Showcase Tag: Earth Temperature

Getting to Net-Zero

Andrew MacDougall studies nature-based solutions to climate change.

“I’m leading a project with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and three other universities,” says MacDougall, associate professor at the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at St. Francis Xavier University. “We’re trying to represent nature-based solutions within climate models to identify any unexpected side effects.”

The nature-based solutions he’s studying are ways to modify either agricultural or natural ecosystems to absorb more carbon.

“The easiest example is growing more trees,” MacDougall says. “It’s the solution governments love the most, even though it’s not terribly effective at cooling the Earth.”

One of the things his group is examining is a local warming effect.

“In the high and mid latitudes such as Canada, forests tend to warm the local environment, even if the overall net effect is cooling globally,” he says. “That’s because coniferous trees  absorb heat and hold it. Large scale afforestation — which is ineffective at global cooling — has positive side-effects on climate change, including a surprisingly big effect on sea ice extent – the total area of ocean surface covered by sea ice.”

For that project, the team has been developing models and then using ACENET to run them.

“One of the climate models we’ve been using is the University of Victoria Earth system climate model,” MacDougall says. “We’re also using the Canadian Earth system model, which was developed by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). Our collaborators at SFU have worked to turn that model into a community model so other researchers will be able to use ACENET infrastructure instead of the computing infrastructure that ECCC maintains.”

MacDougall’s mission with these models is to represent the various climate change solutions within the models to determine how many tons of carbon a given solution will take out of the air.

He also does a lot of work on zero-emissions commitments, which involves trying to figure out whether warming will stop if we do get to net zero. For example, he led a consortium to examine zero-emissions commitments with different climate models.

“It was called the Zero Emissions Commitment Model Intercomparison Project,” he says. “I did the simulations for the Universit of Victoria part of it on ACENET infrastructure. We do most model development on local computers and use ACENET resources for model spin-up and simulations of the future. We often run hundreds of slightly different versions of the model, in what are known as perturbed parameter experiments, to assess uncertainty. The model also needs to be spun-up for 5,000 to 10,000 years, which is 10 to 20 days of computer time. Completing such simulations on local machines is impractical.”

The conclusion from this project was that if we stop emitting carbon dioxide, 50 years later, the amount of warming should stabilize.

MacDougall says doing his work without ACENET’s technology would be very difficult.

Taking the Earth’s Temperature

The greenhouse effect is nothing new. In fact the phenomenon has been influencing the temperature of the Earth for billions of years. The existence of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere acts as a blanket, trapping heat and allowing the Earth’s temperature to remain warmer than it would be otherwise. But in the last 200 years, human activity has been adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at rates exceeding any natural process, making the carbon dioxide blanket thicker and warming the Earth even more. As the planet warms up, most of the additional energy from the enhanced greenhouse effect is stored in the ocean – about 93% in total. The rest is distributed among the continents, in the frozen ices known as the cryosphere, and in the atmosphere. Dr. Hugo Beltrami is a professor at the Climate & Atmospheric Sciences Institute, the Environmental Sciences Program at St. Francis Xavier University and a new Canada Research Chair in Climate Dynamics. He and his graduate students conduct research in the area of global-scale climate change. They are using geothermal data obtained from mining exploration boreholes, reaching deep into the ground to study the changes of the temperature at the continental surface during the last millennium. It’s a complicated process. “We have to go down about 500 metres just to measure the remnants of past ground surface temperature changes that occurred in the last millennium,” he says. “If we want to estimate changes further in the past, we have to go much deeper.” Beltrami’s research is attempting to measure how much energy is stored in the ground and also how energy is distributed between the ground and the atmosphere. It’s critical information for environmentalists, policy makers, planners and scientists. As the ground becomes warmer, more carbon dioxide is released from soils, increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Another aspect of Beltrami’s work relates to regional climate modelling. For example, he and his graduate students have conducted extensive research to project the potential effects of climate change on the propagation of the tick that carries Lyme disease in Nova Scotia and Ontario. He is also developing a climate services centre that will translate global climate model predictions into information that is useful at a local level. The information would allow individual municipalities to access local climate projections, increasing awareness of the potential consequences of climate change on things like infrastructure and public health. The service may also help to support the development of policies to build resilience and mitigate the societal impacts of a changing regional climate. Every part of Beltrami’s research requires his team to use intensive numerical modelling. The numbers are huge and the calculations would be impossible to run on a regular computer. He’s been a user of ACENET since the program started. “ACENET is an essential resource for us,” he says.