“This forecast bleaching episode will be caused by increased water temperatures and is the kind of event we can expect on a regular basis if average global temperatures rise above 2 degrees,” said Richard Leck, Climate Change Strategy Leader for WWF’s Coral Triangle Program.

The bleaching, predicted to occur between now and February, could have a devastating impact on coral reef ecosystems, killing coral and destroying food chains. There would be severe impacts for communities in Australia and the region, who depend on the oceans for their livelihoods.

The Coral Triangle, stretching from the Philippines to Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, is home to 75 per cent of all known coral species. More than 120 million people rely on its marine resources.

“Regular bleaching episodes in this part of the world will have a massive impact on the region’s ability to sustain local communities,” said Leck. “In the Pacific many of the Small Island Developing States, such as the Solomon Islands, rely largely on the coast and coastal environments such as coral reefs for food supply. This is a region where alternative sources of income and food are limited.

“Time is crucial and Australia needs to step up to the plate. Following the government’s lack of resolve to seriously reduce future domestic carbon emissions, Australia has a huge role to play in assisting Coral Triangle countries and people to adapt to the changes in their climate.“

The Australian government this week announced a 2020 target for reducing its greenhouse gas pollution by 5 per cent, which WWF criticised as completely inadequate. Reductions of at least 25 per cent by 2020 are needed to set the world on a pathway to meaningful cuts in greenhouse pollution.

Australia’s Coral Sea, which will also be affected by coral bleaching and climate change, is a pristine marine wilderness covering almost 1,000,000 square kilometres and is extraordinarily rich in marine life, including sharks and turtles, with a series of spectacular reefs rising thousands of metres from the sea floor.

WWF is urging the Australian government to declare the Coral Sea a marine protected area, as well as working to establish a network of marine protected areas that will assist ocean environments to adapt to the changes caused by rising temperatures, and to absorb the impacts from human activity.

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New research shows that we should be looking to the ground, not the sky, to see where climate change could have its most perilous impact on life on Earth — global warming actually changes the molecular structure of organic matter in soil.

“Soil contains more than twice the amount of carbon than does the atmosphere, yet, until now, scientists haven’t examined this significant carbon pool closely,” saidMyrna J. Simpson, principal investigator and associate professor of environmental chemistry at UTSC. “Through our research, we’ve sought to determine what soils are made up of at the molecular level and whether this composition will change in a warmer world.”

Soil organic matter is what makes dirt fertile and able to support plant life – both of which are especially important for agriculture. Organic matter retains water in the soil and prevents erosion. Natural processes of decomposition of soil organic matter provide plants and microbes with the energy source and water they need to grow, and carbon is released into the atmosphere as a by-product of this process. Warming temperatures are expected to speed up this process which will increase the amount of CO2 that is transferred to the atmosphere.

“From the perspective of agriculture, we can’t afford to lose carbon from the soil because it will change soil fertility and enhance erosion” said Simpson. “Alternatively, consider all the carbon locked up in permafrost in the Arctic. We also need to understand what will happen to the stored carbon when microbes become more active under warmer temperatures.”

Priot to Simpson’s research, scientists didn’t know much about soil’s molecular composition. Part of the reason is that, from a chemical perspective, soil is difficult to analyze due to its many components, including bacteria, fungi and an array of fresh, partially degraded, or old plant material. Simpson’s team, which includes Professors Dudley Williams and Andre Simpson as research collaborators, is uniquely positioned to address this new frontier. The team uses a NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) facility – the only NMR facility in Canada specifically dedicated to environmental research – to gain a detailed view of soil’s molecular structure and reactivity.

In their current study, Simpson’s team used an outdoor field experiment in the valley behind the UTSC campus to ensure natural ecosystem processes were preserved. Electrodes warmed the test soil between three and six degrees through winter and summer seasons, over a 14-month period. Throughout the test period, the team analyzed the molecular composition of soil samples.

To anticipate emissions from the burning of fuel and to estimate how it will impact the climate can be done if we know how and when global oil production will peak. But scientists and analysts have debated over this problem in the past years and have been unable to come up with a precise answer. But Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York have considered a wide range of fossil fuel consumption scenarios. Published Aug. 5 in the American Geophysical Union’s Global Biogeochemical Cycles, their research showed that the increasing percentage of carbon dioxide can be kept under a safety line as long as emmissions from coal are evenly dispersed globally.

“This is the first paper in the scientific literature that explicitly melds the two vital issues of global peak oil production and human-induced climate change,” Kharecha said. “We’re illustrating the types of action needed to get to target carbon dioxide levels.”

But why is it bad to have to much carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere ? It’s bad because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases effectively absorb thermal infrared radiation, emitted by the Earth’s surface, by the atmosphere itself due to the same gases, and by clouds. Atmospheric radiation is emitted to all sides, including downward to the Earth’s surface. Thus greenhouse gases trap heat within the surface-troposphere system. It is believed that global warming will become dangerous if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds a concentration of approximately 450 parts per million. That’s a 61 percent increase from the pre-industrial era but just 17 percent more than the actual level of 385 parts per million.

An important source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the volcanoes. However, emissions of CO₂ by human activities (mostly deforestation and the burning of fossil fuel) are currently more than 130 times greater than the quantity emitted by volcanoes, amounting to about 27 billion tonnes per year.

Kharecha and Hansen came up with 5 different carbon dioxide scenarios, each scenario reflecting different estimates for the global production peak of fossil fuels, the timing of which depends on reserve size, recoverability and technology.

The first scenario estimated carbon dioxide levels if emissions from fossil fuels are unconstrained and follow along “business as usual,” growing by two percent annually until half of each reservoir has been recovered, after which emissions begin to decline by two percent annually. The remaining forth considered the previous mentioned dispersing of coal, reduction of coal consumption and/or improvements in coal burning technologies.

The unconstrained “business as usual” scenario resulted in a level of atmospheric carbon dioxide that more than doubled the pre-industrial level and from about 2035 onward levels exceed the 450 parts per million threshold of this study. Even when low-end estimates of reserves were assumed, the threshold was exceeded from about 2050 onwards. However, the other four scenarios resulted in carbon dioxide levels that peaked in various years but all fell below the prescribed cap of 450 parts per million by about 2080 at the latest, with levels in two of the scenarios always staying below the threshold.

“Because coal is much more plentiful than oil and gas, reducing coal emissions is absolutely essential to avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change brought about by atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration exceeding 450 parts per million,” Kharecha said. “The most important mitigation strategy we recommend – a phase-out of carbon dioxide emissions from coal within the next few decades – is feasible using current or near-term technologies.”

There are two main ways in which warming glaciers raise sea level: they add more water as they melt and they also add water when ice breaks off from glacial flows. The incidence of this latter phenomenon has soared in recent years .  Some glaciers draining on the southern Greenland Ice Sheet have been doing so much to the mystification of glaciologists. Unable to model such accelerated ice losses, members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declined to include them in their widely cited projection of up to 60 centimeters of sea level rise by 2100.

The new, higher sea level rise “is a useful number,” says glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in State College. “It’s a reality check.” Geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University agrees. “Where these guys end up is plausible.” Even 1 meter of sea level rise “is a big deal,” he notes, as it would threaten people in many parts of the world.