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  • Impact of Continental Mass Change on Rate-of-Rise of Sea Level

    Impact of Continental Mass Change on Rate-of-Rise of Sea Level

    Reference
    Baur, O., Kuhn, M. and Featherstone, W.E. 2013. Continental mass change from GRACE over 2002-2011 and its impact on sea level. Journal of Geodesy 87: 117-125.    Background
    The authors write that “present-day continental mass variation as observed by space gravimetry reveals secular mass decline and accumulation,” and that “whereas the former contributes to sea-level rise, the latter results in sea-level fall.” Therefore, they state that “consideration of mass accumulation (rather than focusing solely on mass loss) is important for reliable overall estimates of sea-level change.”

    What was done
    Employing data derived from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment – the GRACE satellite mission – Baur et al. assessed continental mass variations on a global scale, including both land-ice and land-water contributions, for 19 continental areas that exhibited significant signals. This they did for a nine-year period (2002-2011), which included “an additional 1-3 years of time-variable gravity fields over previous studies.” And to compensate for the impact of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), they applied the GIA model of Paulson et al. (2007).

    What was learned
    Over the nine years of their study, the three researchers report that the mean GIA-adjusted mass gain and mass loss in the 19 areas of their primary focus amounted to -(0.7 ± 0.4 mm/year) of sea-level fall and +(1.8 ± 0.6) mm/year of sea-level rise, for a net effect of +(1.1 ± 0.6) mm/year. Then, to obtain a figure for total sea-level change, they added the steric component of +(0.5 ± 0.5) mm/year, which was derived by Leuliette and Willis (2011), to their net result to obtain a final (geocenter neglected) result of +(1.6 ± 0.8) mm/year and a final (geocenter corrected) result of +(1.7 ± 0.8) mm/year.

    What it means
    The final geocenter-corrected result of Baur et al. is most heartening, as Chambers et al. (2012) indicate that “sea level has been rising on average by 1.7 mm/year over the last 110 years,” as is also suggested by the analyses of Church and White (2006) and Holgate (2007). Concomitantly, the air’s CO2 concentration has risen by close to a third. And, still, it has not impacted the rate-of-rise of global sea level!

    References
    Chambers, D.P, Merrifield, M.A. and Nerem, R.S. 2012. Is there a 60-year oscillation in global mean sea level? Geophysical Research Letters 39: 10.1029/2012GL052885.

    Church, J.A. and White, N.J. 2006. A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise. Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2005GL024826.

    Holgate, S.J. 2007. On the decadal rates of sea level change during the twentieth century. Geophysical Research Letters 34: 10.1029/2006GL028492.

    Paulson, A., Zhong, S. and Wahr, J. 2007. Inference of mantle viscosity from GRACE and relative sea level data. Geophysical Journal International 171: 497-508.

    Reviewed 3 July 2013

  • Female labour annual growth much higher than that of males during 2007-11

    Female labour annual growth much higher than that of males during 2007-11
    Myra Imran
     Wednesday, July 03, 2013
    From Print Edition
     12  0  1  0

    Islamabad

     

    In Punjab, only 9.46 million females were in the labour force as compared to 24.9 million males during the year 2010-11 but the average annual growth rate of the female labour force was much higher than that of the male labour force which is 8.8 per cent as compared to 2.5 per cent of male during 2007 to 2011.

     

    The interesting dynamics were mentioned in ‘Punjab Employment Trends 2013’ published by the International Labour Organization (ILO). According to the research report, the Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of both the 10+ and 15+ populations in Punjab was found above the national average for Pakistan whereas female participation rates are less than half the male participation rates (26.7 per cent vs 69.7 per cent).

     

    In terms of the gender breakup, own account workers make up the highest share (42 per cent) of employed males followed closely by paid employees (40 per cent); while a substantial majority of employed females (60 per cent) are unpaid family workers.

     

    The economically active population or labour force in the province was 34.36 million in 2010-11, up from 30.67 million in 2007-08, showing an annual average growth of four per cent during this three year period.

     

    The reports highlights the fact that the rural labour force forms the backbone of the provincial labour market, accounting for over 70 per cent of the economically active population in Punjab. In line with the overall trends for Pakistan, there exist large gender gaps in labour force participation, although these gender gaps are less pronounced than those observed for the other provinces.

     

    The report suggests that policies for promoting employment generation in the province should focus on improving the productivity of the agricultural work force, through strengthened extension services and higher outlays on agricultural research and development.

     

    The research report terms high and growing share of self-employed in employment as an important characteristic of the provincial labour market, pointing to a deterioration in the productive work dimension of decent work.

     

    It says that another cause for concern is the prevalence of child labour, particularly in the less developed rural areas of the province, which necessitates policy action to improve work under conditions of freedom and suggests the vibrant youth labour market needs special attention from provincial policy makers to harness its full potential. It appreciates the newly developed Punjab Youth Policy 2012 which according to the research envisages a number of useful interventions in this regard.

     

    The livestock sub-sector, in particular, can support higher levels of employment creation through its backward and forward linkages along the production supply chain. In the urban sector, the productivity of household enterprises can be raised by the provision of business support services including developing market linkages, credit facilities and the design and implementation of relevant technical, education and vocational training programmes.

     

    According to the Labour Force Survey (LFS), the total population of the province of Punjab in 2008 was 90.63 million, which had increased to 97.58 million by 2011, showing an average annual growth of 2.6 per cent during the period 2007-11.

     

    The report says that, the change in the age structure of the labour force due to the ongoing demographic transition in the country has resulted in a ‘youth bulge’. In view of the fact that Pakistan has a relatively large proportion (32 per cent) of uneducated youth, most of whom have little or no vocational and life skills, there is a need to provide for their health, education, and livelihood, and to engage them in activities which convert their latent energy into positive outcomes for the family, community, state and the global community.

     

    In terms of the urban-rural divide, the majority of the population in 2011 resided in rural areas of the province: i.e. nearly 66 million (68 per cent). During the period 2007-11 the annual population growth rate in urban areas was higher (3.04 per cent) than that in the rural areas (2.33 per cent).

     

  • Moniz: CO2 could enhance US oil by millions of barrels a day (video)

    Moniz: CO2 could enhance US oil by millions of barrels a day (video)

    Posted on July 1, 2013 at 10:02 am by Jennifer A. Dlouhy in Environment

     

    The future of coal-fired power may lie in still-developing technology to capture the carbon dioxide it produces and put it to work in the oil field, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz suggested.

    In an interview with Platts Energy Week, Moniz talked up the potential not just for capturing and storing the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels, but using more of it to glean oil from aging fields. Oil and gas companies are already using the method — known as enhanced oil recovery — around the United States, but Moniz sees it ramping up significantly.

    “We’re producing about 300,000 barrels per day using carbon dioxide to enhance oil recovery from older fields,” Moniz told the energy news show. “The estimates are that could increase by a factor of 10 to about 3 million barrels a day.”

    But that would require a whole lot more carbon dioxide — about 600 megatons per year. And according to Moniz, “we could only get that by capturing it from industrial sources, power plants.”

    CBO: Future bleak for carbon-cutting technology

    The Energy Department is working to accelerate some enhanced oil recovery technology and operations. For instance, it has provided about $431 million toward a project at Valero’s refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, where carbon dioxide is now being extracted from two steam methane reformers, then dried, compressed and shipped to the West Hastings oil field 20 miles south of Houston.

    Pumping the greenhouse gas underground has two benefits: Not only does it help pull more crude out of the site, but it also indefinitely stores the carbon dioxide underground.

    The Port Arthur project involves just 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — which puts the potential scale of future efforts in perspective.

    But carbon capture technology is still a long way from being commercially viable. The Energy Department is expected to play a major role in helping develop and commercialize the technology.

    Still alive: Don’t eulogize coal yet, energy execs say

    Moniz said the Energy Department’s role includes “establishing for the longer term the science, the technology and the regulatory basis for large-scale capture of CO2 and utilization and sequestration of that carbon dioxide.”

    Carbon capture technology is seen as key to winnowing the greenhouse gas released by coal-fired power and helping to keep that energy source viable as the U.S. and other countries clamp down on the emissions.

    “We are trying to prepare the future of coal in a carbon constrained world by establishing over this next decade the feasibility and the licensibility of large-scale carbon capture and sequestration,” Moniz said.

    So far, it’s off to a rocky start. Despite the Port Arthur project, larger, utility-scale operations have proved challenging and expensive.

    For example, costs have climbed for Southern Company’s bid to build an integrated gasification combined cycle plant in Mississippi, with the goal of capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from the coal used at the facility.

    President Barack Obama last week directed his Environmental Protection Agency to propose greenhouse gas emissions limits for new and existing power plants. A previous draft proposal focused on new plants — along with the relatively low price of natural gas — prompted some companies to cancel plans to build new coal-fired facilities.

    Coal struggles: Sun sets on two more coal plant projects

    Moniz told Platts he expects coal to remain a “substantial” part of the U.S. energy mix “for some time” to come. But he anticipates more power plants will switch to natural gas from coal, based largely on cost considerations.

    “There have been a bunch of coal plants that have closed. That’s been market forces. It goes back to natural gas availability at low prices,” Moniz said. “What’s been happening in the power sector over the past few years has been market-driven.”

    “There will probably be more of that, with coal being substituted for by gas, as long as prices stay low,” Moniz added.

  • Greenhouse Gas Likely Altering Ocean Foodchain: Atmospheric CO2 Has Big Consequences for Tiny

    Greenhouse Gas Likely Altering Ocean Foodchain: Atmospheric CO2 Has Big Consequences for Tiny Bacteria

    July 2, 2013 — Climate change may be weeding out the bacteria that form the base of the ocean’s food chain, selecting certain strains for survival, according to a new study.

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    In climate change, as in everything, there are winners and losers. As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and temperature rise globally, scientists increasingly want to know which organisms will thrive and which will perish in the environment of tomorrow.

    The answer to this question for nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria (bacteria that obtain energy through photosynthesis, or “blue-green algae”) turns out to have implications for every living thing in the ocean. Nitrogen-fixing is when certain special organisms like cyanobacteria convert inert — and therefore unusable — nitrogen gas from the air into a reactive form that the majority of other living beings need to survive. Without nitrogen fixers, life in the ocean could not survive for long.

    “Our findings show that CO2 has the potential to control the biodiversity of these keystone organisms in ocean biology, and our fossil fuel emissions are probably responsible for changing the types of nitrogen fixers that are growing in the ocean,” said David Hutchins, professor of marine environmental biology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and lead author of an article about this research that appeared in Nature Geoscience on June 30.

    “This may have all kinds of ramifications for changes in ocean food chains and productivity, even potentially for resources we harvest from the ocean such as fisheries production,” Hutchins said.

    Hutchins and his team studied two major groups of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria: Trichodesmium, which forms large floating colonies big enough to see with the naked eye and makes vast “blooms” in the open ocean, and Crocosphaera, which is also very abundant but is a single-celled, microscopic organism.

    Previous research showed that these two types of cyanobacteria should be some of the biggest “winners” of climate change, thriving in high CO2 levels and warmer oceans. However, those previous studies only examined one or two strains of the organisms.

    That’s where USC’s unique resource comes into play — the university is home to a massive culture library of strains and species of the organisms assembled by USC Associate Professor Eric Webb.

    Using the culture library, the team was able to show that some strains grow better at CO2 levels not seen since the start of the Industrial Revolution, while others will thrive in the future “greenhouse” Earth.

    “It’s not that climate change will wipe out all nitrogen fixers; we’ve shown that there’s redundancy in nature’s system. Rather, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide changes specifically which nitrogen fixers are likely to thrive,” Hutchins said. “And we’re not entirely certain how that will change the ocean of tomorrow.”

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  • Has the Republican Party stopped denying climate science, and will they begin participating in the solutions?

    Has the Republican Party stopped denying climate science, and will they begin participating in the solutions?

    Following President Obama’s climate plan, the answers appear to be yes and no, respectively

    Obama climate change speech

    President Barack Obama delivers his climate change speech. Photograph: Dennis Brack/Corbis

    Given that nearly 70 percent of Republicans in Congress and 90 percent of the party’s congressional leadership deny the reality of human-caused global warming, you might expect them to attack President Obama’s climate plan on scientific grounds. On the contrary, Republican politicians have critiqued President Obama’s plan almost entirely on the economics. Even Senator James Inhofe, who wrote an entire book based around the absurd premise that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” did not even touch upon climate science when responding to the climate plan.

    This is a fascinating turn of events. Perhaps Republican politicians have decided that disputing the consensus of 97% of climate research and climate experts is a losing proposition. Whatever the reason, the shift away from science denial toward the economics debate is a welcome one. As even the right-wing Washington Times admitted, remaining entrenched in climate science denial has prevented the Republican Party from becoming involved in discussions about the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the least impact on the economy.

    As a result, President Obama was forced to enforce government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, using a stick because Congress has been unable or unwilling to solve the problem with a carrot. Putting a price on greenhouse gases would create the incentive for consumers to lower their emissions, thus creating demand for innovative new green technologies. Government regulations can only penalize the worst polluters.

    It’s important to note that while carbon pricing is preferable to government regulations from an economic standpoint, Republican claims that these regulations will kill jobs and cost huge sums of money are without merit. Since the greenhouse gas regulations have not yet been developed, we can’t estimate their costs. However, construction of new low emissions power plants would create jobs, and every dollar invested in clean energy creates two to three times as many jobs as putting that same dollar into coal energy. Estimates of the costs of environmental regulations are almost always exaggerated, and so far, alarmism about the costs of these greenhouse gas regulations appear to be no exception.

    There’s also very little Republicans can do to stop these regulations. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that as long as they endanger public health or welfare (which they do), greenhouse gas emissions must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. With Democrats in control of the Senate and Presidency, efforts to undermine this Supreme Court decision via congressional legislation have no chance of passage.

    Republicans can try to score political points by criticizing President Obama for enforcing the law, but polls show that 70 to 87 percent of Americans support these greenhouse gas regulations, and even coal-heavy energy utilities appear to support them. So what other options does the Republican Party have?

    Quite simply, they can work with Democrats to craft climate legislation that would put a price on greenhouse gas emissions and replace the government regulations. Economists generally agree that this market-based approach would be even better for the economy.

    Cap and trade was originally a Republican idea as an alternative to government regulations of pollutants under the Clean Air Act. However, many political conservatives have been rallying around a simpler carbon tax approach. Although the Koch brothers managed to persuade a majority of congressional Republicans to sign a pledge to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue,” a revenue-neutral carbon tax wouldn’t violate that pledge.

    British Columbia implemented a revenue-neutral carbon tax system in 2008, to great success thus far. By offsetting the carbon taxes with decreased income taxes, British Columbia has the lowest personal income tax rates in Canada for incomes of less than $120,000 per year. Their greenhouse gas emissions have dropped faster than the rest of Canada, while their economy has done a bit better than the national average. Public support for the tax is at 64 percent and growing.

    In short, while regulating greenhouse gas emissions is an important and positive step, there are better alternatives available. But those alternatives require congressional legislation, which in turn requires that Republicans work with Democrats. Given that Congress is so dysfunctional that it could not pass gun background check legislation despite 90 percent public support, or a farm bill, climate legislation seems a tall order.

    Nevertheless, the options before Congress are to live with government greenhouse gas regulations, or pass climate legislation. Will Republicans begin to once again participate in crafting climate solutions, as some of them did as recently as 2010? If they so strongly object to President Obama’s greenhouse gas regulations, will congressional Republicans be capable of doing their jobs and coming up with a better solution?

    It may take a few years for Congress to become sufficiently functional to tackle this problem. The good news is that until that happens, government greenhouse gas regulations will begin to reduce American emissions, and there is a growing push among conservatives for Republican policymakers to once again become constructively engaged in solving the climate problem with the maximum economic benefit. With the planet continuing to warm and the climate continuing to change, it’s only a matter of time until Republicans are forced to step up to the plate and offer constructive solutions to the problem.

  • Asylum seekers: six things Kevin Rudd should learn from Malcolm Fraser

     (It should also be remembered that the Franklin Dam was a factor in  Fraser’s election loss in the 1970’s. )

    Wednesday 3 July 2013 01.03 BST

    Asylum seekers: six things Kevin Rudd should learn from Malcolm Fraser

    When it comes to refugees, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser looks leftwing compared to Labor’s current positioning. It doesn’t have to be this way

    Unidentified Australian sailors help to rescue children in the sea near Australia in 2001.
    Unidentified Australian sailors help to rescue children in the sea near Australia in 2001. Photograph: AP

    My first experience of political activism was at the age of three. It was the late 1970s. My parents were Gough Whitlam loyalists who believed the Liberal party prime minister Malcolm Fraser was the architect of the dismissal, an usurper with contempt for democracy. Mother, father and I were living in Canberra. Whenever we passed the Houses of parliament in the car, I remember that dad would silently park and mum would encourage me to take a wee beside the parliament lawn. Such was the loathing the man inspired in progressive Australia.

    Yet three decades later there is, astonishingly, much for the Labor party to learn from Fraser – especially on progressive policy. An emboldened Kevin Rudd is now aiming to harden his government’s stance on refugee boat arrivals. And in this context, Fraser – the Coalition opportunist who once blocked supply for nine months to bring down Whitlam – unexpectedly emerges as a human rights hero.

    It says much about what’s taken place in the Australian political discourse over the past 30 years that Labor foreign minister Bob Carr is today making headlines demonising “economic refugees”, and calling for a toughening of asylum approval processes. On the other hand, Fraser’s ongoing statements avowing the necessity of “a humanitarian commitment to admit refugees for resettlement” in this era of detention centres, offshore processing and “stop the boats” proselytising merely reaffirm the refugee policy that he enacted in government in the 1970s.

    In 1976, a year after Fraser became prime minister, the first “unauthorised and unexpected” boat boarded by Vietnamese refugees arrived on Australian shores; 54 more were to come. Immigration officials lobbied to have crew and passengers of all such vessels jailed and punished, but Fraser’s immigration minister refused, believing such “was a piece of racist barbarism“. Fraser himself noted that “desperate people will not be deterred”, but was left faced with political problem of his own: by February 1979, a Morgan Gallup poll found 61% of Australians wanted to limit refugee intake, while a further 28% wanted it to end completely.

    While early solutions taken by the Fraser government were to turn back large vessels from Australian waters and to (bizarrely) manually dissemble en-route boats that docked in Indonesia and Malaysia, Fraser’s deference to morality and the rule of law ultimately overrode poll unpopularity for his actions. What he went on to achieve in what Robert Manne has called the “halcyon years of Australian refugee policy” offers lessons that Labor would be sensible to heed. If Rudd or Tony Abbott should wish to restore Australia’a international human rights reputation as well as preserve the dignity of human life, either party leader would do well to study his experience – good and bad. To start with, they could do worse than:

    1. Control the language used to tackle the issue

    A mistake made by Fraser’s government was to allow the nefarious term “queue-jumper” to enter the political lexicon with an off-hand comment made by one of his ministers. The term – presumptive in meaning and unfactual, given Australia’s UN human rights commitments to refugee intake – was seized upon to legitimise xenophobia as an act of (false) justice. It is vital that policy-makers refuse to countenance any inflammatory and misleading language racist opponents seek to validate.

    2. Work with foreign governments to expand refugee intake at place of origin

    Fraser’s means of “stopping the boats” was to negotiate with the refugees’ origin or neighbouring nations, as well as Australian allies and the UN, to facilitate orderly migration processes. In the case of Vietnam, the Vietnamese government minimised its own exposure to human rights criticism by facilitating the non-violent immigration to Australia of dissidents and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese. Under Fraser, more than 200,000 refugee migrants were therefore able to arrive in Australia peacefully and by plane, their immigration pre-processed, rather than risk the hazards of the journey by boat and the subsequent deprivation of detention. Arrivals in boats still occurred, but were of far fewer numbers.

    3. Recognise that deterrent policies are completely ineffectual

    Fraser himself made the point nearly a year ago to the ABC: “deterrent policies” pursued by both Liberal and Labor governments do not work. As the man pointed out: “a democratic government such as Australia’s … could not be nasty enough to match the terror, the persecution that is meted out by the Taliban or meted out by possibly both sides in Sri Lanka and a lot of other places … We can’t cut off the heads of young Afghani girls and send them back to Afghanistan and say you better not come to Australia we’re as bad as the Taliban – therefore nothing we can do will be a deterrent.”

    4. Build cultural infrastructure and acknowledge the entrepreneurialism of migrant culture

    The financial arguments against enfranchising a refugee community within Australia are minimal. The “migrant work ethic” has been the economic engine of Australian prosperity since Aboriginal settlement. Fraser’s government worked with established migrant communities, provided funds for English language teaching and improved translator services to enable migrants to create their own economic opportunities in their new home. Adam Bandt’s fight for the Migrant Community Employment Fund, which has just been funded, is some progress in this area; unemployment rates for qualified job-seekers in newly-arrived migrant communities have been up to 85% due to lack of infrastructure.

    5. Expand the humanitarian migration intake

    Australia is one of the most prosperous nations on earth, with a stable democracy and an economy that has grown by 14% in three years. Yet we are ranked 49th in the world for refugee intake. Calls for increasing our disbursement of refugee visas from the 13,000 of last year were heeded by the Gillard government and increased to 20,000 with plans to raise them further to 27,000 over five years. These are enormously positive steps, yet it’s worth noting that Australia’s capacity for intake is far greater than these numbers: we did, after all, resettle vast numbers of post second world war migrants when our population and infrastructure was far smaller. Making acknowledgment of persecution or cultural distress a priority criteria for migration does not compromise our capacity for an orderly intake, and proactively minimises the need for boat arrival.

    6. Stop the political pointscoring and negotiate bipartisan solutions around international co-operation and moral principles

    As prime minister, Whitlam opposed expanding Australia’s humanitarian refugee intake due to a fear of importing divisive communities that would “balkanise” Australia. Facing the refugee influx from Indochina under his own prime ministership, Fraser negotiated with foreign governments, refugee agencies and the UN to expand facilitated refugee intake on the ground, and then presented a moral argument to Whitlam to support the humanity of his structural proposals. Whitlam did, and bipartisan support validated the moral authority of what had been an unpopular policy to the electorate. More than 200,000 new Australian citizens arrived and our nation is all the richer for the result.

    Analysing the sentiments on Fraser’s leadership on humanitarian policy strikes at the current Australian political conscience like an “elegant weapon from a more civilised age“. These days, of course, we do leadership in Australian politics with handmade shivs and all the conscience of a poll-driven prison brawl.

    We cannot, as a nation, allow refugee policy to be dictated by xenophobes through our political leaders. We as Australian individuals are indivisible from a collective moral consciousness of which our nationhood renders us a part. As Fraser himself wrote in March this year: “every Australian carries some part of the guilt for asylum-seeker policies that are inhumane and brutal.”

    Hear, hear, Mr Fraser. And I’m genuinely sorry that I pissed on your lawn.