a new liftoff, aimed at crossing the rest of the Pacific and then continuing around the world, back to their Abu Dhabi starting point. The remaining flights are expected to all be shorter than the Japan-Hawai`i marathon of five days aloft.

The eastern Pacific flight's conclusion will be determined by wind or weather.  The plane could land anywhere up or down the West Coast, or as far inland as Arizona.

SI II, in anticipation of taking off in mid-April, performed several takeoffs, extended flights and landings in late March from the runway at Kalaeloa with Piccard at the controls.

In a blog post, Piccard wrote: “It was beautiful to fly #Si2 under the full moon tonight and I really enjoyed it. I even flew with the window open to feel the night breeze. My second

landing was the best: a kiss landing. We call it like that because the plane touches down so smoothly that you can barely feel it.”

Here is a YouTube video on the mission. Here is the Solar Impulse website. The mission is to send the world a message about the potential of clean fuels. Here is their clean fuels website.

You can subscribe to get updates on the voyage here. The most recent information we have is that it should leave within two weeks.

When the Solar Impulse II does take off for its long voyage to the northeast, it will pass over hundreds of Hawaiian rooftops outfitted with the same technology that is keeping this plucky airborne adventurer aloft.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016