Work of Filipino/American scientist critical to Paris climate talks

Credit: NASA

Josefino Cosimo, is considered one of the leading experts on polar science in the world? 

A LOT of important people from around the world are gathered in Paris this past week and into next week trying find agreement on how best to slow down or stop the world's rising temperatures.

When scientists and climatologists talk about climate change, a lot of their conclusions are based on the work of a Filipino/American scientist, Josefino Cosimo, senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Comiso is considered one of the world's leading experts on polar science.

He said the NASA studies in the polar regions were based on expectations the regions are the places where early signal of a climate change can be found “because of ice-albedo feedback associated with the high albedo of ice and snow.”

"I’ve found that the Arctic perennial ice cover, the ice that survives at the end of the summer, is declining at a rate of 11 percent per decade. For about 1,500 years, the perennial ice has been observed, but if the current decline rate continues we would have an ice-free Arctic in summer within this century - it will be the first such occurrence in modern history."

Why does this matter to us ordinary folk?

"There would be more warming in the Arctic region and more melt in land ice that would cause sea level rise," Cosimo says. "There would be ecological changes, like primary productivity, that would spread to other parts of the world. The highest plankton (or chlorophyll) concentration has been near the polar regions in part because of sea ice. Melted sea ice water forms a stable water layer that is exposed to abundant sunlight and becomes a platform for enhanced photosynthesis and hence high productivity. The loss of the ice cover would mean reduced plankton concentration. Since the plankton is at the bottom of the food chain marine life would be affected and fishery production would be reduced."

Whew! Scary!

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Before you give up all hope, Cosimo says the pattern can be halted. "Modeling studies indicate that if we keep the level of greenhouse gases constant from now no," he says, "we will be able to keep the temperature from reaching more undesirable levels. The sea ice cover in the summer could be salvaged." 

How did a scientist, who graduated from the University of the Philippines in Quezon City in the warm tropical Philippines, become interested in glaciers and other freezing stuff?

The Philippines, made up of 7,000 islands with the bulk of its population at sea level, like other island nations, will be among the first affected by the melting ice, the colder waters and the rising sea levels.

Comiso pointed out the irony that developing countries are the ones suffering more from the effects of greenhouse gas warming than developed economies.

“The Philippines is highly vulnerable to climate change. It is ironic that a country that is contributing to only a small fraction of atmospheric greenhouse gases will be among the most affected by greenhouse gas warming.

“My advice to the Philippine government is to focus on resiliency and adaptation. A large fraction of Filipinos live in coastal areas and there should be a plan for them to start moving to higher elevations,” he added.

Earth’s northern ice cap is heating up and melting down at an alarming, not previously predicted, rate. A paper just out in Wiley Interndisciplary Reviews: Climate Change, by Josefino Comiso and Dorothy Hall looks at recent historic transformations in the Arctic using satellite imagery, mainly from 1979 to the present. The decline of Arctic ice is so extreme that ice thought to have existed for over 1450 years is melting now. (None of the sea ice is really ancient, even the “old” ice recycles over geologically short time periods. But in the near future there will be virtually no “old” ice left in the region.)

According to Cosimo, of NASA, who authored the study, “The Arctic region has been
 warming faster than anywhere else in the globe from 1981 to 2012. Such warming is manifested strongly in all components of the cryosphere in the Northern Hemisphere.”

For those who want the cold hard facts, (my apologies, the topic is no laughing matter) the following is paraphrased from the paper:

• Warming in the region has been amplified … with the rate of warming observed to be ~0.60±0.07 C per decade in the Arctic (>64 oN) compared to ~0.2 o C per decade globally during the last three decades.
• Sea ice extent has been declining at the rate of ~3.8% per decade, while the perennial ice (represented by summer ice minimum) is declining at a much greater rate of ~11.5% per decade.
• Spring snow cover [is] declining by –2.12 % per decade for the period 1967 to 2012.
• The Greenland ice sheet has been losing mass at the rate of ~123 Gt per year (sea level equivalence of 0.34 mm per year) during the period from 1993 to 2010 for the period 2005 to 2010, a higher rate of (Greenland ice sheet) mass loss of ~228 Gt per year has been observed.
• The average area of mountain glaciers has declined by as much as 10% per decade during the period from 1960 to 2000.
• Increases in permafrost temperature have also been measured in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere while a thickening of the active layer that overlies permafrost and a thinning of seasonally-frozen ground has also been reported.

In conclusion, the arctic ice can be reestablished, we stop dilly-dallying around and start weaning ourselves from the use of fossil fuels.

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