Road repair along Nippon Causeway, 2014

My recent article in Scientific American discusses how low-lying coral atolls, like the islands of Kiribati, are a lot more resilient to sea-level rise than dire stories in the media may have you think. But don’t let the nuances of reef island geology described in the article create any doubts about the reality of sea-level rise.

The oceans are rising, and the long-term picture for places like Kiribati is not pretty. This was brought home in the past few days by storm surges again damaging Tarawa atoll’s key causeway that links the most populated islet and international port to the rest of Tarawa.

Here’s a short sidebar of the science of sea-level rise which had to be cut from the article due to space considerations:

The oceans are rising, and the rate of that rise is increasing. Global average sea-level has risen 20 cm since the beginning of the last century, and may rise up to a metre or more by the end of this century.

We can blame greenhouse gas emissions and the basic physics of water.
The planet is absorbing extra heat thanks to the human enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect. The atmosphere gets all the attention, but actually receives only 1-2% of that extra heat. The majority – roughly 93% – goes into warming those deep pools of salt water covering two-thirds of the planet. When water warms up, it expands. That thermal expansion of the ocean is responsible for over half of sea-level rise since 1900.

The key issue for future sea-level is the 3% of the extra heat in the climate system going towards melting ice, especially the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The rate of melt from these great ice sheets, which hold enough water to raise sea-level by about 12 metres, will define the coasts of the future.

The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report concluded that sea-level would likely rise by 52 – 98 cm by the end of this century, but allowed that far greater changes were possible. It all depends on the complicated process of ice sheet melt.

We know that during periods of Earth’s history when temperatures and greenhouse gases were at levels expected for mid-century, ice sheet melt may have raised the oceans more than 5 metres above current sea-level. We don’t know exactly how long it takes for all that ice to break off or melt. Estimates run in the centuries or longer.

The long-term change is the existential concern for a place like Kiribati. From the article:

The fact that reef islands can grow in some cases and that adaptation measures can help will not save Kiribati forever, especially if the world fails to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Climate models project that if we stay on the current emissions path, sea-level could be rising at the end of the century at more than five times today’s rate. Even in the unlikely case that islands are able to continue, on net, to accumulate material at their current rate, they may become narrower, steeper and possess less freshwater, making them prohibitively expensive to inhabit.

After a discussion of adaptation needs and ongoing initiatives in Kiribati, the article concludes with a thought I’ve had every time my local colleagues and I return to land from collecting data:

Tarawa’s lagoon, visible to a trained eye in the distant clouds

As you travel out to sea in Kiribati, the flat islands quickly disappear below the horizon. In the old times, fishers navigated home by looking for the reflection of the shallow, greenish lagoon waters in the clouds. One day in the distant future, many of the islands of Kiribati could succumb to the sea. The people may leave, the trees may die and the land may become a submerged reef. The lagoons, still shallow in contrast to the deep open ocean, would remain green as before.

To outsiders, Kiribati would be gone. To the Kiribati people, the ghost of their former homeland would live on in the clouds.

By Jessica Carilli, Assistant Professor UMass Boston

The author at work

In a warming world, key ocean-atmosphere processes, like the El Niño / Southern Oscillation, are expected to change. An important question is whether the frequency or nature of climate oscillations like El Niño will change in the future.

During El Niño, trade winds that normally blow warm surface waters from east to west across the equatorial Pacific Ocean weaken. The extra-warm surface waters that normally pile up in the west, called the Warm Pool, slosh back towards the east, shutting off upwelling off South America and reducing fishery productivity there. Rainfall patterns also change, moving to the east over the central Pacific and causing droughts in the west. El Niño also has global knock-on effects, like higher rainfall in California and drought in Australia.

In 2010, Simon Donner and I went to the Gilbert Islands, in the Republic of Kiribati, to collect core samples from large coral heads with the intent to learn how climate and the local coral reefs had changed over the past century.

Corals build their calcium carbonate skeletons from seawater, and in the process record changes in their environment – like water temperature and salinity – within the chemistry of their skeletons. Coral skeletons also have rings like trees, so assigning dates to the resulting skeletal environmental records is straightforward.

Butaritari is near the northern edge of the Gilbert group of Kiribati

The Gilbert Islands sit near the eastern edge of the Warm Pool, and are particularly sensitive to a recently discovered variant of El Niño, called El Niño Modoki or central Pacific El Niño. These events seem to be increasing in frequency, which makes this region particularly interesting.

Along with a team of researchers in Australia, we reconstructed water temperature and salinity at Butaritari, in the northern Gilbert Islands, from 1959-2010 and compared trends to other Pacific coral records. The gradient in water temperature from east to west across the Pacific is intrinsically linked to an atmospheric circulation cell called the Walker Circulation, comprised of the trade winds at the surface, rising warm air and rainfall in the west, and sinking, cool dry air in the east.

The records from Butaritari indicate that waters there have not warmed as much as water farther east along the equator. This means the west-east water temperature gradient has weakened over the past half century, and that the Walker Circulation – which breaks down during El Niño events – is weakening.

A weaker Walker Circulation in turn means that El Niño events will be more likely to occur. We could therefore be in for a future of increased El Niño events, which has consequences for fisheries, farming, and freshwater availability – not to mention increased likelihood of natural disasters like flooding and wildfire in some parts of the world.

The original publication can be accessed here or contact Jessica for a PDF.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, this year is on pace to be the warmest in recorded history. Whether or not 2014 is awarded the gold, silver or bronze in the global warming’s equivalent of the 100 m dash will probably depend on the temperature dataset. The precise placement of any one year on the medal standings is, of course, immaterial to the broader issue of the longer term trend, described beautifully by Eric Roston.

What is remarkable to many observers is that a record might be set without the help of a “full El Niño”, to use the WMO’s term. In the last few decades, global average surface temperature records have generally been set by a combination of the long-term warming trend and the bump from everyone’s favourite Latin American weather nickname. An increasingly common way to plot global average surface temperatures is with additional labels for El Niño, La Niña and neutral years, as was done in the WMO report and this figure from Skeptical Science. The take-home message – El Niño, La Niña, neutral, it is all warming.

The labeling is the tricky part, for two reasons. First, El Niños normally develop and peak over the “boreal” or northern hemisphere winter, which means they span two calendar years. There’s usually a few months lag between the development of El Niño and the global temperature effect. Thus, for the global temperature analysis purposes, the “El Niño” year is the year after the onset of the event. The best example is the 1997/98 event which helped bump 1998 to a warmest year gold medal.

Second, there’s no one perfect way to classify El Niño events. For example, in the Skeptical Science plot, 2005 is classified as an El Niño year. In a plot in the WMO report, 2005 is classified as a neutral year. These conflicts arise with “weak” El Niño years because different groups use different classification systems. The U.S. agencies NOAA and NASA disagreed as to whether 2004/05 was an El Niño event.

The suggestion that El Niño events be divided into types or flavours may address some of this potential disagreement. The recent paper led by my former student Sandra Banholzer concluded that the global average surface temperature is anomalously warm – statistically-speaking – during the canonical or traditional “Eastern Pacific” El Niño events like 1997/98, but not during “Central Pacific” events or “Mixed” events. A more nuanced classification system allows 2004/05 to get status as El Niño-ish, but not a classic El Niño.

There are a variety of ways to perform the classifications and it is safe to say that the scientists involved do not agree on the “best” method. Whatever method is used, the underlying surface warming trend is the same. As is clear from this figure from the recent paper, the warming trend is robust.

NOTE: We will have a poster on this subject at AGU on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 15th, 2014.