気候モデルはこの深層水形成の速度が今世紀末には減少することを示唆している。それはただ深層水形成が海洋循環を駆動しているという点だけでなく、それが大量の二酸化炭素をより深くへと輸送し、大気から隔離しているという点でも問題である。
Most scientists regard the idea that global warming will trigger a collapse of ocean circulation — the apocalyptic scenario that inspired the 2004 action film The Day After Tomorrow — to be exceedingly unlikely. But Bryden says that the 2009 Atlantic circulation glitch is an indication of just how surprising ocean behaviour can be. “The next one,” he says, “may be twice as big.”
ほとんどの科学者は地球温暖化が海洋循環の崩壊（2004年の映画「デイ・アフター・トゥモロー」にインスピレーションを与えた、世界の終末のようなシナリオ）に繋がるというアイデアにほとんど現実味がないと思っている。しかし、2009年の大西洋循環の故障は、どれほど海洋の振る舞いが驚くべきものになり得るかを物語っていると、Harry Bryden（Southhampton大の海洋学者）は言う。"次は２倍の規模かもしれない"と彼は言う。
「Oceans under surveillance」Nature (9 May 2013)
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Among the most worrying of the mooted impacts of climate change is an increase in civil conflict as people compete for diminishing resources, such as arable land and water. Recent statistical studies reporting a connection between climate and civil violence have attracted attention from the press and policy-makers, including US President Barack Obama.
気候変化が投げかける最も心配な議論の中には、耕作に適した土地や水といった失われつつある資源を巡って人類が争うことによって生じる、内戦の増加が挙げられる。統計学的に気候と市民の暴動との関係性を報告した最近の研究は報道機関、オバマ大統領を含む政策決定者の注意を引いた。
「A call for peace on climate and conflict」Nature (9 May 2013)
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...it is not surprising to see a growth of work exploring individual perceptions of, and trends in public opinion about, anthropogenic climate change.
The good news for those concerned with climate communication is that there is a great deal of scientific agreement on the issue. The bad news is that climate is inherently uncertain — mainly because of the internal variability of the climate system.
Expert judgement elicitation — a tool used in medicine, engineering and natural sciences to determine the degree of scientific consensus and explore collective views on uncertainties — is gradually making its way into the climate science community.
It follows that mass communication of scientific information, and even scientific agreement on climate change, may have limited impact if political elites continue to disagree on the issue. And influencing the public in polarized contexts is surely a challenging task.
「Climate consensus」Nature Climate Change 3, 303 (April 2013)
一般の人々が人為起源の気候変化を受け入れるためには数多くのハードルを超えなければならない。
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Ecologists have long known that these grazers play an important role in reef health by mowing down weedy algae and clearing attractive settling spots for young corals. Now, many believe that those tasks are essential to enabling some damaged reefs to recover from ecological stress.
The subsequent recovery of those reefs reinforced Steneck’s belief that protecting herbivorous fish is one of the most effective means of boosting reef resilience.
A better understanding of resilience could help planners develop more targeted conservation strategies that don’t threaten local livelihoods, Steneck agrees.
Even if managers are successful in injecting resilience-based measures into conservation plans, however, it is not clear that they can protect reefs from the twin long-term challenges posed by rapid climate change: rising water temperatures and ocean acidification, a pH change spurred by the sea’s absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Another sobering unknown is whether corals can keep pace with acidifying seas, which can dissolve the calcium skeletons of corals and interfere with the development of eggs and larvae. Coral calcification will no longer keep pace with physical reef erosion once atmospheric carbon dioxide levels top 450 parts per million, according to Hoegh-Guldberg. With levels now at 395 ppm, and rising at a rate of 2 ppm a year, that tipping point could be less than 30 years away, he notes.
「As Threats to Corals Grow, Hints of Resilience Emerge」Science 339
サンゴの環境ストレスに対する強さや回復力を決める要因について
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Carbon emissions are a hallmark of energy use — and it is cheap and available energy that has made the modern world.
炭素排出はエネルギー使用の証明であり、それは安く、今の世界を作るのに必要であった利用可能なエネルギーであったのである。
The antagonism between protection of profit and protection of the environment will continue for as long as the two are seen as separate pursuits.
「利益の保護」と「環境保全」の間の対立は、それらが別々の追求と見なされる限り続くだろう。
The economic currency of gross domestic product, for so long used as a benchmark of a country’s performance, could be tweaked to include social indicators and how well a country respects environmental criteria, such as the concept of planetary boundaries that should not be exceeded.
国内総生産（長い間国家の出来映えの基準として使われてきた）といった経済指標は、社会的な指数を含めるように、国家が環境的な分類をどれほど尊重しているか（超えてはならない’惑星の限界’のコンセプトなど）を含めるように、微調整されるだろう。
「Together we stand」Nature (16 May 2013)
経済的な発展と環境保護を両立させ、持続的な社会を構築する
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For this reason, I have seen curricula vitae in which a scientist annotates each of his or her publications with its journal impact factor listed to three significant decimal places (for example, 11.345). And in some nations, publication in a journal with an impact factor below 5.0 is officially of zero value. As frequently pointed out by leading scientists, this impact factor mania makes no sense.
こうした理由から、私は研究者が彼または彼女の投稿論文が掲載された雑誌のインパクト・ファクターが小数点３桁まで注釈付きで書かれている履歴を見てきた（例えば、11.345など）。国によっては、インパクト・ファクターが5.0を下回る雑誌に掲載された論文は公式にはゼロと見なされることもある。一流の研究者がしばしば指摘するように、インパクト・ファクターへの執着は理にかなっていない。
...it wastes the time of scientists by overloading highly cited journals such as Science with inappropriate submissions from researchers who are desperate to gain points from their evaluators.
評価者からポイントを得るのにやっきになっている研究者が、サイエンス誌のように多く引用される科学雑誌に対して不適切な投稿をすることは時間を無駄にすることに他ならない。
Any evaluation system in which the mere number of a researcher’s publications increases his or her score creates a strong disincentive to pursue risky and potentially groundbreaking work, because it takes years to create a new approach in a new experimental context, during which no publications should be expected.
その間一つも投稿論文が期待できないような、新たな実験において新たなアプローチを生み出すには何年も費やすため、研究者の投稿論文数の数だけで彼または彼女のスコアが上がるような評価システムではリスクが高く、革新的な結果を生む可能性のある仕事を選ぶインセンティブが著しく失われる。
The DORA recommendations are critical for keeping science healthy.
DORAの推奨は科学を健全に保つために必要不可欠である。
「Impact Factor Distortions」Science (17 May 2013)
インパクト・ファクターを使って研究者の評価を行わない、という共同声明
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The world’s glaciers have been shrinking frighteningly fast, so fast that their melting was pushing up sea level far faster than the shrinking ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. But then 21st century monitoring from space began to show a much smaller role for glacial ice loss in sea-level rise. Which to believe?
世界の氷河は恐ろしい早さで後退しており、グリーンランドや南極の氷床の後退よりもかなり早く海水準を押し上げている。しかし一方で21世紀の宇宙からのモニタリングは世界の氷河の後退が海水準上昇に与える寄与はかなり小さいと示している。どちらを信じればいいのだろうか？
Water supply problems—farmers losing meltwater in streams and rivers in the hot, dry summer months—will only get worse. And glaciers will be helping drive up sea level through the end of the century and a bit beyond. But with all glacierized regions losing ice in the present climate and more warming expected, Gardner says, all but the most resilient glaciers are likely to disappear within the millennium. Some glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic might last that long, but particularly vulnerable regions like the Alps will likely see most of their glaciers disappear by the end of the century.
水供給問題（牧場主は夏の乾燥した暑い時期に使える、小川や河川を流れる雪解け水を失いつつある）は悪化する一方だろう。そして氷河は海水準が今世紀末までか、或いはもうちょっと先まで上昇し続ける手助けをするだろう。しかし「現在の気候と将来の更なる温暖化で氷を失いつつあるすべての氷河地域は、もっとも強い氷河を除いては、1,000年以内に消滅しそうだ」と、Gardnerは言う。北極圏や南極の氷河の中にはそれくらい長く持ちこたえるものもあるかもしれないが、アルプスといった特に弱い地域においては今世紀末にもほとんどの氷河が消滅するかもしれない。
「Melting Glaciers, Not Just Ice Sheets, Stoking Sea-Level Rise」Science (17 May 2013)
人工衛星観測と地上観測を併せて新たな「氷河融解の海水準上昇の寄与」の推定値が得られた。
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Clinker on the sea bed has even been mapped as a recognisable rock unit. Such
a human-made strata is one piece in the jigsaw supporting the contention that the Anthropocene should be viewed as a distinct period in time. The clinker layer also exposes the fact that human activities permanently change the landscape — on the sea floor as well as on land.
A dead sperm whale washed up on Spanish shores in 2012 was found to have a stomach full of plastics, including flower pots and plastic greenhouse covers. The litter had probably been washed into the sea from greenhouse industries located onshore and had caused gastric rupture in the whale.
It wasn’t until 1997 that this prediction was confirmed: oceanographer and boat captain Charles J. Moore was struck by the seemingly endless amounts of plastic debris he encountered on a sailing voyage across the North Pacific is region is now dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Just like whales swallow whole flower pots, fish and microorganisms mistake the tiny micro-plastic fragments for food. The particles thus enter the food chain, and may eventually even be incorporated into the cells of organisms.
「Message in a bottle」Nature Geoscience 6, 241 (2013)
海のゴミ問題について
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Understanding of climate change is a problem for multiple generations. One generation of scientists has to make provisions for the needs of successor generations, rather than focusing solely on its own immediate scientific productivity.
Government agencies can do a reasonable job in satisfying the immediate needs of the public, e.g., in forecasting hurricane trajectories. But governments have not done well in sustaining long-term observations. For example, the iconic time series of CO2 observations at Mauna Loa, HI, was funded in 2-year increments for decades and was nearly terminated many times by shortsighted program managers.
Without confronting the problem as an intergenerational one, climate forecasts and our ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change will remain rudimentary and inadequate for the challenges that lie ahead.
「Climate change as an intergenerational problem」PNAS 110, 4435-4436 (March 19, 2013)
世代を超えて、継続して気候変化研究をする必要性
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Hence, if climate change leads to an increased likelihood of wave 6–8 resonance, then certain places (and not always the same places from one year to the next) will experience negative temperature anomalies. This finding is something the public (and the “climate sceptic” community) often find hard to understand: How can global warming lead to local cooling? The point is that our climate system is not just a static thermodynamic system, it is a fluid dynamical system, and the effects of dynamics (especially on a rotating planet) can often be counterintuitive. Anyone doubting this should study the humble gyroscope, in particular how it responds to external forcing!
「Climate extremes and the role of dynamics」PNAS 110, 145281-5282 (April 2, 2013)
地球の気象・気候は静的ではなく、動的な流体力学で記述されるということ
