Oceans rising faster, ice melting more

‘Climate change is already irreversible’

NEW YORK, Sept 25, (AP): Due to climate change, the world’s oceans are getting warmer, rising higher, losing oxygen and becoming more acidic at an ever-faster pace and melting even more ice and snow, a grim international science assessment concludes.

But that’s nothing compared to what Wednesday’s special United Nationsaffiliated oceans and ice report says is coming if global warming doesn’t slow down: three feet of sea rise by the end of the century, many fewer fish, weakening ocean currents, even less snow and ice, stronger and wetter hurricanes and nastier El Nino weather systems.

“The oceans and the icy parts of the world are in big trouble and that means we’re all in big trouble too,” said one of the report’s lead authors, Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. “The changes are accelerating.”

These changes will not just hurt the 71% of the world covered by the oceans or the 10% covered in ice and snow, but it will harm people, plants, animals, food, societies, infrastructure and the global economy, according to the special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat from carbon pollution in the air, as well as much of the carbon dioxide itself. The seas warm more slowly than the air but trap the heat longer with bigger side effects – and the report links these waters with Earth’s snow and ice, called the cryosphere, because their futures are interconnected. “The world’s oceans and cryosphere have been taking the heat for climate change for decades. The consequences for nature and humanity are sweeping and severe,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and a deputy assistant administrator for research at the US National Oceanic and

Russia plans to launch three astronauts to the space station Thursday, including the first person from the United Arab Emirates bound for orbit. (AP)

Bid to fight waste:

A southern Philippine city has turned discarded plastic bottles into flowers to fill a garden of thousands of colourful tulips, capturing Atmospheric Administration. The report found: – Seas are now rising at one-seventh of an inch (3.66 millimeters) a year, which is 2.5 times faster than the rate from 1900 to 1990.

– The world’s oceans have already lost 1% to 3% of the oxygen in their upper levels since 1970 and will lose more as warming continues.

– From 2006 to 2015, the ice melting from Greenland, Antarctica and the world’s mountain glaciers has accelerated and is now losing 720 billion tons (653 billion metric tons) of ice a year.

– Arctic June snow cover has shrunk more than half since 1967, down nearly 1 million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers).

– Arctic sea ice in September, the annual minimum, is down almost 13% per decade since 1979. This year’s low, reported Monday, tied for the second-lowest on record. If carbon pollution continues unabated, by the end of the century there will be a 10% to 35% chance each year that sea ice will disappear in the Arctic in September.

– Marine animals are likely to decrease 15%, and catches by fisheries in general are expected to decline 21% to 24% by the end of century because of climate change.

And for the first time, the international team of scientists is projecting that “some island nations are likely to become uninhabitable due to climaterelated ocean and cryosphere change.”

“Climate change is already irreversible,” French climate scientist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a report lead author, said in a Wednesday news conference in Monaco. “Due to the heat uptake in the ocean, we can’t go back. “

But many of the worst-case projections in the report can still be avoided

tourists’ attention and building awareness about recycling.

The tulip garden, which opened on Monday, was built from 26,877 bottles collected from 45 villages around Lamitan City in Basilan, an island province on the southwestern tip of the archipelago.

Plastic bottles were cut into the shape of tulips and painted red, yellow, pink and blue, while others were blended into sand depending on how the world handles the emissions of heat-trapping gases, the report’s authors said. The IPCC increased its projected end-of-century sea level rise in the worst-case scenario by nearly four inches (10 centimeters) from its 2013 projections because of the increased recent melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The new report projects that, under the business-as-usual scenario for carbon emissions, seas by the end of the century will rise between two feet (61 centimeters) and 43 inches (110 centimeters) with a most likely amount of 33 inches (84 centimeters). This is slightly less than the traditional 1 meter (39 inches) that scientists often use.

“Sea level continues to rise at an increasing rate,” the report said. “Extreme sea level events that are historically rare (once per century in the recent past) are projected to occur frequently (at least once per year) at many locations by 2050.” And sea level will rise two to three times as much over the centuries to come if warming continues, so the world is looking at a “future that certainly looks completely different than what we currently have,” said report co-author HansOtto Portner, a German climate scientist.

The Nobel Prize-winning IPCC requires nations meeting this week in Monaco to unanimously approve the report, and because of that the group’s reports tend to show less sea level rise and smaller harms than other scientific studies, outside experts said.

“Like many of the past reports, this one is conservative in the projections, especially in how much ice can be lost in Greenland and Antarctica,” said NASA oceanographer Josh Willis, who studies Greenland ice melt and wasn’t part of the report. “We’re not done revising our sea level rise projections and we won’t be for a while.”

and cement and used to make pathways in the garden.

The Philippines is a major source of ocean plastics and only a small amount of its waste is recycled.

Plastic bottles make up a large chunk of waste in Lamitan, and turning them into a tourist attraction can help combat plastic pollution, said the city’s mayor, Rose Furigay.

“Let us be mindful of how to minimise the use of plastic,” she said.

Basilan is among the country’s poorest provinces, notorious for being a stronghold of an Islamist group known for banditry and kidnapping. (AP)

‘Lab to be demolished’:

The Houston building where Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong and his colleagues were quarantined after their 1969 moon mission has fallen into disrepair and will be demolished, NASA said.

The Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Johnson Space Center hasn’t been used for two years and will likely be torn down next year, the Houston Chronicle reported Tuesday.

The building, completed in 1967, was designed to isolate the astronauts and their lunar rock samples until it was clear they weren’t carrying disease.

Now, exposed wires hang from ceiling tiles saturated with mold, their ends spiraling along the ground next to fallen pieces of fiberglass and discarded office materials.

“I just hate to see what this building represents and what we did here 50 years ago go away,” said Judy Allton, a curator at Johnson. (AP)