What’s Going On in The Gulf of Aden?

USGS is reporting a very unusual swarm of significant earthquakes starting early this morning in the sea between Africa and the Arabian peninusla, right off the coast of Yemen, and in one of the world’s most important and busiest shipping lanes.

But, earthquake swarms happen, even in places that are not normally known for seismic activity. What’s unusual about this particular group of earthquakes?
In this case, it seems that the vast majority of the quakes are happening at almost exactly a depth of 10 kilometers; over 20 earthquakes have occurred at that depth since the swarm began. I’m no statistician, but that seems like a pretty exceptionally unlikely scenario, especially when the region was entirely quiet in terms of seismic activity as of yesterday. It would definitely be interesting to see what real geologists make of it.
Below is a screenshot from the USGS earthquake tracking site, taken early afternoon today, and covering today and yesterday’s major seismic activity worldwide; We’ll update with more information if anything newsworthy develops.

Cloud Modelling Suggests Greater Global Warming

 

A new paper published in the Journal of Climate has shone the light on the inefficiency that currently exists in the modelling of clouds in climate models. The authors of the paper presented a new approach that will help in understanding the clouds role in and their response to global warming.
“All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate,” noted lead author Axel Lauer at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) at UHM. “It is unfortunate that the global models’ greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming.”
Prior to the paper there had been several ineffective methods for modelling clouds, of which no two could agree on the same role and response.
The authors of the study created a model representing only a small portion of the atmosphere over the eastern Pacific Ocean and adjacent land areas in an attempt to successfully simulate the key features of the region’s present-day cloud fields, including its reaction to El Nino.
The successful simulation was then cast a hundred years into the future in an effort to guess at the clouds response to global warming. The end result was a tendency for clouds to thin and cloud cover to reduce, a result that was more pronounced than in any other previous model.
“If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate,” co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, “then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see.”
Source: International Pacific Research Centre

Reality and Need Separated by 5 Gigatonnes

A report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has outlined the “emissions gap” between where nations are currently heading, in terms of their emissions mitigation, and where science says we need to be, by the time we hit 2020.
According to the report, nations are capable of delivering almost 60% of the emissions reductions necessary to keep global temperatures under a 2 degree Celsius rise, but only if the pledges made at the climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 are met.
The report states that in order to keep temperatures below a 2 degree Celsius rise on temperatures in the 1990s, global emissions need to peak within the next 10 years and drop to an equivalent of 44 gigatonnes of CO2 in 2020.The report also states the following;

• Under a business-as-usual scenario, annual emissions of greenhouse gases could be around 56 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2020. As a point of reference, global emissions were estimated to be around 48 gigatonnes in 2009;
• Fully implementing the pledges and intentions associated with the Copenhagen Accord could, in the best case identified by the group, cut emissions to around 49 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2020;
• This would leave a gap of around 5 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent that needs to be bridged over the coming decade – an amount equal to the emissions of all the world’s cars, buses and trucks in 2005;
• In the worst case identified in the report – where countries follow their lowest ambitions and accounting rules set by negotiators are lax rather than strict – emissions could be as high as 53 gigatonnes in 2020, only slightly lower than business as usual projections.

“I encourage all Parties to make good on their national mitigation pledges, and to further progress within the negotiations as well as through strengthened efforts on the ground to curb emissions,” said UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. “There is no time to waste. By closing the gap between the science and current ambition levels, we can seize the opportunity to usher in a new era of low-carbon prosperity and sustainable development for all.”
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, says that “there is a gap between the science and current ambition levels. But, what this report shows is that the options on the table right now in the negotiations can get us almost 60 per cent of the way there. This is a good first step.”
Source: United Nations Environment Programme
Image Source: iagoarchangel