This Week in Water

Waterblogging time again:

As many as 12 million people have been or will be affected by Cyclone Phailin, a "very severe" Category 5 tropical cyclone, that swept through the Western Pacific Basin and hit Thailand, Myanmar, Nepal, and India.

Heavy rains and flooding have forced mass evacuations and stranded many more on the Mexican Pacific Coast around Acapulco.

Searchers are still looking for survivors of a shipwreck of a smuggler's boat off the coast of Malta. At least 34 people have been reported killed.

Massive quantities of water heavily contaminated with radioactive fluids are pouring into the Pacific Ocean off Fukushima over two years after the nuclear accident there. Many are calling for a global takeover of remediation efforts, but TEPCO and the Japanese government have been recalcitrant. The threat of an out-of-control disaster of potentially global consequence still looms.

In Japan, research has shown that the number of suicides increases after several days of rainy weather.

It is not only global warming that is destroying sea life. Increased acidification is proving to be a double whammy for the worlds oceans.

The current rate of acidification is unparalleled in at least the last 300 million years. The proverbial canary in the oceanic coal mine is krill. This from the International Programme on the State of the Oceans, or IPSO.

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico covers up to 6000-7000 square miles at the base of the Mississippi Delta.

Officials at the Vancouver Aquarium are increasingly 'alarmed' at the mass die-off of starfish on the ocean floor.

The U.N. aims to complete its first World Ocean Assessment sometime next year. Current ocean monitoring regimes are insufficiently comprehensive to evaluate the range and depth of stressors on the oceanic ecosystems on a global basis. Watch this space for more.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its findings on the impact of global warming. [Click through for the science] Following are some of its conclusions with respect to water issues:

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased...

"Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 ... It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010 ..., and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971...

"Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent...

"The rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia .... Over the period 1901–2010, global mean sea level rose by 0.19 [0.17 to 0.21] m...

"The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification...

"Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes ... This evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century...

"Changes in the global water cycle in response to the warming over the 21st century will not be uniform. The contrast in precipitation between wet and dry regions and between wet and dry seasons will increase, although there may be regional exceptions...

"The global ocean will continue to warm during the 21st century. Heat will penetrate from the surface to the deep ocean and affect ocean circulation... 

"It is very likely that the Arctic sea ice cover will continue to shrink and thin and that Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover will decrease during the 21st century as global mean surface temperature rises. Global glacier volume will further decrease...

"Global mean sea level will continue to rise during the 21st century ... Under all RCP scenarios the rate of sea level rise will very likely exceed that observed during 1971–2010 due to increased ocean warming and increased loss of mass from glaciers and ice sheets...

"Climate change will affect carbon cycle processes in a way that will exacerbate the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere ... Further uptake of carbon by the ocean will increase ocean acidification." (h/t Peter Glieck)

Bottom line: according to the IPCC, global warming is happening at unprecedented rates and it is unequivocally primarily human-caused. This is having devastating effects on ocean temperatures and acidification, sea levels, polar ice sheets, glaciers, water cycles and seasons, precipitation, drought, monsoons, floods, etc..

That's enough to absorb for now. There were also a number of positive and other interesting developments. I'll have more later.