The Annual Meeting of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is taking place in Chicago this week.

Some Status notes:

CO2 and Sea Level . . . Things are worse than we thought.

From presentations at the meeting, the hard evidence is continuing to mount that damage to our world’s “commons” from human CO2 emissions is accelerating. Basically, it is going to be much “worse” than the very worst predicted.

How could that be?

Chris Field, Stanford University, reported and described the growth of carbon emissions -- which had been increasing nearly 1% per year all the way through the 1990s -- suddenly more than doubled to 3.5% per year growth between 2000 and 2007.

Image:NOAA, Mauna Loa CO2 Record

What happened to cause this accelerated rate? The increase turned out to be “economic growth” in India and China, but mostly China. The real problem comes from China’s vast coal energy supply – a supply almost equivalent to the coal of the United States. China has consciously moved to building and operating dirty filthy coal power plants. Coal is a bad fossil fuel; it produces more CO2 per unit of energy produced -- than any other fossil fuel.

However, the U.S. still emits far more CO2 per capita than China.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

Conservative Sea Level Change:

Sea Level rise is real, unrelenting – and changing. But it is rising.

Anny Cazenave of the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales in Toulouse, France, presented very precise sea level measurements made by satellite.

The work shows that the sea level rise of 1.7 mm per year since the 60's as reported by the IPCC in 2007, should now be factored into the data from satellite showing average sea level rise of 3.35 mm per year from 1993 through 2008. (This is 13 years, and amounts to a total of 43.6 mm for the period, about 1.7 inches in a little over a decade).

Image: NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Sciences

Sea level is not rising for the same reasons now as it was just a few years ago.

Two things cause global sea level to rise.

One factor in the rise of sea level is water's thermal expansion, a result of heat making the water warmer occupying more volume in the ocean basins. The maximum density of water occurs at 3.98 Celsius, (39.164 F) a very cold liquid.

The other is because more water flows into the oceans from glaciers and ice sheets, transferring water volume on land to volume in the ocean.

Cazenave says water stopped thermally expanding, perhaps temporarily, a few years ago. Why the expansion stopped is not clear, but is being studied. However, sea level kept on rising, which clearly means that the water had to come from glaciers and ice locked until melting, to the land.

Cazenave checked measurements of ice melt from sheets of ice and glaciers. In the past, the researchers showed land ice melting accounted for only 40% of sea level rise, leaving thermal expansion as the predominant source, especially between 1993 and 2003, “Now” since 2003, this ice melt accounts for 80% of sea level rise.

Additional notes: (Les Porter)

Thermal expansion of the ocean water could be offset by the denser cold water entering the ocean -- so that offset is being studied.

Clearly, however, thousands of cubic miles of "cold" ice melt water will still push sea level higher. When that cold water also warms, thermal volume increases will resume, sea level rise will continue. The threshold crossing seems to have occurred and means a period (Decades to Hundreds of years?) of cold water entry into the ocean as glacial melting continues. Now and for a substantial period ahead of us, this cold water adds most to rise of sea level and delays the continued eventual simple contribution of thermal expansion to sea level rise. The melting of high mountain ice, the ice caps, and glaciers, and the consequential increase in sea level directly connects to the continued emission of CO2 from fossil sources.