Update: Here’s a correction from The Pueblo Chieftain about the article cited below:

Rainfall in Pueblo was 0.79 inches for August 2011, and 1.18 inches for October 2011. Wrong information was included in a graphic Monday. A reporter made the errors.

From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):

Rainfall in Pueblo has been close to normal since July, but that has not been enough to erase the effects of drought. About 8.5 inches, or 70 percent of normal, have been recorded so far this year. Barring a heavy snowstorm in the next week or two, 2011 is shaping up to be one of the driest years in the last 40 years…

Pueblo typically gets about 12 inches of precipitation annually. Since 2001, four years have been above average; two have been significantly below average. The drier spring conditions triggered an increase in lawn watering that broke a trend toward more conservation that’s been evident since the drought of 2002-03. The Pueblo Board of Water Works reported 9 billion gallons pumped and 8.5 billion gallons consumed through its system at the end of November, about 7 percent above the five-year average…

The U.S. Drought Monitor lists Pueblo, and much of Southern Colorado, in severe drought. Parts of Baca County remain in extreme drought.

From The Denver Post (Bruce Finley):

The question: Are rivers that sustain more than 2 billion people fed primarily by water from rainfall, by seasonal snowmelt or by the glaciers that are vulnerable to climate change?[…]

The high-mountain glaciers, seen as water towers for Asia, have been shrinking at a rate of 0.5 percent a year — similar to glaciers in South America’s Andes and the European Alps. As Asia’s glaciers recede, Chinese and Indian governments are moving to control headwaters with at least 19 proposed dam projects, adding to eight or so existing major dams.

U.S. intelligence agencies were among those interested in enlisting University of Colorado senior research scientist Richard Armstrong and geography professor Mark Williams. “If you cannot plan for effective use of water resources, you’re in trouble,” Armstrong said last week, after launching the project in Kazakhstan with Asian policymakers and scientists.

“There are irrigation systems on these rivers. Hydroelectric plants. They need to understand where their water comes from in order to plan with respect to climate change.” Hard data has been scarce, and research is difficult at elevations up to 18,000 feet, across a 10-nation region. Project leaders plan to send researchers into Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Pamir, Tein Shan and Himalayan mountain watersheds covering 1 million square miles.

The researchers will collect samples of snow, river water, groundwater and glacier-melt water in 6-ounce plastic bottles that will be mailed back to CU. Investigators at an Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research lab in Boulder will use spectrometers and other instruments to analyze the water’s origins.

Meanwhile, November saw above average global temperatures, according to this report from Bob Berwyn writing for the Summit County Citizens Voice. Here’s an excerpt:

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for November 0.81 degrees above the 2oth century average. The global land temperature was 1.10 degrees above average, the 16-warmest on record, while the ocean surface temperature for the month was 0.70 above the historic average, the 12th-warmest on record. For the year-to-date, the combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was 0.94 degrees warmer than average, which is the 11th-warmest on record. For land surface temperatures separately, the year-to-date is the seventh warmest on record…

Warmer-than-average conditions were recorded across central and eastern North America, Northern and Western Europe, northern Russia, most of China and the Middle East, southeastern Australia, and southern South America. In particular, parts of northern Europe experienced much above average temperatures, with the warmest November on record in Norway, where temps for the month were 8.3 degrees above average. The United Kingdom reported its second-warmest November on record, behind 1994. In general, land temperatures were well above normal across most of the Northern Hemisphere higher latitudes, including most of Canada, Northern Europe, and most of Russia.

Arctic sea ice is lingering below average according to this report from Bob Berwyn writing for the Summit County Citizens Voice. From the article:

Overall, the Arctic gained 2.36 million square kilometers (911,000 square miles) of ice during the month, slightly more than the average November ice gain. At the end of the month, sea ice covered 4.19 million square miles, the third-lowest in the satellite record for the month, behind 2006 and 2010. The linear rate of decline for November during the satellite era is now 53,200 20,500 square miles per year, about 4.7 about per decade relative to the 1979 to 2000 average.

Low sea ice extent this summer may be contributing to warmer November temperatures and lower November ice extents in some areas. Norway, for example, reported the warmest November on record. The record warmth in parts of Scandinavia is probably linked with the current positive phase of the Arctic Oscillation.

In recent years, low sea ice extent in the summer has been linked to unusually warm autumn air temperatures, resulting from the larger areas of open water that absorb more heat during the summer. This heat must escape back to the atmosphere in the fall, before the ocean can freeze over. This escaping heat contributes to warmer-than-average conditions, which have been most apparent in October but may also extend into November.

The release of more methane trapped for thousands of years under Arctic ice is another area of study by researchers. Here’s a report from Justin Gillis writing for the New York Times. Click through and read the whole article, there is a lot of great information there. Here’s an excerpt:

Experts have long known that northern lands were a storehouse of frozen carbon, locked up in the form of leaves, roots and other organic matter trapped in icy soil — a mix that, when thawed, can produce methane and carbon dioxide, gases that trap heat and warm the planet. But they have been stunned in recent years to realize just how much organic debris is there.

A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.

Temperatures are warming across much of that region, primarily, scientists believe, because of the rapid human release of greenhouse gases. Permafrost is warming, too. Some has already thawed, and other signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable.

“It’s like broccoli in your freezer,” said Kevin Schaefer, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “As long as the broccoli stays in the freezer, it’s going to be O.K. But once you take it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge, it will thaw out and eventually decay.”

If a substantial amount of the carbon should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming. An especially worrisome possibility is that a significant proportion will emerge not as carbon dioxide, the gas that usually forms when organic material breaks down, but as methane, produced when the breakdown occurs in lakes or wetlands. Methane is especially potent at trapping the sun’s heat, and the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science [ed. emphasis mine].

And for those of you that think that human activity can’t be felt across the oceans or borders, here’s an article, from the Daily Mail about nitrogen pollution of remote watersheds from industrialization. Here’s an excerpt:

Even though they are nowhere near any cities or farms, deposits at the bottom of three quarters of the 36 lakes studied were found to contain more nitrogen than expected. Combined with global warming, the effects could alter the eco-system of the lakes in ways not seen in the last 10,000 years, it was warned.

‘It turns out the world, for nitrogen, is a much smaller place than we’d assumed,’ said author Daniel Schindler of the University of Washington. Human-sourced nitrogen comes from fossil fuels and fertilisers and once in the atmosphere it is spread before being deposited to earth in rain or snowfall.

Although it is vital for life too much can be harmful, and the US Environmental Protection Agency says humans have already doubled the rate of nitrogen released to the biosphere since 1950. We now contribute more nitrogen to the biosphere than all natural processes combined, reports the journal Science…

Prof Gordon Holtgrieve said: ‘When it comes to nitrogen associated with humans, most studies have focused on local and regional effects of pollution and have missed the planetary scale changes.

‘Our study is the first large-scale synthesis to demonstrate that biologically-active nitrogen associated with human society is being transported in the atmosphere to the most remote ecosystems on the planet.

‘Given the broad geographic distribution of our sites – and the range of temperate, alpine and arctic ecosystems – we believe the best explanation is that human-derived nitrogen was deposited from the atmosphere.’

Finally, Todd D. Stern, the top U.S. negotiator at the recently conclude Durban talks on climate change expressed relief that the sessions ended on a positive note. Here’s a report from John M. Broder writing for New York Times Green blog. From the article:

“I think this has ended up being quite a significant agreement and very much along the lines of what we’ve been pushing,” Mr. Stern said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “That was not fully expected when we went in.”

He said the United States team arrived in Durban with two goals. The first was to deepen the agreements reached at the two previous United Nations climate conferences, in Copenhagen and Cancún, Mexico. That meant establishing the terms for a fund to help poor nations adapt to climate change, strengthening programs to monitor emissions reductions and setting up a center to develop and spread clean energy technology.

There were, as always, disagreements about how countries report progress toward their emissions reductions goals and what sort of international verification regime is acceptable. Negotiators ultimately resolved these questions or agreed to deal with them later.
“There were lots of bumps, lots of difficulties, right up to the last 48 hours,” Mr. Stern said. “It would be an overstatement to say it went smoothly, but in the end it went.”

The Americans’ second goal was to find some solution to what could be called the Kyoto conundrum — that is, what sort of treaty or agreement should replace the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 deal that essentially required developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by specified amounts while putting no limits on those from the developing world, including fast-rising economies like China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

The United States never joined Kyoto, Canada just announced it was quitting it, and a number of other major countries, including Russia and Japan, said they would not participate in any further rounds of emissions pledges under it.

Resolving that problem proved to be a huge challenge, and the reason that a conference that was supposed to end Friday evening did not conclude until sunrise on Sunday. The battle pitted the European Union and a bloc of less developed countries that were determined to see Kyoto live on at least for a while, against the United States, China and India. The standoff boiled down to a dispute over what most observers would consider arcane legal language but that meant a lot to the parties involved.

In Mr. Stern’s telling, the United States was decisive in resolving the fight, first by announcing earlier in the week that it was willing to participate in some legally-binding future international climate regime, as long as all nations participated under the same terms. That was seen as a breakthrough, although, as Mr. Stern noted, it has been the American position for years.

Then, in an early-morning huddle on Sunday on the floor of the conference, the American team came up with the language that finally persuaded India to accept the legal character of any future agreement, simply by rearranging a few words.

Mr. Stern credited Susan Biniaz, a veteran lawyer at the State Department, with devising the formula that broke the logjam. At her suggestion, Mr. Stern said, the words “legal outcome” were changed to “agreed outcome with legal force.” That proved to be enough for the Indian delegate, Jayanthi Natarajan, who had insisted angrily all week that India could not agree to any climate treaty that hindered her nation’s economic growth.

“That was the last sticking point, and then we were done,” Mr. Stern said.

Click on the thumbnail graphics to the right for the U.S. Drought Monitor and current snowpack map. Here’s a report from Bob Berwyn writing for the Summit County Citizens Voice. From the article:

This year’s La Niña has been a bit of a disappointment so far, said Klaus Wolter a meteorologist with NOAA’s Climate Diagnostic Center who specializes in evaluating the impacts of the El Niño-La Niña cycle in the southwestern United States…

“The Front Range has done really well,” he said. At his backyard weather station, Wolter picked up 31 inches last week and has recorded more than 70 inches for the season, second only to 1997 in the past 20 years or so.

But Wolter, who recently updated the seasonal forecast for the SWcasts website, expects at least normal snowfall for the remainder of the winter.

The official three-month outlook (December to February) calls for a 33 to 40 percent chance of above-normal precipitation for most of northern Colorado, including the Summit County area.

The overall dryness from New Mexico into eastern Colorado since the beginning of October matches the forecast issued in September. The early November windstorms were also typical for a La Niña.

“My forecast for January through March 2012 is more optimistic than my earlier forecast from September for our north-central mountains, but not for the Four Corners region. The Arkansas Valley has better prospects (near-normal moisture) than is typical for La Niña, while northeastern Colorado has no clear preference for dry or wet this winter,” Wolter wrote in the SWcast outlook.

From the Vail Daily (Lauren Glendenning):

Weather forecasters say La Nina — a weather system where cold ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean bring wetter than normal conditions across the Pacific Northwest and drier and warmer than normal conditions across much of the southern United States — is weaker than it was last winter. Recent weather patterns, however, just don’t follow any conventional wisdom about snow in northern Colorado, La Nina winter or otherwise. Joel Gratz, a meteorologist who runs the website www.onthesnow.com, formerly http://www.coloradopowderforecast.com, calls the weather pattern we’ve seen over the last six or so weeks “pretty difficult.” The computer forecasting models that Gratz and other weather forecasters use haven’t been helpful in predicting when the current pattern will shift…

The pattern is such that storms have been coming in from the Pacific Ocean over British Columbia, Washington or Oregon — as they typically do in La Nina winters — but then the systems have been splitting into two sections. The southern portion has been tracking farther south, while the northern portion stays north of Colorado, said Jim Daniels, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction. The systems have just been going too far south to bring any significant snowfall to the Interstate 70 corridor. The next 14 days just show more of the same, too, Daniels said…

The news has been great for resorts like Wolf Creek, which has received significant snowfall accumulations over the last week and a half or so. And Vail and Beaver Creek have seen some light snowstorms move through in the same time frame, but accumulations have been minimal. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service snow measurement data shows Vail Mountain precipitation from Oct. 1 to Dec. 13 of this year at 72 percent of normal.

From the Associated Press (Arthur Max) via Bloomberg Business Week:

South Africa’s foreign minister and chairman of the 194-party conference, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, told delegates that failure to agree after 16 days of work would be an unsustainable setback for international efforts to control greenhouse gases.

“This multilateral system remains fragile and will not survive another shock,” she told a full meeting of the conference, which had been delayed more than 24 hours while ministers and senior negotiators labored over words and nuances.

Nkoana-Mashabane said the package of four documents, which were being printed as she spoke, were an imperfect compromise, but they reflected years of negotiations on issues that had plagued the U.N. climate efforts.

The 100-plus pages would give new life to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, whose carbon emissions targets expire next year and apply only to industrial countries. A separate document calls on major emitting nations like China and India, excluded under Kyoto, to accept legally binding emissions targets in the future.

After her brief address, Nkoana-Mashabane adjourned the session. The documents were to be discussed and put up for approval later Saturday. The convention operates by consensus, and the package will not be put up for a vote.

More coverage from Louise Gray writing for The Telegraph. From the article:

At the end of the gruelling talks the world decided on the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action”. The two-page document commits all countries to cutting carbon for the first time. A “road map” will guide countries towards a legal deal to cut carbon in 2015, but it will only come into affect after 2020.

Is this a step forwards for the world or backwards?

It depends who you ask. It is a success in terms of keeping the climate change talks on track after it was feared no decision would be reached, making a mockery of the UN process – especially after the collapse of the last high profile talks in Copenhagen in 2009. The EU, who led calls for the so-called “road map” are hailing it as “an historic breakthrough”. The bloc point out that this is the first time that the world’s three biggest emitters: The US, China and India have signed up to a legal treaty to cut carbon.

However it is a failure in terms of the expectations of certain countries, like the small island states, and the charities, who wanted a much stronger agreement. They argue that the legal language needs to be a lot stronger to force countries to act and dates should be brought forward to stop global warming. They point out that carbon emissions will have to peak by 2020 and start to come down for the world to limit temperature rise to 2C.

What about the Kyoto Protocol?

The EU and a few other developed countries have signed up to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, that ends in 2013. This will ensure that there is still some form of legally binding treaty to cut carbon in place in the interim eight years before the new agreement comes into force at the end of 2020. However most of the developing world and the US remain in voluntary agreements to cut carbon until 2020.

Meanwhile, Dr. James Hansen is warning the the 2 degree celsius target is not enough to head off the disaster of anthropogenic climate change. Here’s a report from Bob Berwyn writing for the Summit Daily News. From the article:

“Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient,” Hansen said. “It would be a prescription for disaster … Humans have overwhelmed the natural, slow changes that occur on geologic timescales,” Hansen said. Hansen, along with co-author Makiko Sato, studied how Earth’s climate responded to past natural changes to try and answer one of the fundamental climate science questions: “What is the dangerous level of global warming?”[…]

Based on Hansen’s temperature analysis work at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the Earth’s average global surface temperature has already risen .8 degrees Celsius since 1880, and is now warming at a rate of more than .1 degree Celsius every decade. This warming is largely driven by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, emitted by the burning of fossil fuels at power plants, in cars and in industry…

Hansen and Sato compared the climate of today, the Holocene, with previous similar “interglacial” epochs – periods when polar ice caps existed but the world was not dominated by glaciers. Studying cores drilled from both ice sheets and deep ocean sediments, Hansen found that global mean temperatures during the Eemian period, which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 15,000 years, were less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. If temperatures were to rise 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, global mean temperature would far exceed that of the Eemian, when sea level was four to six meters higher than today, Hansen said…

Two degrees Celsius of warming would make Earth much warmer than during the Eemian, and would move Earth closer to Pliocene-like conditions, when sea level was in the range of 25 meters higher than today, Hansen said. In using Earth’s climate history to learn more about the level of sensitivity that governs our planet’s response to warming today,

Hansen said the paleoclimate record suggests that every degree Celsius of global temperature rise will ultimately equate to 20 meters of sea level rise. However, that sea level increase due to ice sheet loss would be expected to occur over centuries, and large uncertainties remain in predicting how that ice loss would unfold.