Some of you will be aware that part of the thesis of my book The Prostitute State is that there are four pillars supporting the corruption of British democracy.

One of those pillars is the thieving tax havens, almost 50% of which are under some form of British jurisdiction e.g. Bermuda, Cayman and Channel islands.

There is an article in yesterday’s Guardian that states Tory MEPs were instructed by David Gauke MP, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, to vote against a whole range of EU measures to crack down on endemic corporate tax theft.

But what the article fails to convey is that Gauke worked in corporate financial services as a solicitor in the financial services group Macfarlanes, a corporate law firm, prior to being an MP and more importantly his wife Rachel Gauke is a professional support lawyer specialising in corporate tax at legal research provider LexisNexis.

Where ‘mainstream’ political party funding comes from

Do not forget also that over 50% of Tory funding comes from financial services almost all of whom are linked to global tax havens.

New Labour and Lib Dem party major funding donors likewise nearly all came from tax haven sources during their years in power. It is a key element of another pillar of The Prostitute State i.e. the corruption of our political system.

This is how the rich 0.1% protect their tax haven status, by which they cream off the UK’s wealth offshore and leave us with massive Treasury deficits which have then to be paid for with massive austerity cuts to the poor.

Last July Google owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin were each worth about $32 billion dollars – a sum that has since risen to $37-38 billion. It is truly disgusting that our own UK government has been so corrupted by tax haven lobbyists that it seeks to stop the European Union from cracking down on British Bermuda where Google has stashed its ill-gotten tax-thieving pile of $30 billion in cash.

In 2014 the Sunday Mirror reported on the scale of tax dodging by the six of the world’s biggest companies:

“Six of the world’s biggest companies paid just 0.3 per cent of their UK earnings in corporation tax last year, a Sunday Mirror probe has found. We have examined the UK accounts of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Ebay and Starbucks and found the six firms have reported a total of £2.6billion of revenue in the last year.

“But many more billions of pounds of sales from the UK are recorded every year by sister companies – often located in tax havens like Luxembourg and Switzerland. Industry analysts estimate true UK sales of the six at £14.2 billion. Yet they paid £41.3 million in UK corporation tax – just 0.3 per cent.”

And instead of trying to clamp down, reported the UK’s only left wing mainstream tabloid, Osborne introduced new corporate tax reliefs that created a £9 billion Corporation tax “black hole”.

Osborne’s own tax-dodging cash cow

But we should hardly be surprised, since Osborne’s own ‘family firm’ Osborne & Little, in which he holds a 15% stake, is itself a remarkably effective tax-dodger. As reported by Private Eye, commenting on the latest accounts for the company:

“Osborne & Little reported a pre-tax profit of £722,000 on turnover of £34m and incurred a corporation tax charge of £179,000. But the accounts for the year to March 2015 show it ended up paying precisely zero ‘United Kingdom corporation tax’ as the company was able to claim for ‘timing differences’ from previous years that offset the £179,000 …

“In fact, Osborne & Little has not had to pay any UK corporation tax for the last SEVEN years as it has claimed variously for ‘capital allowances’, ‘adjustments in respect of prior years’ and historic losses – even as the company generated a total of over £200m in sales between April 2008 and March 2015.”

Don’t forget Britain’s own tax-dodging media-owning billionaires

And of course the fact that all of the five extremist media billionaires who own nearly all of the UK’s media are also off-shore tax haven thieves, means that the government can do the tax haven dodgers lobbying for them, without being properly exposed.

The Prostitute State is alive and well and protecting its tax havens … and the UK’s NHS, education, social services and local government pay the price.

It really is time for this corruption to be halted. It is these thieves that our legal system should be cracking down on – not the police beating up and arresting deceitfully the heroes in UK Uncut!!

Donnachadh McCarthy FRSA is the author of “The Prostitute State: How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought”.

The unusually hot summers in Europe over the last three decades are further evidence that human activities are largely responsible for recent global warming, according to new research.

The scientists say they have found no 30-year periods in the last 2,000 years that have exceeded the mean average European summer temperature of the years from 1986 to 2015.

The new research says that already most of Europe has experienced strong summer warming in the past few decades, with severe heatwaves in 2003, as well as in 2010 and in 2015.

This new data adds to the fears expressed by scientists this week that parts of the Mediterranean and Arctic regions will heat up by 3.4C and 6C respectively above pre-industrial levels.

Sonia Seneviratne, head of the land-climate dynamics group at Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (ETH Zurich), and colleagues reported in Nature on the meaning of a 2C global average warming. She says:

“We even see starkly different rates of extreme warming over land when global average temperatures reach just 1.5C, which is the limit to the rate of warming agreed to at the Paris climate talks. At 1.5C, we would still see temperature extremes in the Arctic rise by 4.4C, and a 2.2C warming of extremes around the Mediterranean basin.”

Historical evidence

According to the new report, published in Environmental Research Letters “reconstructions indicate that the mean 20th century European summer temperature was not significantly different from some earlier centuries, including the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th centuries CE …

“Recent summers, however, have been unusually warm in the context of the last two millennia and there are no 30 year periods in either reconstruction that exceed the mean average European summer temperature of the last three decades (1986-2015 CE).”

The 45 scientists, from 13 countries, say their research now puts the current warmth in the context of the last 2,100 years, using tree-ring information and historical documentary evidence. Their interdisciplinary study involved the collaboration of researchers from Past Global Changes (PAGES), a core project of the global sustainability science programme, Future Earth.

During Roman times, up until the 3rd century, there were warm summers, followed by generally cooler conditions from the 4th to the 7th centuries. A generally warm medieval period was followed by a mostly cold Little Ice Age from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

The scientists say the pronounced warming early in the 20th century and in recent decades is well represented by the tree-ring data and historical evidence on which their reconstruction is based.

Time to prepare for future extreme climate events

They also say the evidence suggests that past natural changes in summer temperature are greater than previously thought, suggesting that climate models may underestimate the full range of future extreme events, including heatwaves.

This past variability has been associated with large volcanic eruptions and changes in the amount of energy received from the sun.

The scientists say their finding that temperatures over the last 30 years lie outside the range of these natural variations supports the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that recent warming is mainly caused by human activity.

“We now have a detailed picture of how summer temperatures have changed over Europe for more than 2,000 years and we can use that to test the climate models that are used to predict the impacts of future global warming“, says the co-ordinator of the study, Professor Jürg Luterbacher, director of the department of geography at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany.

Professor Luterbacher co-authored a 2014 report titled ‘The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case‘, published in Climate Change. The report drew on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources.

He and his colleagues wrote then that Europe was affected in 1540 by “an unprecedented 11-month-long megadrought … We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.”

They concluded: “Given the large spatial extent, the long duration and the intensity of the 1540 heat and drought, the return of such an event in the course of intensified global warming involves staggering losses.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

For billions of years, life on Earth remained relatively simple. Only single-celled organisms that could live with little or no oxygen were able to survive in the seas.

Eventually, the rise of oxygen led to a proliferation of diverse, multicellular life. However the oceans have not remained unchanged since that chemical and biological revolution.

At several times in geological history, they have partially reverted back to their original bacterially-dominated, oxygen-free state – and they could do so again.

Today rising CO₂ levels are making the oceans warmer and more acidic. Deforestation and intensive farming are causing soils and nutrients to be flushed into the sea.

And increasingly, the oceans are being stripped of oxygen, leaving large ‘dead zones‘ in the Gulf of Mexico, the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic off West Africa.

These dead zones, smaller-scale revivals of the primeval oceans that existed before complex life, appear to be caused by poor land management, such as fertilisers draining from farms into the sea. It is a process that could be exacerbated by climate change – as has happened in the past.

How oceans become ‘dead’

Oceans lose their oxygen when animals and bacteria consume it faster than it can be replenished. This usually comes about in stagnant or algae-rich waters. In severe cases, all oxygen can be consumed rendering the waters ‘anoxic’ and inhospitable to animal life.

This happens today in isolated fjords and basins. And it has happened on a larger scale throughout Earth’s history, especially during the Cretaceous, towards the end of the dinosaur era 145-66m years ago. Then, large parts of the ancient oceans became anoxic, allowing vast amounts of organic matter to escape degradation, and in many cases forming deposits of oil and gas.

We can examine the extent of anoxia by looking for a certain type of ‘green sulfur bacteria‘ which require both sunlight and oxygen-depleted waters in order to conduct their rather exotic form of photosynthesis. Evidence of their presence can be found in ancient rocks – molecular proof that anoxia once extended from the seafloor almost all the way to the ocean’s surface.

These oceans thrived with microbial life. But animals need oxygen, and vast portions of these ancient oceans would have become ‘dead’ to them.

Life in the deep sea

Unlike almost every other ecosystem on our planet, the deep sea is bereft of light and plants. Animals down there largely live off marine snow, the scraps of organic matter that somehow escape from the surface world and sink to the twilight realm below. In this energy-starved world, creatures live solitary lives in emptiness, darkness and mystery.

And yet life is there. Krill thrive on the slowly-sinking snow. Sperm whales dive deep to consume the krill and emerge with scars from giant squid. And when a whale dies and its carcass plummets to the seafloor, it is set upon by sharks and fish who emerge from the darkness for the unexpected feast.

Within days the carcass is stripped to the bones – but even then, massive colonies of tube worms spring to life. All of these animals, the fish, whales and worms, depend on oxygen. Our oxygen-rich seas are an incredible contrast to the North Atlantic during some anoxic events.

Then, plesiosaurs (see photo, above right) and ichthyosaurs, feeding on magnificent ammonites, would have been confined to the sunlit, oxygen-rich realm near the surface, their maximum depth of descent marked by a layer of pink and then green water, pigmented by bacteria.

And below it, where the deeper waters were anoxic, only single-celled organisms adapted to life without oxygen were able to survive.

Could this happen again?

Conventional wisdom has been that such extreme anoxia in the future is unlikely, that Cretaceous ‘dead zones’ were a consequence of a markedly different geography. The ancient Atlantic Ocean was smaller and more restricted, lending itself to these extreme conditions.

This is a bit like the modern Black Sea, a restricted basin where fresh river water sits stably above salty and dense marine deep water. But the Black Sea doesn’t quite match up with what we know about ancient anoxic oceans.

For a start, if driven solely by geographical shape, why were the oceans not anoxic as the norm rather than only at certain times? Sometimes much larger oceans became dead zones, or the anoxia was restricted to coastal areas. And although ocean circulation was slower during warm climates, it did not stop – unlike in the Black Sea.

This suggests geography was important but not exclusively so. Algal blooms are a more likely trigger. These algae would have flourished after dramatic increases in nutrients caused by erosion and chemical weathering, driven by higher carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming and/or changes in the hydrological cycle – all of which we now know occurred prior to several anoxic events.

It is likely that today’s coastal dead zones are due not to climate change but to our excessive use of fertilisers. And it is unlikely that our future will revisit the widespread ocean anoxia of the past.

But the lessons of the past do suggest global warming could exacerbate the impacts of our poor land management, adding yet another pressure to already stressed ecosystems.

Richard Pancost is Professor of Biogeochemistry and Director of the Cabot Institute, University of Bristol.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The unusually hot summers in Europe over the last three decades are further evidence that human activities are largely responsible for recent global warming, according to new research.

The scientists say they have found no 30-year periods in the last 2,000 years that have exceeded the mean average European summer temperature of the years from 1986 to 2015.

The new research says that already most of Europe has experienced strong summer warming in the past few decades, with severe heatwaves in 2003, as well as in 2010 and in 2015.

This new data adds to the fears expressed by scientists this week that parts of the Mediterranean and Arctic regions will heat up by 3.4C and 6C respectively above pre-industrial levels.

Sonia Seneviratne, head of the land-climate dynamics group at Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (ETH Zurich), and colleagues reported in Nature on the meaning of a 2C global average warming. She says:

“We even see starkly different rates of extreme warming over land when global average temperatures reach just 1.5C, which is the limit to the rate of warming agreed to at the Paris climate talks. At 1.5C, we would still see temperature extremes in the Arctic rise by 4.4C, and a 2.2C warming of extremes around the Mediterranean basin.”

Historical evidence

According to the new report, published in Environmental Research Letters “reconstructions indicate that the mean 20th century European summer temperature was not significantly different from some earlier centuries, including the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th centuries CE …

“Recent summers, however, have been unusually warm in the context of the last two millennia and there are no 30 year periods in either reconstruction that exceed the mean average European summer temperature of the last three decades (1986-2015 CE).”

The 45 scientists, from 13 countries, say their research now puts the current warmth in the context of the last 2,100 years, using tree-ring information and historical documentary evidence. Their interdisciplinary study involved the collaboration of researchers from Past Global Changes (PAGES), a core project of the global sustainability science programme, Future Earth.

During Roman times, up until the 3rd century, there were warm summers, followed by generally cooler conditions from the 4th to the 7th centuries. A generally warm medieval period was followed by a mostly cold Little Ice Age from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

The scientists say the pronounced warming early in the 20th century and in recent decades is well represented by the tree-ring data and historical evidence on which their reconstruction is based.

Time to prepare for future extreme climate events

They also say the evidence suggests that past natural changes in summer temperature are greater than previously thought, suggesting that climate models may underestimate the full range of future extreme events, including heatwaves.

This past variability has been associated with large volcanic eruptions and changes in the amount of energy received from the sun.

The scientists say their finding that temperatures over the last 30 years lie outside the range of these natural variations supports the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that recent warming is mainly caused by human activity.

“We now have a detailed picture of how summer temperatures have changed over Europe for more than 2,000 years and we can use that to test the climate models that are used to predict the impacts of future global warming“, says the co-ordinator of the study, Professor Jürg Luterbacher, director of the department of geography at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany.

Professor Luterbacher co-authored a 2014 report titled ‘The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case‘, published in Climate Change. The report drew on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources.

He and his colleagues wrote then that Europe was affected in 1540 by “an unprecedented 11-month-long megadrought … We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.”

They concluded: “Given the large spatial extent, the long duration and the intensity of the 1540 heat and drought, the return of such an event in the course of intensified global warming involves staggering losses.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

For billions of years, life on Earth remained relatively simple. Only single-celled organisms that could live with little or no oxygen were able to survive in the seas.

Eventually, the rise of oxygen led to a proliferation of diverse, multicellular life. However the oceans have not remained unchanged since that chemical and biological revolution.

At several times in geological history, they have partially reverted back to their original bacterially-dominated, oxygen-free state – and they could do so again.

Today rising CO₂ levels are making the oceans warmer and more acidic. Deforestation and intensive farming are causing soils and nutrients to be flushed into the sea.

And increasingly, the oceans are being stripped of oxygen, leaving large ‘dead zones‘ in the Gulf of Mexico, the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic off West Africa.

These dead zones, smaller-scale revivals of the primeval oceans that existed before complex life, appear to be caused by poor land management, such as fertilisers draining from farms into the sea. It is a process that could be exacerbated by climate change – as has happened in the past.

How oceans become ‘dead’

Oceans lose their oxygen when animals and bacteria consume it faster than it can be replenished. This usually comes about in stagnant or algae-rich waters. In severe cases, all oxygen can be consumed rendering the waters ‘anoxic’ and inhospitable to animal life.

This happens today in isolated fjords and basins. And it has happened on a larger scale throughout Earth’s history, especially during the Cretaceous, towards the end of the dinosaur era 145-66m years ago. Then, large parts of the ancient oceans became anoxic, allowing vast amounts of organic matter to escape degradation, and in many cases forming deposits of oil and gas.

We can examine the extent of anoxia by looking for a certain type of ‘green sulfur bacteria‘ which require both sunlight and oxygen-depleted waters in order to conduct their rather exotic form of photosynthesis. Evidence of their presence can be found in ancient rocks – molecular proof that anoxia once extended from the seafloor almost all the way to the ocean’s surface.

These oceans thrived with microbial life. But animals need oxygen, and vast portions of these ancient oceans would have become ‘dead’ to them.

Life in the deep sea

Unlike almost every other ecosystem on our planet, the deep sea is bereft of light and plants. Animals down there largely live off marine snow, the scraps of organic matter that somehow escape from the surface world and sink to the twilight realm below. In this energy-starved world, creatures live solitary lives in emptiness, darkness and mystery.

And yet life is there. Krill thrive on the slowly-sinking snow. Sperm whales dive deep to consume the krill and emerge with scars from giant squid. And when a whale dies and its carcass plummets to the seafloor, it is set upon by sharks and fish who emerge from the darkness for the unexpected feast.

Within days the carcass is stripped to the bones – but even then, massive colonies of tube worms spring to life. All of these animals, the fish, whales and worms, depend on oxygen. Our oxygen-rich seas are an incredible contrast to the North Atlantic during some anoxic events.

Then, plesiosaurs (see photo, above right) and ichthyosaurs, feeding on magnificent ammonites, would have been confined to the sunlit, oxygen-rich realm near the surface, their maximum depth of descent marked by a layer of pink and then green water, pigmented by bacteria.

And below it, where the deeper waters were anoxic, only single-celled organisms adapted to life without oxygen were able to survive.

Could this happen again?

Conventional wisdom has been that such extreme anoxia in the future is unlikely, that Cretaceous ‘dead zones’ were a consequence of a markedly different geography. The ancient Atlantic Ocean was smaller and more restricted, lending itself to these extreme conditions.

This is a bit like the modern Black Sea, a restricted basin where fresh river water sits stably above salty and dense marine deep water. But the Black Sea doesn’t quite match up with what we know about ancient anoxic oceans.

For a start, if driven solely by geographical shape, why were the oceans not anoxic as the norm rather than only at certain times? Sometimes much larger oceans became dead zones, or the anoxia was restricted to coastal areas. And although ocean circulation was slower during warm climates, it did not stop – unlike in the Black Sea.

This suggests geography was important but not exclusively so. Algal blooms are a more likely trigger. These algae would have flourished after dramatic increases in nutrients caused by erosion and chemical weathering, driven by higher carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming and/or changes in the hydrological cycle – all of which we now know occurred prior to several anoxic events.

It is likely that today’s coastal dead zones are due not to climate change but to our excessive use of fertilisers. And it is unlikely that our future will revisit the widespread ocean anoxia of the past.

But the lessons of the past do suggest global warming could exacerbate the impacts of our poor land management, adding yet another pressure to already stressed ecosystems.

Richard Pancost is Professor of Biogeochemistry and Director of the Cabot Institute, University of Bristol.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The unusually hot summers in Europe over the last three decades are further evidence that human activities are largely responsible for recent global warming, according to new research.

The scientists say they have found no 30-year periods in the last 2,000 years that have exceeded the mean average European summer temperature of the years from 1986 to 2015.

The new research says that already most of Europe has experienced strong summer warming in the past few decades, with severe heatwaves in 2003, as well as in 2010 and in 2015.

This new data adds to the fears expressed by scientists this week that parts of the Mediterranean and Arctic regions will heat up by 3.4C and 6C respectively above pre-industrial levels.

Sonia Seneviratne, head of the land-climate dynamics group at Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (ETH Zurich), and colleagues reported in Nature on the meaning of a 2C global average warming. She says:

“We even see starkly different rates of extreme warming over land when global average temperatures reach just 1.5C, which is the limit to the rate of warming agreed to at the Paris climate talks. At 1.5C, we would still see temperature extremes in the Arctic rise by 4.4C, and a 2.2C warming of extremes around the Mediterranean basin.”

Historical evidence

According to the new report, published in Environmental Research Letters “reconstructions indicate that the mean 20th century European summer temperature was not significantly different from some earlier centuries, including the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th centuries CE …

“Recent summers, however, have been unusually warm in the context of the last two millennia and there are no 30 year periods in either reconstruction that exceed the mean average European summer temperature of the last three decades (1986-2015 CE).”

The 45 scientists, from 13 countries, say their research now puts the current warmth in the context of the last 2,100 years, using tree-ring information and historical documentary evidence. Their interdisciplinary study involved the collaboration of researchers from Past Global Changes (PAGES), a core project of the global sustainability science programme, Future Earth.

During Roman times, up until the 3rd century, there were warm summers, followed by generally cooler conditions from the 4th to the 7th centuries. A generally warm medieval period was followed by a mostly cold Little Ice Age from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

The scientists say the pronounced warming early in the 20th century and in recent decades is well represented by the tree-ring data and historical evidence on which their reconstruction is based.

Time to prepare for future extreme climate events

They also say the evidence suggests that past natural changes in summer temperature are greater than previously thought, suggesting that climate models may underestimate the full range of future extreme events, including heatwaves.

This past variability has been associated with large volcanic eruptions and changes in the amount of energy received from the sun.

The scientists say their finding that temperatures over the last 30 years lie outside the range of these natural variations supports the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that recent warming is mainly caused by human activity.

“We now have a detailed picture of how summer temperatures have changed over Europe for more than 2,000 years and we can use that to test the climate models that are used to predict the impacts of future global warming“, says the co-ordinator of the study, Professor Jürg Luterbacher, director of the department of geography at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany.

Professor Luterbacher co-authored a 2014 report titled ‘The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case‘, published in Climate Change. The report drew on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources.

He and his colleagues wrote then that Europe was affected in 1540 by “an unprecedented 11-month-long megadrought … We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.”

They concluded: “Given the large spatial extent, the long duration and the intensity of the 1540 heat and drought, the return of such an event in the course of intensified global warming involves staggering losses.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

For billions of years, life on Earth remained relatively simple. Only single-celled organisms that could live with little or no oxygen were able to survive in the seas.

Eventually, the rise of oxygen led to a proliferation of diverse, multicellular life. However the oceans have not remained unchanged since that chemical and biological revolution.

At several times in geological history, they have partially reverted back to their original bacterially-dominated, oxygen-free state – and they could do so again.

Today rising CO₂ levels are making the oceans warmer and more acidic. Deforestation and intensive farming are causing soils and nutrients to be flushed into the sea.

And increasingly, the oceans are being stripped of oxygen, leaving large ‘dead zones‘ in the Gulf of Mexico, the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic off West Africa.

These dead zones, smaller-scale revivals of the primeval oceans that existed before complex life, appear to be caused by poor land management, such as fertilisers draining from farms into the sea. It is a process that could be exacerbated by climate change – as has happened in the past.

How oceans become ‘dead’

Oceans lose their oxygen when animals and bacteria consume it faster than it can be replenished. This usually comes about in stagnant or algae-rich waters. In severe cases, all oxygen can be consumed rendering the waters ‘anoxic’ and inhospitable to animal life.

This happens today in isolated fjords and basins. And it has happened on a larger scale throughout Earth’s history, especially during the Cretaceous, towards the end of the dinosaur era 145-66m years ago. Then, large parts of the ancient oceans became anoxic, allowing vast amounts of organic matter to escape degradation, and in many cases forming deposits of oil and gas.

We can examine the extent of anoxia by looking for a certain type of ‘green sulfur bacteria‘ which require both sunlight and oxygen-depleted waters in order to conduct their rather exotic form of photosynthesis. Evidence of their presence can be found in ancient rocks – molecular proof that anoxia once extended from the seafloor almost all the way to the ocean’s surface.

These oceans thrived with microbial life. But animals need oxygen, and vast portions of these ancient oceans would have become ‘dead’ to them.

Life in the deep sea

Unlike almost every other ecosystem on our planet, the deep sea is bereft of light and plants. Animals down there largely live off marine snow, the scraps of organic matter that somehow escape from the surface world and sink to the twilight realm below. In this energy-starved world, creatures live solitary lives in emptiness, darkness and mystery.

And yet life is there. Krill thrive on the slowly-sinking snow. Sperm whales dive deep to consume the krill and emerge with scars from giant squid. And when a whale dies and its carcass plummets to the seafloor, it is set upon by sharks and fish who emerge from the darkness for the unexpected feast.

Within days the carcass is stripped to the bones – but even then, massive colonies of tube worms spring to life. All of these animals, the fish, whales and worms, depend on oxygen. Our oxygen-rich seas are an incredible contrast to the North Atlantic during some anoxic events.

Then, plesiosaurs (see photo, above right) and ichthyosaurs, feeding on magnificent ammonites, would have been confined to the sunlit, oxygen-rich realm near the surface, their maximum depth of descent marked by a layer of pink and then green water, pigmented by bacteria.

And below it, where the deeper waters were anoxic, only single-celled organisms adapted to life without oxygen were able to survive.

Could this happen again?

Conventional wisdom has been that such extreme anoxia in the future is unlikely, that Cretaceous ‘dead zones’ were a consequence of a markedly different geography. The ancient Atlantic Ocean was smaller and more restricted, lending itself to these extreme conditions.

This is a bit like the modern Black Sea, a restricted basin where fresh river water sits stably above salty and dense marine deep water. But the Black Sea doesn’t quite match up with what we know about ancient anoxic oceans.

For a start, if driven solely by geographical shape, why were the oceans not anoxic as the norm rather than only at certain times? Sometimes much larger oceans became dead zones, or the anoxia was restricted to coastal areas. And although ocean circulation was slower during warm climates, it did not stop – unlike in the Black Sea.

This suggests geography was important but not exclusively so. Algal blooms are a more likely trigger. These algae would have flourished after dramatic increases in nutrients caused by erosion and chemical weathering, driven by higher carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming and/or changes in the hydrological cycle – all of which we now know occurred prior to several anoxic events.

It is likely that today’s coastal dead zones are due not to climate change but to our excessive use of fertilisers. And it is unlikely that our future will revisit the widespread ocean anoxia of the past.

But the lessons of the past do suggest global warming could exacerbate the impacts of our poor land management, adding yet another pressure to already stressed ecosystems.

Richard Pancost is Professor of Biogeochemistry and Director of the Cabot Institute, University of Bristol.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The unusually hot summers in Europe over the last three decades are further evidence that human activities are largely responsible for recent global warming, according to new research.

The scientists say they have found no 30-year periods in the last 2,000 years that have exceeded the mean average European summer temperature of the years from 1986 to 2015.

The new research says that already most of Europe has experienced strong summer warming in the past few decades, with severe heatwaves in 2003, as well as in 2010 and in 2015.

This new data adds to the fears expressed by scientists this week that parts of the Mediterranean and Arctic regions will heat up by 3.4C and 6C respectively above pre-industrial levels.

Sonia Seneviratne, head of the land-climate dynamics group at Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (ETH Zurich), and colleagues reported in Nature on the meaning of a 2C global average warming. She says:

“We even see starkly different rates of extreme warming over land when global average temperatures reach just 1.5C, which is the limit to the rate of warming agreed to at the Paris climate talks. At 1.5C, we would still see temperature extremes in the Arctic rise by 4.4C, and a 2.2C warming of extremes around the Mediterranean basin.”

Historical evidence

According to the new report, published in Environmental Research Letters “reconstructions indicate that the mean 20th century European summer temperature was not significantly different from some earlier centuries, including the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th centuries CE …

“Recent summers, however, have been unusually warm in the context of the last two millennia and there are no 30 year periods in either reconstruction that exceed the mean average European summer temperature of the last three decades (1986-2015 CE).”

The 45 scientists, from 13 countries, say their research now puts the current warmth in the context of the last 2,100 years, using tree-ring information and historical documentary evidence. Their interdisciplinary study involved the collaboration of researchers from Past Global Changes (PAGES), a core project of the global sustainability science programme, Future Earth.

During Roman times, up until the 3rd century, there were warm summers, followed by generally cooler conditions from the 4th to the 7th centuries. A generally warm medieval period was followed by a mostly cold Little Ice Age from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

The scientists say the pronounced warming early in the 20th century and in recent decades is well represented by the tree-ring data and historical evidence on which their reconstruction is based.

Time to prepare for future extreme climate events

They also say the evidence suggests that past natural changes in summer temperature are greater than previously thought, suggesting that climate models may underestimate the full range of future extreme events, including heatwaves.

This past variability has been associated with large volcanic eruptions and changes in the amount of energy received from the sun.

The scientists say their finding that temperatures over the last 30 years lie outside the range of these natural variations supports the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that recent warming is mainly caused by human activity.

“We now have a detailed picture of how summer temperatures have changed over Europe for more than 2,000 years and we can use that to test the climate models that are used to predict the impacts of future global warming“, says the co-ordinator of the study, Professor Jürg Luterbacher, director of the department of geography at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany.

Professor Luterbacher co-authored a 2014 report titled ‘The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case‘, published in Climate Change. The report drew on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources.

He and his colleagues wrote then that Europe was affected in 1540 by “an unprecedented 11-month-long megadrought … We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.”

They concluded: “Given the large spatial extent, the long duration and the intensity of the 1540 heat and drought, the return of such an event in the course of intensified global warming involves staggering losses.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

For billions of years, life on Earth remained relatively simple. Only single-celled organisms that could live with little or no oxygen were able to survive in the seas.

Eventually, the rise of oxygen led to a proliferation of diverse, multicellular life. However the oceans have not remained unchanged since that chemical and biological revolution.

At several times in geological history, they have partially reverted back to their original bacterially-dominated, oxygen-free state – and they could do so again.

Today rising CO₂ levels are making the oceans warmer and more acidic. Deforestation and intensive farming are causing soils and nutrients to be flushed into the sea.

And increasingly, the oceans are being stripped of oxygen, leaving large ‘dead zones‘ in the Gulf of Mexico, the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic off West Africa.

These dead zones, smaller-scale revivals of the primeval oceans that existed before complex life, appear to be caused by poor land management, such as fertilisers draining from farms into the sea. It is a process that could be exacerbated by climate change – as has happened in the past.

How oceans become ‘dead’

Oceans lose their oxygen when animals and bacteria consume it faster than it can be replenished. This usually comes about in stagnant or algae-rich waters. In severe cases, all oxygen can be consumed rendering the waters ‘anoxic’ and inhospitable to animal life.

This happens today in isolated fjords and basins. And it has happened on a larger scale throughout Earth’s history, especially during the Cretaceous, towards the end of the dinosaur era 145-66m years ago. Then, large parts of the ancient oceans became anoxic, allowing vast amounts of organic matter to escape degradation, and in many cases forming deposits of oil and gas.

We can examine the extent of anoxia by looking for a certain type of ‘green sulfur bacteria‘ which require both sunlight and oxygen-depleted waters in order to conduct their rather exotic form of photosynthesis. Evidence of their presence can be found in ancient rocks – molecular proof that anoxia once extended from the seafloor almost all the way to the ocean’s surface.

These oceans thrived with microbial life. But animals need oxygen, and vast portions of these ancient oceans would have become ‘dead’ to them.

Life in the deep sea

Unlike almost every other ecosystem on our planet, the deep sea is bereft of light and plants. Animals down there largely live off marine snow, the scraps of organic matter that somehow escape from the surface world and sink to the twilight realm below. In this energy-starved world, creatures live solitary lives in emptiness, darkness and mystery.

And yet life is there. Krill thrive on the slowly-sinking snow. Sperm whales dive deep to consume the krill and emerge with scars from giant squid. And when a whale dies and its carcass plummets to the seafloor, it is set upon by sharks and fish who emerge from the darkness for the unexpected feast.

Within days the carcass is stripped to the bones – but even then, massive colonies of tube worms spring to life. All of these animals, the fish, whales and worms, depend on oxygen. Our oxygen-rich seas are an incredible contrast to the North Atlantic during some anoxic events.

Then, plesiosaurs (see photo, above right) and ichthyosaurs, feeding on magnificent ammonites, would have been confined to the sunlit, oxygen-rich realm near the surface, their maximum depth of descent marked by a layer of pink and then green water, pigmented by bacteria.

And below it, where the deeper waters were anoxic, only single-celled organisms adapted to life without oxygen were able to survive.

Could this happen again?

Conventional wisdom has been that such extreme anoxia in the future is unlikely, that Cretaceous ‘dead zones’ were a consequence of a markedly different geography. The ancient Atlantic Ocean was smaller and more restricted, lending itself to these extreme conditions.

This is a bit like the modern Black Sea, a restricted basin where fresh river water sits stably above salty and dense marine deep water. But the Black Sea doesn’t quite match up with what we know about ancient anoxic oceans.

For a start, if driven solely by geographical shape, why were the oceans not anoxic as the norm rather than only at certain times? Sometimes much larger oceans became dead zones, or the anoxia was restricted to coastal areas. And although ocean circulation was slower during warm climates, it did not stop – unlike in the Black Sea.

This suggests geography was important but not exclusively so. Algal blooms are a more likely trigger. These algae would have flourished after dramatic increases in nutrients caused by erosion and chemical weathering, driven by higher carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming and/or changes in the hydrological cycle – all of which we now know occurred prior to several anoxic events.

It is likely that today’s coastal dead zones are due not to climate change but to our excessive use of fertilisers. And it is unlikely that our future will revisit the widespread ocean anoxia of the past.

But the lessons of the past do suggest global warming could exacerbate the impacts of our poor land management, adding yet another pressure to already stressed ecosystems.

Richard Pancost is Professor of Biogeochemistry and Director of the Cabot Institute, University of Bristol.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The unusually hot summers in Europe over the last three decades are further evidence that human activities are largely responsible for recent global warming, according to new research.

The scientists say they have found no 30-year periods in the last 2,000 years that have exceeded the mean average European summer temperature of the years from 1986 to 2015.

The new research says that already most of Europe has experienced strong summer warming in the past few decades, with severe heatwaves in 2003, as well as in 2010 and in 2015.

This new data adds to the fears expressed by scientists this week that parts of the Mediterranean and Arctic regions will heat up by 3.4C and 6C respectively above pre-industrial levels.

Sonia Seneviratne, head of the land-climate dynamics group at Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (ETH Zurich), and colleagues reported in Nature on the meaning of a 2C global average warming. She says:

“We even see starkly different rates of extreme warming over land when global average temperatures reach just 1.5C, which is the limit to the rate of warming agreed to at the Paris climate talks. At 1.5C, we would still see temperature extremes in the Arctic rise by 4.4C, and a 2.2C warming of extremes around the Mediterranean basin.”

Historical evidence

According to the new report, published in Environmental Research Letters “reconstructions indicate that the mean 20th century European summer temperature was not significantly different from some earlier centuries, including the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th centuries CE …

“Recent summers, however, have been unusually warm in the context of the last two millennia and there are no 30 year periods in either reconstruction that exceed the mean average European summer temperature of the last three decades (1986-2015 CE).”

The 45 scientists, from 13 countries, say their research now puts the current warmth in the context of the last 2,100 years, using tree-ring information and historical documentary evidence. Their interdisciplinary study involved the collaboration of researchers from Past Global Changes (PAGES), a core project of the global sustainability science programme, Future Earth.

During Roman times, up until the 3rd century, there were warm summers, followed by generally cooler conditions from the 4th to the 7th centuries. A generally warm medieval period was followed by a mostly cold Little Ice Age from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

The scientists say the pronounced warming early in the 20th century and in recent decades is well represented by the tree-ring data and historical evidence on which their reconstruction is based.

Time to prepare for future extreme climate events

They also say the evidence suggests that past natural changes in summer temperature are greater than previously thought, suggesting that climate models may underestimate the full range of future extreme events, including heatwaves.

This past variability has been associated with large volcanic eruptions and changes in the amount of energy received from the sun.

The scientists say their finding that temperatures over the last 30 years lie outside the range of these natural variations supports the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that recent warming is mainly caused by human activity.

“We now have a detailed picture of how summer temperatures have changed over Europe for more than 2,000 years and we can use that to test the climate models that are used to predict the impacts of future global warming“, says the co-ordinator of the study, Professor Jürg Luterbacher, director of the department of geography at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany.

Professor Luterbacher co-authored a 2014 report titled ‘The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case‘, published in Climate Change. The report drew on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources.

He and his colleagues wrote then that Europe was affected in 1540 by “an unprecedented 11-month-long megadrought … We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.”

They concluded: “Given the large spatial extent, the long duration and the intensity of the 1540 heat and drought, the return of such an event in the course of intensified global warming involves staggering losses.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.