Climate News: The Long and the Short

In terms of scope and long-term effect, the biggest climate news of the past week was about East Antarctica, contained in research by an international team published in Nature Geoscience.  The Washington Post summarized the import:

"A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea level rise.

Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity."

This research is preliminary, requiring data that now is likely to be sought before this year is out.  But the implications of greater than previously estimated melting in Antarctica adding some 20 feet to sea level rise expected before last year are enormous.  These levels will not be totally achieved for decades, perhaps a century or more, but they suggest profound changes to our coasts and everything now on them well before that.

At the Earth's opposite pole, the accelerating loss of Arctic sea ice--which hit a record low winter peak this year, it was revealed a few days ago--has both long term implications for sea level rise and short term relationships to our weather, as seen the past several winters in the US and elsewhere.

The likelihood that weather patterns now and in the near future are changing due to climate crisis phenomena, perhaps for a long time to come, received more support this past week.  According to one report, the nature of the new El Nino adds to suggestions that we're about to jump into a new climate and weather reality, characterized by global heating and local effects including more violent storms with more precipitation, and continued drought where this is drought now:

“One way of thinking about global warming from the human influences is that it's not just a gradual increase, but perhaps it's more like a staircase, and we're about to go up an extra step to a new level,” says climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research."

Though heat released from the Pacific is more and more predicted to have this temperature jump effect, that's on top of a very consistent pattern of increasing global temperatures.  Last week NOAA announced February 2015 was among the hottest Februarys on record, and the first two months of this year suggest 2015 will be hotter than the record-breaking 2014.  But February is notable for another historical reason, this article in Slate notes:

"It’s been exactly 30 years since the last time the world was briefly cooler than its 20th-century average. Every single month since February 1985 has been hotter than the long-term average—that’s 360 consecutive months."