Behind record oil prices, troubling signs in production

by Jad Mouawad, International Herald Tribune, April 28, 2008

As oil prices soared to record levels in recent years, basic economics suggested that consumption would fall and supply would rise as producers opened the taps to pump more.

But as prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy specialists are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to attract new production or to suppress global demand, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices spiraling upward.

A central reason supply is not rising to meet demand is that producers outside of the OPEC cartel -- countries like Russia, Mexico and Norway -- have been showing troubling signs of sluggishness. Unlike the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose explicit goal is to regulate supply to keep prices up, the other countries are the free traders of the international market, with every incentive to produce flat-out at a time of high prices.

That they are not doing so is a troubling sign. Countries outside of OPEC have been the main source of production growth in the past three decades, as new fields were discovered in Alaska, the North Sea or West Africa. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, new opportunities emerged in Russia and the Caspian Sea.

But for a variety of reasons, including sharply higher drilling costs and nationalistic policies that restrict foreign investments, these countries are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to bolster output. They seem stuck at about 50 million barrels of oil a day, or 60 percent of the world's oil supplies, with few prospects for growth.

Analysts at Barclays Capital said last week that non-OPEC supplies were "seemingly dead in the water." Goldman Sachs raised similar concerns last month, saying that growth in non-OPEC supplies "can no longer be taken for granted."

At the same time, oil consumption keeps expanding at a faster clip than production. Demand is forecast to increase this year by 1.2 million barrels a day, to 87.2 million barrels a day. Consumption has actually fallen a bit in the United States, the world's biggest consumer, as the country grapples with an economic slowdown.

But that drop is being offset by growth in other countries. World consumption is projected to rise 35 percent, to around 115 million barrels a day, in the next two decades. Most of the growth will come from China, India and oil-producing countries in the Middle East, where retail fuel prices are subsidized, encouraging wasteful consumption.

"What is disturbing here is that things seem to get worse, not better," an analyst at Goldman Sachs, David Greely, said. "These high prices are not attracting meaningful new supplies."

Oil for June delivery settled at $118.75 a barrel Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange after earlier touching a record $119.93. Longer-term oil futures, dated for 2013, now trade at $108 a barrel, a strong indication that investors see little cause for prices to drop in the next five years - partly because of low expectations about production growth.

The outlook for oil supplies "signals a period of unprecedented scarcity," an analyst at CIBC World Markets, Jeff Rubin, said last week.

Oil prices might reach more than $200 by 2012, he said, a level that would probably mean $7 a gallon, or $1.85 a liter, gasoline in the United States.

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway's production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001. In Britain, the fall has been a more drastic 43 percent drop in eight years. The North Sea is now considered a dying oil basin. The giant field at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska has undergone a similar decline.

In many other places, the problems are not located below ground, as energy executives like to put it, but above ground. Higher petroleum taxes and tougher contract rules, scarce manpower and swelling costs, as well as political wrangling and violence, are making it much harder to bolster production.

"It's a crunch," said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. "The world is not running out of oil, but rather it's running out of oil production capacity."

Recently, the case that has attracted the most attention is Mexico, a leading exporter to the United States, which seems increasingly helpless to stem the collapse of its largest oil field, Cantarell. Last week, the country's state-owned oil company, Pemex, said that production had fallen 300,000 barrels a day so far this year, a stunning drop. Mexico's output has dropped 9 percent in two years, and analysts say they expect further declines this year.

A combination of falling production and rising domestic consumption could wipe out Mexico's exports within five years, including the 1.5 million barrels it sends to the United States each day.

Another country, Russia, is also troubling analysts' forecasts. The country is not exactly running out of places to look for oil - a huge part of Eastern Siberia remains unexplored - and Russia has been the biggest contributor to the growth in energy supplies in the last decade.

But this month, Russian energy officials warned that the days of stunning growth that followed the demise of the Soviet Union were over, as the country would focus on stabilizing its output. Russia today produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day, up from a low point of 6 million barrels in 1996.

About 75 percent of the world's oil reserves are in OPEC countries, where governments voluntarily restrict their output to push up prices. As countries like Russia slow output, analysts say OPEC will have to pick up the slack. The oil cartel currently accounts for 40 percent of the world's oil exports.

Further clouding the picture, Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, signaled last week that it might have trouble increasing its production.

Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC, signaled it would freeze any further expansion after next year. That dims the long-range outlook for OPEC supplies, though in the near term, Saudi Arabia is expected to loom larger in the market as it completes a $50 billion plan to increase its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day. Yet that leaves it well short of the 15 million barrels that most experts say they expected the kingdom to produce in the long run.

OPEC's 13 members say they plan to spend $150 billion to expand capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012, according to estimates by the cartel. But that also falls short of most projections that say OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the planned growth in demand.

Reaching that level is going to be impossible unless the violence and tensions in both Iran and Iraq are resolved, analysts said. Because of sanctions for the past 30 years, both countries have been producing much less than their huge oil reserves would permit.

Not everyone has a pessimistic outlook. The U.S. Energy Department forecasts sustained growth in non-OPEC supplies this year and next. A study by the National Petroleum Council, an industry group that provides advice to the secretary of energy, outlined a variety of possibilities for oil expansion, and concluded that the world still had plenty of petroleum resources that could be tapped.

In fact, high prices have sparked a global dash for oil. Companies are trawling deep oceans or seeking to drill in the Arctic Ocean. In some cases, the hunt has been successful. Brazil, for example, has struck large offshore discoveries that could turn the country into one of the world's top 10 producers in the coming decade. Yet it takes years to bring such remote fields into production, and the market needs oil now.

To make up the shortfall, the world is increasingly turning to fuels made from unconventional sources, like biofuels or heavy oil. Canadian tar sands, for example, have attracted large investments, and biofuels have accounted for much of the growth in fuel supplies in the last two years.

The International Energy Agency, an adviser to industrialized countries, estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production, let alone increase overall output. The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to bolster global output, a level of investment that is unlikely to be met. It said a crisis "involving an abrupt run-up in prices" could not be ruled out before 2015.

"According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects: they reduce demand and they induce oil supplies," said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the energy agency. "Not this time."

Link to article:

Humans put CO2 into atmosphere 14,000 times faster than nature

by Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent, News Daily, April 27, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Before humans began burning fossil fuels, there was an eons-long balance between carbon dioxide emissions and Earth's ability to absorb them, but now the planet can't keep up, scientists said on Sunday.

The finding, reported in the journal, Nature Geoscience, relies on ancient Antarctic ice bubbles that contain air samples going back 610,000 years.

Climate scientists for the last 25 years or so have suggested that some kind of natural mechanism regulates our planet's temperature and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those skeptical about human influence on global warming point to this as the cause for recent climate change.

This research is likely the first observable evidence for this natural mechanism.

This mechanism, known as "feedback," has been thrown out of whack by a steep rise in carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal and petroleum for the last 200 years or so, said Richard Zeebe, a co-author of the report.

"These feedbacks operate so slowly that they will not help us in terms of climate change ... that we're going to see in the next several hundred years," Zeebe said by telephone from the University of Hawaii. "Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium."

In the ancient past, excess carbon dioxide came mostly from volcanoes, which spewed very little of the chemical compared to what humans activities do now, but it still had to be addressed.

This antique excess carbon dioxide -- a powerful greenhouse gas -- was removed from the atmosphere through the weathering of mountains, which take in the chemical. In the end, it was washed downhill into oceans and buried in deep sea sediments, Zeebe said.

14,000 TIMES FASTER THAN NATURE

Zeebe analyzed carbon dioxide that had been captured in Antarctic ice, and by figuring out how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere at various points in time, he and his co-author determined that it waxed and waned along with the world's temperature.

"When the carbon dioxide was low, the temperature was low, and we had an ice age," he said. And while Earth's temperature fell during ice ages and rose during so-called interglacial periods between them, the planet's mean temperature has been going slowly down for about 600,000 years.

The average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume, Zeebe said, which means that 22 molecules of carbon dioxide were added to, or removed from, every million molecules of air.

Since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, ushering in the widespread human use of fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 100 parts per million.

That means human activities are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about 14,000 times as fast as natural processes do, Zeebe said.

And it appears to be speeding up: the U.S. government reported last week that in 2007 alone, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by 2.4 parts per million.

The natural mechanism will eventually absorb the excess carbon dioxide, Zeebe said, but not for hundreds of thousands of years.

"This is a time period that we can hardly imagine," he said. "They are way too slow to help us to restore the balance that we have now basically distorted in a very short period of time."

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Link to article: http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/n25417377-climate-warming/

Tom Crompton: Begging for More Than "Small" Changes

VIEWPOINT Tom Crompton

BBC Online: Small changes to the way we live our lives are not enough to tackle the environmental challenges facing the planet, argues Tom Crompton. In this week's Green Room, he says the stark reality is that the only option is to cut the unsustainable consumption of the Earth's finite resources.

Having embraced one simple change, some people then tend to rest on their laurels

Almost daily, it seems, scientists' prognoses about the state of our planet grow evermore dire.

Take climate change, for example. Just last week, a new study suggested that sea levels could rise by up to one-and-a-half metres by the end of this century, with catastrophic impacts for low-lying countries.

This is more than three times as high as the most pessimistic projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Yet some climatologists are suggesting that even this is a huge under-estimate of the likely extent of sea level rise.

In the face of mounting evidence of profound environmental challenges, the insistence that we can tackle these by embracing a few simple and painless changes - switching to low-energy light bulbs or buying a hybrid car - feels increasingly unrealistic.

'Simple and painless'

This is leading to heated debate among environmental organisations about the best response; a debate that WWF believes should be opened up to a wider audience.

Some measures make us feel better but do they make a difference?

Most approaches to encourage behavioural change rely on techniques borrowed from the marketing industry, such as "selling" these changes by linking them to a desirable product.

Those who practise these approaches often insist that, having made simple changes in their purchasing habitats, people will be led up a "virtuous ladder" towards ever more significant behavioural choices.

Marketing approaches may well work for promoting specific changes, where these are small and painless, and where they are the focus of a targeted campaign.

Unfortunately, as a response to problems of the scale that confront us, it seems that they are shot full of holes.

Of course, it's helpful for people to switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, or turn their central heating down; cumulatively, such changes will have a beneficial impact.

However, these sorts of campaigns may well be a poor use of scant communication resources, and may even serve to undermine prospects for generating the more fundamental changes that are needed.

There is little evidence to show that using such an approach increases the probability of people embarking upon more effective - and more difficult - changes.

In fact, some research shows that, for a significant number of people, the opposite is true. Having embraced one simple change, some people then tend to rest on their laurels and be less likely to engage in other more significant changes.

If I save money by repairing my old car rather than buying a new one, I could spend the savings on cheap flights abroad

But there's also another, more fundamental limitation on the usefulness of marketing approaches to creating behavioural change.

Environmental problems can often be traced to our appetite for "stuff", items that demand resources and energy in their manufacture, sale, use and disposal.

The problem is that we seem to have an in-built tendency not just to consume a lot of things, but to consume ever more things.

As a result, "green consumption" can only get us so far. I may buy this year's top-of-the-range hybrid car, only to want to replace it for a newer model next year, and the year after that.

It doesn't necessarily help if I'm encouraged that the best thing to do is to keep my car until it eventually falls apart.

If I save money by repairing my old car rather than buying a new one, I could spend the savings on cheap flights abroad. The net environmental impact will probably be negative.

Even selling my vehicle and joining a car-share scheme may backfire in this way, unless I am careful about how I spend the money that I've saved.

Less is more

As long as campaigns to encourage us to change our behaviour are based on appeals to self-interest or financial incentive, they will be fraught with difficulties.

Endless sales and bargains could be costing the Earth

We need a different approach to motivating people to change; one which stems from a re-examination of the values upon which this change is built.

Studies find that people who engage in behaviour in pursuit of "intrinsic" goals - such as personal growth, community involvement, or a sense of connection with nature - tend to be more highly motivated and more likely to engage in environmentally friendly behaviour than individuals who are motivated by "extrinsic" goals - that is, financial success, image and the acquisition of material goods.

This seems to be the case particularly for more difficult behaviours - those that require greater effort or entail more inconvenience.

There is a lot that governments can do to make environmentally friendly choices easier. But many of these things will cost taxpayers money, and governments will be reluctant to embark on these things without pressure from their electorates.

As in the case of individual behaviour change, if this pressure is to emerge, the values underlying this change in electoral demand will be critically important.

Bringing intrinsic values to the fore in public debate is not going to be easy. So we need to start trying to do so right away.

Environmental organisations might start by unequivocally reflecting the intrinsic values that underpin the environment movement itself.

They should also work with leading businesses and forward-thinking political leaders to think beyond the opportunities offered by green consumerism; preparing for a world where we will inevitably need to consume not just differently, but less.

Environmental organisations can then help to embolden business and political leaders to begin to inject public debate with values that move far beyond self-interest and materialism.

To attempt less is increasingly looking like burying our heads in the sand.

Dr Tom Crompton is a change strategist for conservation charity WWF-UK

WWF's new report Weathercocks and Signposts: The Environment Movement at a Cross Roads can be downloaded from the WWF website

The Green Room is a series of opinion pieces on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website.

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7359018.stm

Presence of Ocean Current 'Stripes' Revealed

ScienceDaily, April 26, 2008

More than 20 years of continuous measurements and a dose of "belief" yield discovery of subtle ocean currents that could dramatically improve forecasts of climate, ecosystem changes. An international collaboration of scientists led by Peter Niiler, a physical oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, and Nikolai Maximenko, a researcher at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii, has detected the presence of crisscrossing patterns of currents running throughout the world's oceans. The new data could help scientists significantly improve high-resolution models that help them understand trends in climate and marine ecosystems.

A worldwide crisscrossing pattern of ocean current striations has been revealed through measurements made by drifting buoys over a period of more than 20 years and through satellite readings of ocean velocity. Blue bands represent westward-flowing currents and red bands indicate eastward-flowing currents that move at roughly 1 cm/s. (Credit: Image courtesy of Nikolai Maximenko, University of Hawaii.) Please click on image to enlarge it.

The basic dimensions of these steady patterns called striations have slowly been revealed over the course of several research papers by Niiler, Maximenko, and colleagues. An analysis by Maximenko, Niiler, and colleagues appearing today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters has produced the clearest representation of these striated patterns in the eastern Pacific Ocean to date and revealed that these complex patterns of currents extend from the surface to at least depths of 700 m (2,300 ft.). The discovery of similarly detailed patterns around the world is expected to emerge from future research.

Niiler credits the long-term and comprehensive ocean current measurements made over more than 20 years by the Global Drifter Program, now a network of more than 1,300 drifting buoys designed by him and administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for detecting these new current patterns on a global basis. Niiler added that the foresight of the University of California to provide long-term support to scientists was crucial to the discovery.

"I'm most grateful to the University of California for helping to support the invention and the 20-year maintenance of a comprehensive program of ocean circulation measurements," he said. "Scripps Institution of Oceanography is unique because of its commitment to long-term observations of the climate. Instrumental measurements of the ocean are fundamental to the definition of the state of the climate today and improvement of its prediction into the future."

In portions of the Southern Ocean, these striations-also known as ocean fronts-produce alternating eastward and westward accelerations of circulation and portions of them nearly circumnavigate Antarctica. These striations also delineate the ocean regions where uptake of carbon dioxide is greatest. In the Atlantic Ocean, these flows bear a strong association to the Azores Current along which water flowing south from the North Atlantic circulation is being subducted. The spatial high-resolution view of the linkage between the striations and the larger scale patterns of currents could improve predictions of ocean temperatures and hurricane paths.

In addition, the striations are connected to important ecosystems like the California and Peru-Chile current systems. Off California, the striations are linked to the steady east-west displacements, or meanders, of the California Current, a major flow that runs from the border of Washington and Oregon to the southern tip of Baja California. The striations run nearly perpendicular to the California Current and continue southwestward to the Hawaiian Islands.

Niiler said there are a number of scientists who have theorized the existence of striations in the ocean. He was the first to formulate such a theory as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in 1965. Niiler's theory today is that the steady-state striations in the eastern North Pacific are caused by the angular momentum of the swirling eddies within the California Current System.

A worldwide crisscrossing pattern of ocean current striations has been revealed through measurements made by drifting buoys over a period of more than 20 years and through satellite readings of ocean velocity. Blue bands represent westward-flowing currents and red bands indicate eastward-flowing currents that move at roughly 1 cm/s. Image courtesy of Nikolai Maximenko, University of Hawaii.

The new maps of ocean circulation produced by a combination of drifter and satellite measurements will eventually be the yardstick for judging the accuracy of the circulation patterns portrayed by climate and ocean ecosystem models -- a major deficiency in current simulations -- and to generate substantially more reliable forecast products in climate and ecosystem management. Niiler noted, for example, that there are a large number of computer models that can simulate equatorial currents, but fail in the attempt to accurately simulate the meandering flow of the California Current and the striations that exude from it.

"I think this research presents the next challenge in ocean modeling," said Niiler. "I'm looking forward to the day when we can correctly portray most ocean circulation systems with all climate and ecosystem models."

Maximenko said the clear resolution of the subtle striations would not have been possible without the use of data from both the drifters and satellites.

"Our finding was so unbelievable that our first proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation failed miserably because most reviewers said 'You cannot study what does not exist,'" Maximenko said. "The striations are like ghosts. To see them one needs to believe in them. No doubt, armed with our hint, scientists will start finding all kinds of striations all around the world."

Maximenko, Niiler, and their international colleagues are now writing a series of papers that reveal new details about the crisscross patterns and their ties to currents such as the Kuroshio, which flows in western Pacific Ocean waters near Japan.

NOAA, the National Science Foundation, the NASA Ocean Surface Topography Team, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology supported the research.

Adapted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego.

APA style reference:

University of California - San Diego (2008, April 26). Scientists Reveal Presence of Ocean Current 'Stripes'. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 26, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/04/080425095207.htm

Link to article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080425095207.htm

Assessing the Impacts of Climate Change on Arctic Marine Mammals

Special issue of

Ecological Applications

Volume 18, Issue sp2 (March 2008)

published by the Ecological Society of America

While the Earth’s climate has exhibited broad extremes over geologic time, there is general agreement that the effects of global warming ongoing now are accentuated in the Arctic, and that the rate of environmental change may be unprecedented. How marine mammals respond to environmental change depends on a species’ adaptability, given its natural history and the temporal and spatial scale of perturbation. Although loss of sea ice as a platform for polar bears to hunt and walrus to rest grabs news headlines, there has been no rigorous effort to investigate either climate change or environmental responses, including those by humans, at the ecological scale of Arctic marine mammals. Here, we attempt just such an investigation through a collection of papers drafted by specialists in a cross-section of disciplines.

Why this collection of papers?—As Arctic sea ice is diminished, ice-associated marine mammals will be affected directly and indirectly. The overall area of sea ice habitat will shrink, reducing the range of ice-obligate species (e.g., ringed seal and polar bear). Ice substrate for breeding and resting will be lost, as will seasonal proximity between ice and key bathymetric features such as shallow continental shelves. Ecological process of the Arctic will change in many ways, while human activities such as shipping and resource development in the region will likely increase. The relationship among marine mammals, indigenous hunters, commercial interests, and sea ice will be sharply altered.

Such conclusions may seem self-evident, but understanding the specific mechanisms by which climate change will affect Arctic marine mammals is important both for its own sake and for determining the extent to which conservation strategies can help prevent or mitigate any negative impacts. A thorough assessment of this topic, involving several perspectives and disciplines, will help identify the species, characteristics, and regions of greatest vulnerability.

Four papers set the stage for assessing current and future status of Arctic marine mammals with respect to climate change. Walsh reviews current climatological understanding, including model projections for the coming century. Harington describes the evolutionary history of Arctic marine mammals. Murray discusses what zooarchaeology teaches us about past distributions. O’Corry-Crowe uses molecular genetics to investigate past and current distributions and behaviors.

The next four papers cover the potential effects of climate change on various aspects of Arctic marine mammals’ natural history and ecology. Bluhm and Gradinger discuss productivity and prey. Laidre et al. consider habitats. Burek et al. describe body condition and health. Hovelsrud et al. review human interactions. Metcalf and Robards examine the case of walrus hunting in western Alaska.

Finally, two papers synthesize the findings of the preceding papers to assess overall impacts and resilience of marine mammals (Moore & Huntington) and the potential for conservation action (Ragen et al.). Taken together, the papers provide a multidisciplinary, authoritative summary of current knowledge to serve both as a baseline for future assessments and as the basis for action in research and in conservation.

Defining the Arctic and Arctic marine mammals.—Simple and satisfactory definitions of the Arctic are elusive. Astronomical, climatological, oceanographic, botanic, and other boundaries have their strengths and weaknesses. For our purposes, we consider the Arctic marine environment to be the region where sea ice is a dominant feature for a considerable part of the year. Our region therefore includes the Arctic Ocean proper as well as the Barents and Bering seas and Hudson and Baffin bays. The Sea of Okhotsk and the Norwegian, Greenlandic, and Icelandic seas share some characteristics and species with the Arctic but are not included in the core Arctic region for our purposes.

More pertinent than a geographical limit, however, is the question of which species should be
considered ‘‘Arctic’’ for our assessment. Many species visit the Arctic at various times or are found in proximity to sea ice at some point in their migrations or life cycle. Relatively few species actually require sea ice for their survival, though it appears to be preferred habitat for several. Some species are found year-round in the Arctic but also have separate stocks in more southerly locations. While any species list has an element of arbitrariness, we have chosen as ‘‘core species’’ for this assessment the seven that occupy the Arctic environment and for which at least some portion of the population is associated with sea ice year-round:

Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus)
Beluga, or white whale (Delphinapterus leucas)
Narwhal (Monodon monoceros)
Bearded seal (Erignathus barbatus)
Ringed seal (Phoca hispida)
Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus)
Polar bear (Ursus maritimus)

These species are considered in all papers, and a summary of habitat and range for each appears in Laidre et al. in this volume.

In addition, nine other species are seasonal or occasional migrants to the Arctic or have some
association with sea ice. These include the harp seal (Phoca groenlandica), hooded seal (Cystophora cristata), ribbon seal (Phoca fasciata), spotted seal (Phoca largha), gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus), killer whale (Orcinus orca), minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), and humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). Discussion of these species has been included where they either shed light on the core species or where changes in the core Arctic region are expected to have a significant effect on any one of these species. The reader is directed to species accounts in natural history guides for additional background information.

Acknowledgments.—We thank the Marine Mammal Commission (USA) for supporting the
preparation and publication of this Special Issue. We also thank the reviewers of the papers in this collection for their encouragement and constructive criticism.

—HENRY P. HUNTINGTON and SUE E. MOORE
Guest Editors

Link to open source journal issue: http://www.esajournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-toc&issn=1051-0761&volume=18&issue=sp2&ct=1

North Pole Free of Ice in 2008?

by Catherine Brahic, NewScientist.com new service, April 25, 2008

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

"The set-up for this summer is disturbing," says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.

The ice expanded again over the winter and in March 2008 covered a greater area than it had in March 2007. Although this was billed as good news in many media sources, the trend since 1978 is on the decline.

Young and thin

Arctic ice at its maximum in March, but that maximum is declining by 44,000 km² per year on average, the NSIDC has calculated. That corresponds to an area roughly twice the size of New Jersey.

What is more, the extent of the ice is only half the picture. Satellite images show that most of the Arctic ice at the moment is thin, young ice that has only been around since last autumn (see graphic, below -- click to enlarge).

Thin ice is far more vulnerable than thick ice that has piled up over several years.

Net loss

"There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment," says Serreze. "This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year."

Despite its news value in the media, the North Pole being ice free is not in itself significant. To scientists, Serreze points out, "this is just another point on the globe." What is worrying, though, is the fact that multi-year ice – the stuff that doesn't melt in the summer – is not piling up as fast as Arctic ice generally is melting.

On average each year about half of the first year ice, formed between September and March, melts during the following summer. In 2007, nearly all of it disappeared.

Moreover, an atmospheric phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation kicked into its strong, "positive," phase this winter. This is known to generate winds which push multi-year ice out of the Arctic along the east coast of Greenland.

Ice still possible

Together, these are the factors that have led to most of the Arctic ice now being so young and thin.

"Even if you lost only half of the first-year ice this year – which would be average – you are still in for a very low ice extent this summer," says Serreze.

Some factors could still save the day, though. In summer 2007, warm winds favoured melting. "If we have an atmospheric pattern like we had last year, we are going to lose a whole bunch of ice this summer, but if we have a cooler, more cyclonic pattern, that might preserve some of that ice," says Serreze.

Link to article: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13779-north-pole-could-be-ice-free-in-2008.html

Changes in the Troposphere, Jet Streams, and Tropical Belts

BLOGGER'S NOTE: A commenter on the realclimate blog has recently left links to 3 abstracts of interest and concerning changes in the temperatures, locations, and winds of the troposphere and stratosphere.
__________________________________________________________________

Nature Geoscience 1, 12-13 (2008). DOI: 10.1038/ngeo.2007.53

Atmospheric science: Raising the roof

Tiffany A. Shaw¹ & Theodore G. Shepherd¹

1. Tiffany A. Shaw and Theodore G. Shepherd are in the Department of Physics, University of Toronto, 60 Saint George Street, Toronto M5S 1A7, Canada.
   e-mail: tshaw@atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca
   e-mail: tgs@atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca

Abstract

The atmosphere's lowermost 10 km have long been assumed to be almost solely responsible for weather and climate on Earth. Emerging evidence points to the layer above as an important influence on surface winds and temperatures on seasonal to decadal timescales.

Link: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n1/abs/ngeo.2007.53.html
___________________________________________________________________

Science, 26 May 2006. Vol. 312, No. 5777, p. 1179. DOI: 10.1126/science.1125566

Enhanced Mid-Latitude Tropospheric Warming in Satellite Measurements

Qiang Fu,^1,2* Celeste M. Johanson,¹ John M. Wallace,¹ and Thomas Reichler³

The spatial distribution of tropospheric and stratospheric temperature trends for 1979 to 2005 was examined, based on radiances from satellite-borne microwave sounding units that were processed with state-of-the-art retrieval algorithms. We found that relative to the global-mean trends of the respective layers, both hemispheres have experienced enhanced tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling in the 15° to 45° latitude belt, which is a pattern indicative of a widening of the tropical circulation and a poleward shift of the tropospheric jet streams and their associated subtropical dry zones. This distinctive spatial pattern in the trends appears to be a robust feature of this 27-year record.

¹ Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
² College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, 730000, China.
³ Department of Meteorology, University of Utah, 135 S 1460 E, Room 819 (WBB), Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0110, USA.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. e-mail: qfu@atmos.washington.edu

Link: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5777/1179
___________________________________________________________________

Nature Geoscience 1, 21-24 (2008)
Published online: 2 December 2007. DOI: 10.1038/ngeo.2007.38

Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate

Dian J. Seidel¹, Qiang Fu², William J. Randel³ & Thomas J. Reichler⁴

Abstract

Some of the earliest unequivocal signs of climate change have been the warming of the air and ocean, thawing of land and melting of ice in the Arctic. But recent studies are showing that the tropics are also changing. Several lines of evidence show that over the past few decades the tropical belt has expanded. This expansion has potentially important implications for subtropical societies and may lead to profound changes in the global climate system. Most importantly, poleward movement of large-scale atmospheric circulation systems, such as jet streams and storm tracks, could result in shifts in precipitation patterns affecting natural ecosystems, agriculture, and water resources. The implications of the expansion for stratospheric circulation and the distribution of ozone in the atmosphere are as yet poorly understood. The observed recent rate of expansion is greater than climate model projections of expansion over the twenty-first century, which suggests that there is still much to be learned about this aspect of global climate change.

1. NOAA Air Resources Laboratory, Silver Spring, MD, USA
2. University of Washington, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Seattle, WA, USA
3. NCAR, Atmospheric Chemistry Division, Boulder, CO, USA
4. University of Utah, Department of Meteorology, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Correspondence to: Dian J. Seidel¹ e-mail: dian.seidel@noaa.gov

Link: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n1/abs/ngeo.2007.38.html
___________________________________________________________________

Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35 (2008) L08803. DOI: 10.1029/2008GL033614

Historical trends in the jet streams

Cristina L. Archer (Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, CA, U.S.A.) and Ken Caldeira (Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, CA, U.S.A.)

Abstract

Jet streams, the meandering bands of fast winds located near the tropopause, are driving factors for weather in the midlatitudes. This is the first study to analyze historical trends of jet stream properties based on the ERA-40 and the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis datasets for the period 1979 to 2001. We defined jet stream properties based on mass and mass-flux weighted averages. We found that, in general, the jet streams have risen in altitude and moved poleward in both hemispheres. In the northern hemisphere, the jet stream weakened. In the southern hemisphere, the sub-tropical jet weakened, whereas the polar jet strengthened. Exceptions to this general behavior were found locally and seasonally. Further observations and analysis are needed to confidently attribute the causes of these changes to anthropogenic climate change, natural variability, or some combination of the two.

Received 12 February 2008; accepted 14 March 2008; published 18 April 2008.

Link: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL033614.shtml

Arctic summers ice free "by 2013" (paper from Dec. '07)

by Jonathan Amos, Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco

Arctic summer melting in 2007 set new records More details

Scientists in the U.S. have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly Professor Peter Wadhams

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.

"So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."

Real world

Using supercomputers to crunch through possible future outcomes has become a standard part of climate science in recent years.

Professor Maslowski's group, which includes co-workers at NASA and the Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), is well known for producing modelled dates that are in advance of other teams.

These other teams have variously produced dates for an open summer ocean that, broadly speaking, go out from about 2040 to 2100.

But the Monterey researcher believes these models have seriously underestimated some key melting processes. In particular, Professor Maslowski is adamant that models need to incorporate more realistic representations of the way warm water is moving into the Arctic basin from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

"My claim is that the global climate models underestimate the amount of heat delivered to the sea ice by oceanic advection," Professor Maslowski said.

"The reason is that their low spatial resolution actually limits them from seeing important detailed factors.

"We use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice forced with realistic atmospheric data. This way, we get much more realistic forcing, from above by the atmosphere and from the bottom by the ocean."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN-led body which assesses the state of the Earth's climate system, uses an averaged group of models to forecast ice loss in the Arctic.

But it is has become apparent in recent years that the real, observed rate of summer ice melting is now starting to run well ahead of the models.

The minimum ice extent reached in September 2007 shattered the previous record for ice withdrawal set in 2005, of 5.32 million sq km.

The long-term average minimum, based on data from 1979 to 2000, is 6.74 million sq km. In comparison, 2007 was lower by 2.61 million sq km, an area approximately equal to the size of Alaska and Texas combined, or the size of 10 United Kingdoms.

Diminishing returns

Professor Peter Wadhams from Cambridge University, UK, is an expert on Arctic ice. He has used sonar data collected by Royal Navy submarines to show that the volume loss is outstripping even area withdrawal, which is in agreement with the model result of Professor Maslowski.

"Some models have not been taking proper account of the physical processes that go on," he commented.

"The ice is thinning faster than it is shrinking; and some modellers have been assuming the ice was a rather thick slab.

"Wieslaw's model is more efficient because it works with data and it takes account of processes that happen internally in the ice."

Along the Northwest Passage

He cited the ice-albedo feedback effect in which open water receives more solar radiation, which in turn leads to additional warming and further melting.

Professor Wadhams said the Arctic was now being set up for further ice loss in the coming years.

"The implication is that this is not a cycle, not just a fluctuation. The loss this year will precondition the ice for the same thing to happen again next year, only worse.

"There will be even more opening up, even more absorption and even more melting.

"In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early as 2013, but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040."

The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) collects the observational data on the extent of Arctic sea ice, delivering regular status bulletins. Its research scientist Dr Mark Serreze was asked to give one of the main lectures here at this year's AGU Fall Meeting.

Discussing the possibility for an open Arctic ocean in summer months, he told the meeting: "A few years ago, even I was thinking 2050, 2070, out beyond the year 2100, because that's what our models were telling us. But as we've seen, the models aren't fast enough right now; we are losing ice at a much more rapid rate.

"My thinking on this is that 2030 is not an unreasonable date to be thinking of."

And later, to the BBC, Dr Serreze added, "I think Wieslaw is probably a little aggressive in his projections, simply because the luck of the draw means natural variability can kick in to give you a few years in which the ice loss is a little less than you've had in previous years. But Wieslaw is a smart guy and it would not surprise me if his projections came out."

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore cited Professor Maslowski's analysis on Monday in his acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.

This article was published by BBC News online on December 12, 2007.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm

MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence and its approach to climate change problems

BLOGGER'S NOTE: The text below has been lifted from Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog, New York Times, April 25, 2008.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Center for Collective Intelligence is creating what it calls a wiki-style Climate Collaboratorium aimed at clarifying issues and options related to human-driven climate change. The idea began in a 2006 paper by M.I.T.’s Mark Klein and others (pdf alert). A video summary is on YouTube:

Link to youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2w2WBCn7ug

Bush's climate change plan branded "Neanderthal"

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, April 18, 2008

International efforts are gaining momentum to hammer out a new climate change agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

A new plan from U.S. President George Bush which aims to cap greenhouse gases by 2025 has been dismissed as "disastrous" and "Neanderthal" by a group of ministers at a climate change meeting in Paris.

This week Mr Bush said he wanted to stop the growth of U.S. emissions by 2025, taking a stronger stance on the issue than in the past.

However his plan, announced at a ministerial-level meeting of major carbon emitters, has drawn criticism from delegates from Australia, the European Union and some U.S. participants.

Germany says Mr Bush has taken climate change policy back in time, to before last December's UN climate talks in Bali and last July's G8 summit.

In a statement called "Bush's Neanderthal speech," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said: "His speech showed not leadership but losership. We are glad that there are also other voices in the United States."

South Africa said Mr Bush's proposal was a disastrous effort from the world's biggest carbon polluter and a "slap" to developing countries.

International efforts are gaining momentum to hammer out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

The talks in Bali produced a two-year "roadmap" intended to lead towards a global agreement on carbon emissions by 2013.

Climate experts say any new agreement must form a bridge between the U.S. and the EU, on the one hand, and developing nations on the other.

Mr Bush's critics say that instead of setting a date for cutting U.S. emissions, he had merely chosen the year 2025 for them to peak.

He also renewed his attack on Kyoto-style mandatory emissions caps, and pressed big emerging countries to make concessions, saying they should not get "a free ride" in the next climate treaty.

Link to article: http://www.abc.net.au/ra/news/stories/200804/s2220551.htm

Oceans heat up unevenly

by Belle Dumé, environmental research web, April 1, 2008

Although the world's oceans are expected to warm up as a result of climate change, the way this happens will be more complex than first thought. So say researchers in the US and UK who have found that, while the North Atlantic Ocean has become warmer over the last 50 years, this change has not been uniform. Instead, the subpolar regions have cooled and tropical regions warmed, so masking the overall effects of anthropogenic warming.

Susan Lozier at Duke University, US, and Richard Williams at Liverpool University, UK, and co-workers analysed temperature data from the National Oceanic Data Center World Ocean Database from 1950 to 2000. They interpreted the data by using circulation model experiments driven by realistic surface air-sea fluxes and winds over this period. The model predicts how winds, evaporation, rainfall and heat exchange with the atmosphere affect the North Atlantic Ocean's heat content over time.

The experiments showed that water in the subpolar North Atlantic Ocean (north of 45° latitude) became cooler as it exchanged heat with the air above it. In contrast, the subtropical and tropical ocean (south of 45° latitude) warmed up.

"The experiments revealed that much of the heat changes over the North Atlantic Ocean were associated with a wind-induced redistribution of heat together with a background input of heat in the tropics," Williams told environmentalresearchweb. This pattern can be explained by the large-scale change in the wind pattern – as measured by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index defined by differences in sea-level pressures. This atmospheric variability changes from year-to-year and over decades.

"Heat changes in the ocean show a much more complicated response than expected over the North Atlantic," explained Williams. "The variability in ocean heat content appears to be associated with changes in atmospheric wind forcing, which varies on a decadal timescale. At the moment, it is unclear as to which parts of this warming signal induced by the wind forcing link back to anthropogenic forcing and which parts reflect natural changes in the climate."

The researchers went on to say that they do not want their work to be used as part of a referendum as to whether greenhouse warming is happening. "Anthropogenic warming is almost certainly occurring given the wide range of global signals, including rise in surface and atmospheric temperatures, rise in sea levels, and decline in summer sea ice in the Arctic," stressed Williams. However, these "background" trends could also be being masked by changes that occur over decades on regional scales, he added.

"In our study, we have shown that regional signals in the North Atlantic have a more complex pattern than initially expected, where decadal variability might be masking any background warming trend," he said.

The team will now extend the ocean data analysis and model investigations to further examine interior ocean temperature changes.

The work was published in Sciencexpress.

About the author

Belle Dumé is a contributing editor to environmentalresearchweb.

Link to article: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/research/33619

Wilkins ice shelf's rift zones connecting

by Liz Kalaugher, environment research web, April 22, 2008

On 28th and 29th February 2008, a 400 sq. km area of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula broke up. That adds to the total of seven ice shelves that have disappeared in the West Antarctic between 1995 and 2002, a phenomenon believed to be due to increased temperatures.

According to Angelika Humbert of Darmstadt University of Technology and Matthias Braun of Bonn University, both in Germany, the area of loss in February is less spectacular than the effect on the whole ice shelf. The fracture created a large number of intersecting rifts in around 5000 sq. km of the northern part of the ice shelf.

"The failure zones from the break-up make the shelf vulnerable," said Braun.

Over the past two years, Humbert and Braun have examined 22 years' worth of European Space Agency remote sensing data for the region. They believe their study of the break-up has given them new insights into some of the mechanisms behind ice shelf failures.

Rifts and failure zones first started to develop on the Wilkins Ice Shelf in 1993/94, according to the researchers. In February 2008 a rift formed very quickly between the central part of Wilkins Ice shelf and the stabilizing Charcot Island -- on a scale of just minutes. The connection lost 40% of its total size.

The pair have mapped visible structures on the ice shelf, such as flow lines, rifts and grounded areas. They say that the Wilkins shelf is unusual in having lots of small ice rises -- areas that protrude above the surface where the ice shelf meets the seabed below. The rises, which on Wilkins generally have a diameter less than 1 km, divide the ice flow and cause small rifts, acting as nuclei for the development of failure zones. During the February breakup, these rifts typically extended to roughly 20 km either side of the rises. A number of new rifts also formed.

"The rift zones are connected now and that makes a part of the ice shelf vulnerable to breakup," said the researchers. This is the first time they have seen such a creation of new ice rifts and joining of existing rifts -- they believe it may be unique. The result is a more fragile ice shelf.

Humbert and Braun reckon that unequal buoyancy forces arising from differences in ice thickness may have caused the accumulation of bending stress, leading to this rift behavior. They are currently looking at further observations to find out more and say that more satellite measurements and field surveys of ice shelves are needed to help examine the causes of ice shelf disintegration.

The Wilkins Ice shelf is confined by four islands -- Alexander, Latady, Charcot, and Rothschild, giving it a fairly unique structure. The northeastern part of the ice shelf is around 50-150 m thick while the western and southern regions are thicker, with ice 170-270 m thick.

The shelf is unusual in that it receives only a small contribution from glaciers, gaining most of its mass from snow build up. Wilkins loses most of its mass by basal melting, as well as experiencing discontinuous fast breakup events rather than the slower, more standard iceberg calving that occurs elsewhere. The shelf is also comparably warm, with a temperature of -9 °C at the surface.

Humbert and Braun reported their work at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria. They have submitted papers to Geophysical Research Letters and to The Cryosphere.

About the author

Liz Kalaugher is editor of environmentalresearchweb.

Link to article: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/research/33873

Accumulation of greenhouse gases accelerating

by Randolph E. Schmid, AP Science Writer, April 23, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Major greenhouse gases in the air are accumulating faster than in the past despite efforts to curtail their growth.

Carbon dioxide concentration in the air increased by 2.4 parts per million last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday, and methane concentrations also rose rapidly.

Global averages of the concentrations of the major, well-mixed, long-lived greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, CFC-12 and CFC-11) from the NOAA global flask sampling network since 1978. These gases account for about 97% of the direct radiative forcing by long-lived greenhouse gases since 1750. The remaining 3% is contributed by an assortment of 10 minor halogen gases. Methane data prior to 1983 are annual averages from Etheridge et al. (1998), adjusted to the NOAA calibration scale [Dlugokencky et al., 2005]. Click on image to view full size figure.

Concern has grown in recent years about these gases, with most atmospheric scientists concerned that the increasing accumulation is causing the earth's temperature to rise, potentially disrupting climate and changing patterns of rainfall, drought and other storms.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has worked to detail the scientific bases of this problem and the Kyoto agreement sought to encourage countries to take steps to reduce their greenhouse emissions. Some countries, particularly in Europe, have taken steps to reduce emissions.

But carbon dioxide emissions, primarily from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas have continued to increase.

Since 2000, annual increases of two parts per million or more have been common, compared with 1.5 ppm per year in the 1980s and less than one ppm per year during the 1960s, NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory said.

Global concentration of carbon dioxide is now nearly 385 parts per million. Preindustrial carbon dioxide levels hovered around 280 ppm until 1850. Human activities pushed those levels up to 380 ppm by early 2006.

Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase, said Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.

Methane in the atmosphere rose by 27 million tons last year after nearly a decade with little or no increase, he said.

Methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but there's far less of it in the atmosphere. When related climate affects are taken into account, methane's overall climate impact is nearly half that of carbon dioxide.
___
On the Net:
Earth System Research Laboratory: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi

Link to article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080423/ap_on_sc/greenhouse_gases

National Snow and Ice Data Center -- Arctic sea ice melt extent graph discrepancies from April 2008

BLOGGER'S update, April 23rd (evening):

Hank Roberts was kind enough to post the explanation (although, looking at this evening's graph, I must admit, after viewing the 4 graphs, that I still have no idea what is going on with them -- only time will tell, it seems):

"The satellite data sources for these products, while generally providing complete coverage, are subject to gaps (shown in dark grey) in coverage because of satellite operations. In the daily extent time series, gaps are replaced with values interpolated from surrounding days, but temporary spurious results may occur. The current satellite source is aging and showing more frequent data gaps. NSIDC is investigating a reliable replacement data source. —Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center"

Blogger's note -- update of April 23 (morning): This just gets weirder and weirder. April 20 shows one thing, April 21 another, and now April 23 looks more like April 20 again. Anyway, I guess the NSIDC are the only ones who can tell us how they update this graph.


ABOVE: Graph from April 20, 2008.

BELOW: Graph from April 21, 2008.



BELOW: Graph from the morning of April 23rd, 2008.
(Once again, thank you to Leon for pointing it out to me.)


BELOW: Graph from the evening of April 23rd, 2008.


BELOW: Graph from the evening of April 25th, 2008.

Link to updated graph: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png

Recovering From Wyoming’s Energy Bender by Alexandra Fuller, and see also Terry Tempest Williams

by Alexandra Fuller, New York Times, April 20, 2008

FOR all its Old West mythology, Wyoming is and always will be a mining state, more roughneck than cowboy. Frankly, in a land of long winters and high winds, there aren’t a lot of other economic choices. And a powerful oil lobby reminds us with Orwellian regularity that we owe everything to oil and gas taxes, bullying those who disagree. (In February, a committee of the Wyoming Legislature rejected a spending increase for the University of Wyoming’s Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources after institute scientists dared to raise concerns about water produced in coal-bed methane wells.) Even so, the oilier side of our nature has never threatened to unhorse the cowboy entirely, not even now, when the pressure to develop every last seam of energy is end-of-administration intense.

Since 1996, oil and gas companies have leased from the federal government the mineral rights to nearly 27 million acres of land in the Rocky Mountain West, and Wyoming has shouldered the greatest share of that development. In the last decade, oil companies have leased a fifth to a quarter of the state’s land — 15.5 million acres administered by the Bureau of Land Management, as well of hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest and private land. If Wyoming were a country, it would be one of the largest coal-producing nations in the world, and its output of natural gas is among the greatest in American history. The argument has never been that we shouldn’t provide energy. But is that all we’re good for? And what, if anything, should we leave for future generations? These are global questions posed on a local level.

During his second term, President Bill Clinton, under pressure from a Republican Congress, leased out just as much of Wyoming’s land as the current administration has to date. The difference was that the Clinton administration enforced laws encouraging the Bureau of Land Management to “manage, protect and improve” our public lands while allowing for other values like recreation, grazing and wildlife habitat. The Bush administration, on the other hand, has lifted every possible impediment to industry.

For example, oil and gas companies are exempt from provisions of the Clean Water Act that require construction activities to reduce polluted runoff as well as from provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act that regulate underground injection of chemicals. The industry is also generously permitted to drill on critical wildlife winter range (close to 90 percent of all their requests to drill on winter range have been granted). Oil rigs are drilling for natural gas on the banks of the New Fork River (the headwaters of the Colorado) and in the foothills of the Wyoming Range. Well sites in many parts of the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are so closely spaced that, with roads, gas pipelines and compressor stations, the development is continuous.

Meantime, drug treatment centers and domestic abuse shelters across the state have declared themselves overwhelmed and, in spite of what the oil companies keep telling us, we’re far from happy. Wyoming has the uneasy distinction of having one of the country’s highest suicide rates. We top the national death toll on the job with 16.8 deaths per 100,000 workers. Wyoming is responsible for by far the highest percentage of deaths on the job in the interior West’s oil and gas industry. At public meetings organized by the Bureau of Land Management to announce the development of Wyoming’s public lands, oil company executives initially argued to a largely receptive audience that a new boom would be good for the state’s economy. Lately, executives have been telling increasingly unhappy communities that domestic drilling is our moral duty, an alternative to sending more soldiers to war. They imply that anything less than full support for the oil companies is un-American. But a bumper sticker on a pick-up truck hints at the truth: “The war is over. Halliburton won.”

Meanwhile, cattle and sheep ranchers and hunting and tourist guides have found themselves wondering what has happened to their Wyoming. Wildlife suffers as oil leases overlap with habitat: 14.1 million acres of sage grouse habitat, 3.2 million acres of pronghorn winter habitat, 2.9 million acres of mule deer winter habitat and 1.1 million acres of elk winter habitat. Even most of the state’s wild horse herd management areas (the only Wyoming lands on which wild horses may legally roam) are destined for oil development.

Eighty-five water wells in the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have recently tested positive for hydrocarbons, indicating that toxic chemicals from drilling have leaked into the water table. Air pollution in the same area was so great this winter that vulnerable residents were warned not to venture outside. Oil companies argued that strong winds would rectify the problem.

They were right to predict a wind of change, but it came in the form of an unprecedented experiment in the art of listening. In the last few months, Terry Tempest Williams, a writer in residence at the University of Wyoming, has taken her students on the road to conduct what she calls “weather reports” in small communities. Addressing packed rooms, Ms. Williams turns the microphone over to the people of Wyoming — a stoical populace whose habitual stance against something they don’t like is a tight lip. Astonishingly, they have opened up, voicing their concerns over the rapidity and scale of the oil and gas development.

“One day, I fear I will wake up and all that will be left of Wyoming is a hole in the ground,” one resident of the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem said.

Oil executives have pushed back. One oilman, State Senator Kit Jennings, took the microphone in Casper and declared that Ms. Williams had demonized the oil companies. He rejected her contention in a local newspaper article that the energy boom had helped drive up the use of crystal methamphetamine in the region and announced that he had demanded that she be fired from the university for her criticism of the industry.

Oil and gas are accustomed to dominating the debate. But Ms. Williams’s forums have created an opportunity for grass-roots rebuttal. Residents, who have so far been cowed by the enormous tax contributions that energy companies make to the state’s coffers, are upholding values not counted in dollars. “My hope is that with our backs against the wall we will finally speak up,” another weather reports participant said.

Maybe Wyomingites, justifiably proud of their roughneck heritage and anxious to keep the oil field work, have realized that this boom isn’t going away soon, and they’d like a little of Wyoming left when the oil companies move back to Texas. “We’re Mother Nature’s bodyguards,” a billboard sponsored by Sportsmen for the Wyoming Range warns. “And yes, we are heavily armed.”

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/opinion/20fuller.html

North America's Jet Stream Creeping North

Wandering Stream. The jet stream -- pictured here -- is creeping northward and weakening, new research shows. Global warming could be to blame. (AP photo/NOAA)
by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, Discovery, April 18, 2008

The jet stream -- America's stormy weather maker -- is creeping northward and weakening, new research shows. That potentially means less rain in the already dry South and Southwest and more storms in the North.

And it could also translate into more and stronger hurricanes, since the jet stream suppresses their formation. The study's authors said they have to do more research to pinpoint specific consequences.

From 1979 to 2001, the Northern Hemisphere's jet stream moved northward on average at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year, according to the paper published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The authors suspect global warming is the cause, but have yet to prove it.

The jet stream is a high-speed, constantly shifting river of air about 30,000 feet above the ground that guides storm systems and cool air around the globe. And when it moves away from a region, high pressure and clear skies predominate.

Two other jet streams in the Southern Hemisphere are also shifting poleward, the study found.

The northern jet stream "is the dominant thing that creates weather systems for the United States," said study co-author Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, Calif. "Bascially look south of where you are and that's probably a good guess of what your weather may be like in a few decades."

The study looked at the average location of the constantly moving jet stream and found that when looked at over decades, it has shifted northward. The study's authors and other scientists suggest that the widening of the Earth's tropical belt -- a development documented last year -- is pushing the three jet streams toward the poles.

Climate models have long predicted that with global warming, the world's jet streams would move that way, so it makes sense to think that's what happening, Caldeira said. However, proving it is a rigorous process, using complex computer models to factor in all sorts of possibilities. That has not been done yet.

A rate of 1.25 miles a year "doesn't sound like much, but that works out to about 18 feet per day," Caldeira said. "If you think about climate zones shifting northward at this rate, you can imagine squirrels keeping up. But what are oak trees going to do?

"We are seeing a general northward shift of all sorts of phenomena in the Northern Hemisphere occurring at rates that are faster than what ecosystems can keep up with," he said.

Dian Seidel, a research meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who wrote a study about the widening tropical belt last year, said she was surprised that Caldeira found such a small shift. Her study documented that the tropical belt was bulging at a much faster rate. Caldeira said his figures represent the minimum amount of movement.

The jet stream also factors into bumpy air travel. It is a cause of clear air turbulence that airline pilots try to avoid by tracking where the jet stream is.

Link to article: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/04/18/jet-stream-storm.html

Losing Greenland by Alexandra Witze of NatureNews

Published on the net in NatureNews: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080416/full/452798a.html

Is the Arctic's biggest ice sheet in irreversible meltdown? And would we know if it were? Alexandra Witze reports.

I. JOUGHIN

When people talk about catastrophic climate change, there's a fair chance that Greenland is on their mind. If they use the term 'tipping point', then it is pretty much a sure thing. One-twentieth of the world's ice is locked up atop that island, and if it were to melt completely, global sea levels would rise by seven metres. The collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is in the front rank of potential climate catastrophes.

Melting is already undoubtedly and dramatically underway. Glaciers are spitting icebergs into the ocean and scurrying back up their narrow fjords like rats up drainpipes. Giant lakes are forming on the frozen surface, sending torrents of water plunging through fissures in the ice sheet and thus, perhaps, accelerating its slipping and sliding seawards. Over the past four summers, Greenland has shed an average of between 380 billion tonnes and 490 billion tonnes of ice each year — on average 150 billion tonnes more than it gains in snow in winter.

That's a lot of water. It is not, as yet, a lot of Greenland's ice, which totals 2.9 million cubic kilometres. Such size brings with it an inherent sense of stability. We do not expect things bigger than mountain ranges just to go away. But there's a disturbing sense in which Greenland shouldn't be here in the first place. It is a holdover of the most recent ice age, a creature of conditions that no longer apply. No ice sheet would grow in Greenland if the current one were to vanish — even without human-induced warming, the climate would not allow it. The ice is a relic, stranded out of time. And relics are fragile.

The question is, how fragile? Has the warming the sheet has experienced so far and the further warming already in the pipeline enough to push the ice sheet past a point of no return¹? If that is not yet the case, how far from that threshold are we? And if the sheet does start to go, how fast will it do so? The sheet will not vanish tomorrow, nor in a century — but assumptions that such processes take millennia are being reexamined on the basis of the changes already seen. The most recent synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that the changes seen in Greenland today are not fully factored into the estimates of sea-level rise given in earlier science reports from the panel — a note that those who see Greenland as a potential poster child for catastrophe have made much of.

As yet, these pressing questions simply cannot be answered. They require models and theories not yet fully developed. And that lack of development is in part a lack of data — good data that show clear trends. Even though researchers scatter themselves around the island every summer to try to capture the meltdown's extent and processes, there is no systematic, long-term, broadly based monitoring of the sort needed to produce a truly comprehensive account of what is happening with the ice sheet. “Do we have the data we need to understand what's driving these changes?” asks Ian Howat, a glaciologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. “The answer is definitely no.”

The gravity of the situation

To get the best overview of the great Greenland meltdown, you need to go to space and look for gravity. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is a pair of US–German satellites that orbit Earth 500 kilometres up, one close behind the other. Through constant interchange of microwaves the satellites measure the distance between them very precisely, and that distance changes as massive objects below tug at the leader and the follower in slightly different ways at any given instant. The small discrepancies so produced can be used to calculate a gravity map for the planet. As masses move around, that map will change.

“2007 was a shocking year.” Scott Luthcke

Data from GRACE have revealed how the water flow in the Amazon basin changes with the seasons, and which Asian aquifers are replenished by the monsoons. The mission has also provided new information about the flow of water off the massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. “When you look at a lot of the insight we have” about Greenland, says Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “it's GRACE.”

The estimates vary as to how much mass is lost through melting each summer. Isabella Velicogna of the University of California, Irvine, leads a group that takes a large-scale approach², averaging the global gravity numbers provided by GRACE for each 30-day period. Her latest estimate suggests that 211 billion tonnes of ice are being lost each year, mainly from southern Greenland. “There is no doubt that things are changing faster than we expected,” she says. Meanwhile, Scott Luthcke of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, takes a different tack, using the changing distance between the satellites to calculate the pull of smaller mass concentrations on the ground over time³. Including the 2007 melt season, he gets preliminary estimates of 154 billion tonnes of ice lost per year. The numbers sound different, but both groups emphasize how close they are, and over time there seems to be some convergence. “These are two vastly different ways of processing data, and they're almost within the error bars,” says Luthcke. “Greenland is losing a lot of mass.”

GRACE is also providing clues as to how the situation varies from year to year — particularly for the last melt season, when surface temperatures were 4–6 °C higher than average and during which 500 billion tonnes of ice vanished. That's 30% more than the previous year, and 4% more than the previous record, set in 2005. “2007 was a shocking year,” says Luthcke. And GRACE's findings are bolstered by observations of dramatic ice losses by other satellites. Radar measurements, for instance, have shown⁴ that glaciers in southern Greenland are dumping ice into the ocean ever more quickly. At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December, Velicogna presented results showing that the GRACE estimates are supported by data taken from the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which uses a laser altimeter to measure elevation changes on the ice sheet.

An island rising

One reason for needing extra information to supplement the data from GRACE is the problem of "post-glacial rebound." As big as Greenland's ice sheet is today, in the ice age it was just a part of something far bigger, ice that reached as far south as the Ohio Valley and as far east as the Urals. That vast mass pressed the crust beneath it down into the denser mantle below. Although most of the ice has long since disappeared, large parts of the high-latitude crust have yet to recover from this repressed position. Scandinavia, for instance, rises 9 millimetres higher every year as the denser mantle pushes the lighter crust back up. This ongoing bounceback makes analysing the GRACE data harder.

Help may soon come from a system of global-positioning receivers that have just been installed around Greenland to measure how the bedrock is rising over time. Last summer, a team of researchers from the United States, Denmark and Luxembourg put 24 stations around the rocky, ice-free edges of the island — tripling Greenland's global positioning system (GPS) infrastructure in one field season, according to Michael Bevis, the project leader at Ohio State University. The Greenland GPS Network (GNET) is one of the northern components of a two-pole effort called POLENET to measure post-glacial rebound and other phenomena; there will eventually be around 50 GNET stations in Greenland. “We need much improved models of post-glacial rebound, otherwise GRACE measurements will have very limited value in Greenland and Antarctica,” says Bevis. “If we can pull this off, GRACE will become the most powerful system ever devised for measuring ice mass change.”

NASA/GSFC Visualization Studio. Source: S. LUTHCKE.

The GNET stations are strung along the rocky margin of Greenland, mainly in remote areas (see map, above). They require a lot of battery capacity to continue operating throughout the winter months, and links to five of the stations installed last summer have already gone down. The team is planning to retrieve the data manually and fix the stations this summer.

All this makes GNET a fairly expensive proposition. The last field season consumed about US$1 million, and flat budgets, rising fuel costs and the weak dollar are making things even tighter this year. The rest of the GNET stations will have to go in over the next two summers instead of all in 2008, as originally planned.

The GNET receivers are expensive, highly precise, heavy and, in principle, durable. Another monitoring strategy takes the opposite tack; it uses GPS equipment cheap enough to lose, embedded at the calving fronts of some of Greenland's most active "outlet glaciers." These are the thick streams of ice that flow through narrow fjords into the oceans surrounding Greenland. A decade ago, researchers thought that these outlet glaciers moved slowly, creeping downward from the high centre of the ice sheet. In recent years, though, the glaciers have been doing a veritable hokey-cokey on their approach to the ocean, first advancing rapidly, then pulling back.

It started more than a decade ago with the biggest outlet glacier of all, Jakobshavn Isbræ on the west coast, which among its claims to fame is the most likely source of the iceberg that sank the Titanic . Between 1992 and 2003, Jakobshavn Isbræ accelerated from 5.7 kilometres per year to 12.6 kilometres per year⁵. “That was incredibly dramatic,” says Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle. “A decade ago, nobody would have anticipated one of Greenland's biggest outlet glaciers doubling its speed.” Faster glacier movement means more ice dumped into the ocean, and a thinning of the central ice sheet from which the glaciers feed.

Over on the east coast, the island's other two big outlet glaciers also started speeding up⁶: Helheim in 2002, and Kangerdlugssuaq in 2005. The process didn't go smoothly. Helheim, for instance, retreated more than 3 kilometres between 2001 and 2003 as its front melted away faster than new ice flowed down to make up the difference. Then in 2005 it began advancing again as flow took over. This back-and-forth is captured most dramatically in remote-sensing images from satellites such as NASA's Terra and Aqua. “There is a lot of variability, and the important thing to remember is we only have a few good years of observations,” says Joughin. “We don't know if we are looking at the beginning of a longer-term trend.”

A GPS station, part of a network for measuring crustal movement. M. BEVIS

Joughin and others suspect that the back-and-forth of the outlet glaciers has a lot to do with the geometry of the fjords the ice squeezes through. The glaciers inch forward until their ends finally break off, calving icebergs into the ocean. This relieves stress on the glacier, which begins to surge, much as removing a buttress holding up a rickety old house will cause the house to collapse.

But the scenario is not as clear-cut as it might seem. In the past, glaciers advanced and then calved off icebergs when they got too long. Now, the calving happens while the glacier is advancing. What this means is unclear, but it does suggest that the glaciers are behaving in a fundamentally different manner than just a few years earlier. “This is what we cannot predict,” says Steffen.

But the unpredictable is not necessarily unprecedented. During the 1920s, Greenland experienced a rapid warm-up; average annual temperatures rose more than 2 °C over the decade. At Ohio State, meteorologist Jason Box and student Adam Herrington have been looking for records of what happened to the Big Three outlet glaciers back then, to see whether there are lessons about what to expect in the future. Among their finds was a series of maps showing the snout of the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier. Over just a few years in the early 1930s, the glacier retreated some 10 kilometres upstream — having lost an area up to 70 square kilometres in what may have been a single large calving event. The break-up, says Box, was “exceptional” in that the ice would have taken years to grow back to its previous state. And it suggests that the sort of rapid response to warming seen in recent years is the glaciers' expected response to warming.

One emerging area of research is the effect that ocean temperatures — as opposed to air temperatures — have on the outlet glaciers. Howat says, for instance, that warm ocean temperatures in the summer of 2003 coincided with a time when several of the outlet glaciers feeding into that warmer sea began speeding up dramatically. But little work has been done to correlate ocean temperatures with the glacier retreats. The ocean has been “a total blank spot on the map,” Howat says. “You have a big ice sheet with a lot of it sitting in the water — you'd think you'd want to know what's happening in the water.” Some researchers are starting to target this as their next area of interest.

Lakes on ice

The water that surrounds Greenland has been there forever. More novel is the increasing amount of water which, in summer, sits on top of it. What starts out in the winter as cold white snow ends up in the summer as a landscape of blue water, as more than 1,000 shallow melt lakes up to 5 kilometres across form on the ice. It is like Minnesota — but white.

“You have a big ice sheet with a lot of it sitting in the water — you'd think you'd want to know what's happening in the water.” Ian Howat

2007 was a particularly good year to study this surface melting, because there was a great deal of it. High-pressure weather systems throughout much of the summer kept storms away, allowed the Sun to beat down on the ice almost without cease. The melt season lasted 25–30 days longer than average, and 19,000 square kilometres turned from ice to water, says Marco Tedesco of Goddard — that is roughly the area of Wales. The effect was particularly noticeable at higher elevations; as warm air swept ever higher, the area that melted at 2,000 metres or greater was 150% larger than normal.

Even in a normal May to August field season, researchers have to make sure that their instruments stay anchored on the ice sheet, planting their poles 2–3 metres deep to make sure they can withstand the melt. It's not just the water that makes things difficult — it's the unpredictability. Melt lakes have been known to drain away tens of millions of cubic metres of water in the space of a day, swirling down some unknown drain channel in the ice. Huge waterfalls appear and then disappear overnight. How exactly the water gets from the top of the ice to its bowels isn't known, but understanding the plumbing could help illuminate a crucial question — does the water that reaches the bottom of the ice sheet lubricate it in a way that encourages movement and collapse⁷? This has become a commonplace speculation among Greenland catastrophists, but the degree to which it is actually happening, how well it explains the ice loss measured by GRACE and to what extent it may change the shorelines of the world is not yet clear.

Back to the Eemian

The suddenly apparent pace of change has led some to question previous, rather staid models of ice-sheet dynamics, which suggest that even fast changes take several centuries. “It has only been in the past five years that we have realized that hey, the ice sheet is falling apart, these changes are happening, our models are way off,” says Howat. But predicting how far off they actually are — and some believe they may not be as soon as catastrophists predict — is not easy. Anecdotes of this or that particular, however momentous, are no match for thorough, consistent monitoring. If you want models of the future you can rely on, you have to monitor the process you model. “The modelling has not happened because there are just not enough data,” says Philippe Huybrechts, an ice-sheet modeller at the Free University in Brussels. Researchers on the ice might see moulins forming, or outlet glaciers calving, but “it is just in one place and for one season, or for a few weeks,” he says. “To generalize from that over a whole ice sheet in a way that you can predict things, it's just not possible.”

At the moment, the best Greenland modellers are stretched by trying to explain what has already happened, without even thinking about what is to come. They are responsive, not predictive. But some are trying to change that. At the University of Kansas, Cornelis Van der Veen is helping to lead an effort to improve ice-sheet models; he and others are planning a major conference to be held in July in St Petersburg, Russia. The idea is to identify the big unknowns and figure out how to tackle them, one by one. “One outlet glacier speeding up isn't really the end of the world,” he notes. “But if they are doing that all over the place then that is an indication that something is going on that we really do not understand. It is not something that can be solved within a couple of months.”

The calving rate of some Greenland glaciers has increased. J. BALOG/AURORA PHOTOS

“It's very difficult to model a new process, such as why glaciers accelerate, before you have an understanding of why it is happening,” says Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen. “One thing is to observe it. The next step is to understand it. The third is to put it into the model and predict the future. We are at step two, struggling to understand the process.”

One route to understanding may be through palaeoclimate studies. Dahl-Jensen is leading a team that aims to drill a core 2,500 metres into the ice of northwestern Greenland over the next couple of summers. This core — the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling — would complement the pioneering climate records cored out of Greenland's ice over the past couple of decades. None of the earlier cores was able to extract an unbroken record of the Eemian stage, some 120,000 years ago and the last time that Earth was in a warm "interglacial" period. Understanding what Greenland was like then could help scientists understand how the ice sheet might respond in a warmed future, says Dahl-Jensen. Temperatures in Greenland were roughly 5 °C higher during the Eemian than they are today. Yet sea level was only one or two metres higher, and every ice core that has ever been drilled deep enough on the island has included some ice from the Eemian. “A major part of the Greenland ice sheet survived,” says Dahl-Jensen — and argues that more sampling of this period might help to pinpoint the factors that could allow ice to stick around when temperatures are higher than today.

“Every summer brings something totally different.” Leigh Stearns

But this is not necessarily the encouraging news it might seem. Because global warming is amplified near the poles, 5 °C of warming in Greenland might be achieved with just 2.5 °C of average global warming — which is quite plausible. And an important regional factor here might be the dramatic recent reductions seen in the sea ice to the island's north. The extent to which the cold, reflective ice on the sea keeps Greenland cool is simply not known.

The long view needed

More sampling of the past, together with that of the present, may help us to unravel the future of the Greenland ice sheet. For now, though, things seem to be getting more ravelled, not less. Every year brings a new set of data, a new insight into the behaviour of Greenland's interlocking ice-sheet dynamics, stream flows and glacial surges. “We are just learning so much,” says Leigh Stearns, a glaciologist at the University of Maine at Orono. “Every summer brings something totally different.”

Melt water draining into moulins could accelerate the movement of the ice sheet. I. JOUGHIN

But if the learning is copious, it is not systematic. Despite the real risk of a meltdown — and the real benefits to be gained from being able to say something reliable about how long there is to go, and how high the seas might rise — the investigation of the ice's every nook and cranny is far from over. One idea is to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to fly across the ice sheet gathering data such as the depths of melt lakes. But this is easier said than done; John Adler, a PhD student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, ran some tests last August in which he took three types of commercially available UAVs to Kangerlussuaq airport and ran flights over the melt lakes for a week. He is still getting the kinks out of the system, but says that UAVs could provide a cheaper and more repeatable way to get local measurements than relying on expensive helicopter flights, as is done today. Even so, the UAVs are labor intensive and cannot be operated all year round.

Over the long term, satellites should provide the most coherent record of change. The Terra and Aqua satellites, along with Europe's Envisat and other surface-monitoring satellites, are workhorses that regularly photograph the advance and retreat of outlet glaciers. Despite its glitches, the ICESat altimeter sends back elevation changes that track the thinning of the ice sheet; a successor, ICESat-II, is already in the works. And the European Space Agency is working to launch a successor to the ice-thickness-measuring CryoSat, the first incarnation of which failed after launch in 2005.

Yet major problems remain in acquiring and using Earth-observation data (see Nature 450, 782–785; 2007). Access to data from Canada's Radarsat-1 and Radarsat-2 for instance, is ensnarled in a potential takeover by a U.S. company, a sale that was blocked last week by the Canadian government.

Even with the right satellites, not everything can be done from space. Yet very few researchers have Greenland as the main focus of their scientific work. Decades from now, this could turn out to be one of the most short-sighted allocations of resources that began the twenty-first century. Climate change elsewhere in the Arctic has been swifter than anticipated. The remarkable shrinkage of the sea is “the largest change in Earth's surface that humans have probably ever observed,” Howat points out. Trying to get any and every handle on how that affects the poised mass of ice next door must surely be a priority, he says. “This should be a critical thing to study.”

See Editorial, page 781 . For a video of a camera being dropped down a moulin on the Greenland ice sheet, see http://tinyurl.com/5dua42

References

• 1. Gregory, J. M., Huybrechts, P. & Raper, S. C. B. Nature 428, 616 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
  2. Velicogna, I. & Wahr, J. Nature 443, 329-331 (2006). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
  3. Luthcke, S. B. et al. Science 314, 1286-1289 (2006). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
  4. Rignot, E. & Kanagaratnam, P. Science 311, 986-990 (2006). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
  5. Joughin, I., Abdalati, W. & Fahnestock, M. Nature 432, 608-610 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
  6. Joughin, I. et al. J. Geophys. Res. 113, F01004 (2008). | Article |
  7. Zwally, J. et al. Science 297, 218-222 (2002). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

IR image of Arctic sea ice showing water vapor pouring out of the pole

BLOGGER'S NOTE: there seems to be a change in northern Greenland -- will be posting before and after photos. Please click on the image to enlarge it. Notice what appear to be examples of cloud gravity waves (are they altostratus undulatus clouds? Somebody please correct me if I am saying this incorrectly) in the southern portion of the vortex over Alaska.



Link to updated images: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg

And, just for fun (since this climate change stuff is not so very humorous), here is a youtube video of some cloud gravity waves:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXnkzeCU3bE

Arctic summer 2008 -- How much ice? (Arctic sea ice)

Update from April 20, 2008

BLOGGER'S NOTE: Leon from Holland has posted a comment linking to this graph (please click to enlarge) from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, Colorado:

Link to graph: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
__________________________________________________________________

by Liz Kalaugher, environmental research web, April 18, 2008

In summer 2007 the Arctic experienced record ice loss. So the big questions now are, how well did the ice recover over the winter and how likely is another record minimum in ice extent this summer?

Having thrown these two queries into the mix at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Julienne Stroeve of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, US, proceeded to detail the latest thinking.

"The ice loss penetrated much further into the central area than ever seen before [in summer 2007]," said Stroeve. "There was some recovery in the extent of winter ice in 2007/2008 but it was still well below normal."

According to Stroeve, there were also anomalies in ice concentration, with levels above normal in the east and below normal in the west.

This spring, first-year ice made up 72% of the Arctic basin, compared to the 2007 spring level of 59%. Stroeve says this is partly because so much ice melted last summer, but also because of a return to a positive Arctic oscillation, which exports older ice out of the Arctic basin.

This is potentially a problem because younger ice is thinner and will melt out more easily. What's more, satellite measurements indicate that first-year ice is 5-10 cm thinner this year than last, and that older ice is thinner this year too.

So what could this mean for summer 2008? Stroeve says it seems like the Arctic is heading for a very low extent ice year, whether it's a record or not. And what happens will depend on natural variability in atmospheric circulation patterns.

About the author

Liz Kalaugher is editor of environmentalresearchweb.

Link to article (free registration required): http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/research/33829

Sea level could rise three times more than IPCC prediction

environmental research web, April 17, 2008

Sea level has been within about 20 cm of present values for the last 2000 years but will rise 0.8-1.5 m by 2100. That's according to analysis that uses advanced statistical techniques to calculate sea level values from reconstructed past temperatures and projected temperatures.

The model's predictions for 2100 are three times higher than the estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"If you look at the IPCC report, you will find information for the last 50-100 years and information on a geological scale but little for the last couple of thousand years," said Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanogaphic Laboratory. "That's why we decided to carry out this analysis."

Observations are available for the last 100 years or so from tide gauges, while satellites have been taking sea level data since 1982. The larger sea level changes that occurred before around 8000 years ago have left information in sediment records, but the stability of sea level itself over the last 2000 years has created a paucity of data.

Jevrejeva and colleagues John Moore of the University of Oulu, and Aslak Grinsted of the University of Lapland employed a four parameter response equation that used geological evidence, observed temperature data and proxy temperature data.

The analysis came up with present day sea levels that were in good agreement with tide gauge and satellite observations. It also predicted sea level rises of 2 cm for the 18th Century, 6 cm for the 19th Century and 19 cm for the 20th Century, all of which tally with observations and confirm that the model is working, says Jevrejeva.

"The rapid rate of sea level rise will be associated with melting ice sheets," she added.

Commenting on Jevrejeva's work, Simon Holgate of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory said: "There is a strong sense in the community that the IPCC numbers are underestimates. The models don't take ice sheet melting into account."

Jevrejeva and colleagues’ research indicates a sea level global temperature response time of around 250 years. The team says this is a significantly faster response than many models but is consistent with recent observations of rapid ice sheet dynamic response to warming.

The scientists reported their work at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2008 in Vienna, Austria. They have submitted a paper on their model to PNAS.

• A session on sea level rise was held at the assembly to mark the 75th anniversary of the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL), a network of around 2000 tide gauges worldwide. Although initially set up to measure land movement, the service has become vitally important for monitoring sea level changes and for calibrating data on sea level rise from satellites. The PSMSL is currently installing additional tide gauges around the coast of Africa and developing a tsunami warning system for three additional regions, including the Indian Ocean.

About the author

Liz Kalaugher is editor of environmentalresearchweb

Link to article (free registration required): http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/research/33824

Sir Nicholas Stern: I underestimated the threat

by David Adam, environment correspondent, The Guardian, April 18, 2008

Sir Nicholas Stern has warned that the gloomy predictions of his high-profile review of the future effects of global warming underestimated the risks, and that climate change poses a bigger threat than he realised.

Stern said this week that new scientific findings showed greenhouse gas emissions were causing more damage than was understood in 2006, when he prepared his study for the government. He pointed to last year's reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and new research which shows that the planet's oceans and forests are soaking up less carbon dioxide than expected.

He said: "Emissions are growing much faster than we'd thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than we'd thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates and the speed of climate change seems to be faster."

Stern said the new findings vindicated his report, which has been criticised by climate sceptics and some economists as exaggerating the possible damage. "People who said I was scaremongering were profoundly wrong," he told a conference in London.

He said that increasing commitments from countries to curb greenhouse gases now needed to be translated into action. Earlier this week, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, said a lack of such action from developed countries could derail attempts to seal a new global climate treaty at a crucial meeting in Copenhagen next year.

The Stern Review was credited with shifting the debate about climate change from an environmental focus to the economic impacts. It said the expected increase in extreme weather, with the associated and expensive problems of agricultural failure, water scarcity, disease and mass migration, meant that global warming could swallow up to 20% of the world's GDP, with the poorest countries the worst affected. The cost of addressing the problem, it said, could be limited to about 1% of GDP, provided it started on a serious scale within 10 to 20 years.

Stern's study was largely based on the previous IPCC report that appeared in 2001. The IPCC raised the stakes last year when it said that steps to curb emissions were needed by 2015 if the worst effects of global warming were to be avoided. Since then, a number of polar experts have warned that the Arctic and Antarctic are losing ice much faster than thought, and that the sea level rise could be more severe than the IPCC suggested. Other studies, focusing on how greenhouse gases are swapped between the land, sea and atmosphere, have suggested that scientists have underestimated the speed and strength with which serious climate change will strike.

Last October, scientists warned that global warming will be "stronger than expected and sooner than expected," after a new analysis showed carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere much more quickly than predicted. Experts said that the rise was partly down to soaring economic development in China.

Link to article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/18/climatechange.carbonemissions

BBC News: More doubt on cosmic ray climate link

Friday, 18 April 2008

by Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Vienna

Cosmic rays have their origins in hugely energetic events in space

Research has thrown further doubt on the notion that cosmic rays are a major influence on the Earth's climate.

The idea that modern global warming is due to changes in cloudiness caused by solar influences on cosmic rays is popular with "climate sceptics."

But scientists found changes in cosmic ray flux do not affect cloud formation -- the second such report in a month.

Separately, other researchers have found that particles from space may affect temperatures at the poles.

Both pieces of research were presented here at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting.

Cosmic rays, hugely energetic particles coming from space, smash into the top of the Earth's atmosphere, creating a cascade of charged particles lower down.

These particles may help water droplets to coalesce, and so aid the formation of clouds.

The proposed link to climate change is that cosmic rays can be partially blocked by the Sun's solar wind.

When the Sun is forceful, there are fewer cosmic rays arriving in the atmosphere, so fewer clouds form, which has a net heating effect on the Earth.

If the mechanism has an impact today, several scientists have hypothesized, it should be possible to spot a link between the intensity of cosmic rays and the formation of clouds.

Jon Egill Kristjansson from the University of Oslo is one; and he unveiled his new results at the EGU meeting.

Human trails

Over the southern Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, where air is much cleaner than in more urbanized regions of the world, particles from ship's chimneys change the properties of clouds in a way that is clearly visible to the Modis instruments (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers) onboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.

NASA satellites show the impact of shipping exhausts on cloud formation

The particles are stimulating the formation of water droplets.

If cosmic rays play a significant role in cloud formation, Dr Kristjansson reasoned, sudden changes in cosmic ray intensity should also show up, producing increases in cloud cover, changes in the size of droplets, and possibly in the total amount of water carried in the clouds.

"We have short-term changes called 'Forbush decreases,' caused by eruptions on the Sun, where cosmic ray flux can decrease dramatically over one or two days and then gradually recover," he told BBC News.

"The cosmic ray signature on clouds, if there is one, should show up here."

He identified 13 Forbush events between 2000 and 2005 and looked for evidence in Modis data of concurrent changes in cloud properties.

Although some of the events were followed by a decrease in cloud cover or changes in the size of cloud droplets, others preceded an increase in cloud cover, or no change at all.

Overall, the results essentially appeared random; abrupt dips in cosmic ray intensity did not produce any discernible pattern of changes in clouds, either immediately or in the four days following the Forbush decrease.

"This is a careful piece of work by Jon Egill Kristjansson that appears to find no evidence for the reputed link between cosmic rays and clouds," commented Joanna Haigh from Imperial College London, who is also attending the EGU meeting and has also studied possible links between solar variability and modern-day climate change.

Data showed no impact of galactic cosmic ray (GCR) flux on cloudiness

"It's supporting other recent work that also found no relationship," she added, referring to a research paper published two weeks ago by a UK team which, using different sets of data and different means of analysis, also found no discernible influence of cosmic rays on cloud cover.

"I think that as a factor in climate change, it's pretty clear that we don't have any indication at this point that this is important at all," added Dr Kristjansson.

"Whereas global mean temperatures have been rising steadily over the last 30 years, we see that the cosmic ray flux has been steady."

Local change

The EGU meeting also saw the first presentation of other research that could perhaps help to explain temperature variations seen between different regions of the Arctic and Antarctic.

Computer models have predicted that energetic particles hitting the top of the atmosphere in polar regions may change temperatures by stimulating the production of nitrous oxides (NOx).

"The energetic particles induce NOx production, and the NOx is then transported down to the stratosphere," explained Annika Seppala, who led the project from the Finnish Meteorological Institute and also works with the British Antarctic Survey.

"NOx destroys ozone in catalytic reaction cycles; and when you change ozone in the stratosphere, that... can then feed down to surface temperatures," she told BBC News.

Periods of intense activity warmed (red) some regions and cooled others (blue)

Dr Seppala's observations appear to bear out the models' predictions, at least in winter in the polar regions.

In periods of relatively intense particle activity, some areas of the Earth's surface in both the Arctic and Antarctic are warmer while others become colder, showing differences of up to 2C or 3C compared to the long-term averages.

In periods of unusually low particle activity, the patterns are reversed.

The mechanism appears to be redistributing heat across the polar regions; there is no evidence for any overall warming or cooling, Dr Seppala added, nor that the scale of the effect has changed over time.

"The results were amazing, and I think it's something significant that we have to take into account," commented Katje Matthes from the Free University of Berlin, who chaired the EGU session which saw the new data presented.

"I think it's rather a local effect," she added, "and I don't think it has a big impact on global temperatures."

The Antarctic picture is particular fascinating. High particle flux places a big red patch, indicating warmth, over the Antarctic Peninsula, an area that is feeling the impacts of climate change faster than most other parts of the planet.

The heating and cooling from this mechanism might be short-term; but scientists studying the loss of ice from this region of Antarctica will surely want to understand whether the short-term natural highs and lows combine with the overall warming trend in a way that speeds melting.

Dr Seppala's team now intends to investigate what happens in the other seasons of the year, which will give a better understanding of the importance of this newly confirmed process.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7352667.stm

Climate target is not radical enough -- recent study by Hansen et al.

NASA scientist warns the world must urgently make huge CO2 reductions

by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, April 7, 2008

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.

Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 -- the most stringent in the world -- should be slashed to 350 ppm. He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the arXiv.org website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth's history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.

The team studied core samples taken from the bottom of the ocean, which allow C02 levels to be tracked millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35 m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450 ppm.

"If you leave us at 450 ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice -- that's a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster -- a guaranteed disaster," Hansen told the Guardian.

At levels as high as 550 ppm, the world would warm by 6C, the paper finds. Previous estimates had suggested warming would be just 3C at that point.

Hansen has long been a prominent figure in climate change science. He was one of the first to bring the crisis to the world's attention in testimony to Congress in the 1980s.

But his relationship with the Bush administration has been frosty. In 2005 he accused the White House and NASA of trying to censor him. He has steadily revised his analysis of the scale of the global warming and was himself one of the architects of a 450 ppm target. But he told the Guardian, "I realise that was too high."

The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls "slow feedback" mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

Hansen said that he now regards as "implausible" the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. "If we follow business as usual I can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century."

The revised target is likely to prompt criticism that he is setting the bar unrealistically high. With the U.S. administration still acting as a drag on international efforts, climate campaigners are struggling even to get a 450 ppm target to stick.

Hansen said his findings were not a recipe for despair. The good news, he said, is that reserves of fossil fuels have been exaggerated, so an alternative source of energy will have to be rapidly put in place in any case. Other measure could include a moratorium on coal power stations which would bring the C02 levels to below 400 ppm.

Hansen's revised position will pile yet further pressure on Britain over plans to build a new generation of coal power stations. Last year he wrote to Gordon Brown urging him to block the first such power station; the Royal Society has made similar suggestions to the government.

Link to article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/07/climatechange.carbonemissions

Ice Sheet 'Plumbing System' Found: Lakes Of Meltwater Can Crack Greenland's Ice And Contribute To Faster Ice Sheet Flow

ScienceDaily, April 18, 2008 — Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of Washington (UW) have for the first time documented the sudden and complete drainage of a lake of meltwater from the top of the Greenland ice sheet to its base.From those observations, scientists have uncovered a plumbing system for the ice sheet, where meltwater can penetrate thick, cold ice and accelerate some of the large-scale summer movements of the ice sheet.

According to research by glaciologists Sarah Das of WHOI and Ian Joughin of UW, the lubricating effect of the meltwater can accelerate ice flow 50 to 100 percent in some of the broad, slow-moving areas of the ice sheet.

“We found clear evidence that supraglacial lakes—the pools of meltwater that form on the surface in summer—can actually drive a crack through the ice sheet in a process called hydrofracture,” said Das, an assistant scientist in the WHOI Department of Geology and Geophysics. “If there is a crack or defect in the surface that is large enough, and a sufficient reservoir of water to keep that crack filled, it can create a conduit all the way down to the bed of the ice sheet.”

But the results from Das and Joughin also show that while surface melt plays a significant role in overall ice sheet dynamics, it has a more subdued influence on the fast-moving outlet glaciers (which discharge ice to the ocean) than has frequently been hypothesized. (To learn more about this result, read the corresponding news release from UW.)

The research by Das and Joughin was compiled into two complementary papers and published on April 17 in the online journal Science Express. The papers will be printed in the journal Science on May 9.

Co-authors of the work include Mark Behn, Dan Lizarralde, and Maya Bhatia of WHOI; Ian Howat, Twila Moon, and Ben Smith of UW; and Matt King of Newcastle University.

Thousands of lakes form on top of Greenland’s glaciers every summer, as sunlight and warm air melt ice on the surface. Past satellite observations have shown that these supraglacial lakes can disappear in as little as a day, but scientists did not know where the water was going or how quickly, nor the impact on ice flow.

Researchers have hypothesized that meltwater from the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet might be lubricating the base. But until now, there were only theoretical predictions of how the meltwater could reach the base through a kilometer of subfreezing ice.

“We set out to examine whether the melting at the surface—which is sensitive to climate change—could influence how fast the ice can flow,” Das said. “To influence flow, you have to change the conditions underneath the ice sheet, because what’s going on beneath the ice dictates how quickly the ice is flowing."

"If the ice sheet is frozen to the bedrock or has very little water available," Das added, "then it will flow much more slowly than if it has a lubricating and pressurized layer of water underneath to reduce friction.”

In the summers of 2006 and 2007, Das, Joughin, and colleagues used seismic instruments, water-level monitors, and Global Positioning System sensors to closely monitor the evolution of two lakes and the motion of the surrounding ice sheet. They also used helicopter and airplane surveys and satellite imagery to monitor the lakes and to track the progress of glaciers moving toward the coast.

The most spectacular observations occurred in July 2006 when their instruments captured the sudden, complete draining of a lake that had once covered 5.6 square kilometers (2.2 square miles) of the surface and held 0.044 cubic kilometers (11.6 billion gallons) of water.

Like a draining bathtub, the entire lake emptied from the bottom in 24 hours, with the majority of the water flowing out in a 90-minute span. The maximum drainage rate was faster than the average flow rate over Niagara Falls.

Closer inspection of the data revealed that the pressure of the water from the lake split open the ice sheet from top to bottom, through 980 meters (3,200 feet) of ice. This water-driven fracture delivered meltwater directly to the base, raising the surface of the ice sheet by 1.2 meters in one location.

In the middle of the lake bottom, a 750-meter (2,400 foot) wide block of ice was raised by 6 meters (20 feet). The horizontal speed of the ice sheet--which is constantly in motion even under normal circumstances--became twice the average daily rate for that location.

“It’s hard to envision how a trickle or a pool of meltwater from the surface could cut through thick, cold ice all the way to the bed,” said Das. “For that reason, there has been a debate in the scientific community as to whether such processes could exist, even though some theoretical work has hypothesized this for decades.”

The seismic signature of the fractures, the rapid drainage, and the uplift and movement of the ice all showed that water had flowed all the way down to the bed. As cracks and crevasses form and become filled with water, the greater weight and density of the water forces the ice to crack open.

As water pours down through these cracks, it forms moulins (cylindrical, vertical conduits) through the ice sheet that allow rapid drainage and likely remain open for the rest of the melt season.

Das, Joughin, and their field research team will be featured this summer during an online- and museum-based outreach project known as Polar Discovery. Their return research expedition to Greenland will be chronicled daily through photo essays, and the researchers will conduct several live conversations with students, educators, and museum visitors via satellite phone.

Funding for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the WHOI Clark Arctic Research Initiative, and the WHOI Oceans and Climate Change Institute.

Adapted from materials provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Need to cite this story in your essay, paper, or report? Use one of the following formats:

APA: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (2008, April 18). Ice Sheet 'Plumbing System' Found: Lakes Of Meltwater Can Crack Greenland's Ice And Contribute To Faster Ice Sheet Flow. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 18, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/04/080417142503.htm

MLA: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "Ice Sheet 'Plumbing System' Found: Lakes Of Meltwater Can Crack Greenland's Ice And Contribute To Faster Ice Sheet Flow." ScienceDaily 18 April 2008. /releases/2008/04/080417142503.htm>.

Link to article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417142503.htm

NOAA: Year 2007 Climate and Weather Anomalies; 2007 Annual Climate Report

Please click on the image to enlarge it.

Link to image: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2007/ann/significant-extremes2007.gif

NOAA: 2007 a Top Ten Warm Year for U.S. and Globe

The year 2007 the 10th warmest year for the contiguous U.S., since national records began in 1895, according to preliminary data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The year was marked by exceptional drought in the U.S. Southeast and the West, which helped fuel another extremely active wildfire season. The year also brought outbreaks of cold air, and killer heat waves and floods. Meanwhile, the global surface temperature for 2007 was the fifth warmest since records began in 1880.

U.S. Temperatures

The average U.S. temperature for 2007 was 54.2°F; 1.4°F warmer than the 20th century mean of 52.8°F. NCDC originally estimated in mid-December that 2007 would end as the eighth warmest on record, but below-average temperatures in areas of the country last month lowered the annual ranking. For Alaska, 2007 was the 15th warmest year since statewide records began in 1918.

Six of the 10 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S. have occurred since 1998, part of a three decade period in which mean temperatures for the contiguous U.S. have risen at a rate near 0.6°F per decade.

The warmer-than-average conditions in 2007 influenced residential energy demand in opposing ways, as measured by the nation's Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index. Using this index, NOAA scientists determined that the U.S. residential energy demand was about three percent less during the winter and eight percent higher during the summer than what would have occurred under average climate conditions.

Exceptional warmth in late March was followed by a record cold outbreak from the central Plains to the Southeast in early April. The combination of premature growth from the March warmth and the record-breaking freeze behind it caused more than an estimated $1 billion in losses to crops (agricultural and horticultural).

A severe heat wave affected large parts of the central and southeastern U.S. in August, setting more than 2,500 new daily record highs.

Global Temperatures

For 2007, the global land and ocean surface temperature was the fifth warmest on record. Separately, the global land surface temperature was warmest on record while the global ocean temperature was 9th warmest since records began in 1880. Some of the largest and most widespread warm anomalies occurred from eastern Europe to central Asia.

Including 2007, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1995. The global average surface temperature has risen between 0.6°C and 0.7°C since the start of the twentieth century, and the rate of increase since 1976 has been approximately three times faster than the century-scale trend.

The greatest warming has taken place in high latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Anomalous warmth in 2007 contributed to the lowest Arctic sea ice extent since satellite records began in 1979, surpassing the previous record low set in 2005 by a remarkable 23 percent. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, this is part of a continuing trend in end-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent reductions of approximately 10 percent per decade since 1979.

U.S. Precipitation and Drought Highlights

Severe to exceptional drought affected the Southeast and western U.S. More than three-quarters of the Southeast was in drought from mid-summer into December. Increased evaporation from usually warm temperatures, combined with a lack of precipitation, worsened drought conditions. Drought conditions also affected large parts of the Upper Midwest and areas of the Northeast.

Water conservation measures and drought disasters, or states of emergency, were declared by governors in five southeastern states, along with California, Oregon, Maryland, Connecticut, and Delaware at some point during the year.

A series of storms brought flooding, millions of dollars in damages and loss of life from Texas to Kansas and Missouri in June and July. Making matters worse were the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin, which produced heavy rainfall in the same region in August.

Drought and unusual warmth contributed to another extremely active wildfire season. Approximately nine million acres burned through early December, most of it in the contiguous U.S., according to preliminary estimates by the National Interagency Fire Center.

There were 15 named storms in the Atlantic Basin in 2007, four more than the long-term average. Six storms developed into hurricanes, including Hurricanes Dean and Felix, two category 5 storms that struck Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and Nicaragua, respectively (the first recorded occurrence of two category 5 landfalls in the Atlantic Basin in the same year). No major hurricanes made landfall in the U.S., but three tropical depressions, one tropical storm and one Category 1 Hurricane made landfall along the Southeast and Gulf coasts.

La Niña conditions developed during the latter half of 2007, and by the end of November, sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific were more than 3.6°F (2°C) below average. This La Niña event is likely to persist into early 2008, according to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.

Link to 2007 annual report: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/ann/ann07.html#majorhighlights

NOAA: 2nd Warmest March on Record for Globe; Global Land Surface Temperature Warmest on Record

The average global temperature (land and ocean surface combined) for last month was the 2nd warmest on record for March, while the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was near average (ranking the 63rd warmest), according to an analysis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

U.S. Temperature Highlights

In the contiguous United States, the average temperature for March was 42°F, which was 0.4°F below the 20th century mean, ranking it as the 63rd warmest March on record, based on preliminary data.

Only Rhode Island, New Mexico and Arizona were warmer than average, while near-average temperatures occurred in 39 other states. The monthly temperature for Alaska was the 17th warmest in the 1918-2008 record, with an average temperature 3.8°F above the 1971-2000 mean.

The broad area of near-average temperatures kept the nation's overall temperature-related residential energy demand for March near average, based on NOAA's Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index.

U.S. Precipitation Highlights

Nine states from Oklahoma to Vermont were much wetter than average, with Missouri experiencing its second wettest March on record. Much of the month's precipitation fell March 17-20, when an intense storm system moved slowly from the southern Plains through the southern Midwest.

Rainfall amounts in a 48-hour period totaled 13.84 inches in Cape Girardeau, Mo., and 12.32 inches in Jackson, Mo. The heavy rainfall combined with previously saturated ground resulted in widespread major flooding of rivers and streams from the Missouri Ozarks eastward into southern Indiana.

From March 7-9, eight to 12 inches of snow fell from Louisville, Ky., to central Ohio. In Columbus, an all-time greatest 24-hour snowfall of 15.5 inches broke the old record of 12.3 inches set on April 4, 1987.

In the Southeast, a powerful tornado moved through downtown Atlanta on March 14, causing significant damage to many buildings. This was one of 90 tornado reports from the Southeast in March, accounting for 61 percent of all of the reported March tornadoes in the nation.

Rainfall in the middle of March improved drought conditions in much of the Southeast, but moderate-to-extreme drought remained in more than 59 percent of the region.

In the western U.S., the weather pattern in March bore a greater resemblance to a typical La Niña, with especially dry conditions across Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. March was extremely dry in much of California, tying as the driest in 68 years at the Sacramento airport with 0.05 inches, a 2.75 inch departure from average.

Snowpack conditions dropped in many parts of the West in March, but in general, heavy snowfall during December-February has left the western snow pack among the healthiest in more than a decade, with most locations near to above average.

Global Highlights

The global surface (land and ocean surface) temperature was the 2nd warmest on record for March in the 129-year record, 1.28° F (0.71° C) above the 20th century mean of 54.9° F (12.7° C). The warmest March on record (+1.33° F/0.74° C) occurred in 2002.

The global land surface temperature was the warmest on record for March, 3.3° F (1.8° C) above the 20th century mean of 40.8° F (5.0° C). Temperatures more than 8° F above average covered much of the Asian continent. Two months after the greatest January snow cover extent on record on the Eurasian continent, the unusually warm temperatures led to rapid snow melt, and March snow cover extent on the Eurasian continent was the lowest on record.

Although the ocean surface average was only the 13th warmest on record, as the cooling influence of La Niña in the tropical Pacific continued, much warmer than average conditions across large parts of Eurasia helped push the global average to a near record high for March.

Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent was the fourth lowest on record for March, remaining consistent with boreal spring conditions of the past two decades, in which warming temperatures have contributed to anomalously low snow cover extent.

Some weakening of La Niña, the cold phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, occurred in March, but moderate La Niña conditions remained across the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Link to article: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/mar/mar08.html

_________________________________________________________________

More from Discovery News:

Record Heat for Land Surfaces in March

Asia Land Surface the Hottest

April 18, 2008 -- Planet Earth continues to run a fever. Last month was the warmest March on record over land surfaces of the world and the second warmest overall worldwide. For the United States, however, it was just an average March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday.

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said high temperatures over much of Asia pulled the worldwide land temperature up to an average of 40.8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.9 degrees Celsius), 3.2 degrees (1.8 C) warmer than the average in the 20th century.

While Asia had its greatest January snow cover this year, warm March readings caused a rapid melt and March snow cover on the continent was a record low.

Global ocean temperatures were the 13th warmest on record, with a weakening of the La Nina conditions that cool the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Overall land and sea surface temperatures for the world were second highest in 129 years of record keeping, trailing only 2002, the agency said.

Warming conditions in recent decades have continued to raise concern about global climate change, which many weather and climate experts believe is related to gases released into the atmosphere by industrial and transportation processes.

The climate center said that for the 48 contiguous United States it was about average, ranking as the 63rd warmest March in 113 years of record keeping.

The average temperature for the U.S. in March was 42 degrees, 0.4 degrees below the 20th century mean.

The agency said only Rhode Island, New Mexico and Arizona were warmer than average, while near-average temperatures occurred in 39 other states. The monthly temperature for Alaska was the 17th warmest on record.

The snow pack declined in many parts of the West in March, but the Western snow pack remains the best in more than a decade thanks to heavy snowfall December through February.

For the month, nine states from Oklahoma to Vermont were much wetter than average, with Missouri experiencing its second wettest March on record.

Moderate to extreme drought remains in much of the Southeast despite rainfall in the middle of the month.

Link to article: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/04/18/warmest-march.html

NASA: Researchers Warm Up to Melt's Role in Greenland Ice Loss

April 17, 2008

Scientists survey surface lakes brought about by seasonal melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet in July 2006. Credit: Joughin/UW Polar Science Center
> High resolution image

In July 2006, researchers afloat in a dinghy on a mile-wide glacial lake in Greenland studied features of the lake and ice 40 feet below. Ten days later the entire contents of the lake emptied through a crack in the ice with a force equaling the pummeling water of Niagara Falls. The entire process only took 90 minutes.

Observations before, during and after this swift, forceful event were collected and analyzed by a team led by Ian Joughin of the University of Washington in Seattle and Sarah Das of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. Their first-of-a-kind observations confirm the structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet plumbing, and go further to show that summertime melt indeed contributes to the speed up of ice loss. They also conclude, however, that summertime melt is not as critical a factor as other causes of ice loss. Research by Joughin and colleagues, published April 17 in Science Express, was funded in part by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Scientists know that Greenland is losing ice. Much of Greenland's ice sheet is slow moving, creeping toward the ocean where the ice can calve off as icebergs. The landscape is also dumps ice into the ocean through outlet glaciers – rivers of ice that channel through valleys of bedrock and move at least 10 times faster than the ice sheet. Whether or not summertime melt has a significant influence on the speed of these flows has been an endless topic of debate among scientists – until now.

Ian Howat and Twila Moon of the University of Washington in Seattle conduct a sonar survey of a melt lake on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Credit: Joughin/UW Polar Science Center
> High resolution image

"For years people have said that the increasing length and intensity of the melt season in Greenland could yield an increase in ice discharge," said Joughin, lead author on the paper in Science. "Greater melt in future summers would cause ice to flow faster toward the coast and draw down more of the ice sheet."

Scientists have used computer models to show how melt could contribute to the observed speed up of the ice sheet. Meltwater travels through cracks in the ice down to the base of the mile-thick ice sheet where it forms a lubricating layer between the ice and the land. The fluid layer then makes it easier for the ice to slip away toward the ocean. The effect, however, had never been observed in Greenland on a large-scale, a fact that motivated Joughin and colleagues to get a closer look.

In 2006, Joughin embarked on an expedition by airplane to locate lakes on the ice sheet that they had identified in advance using NASA's Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The team selected two lakes full of meltwater and set up Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment to measure ground movement in a limited area but over frequent intervals, every two days. They also collected data from the NASA-launched and Canadian-owned satellite RADARSAT, which could provide similar movement information over an area hundreds of miles wide, but could make those measurements only every 24 days. When combined, these data helped the researchers identify relative changes in ice movements across the entire ice sheet.

They found that the influence of the violent draining of the lakes had a short-lived influence on the local movement of the ice sheet. Speedup during periods of summer were widespread across Greenland, suggesting that the ice sheet's plumbing is composed of a drainage network that quickly distributes the lubricating meltwater throughout the base of the ice sheet, as opposed to the water remaining confined to a single isolated crack.

A large fracture is visible in a lake bed on the Greenland Ice Sheet after it drained the lake's entire liquid contents. Credit: Joughin/UW Polar Science Center
> High resolution image

As for the relative speed of movement across Greenland, the researchers found that the slow-moving ice sheet saw seasonal increases in speed ranging from 50 to 100 percent. Despite the speed up, the ice sheet makes a relatively small contribution to ice loss compared to the already fast-moving outlet glaciers. The fast-moving outlet glaciers, however, are not affected as much by seasonal melt, which accounts for a speed increase of up to 15 percent and in many cases much less. "If you're really going to get a lot of ice out of Greenland, that would have to occur through outlet glaciers, but those are not being affected very much by seasonal melt," Joughin said. "The outlet glaciers are more affected by the removal of their shelves and grounded ice in their fjords, which decreases resistance to ice flow."

Kathryn Hansen

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Link to article: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland_speedup.html

Bush vision on climate change under fire at Paris meeting

The Sydney Morning Herald, April 17, 2008

US President George W. Bush's new blueprint for tackling global warming came under attack on Thursday from other carbon emitters, with some branding his scheme a step backwards in the battle against climate change.

Leading the charge at a meeting in Paris was South Africa, which lashed the proposals Bush outlined on Wednesday as a retreat by the planet's No. 1 polluter and a slap to poor countries least to blame for today's warming crisis.

The European Union (EU) -- which had challenged the US to follow its lead on slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 -- voiced disappointment.

Bush's speech came on the eve of the two-day Paris meeting, which gathers ministers from 16 economies accounting for 80 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

He called for the growth in US greenhouse gas emissions to be stopped by 2025 "and begin to reverse thereafter, so long as technology continues to advance."

He described these as "realistic goals," whereas "the wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realised and every chance of hurting our economy."

And he insisted that any future emissions-cutting deal under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) includes "meaningful participation" by fast-growing populous nations and that it "gives none a free ride."

Some delegates at the so-called Major Emitters Meeting (MEM) were dismayed by the tenor of Bush's speech.

They said it reminded them of the fierce opposition to the UNFCCC's Kyoto Protocol that has been a hallmark of the Bush presidency and remains the biggest obstacle in building a new global treaty beyond 2012, when Kyoto's present commitments run out.

"There is no way whatsoever that we can agree to what the US is proposing," South African Environment and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a statement.

"In effect, the US wants developing countries that already face huge poverty and development challenges to pay for what the US and other highly industrialized countries have caused over the past 150 years," he said.

"(...) On this issue, the current US administration is isolated. It is them against the overwhelming majority of the world, developed and developing countries alike."

The representatives of the European Commission and the EU's presidency said they were disappointed, while Germany described the US plan as a step backwards as time was running out and urged Washington to reconsider, delegation sources said.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer, though, said he saw some positive aspects, in that Bush's proposal would help spur real negotiations for a post-2012 deal. These marathon, fiendishly complex talks are scheduled to conclude in Copenhagen in December 2009.

The talks are the third MEM, a process launched by Bush last September that had won grudging applause and helped ease the US's years-long pariah status on climate change.

The aim of the MEM is to identify a global emissions goal and explore how smart technology and "sectoral" efforts by energy-intensive industries could be harnessed to achieve it.

The forum gathers Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States. The UNFCCC and EU are also represented.

Bush walked away from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, arguing that Kyoto was too costly for his oil-dependent economy and unfair as only rich nations -- and not big developing countries such as China and India -- had to make legally-binding curbs on their greenhouse-gas emissions.

The emerging giants, though, are firmly against signing up to mandatory targets in the post-2012 Kyoto commitments.

They argue that they are not to blame for today's warming and say stringent pledges could threaten their rise out of poverty.

Link to article: http://news.smh.com.au/bush-vision-on-climate-change-under-fire-at-paris-meeting/20080417-26wm.html

© 2008 AFP

A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice

by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, published April 17, 2008

DENILIQUIN, Australia — Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”

The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.

Ten thousand miles separate the mill’s hushed rows of oversized silos and sheds — beige, gray and now empty — from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but a widening global crisis unites them.

The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Drought affects every agricultural industry based here, not just rice — from sheepherding, the other mainstay in this dusty land, to the cultivation of wine grapes, the fastest-growing crop here, with that expansion often coming at the expense of rice.

The drought’s effect on rice has produced the greatest impact on the rest of the world, so far. It is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and many scientists believe it is among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production.

While a link between short-term changes in weather and long-term climate change is not certain, the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.

Indeed, the chief executive of the National Farmers’ Federation in Australia, Ben Fargher, says, “Climate change is potentially the biggest risk to Australian agriculture.”

Drought has already spurred significant changes in Australia’s agricultural heartland. Some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat or, especially here in southeastern Australia, wine grapes. Other rice farmers have sold their fields or their water rights, usually to grape growers.

Scientists and economists worry that the reallocation of scarce water resources — away from rice and other grains and toward more lucrative crops and livestock — threatens poor countries that import rice as a dietary staple.

The global agricultural crisis is threatening to become a political one, pitting the United States and other developed countries against the developing world over the need for affordable food versus the need for renewable energy. Many poorer nations worry that subsidies from rich countries to support biofuels, which turn food, like corn, into fuel, are pushing up the price of staplesThe World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization both called on major agricultural countries to overhaul policies to avoid a social explosion from rising food prices.

With rice, which is not used to make biofuel, the problem is availability. Even in normal times, little of the world’s rice is actually exported — more than 90 percent is consumed in the countries where it is grown. In the last quarter-century, rice consumption has outpaced production, with global reserves plunging by half just since 2000. Current economic uncertainty has led producers to hoard rice and speculators and investors even see it as a lucrative, or at least safe, investment.

All these factors have made countries that buy rice on the global market vulnerable to extreme price swings.

Senegal and Haiti each import four-fifths of their rice. And both have faced mounting unrest as prices have increased. Police suppressed violent demonstrations in Dakar on March 30, and unrest has spread to other rice-dependent nations in West Africa, notably Ivory Coast. The Haitian president, René Préval, after a week of riots, announced subsidies for rice buyers on Saturday.

Scientists expect the problem to worsen in the decades ahead.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the United Nations, predicted last year that even slight warming would decrease agricultural output in tropical and subtropical countries.

Moderate warming could benefit crop and pasture yields in countries far from the Equator, like Canada and Russia. In fact, the net effect of moderate warming is likely to be higher total food production around the world in the next several decades.

But the scientists said the effect would be uneven, and enormous quantities of food would need to be shipped from areas farther from the Equator to feed the populations of often less-affluent countries closer to the Equator.

The panel predicted that even greater warming, which might happen by late in this century if few or no limits are placed on greenhouse gas emissions, would hurt total food output and cripple crops in many countries.

Paul Lamine N’Dong, an elder in Joal, Senegal, worries that hot weather and failing rains have already crippled his village’s crop of millet, a coarse grain eaten locally and traded for rice.

Sitting on a concrete dais reserved for elders, Mr. N’Dong said on a recent morning, “The price rises very quickly, which means we really have to go and look for money.”

“It is live or die,” he said.

Survival Techniques

For farmers in a richer nation like Australia the effects of the current drought are already significant.

The rice farmers who do not give up and sell their land or water rights are experimenting with varieties or techniques that require less water. Australia now has some of the world’s highest rice yields for a given quantity of water.

Still, Australia’s total rice capacity has declined by about a third because many farmers have permanently sold water rights, mostly for grape production. And production last year was far lower because of a severe shortage of water; rice farmers received one-eighth of the water they are usually promised by the government.

The accidental beneficiaries of these conditions have been the farmers who grow wine grapes in the same river basin where the Deniliquin mill stands silent.

Even with the recent doubling of rice prices, to around $1,000 a metric ton for the high grades produced by Australia, it is even more profitable to grow wine grapes.

All told, wine grapes produce a pretax profit of close to $2,000 an acre while rice produces a pretax profit around $240 an acre.

Ranchers like Peter Milliken, who raises sheep on 37,500 acres near Hay, Australia, are trying to reduce the water they use. Mr. Milliken is installing a buried nine-mile pipe to replace an irrigation canal that lost up to 90 percent of its water to evaporation — and planning for the day when he does not irrigate at all.

Sheep farmers have already worked out cooperative arrangements to send flocks to whatever fields have recently received rain, sometimes herding or trucking them long distances. Keeping an eye on a flock, Frank Cox, a drover, said recently, “We had to move the sheep because they were dying of starvation, and truck them down here.”

The changes here are making rice harder to find.

For instance, SunRice, the Australian rice trading and marketing giant owned by the country’s rice growers, began preparing to mothball the Deniliquin mill five months ago, when it noticed that Australian farmers were planting almost no rice. To make sure that it could continue supplying the domestic market, as well as export markets in Papua New Guinea, South Pacific island nations, Taiwan and the Middle East, SunRice went into international markets and stepped up rice purchases from other countries, the chief executive, Gary Helou, said

The SunRice purchases became one among the many factors that are making it harder for longtime rice importers elsewhere to find supplies.

Seeking Hardier Rice

Researchers are looking for solutions to global rice shortages — for example, rice that blooms earlier in the day, when it is cooler, to counter global warming. Rice plants that happen to bloom on hot days are less likely to produce grains of rice, a difficulty that is already starting to emerge in inland areas of China and other Asian countries as temperatures begin to climb.

“There will be problems very soon unless we have new varieties of rice in place,” said Reiner Wassmann, climate change coordinator at the International Rice Research Institute near Manila, a leader in developing higher-yielding strains of rice for nearly half a century.

The recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried an important caveat that could make the news even worse: the panel said that existing models for the effects of climate change on agriculture did not yet include newer findings that global warming could reduce rainfall and make it more variable.

Many agronomists contend that changes in the timing and amount of rain are more important for crops than temperature changes. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said long-range climate forecasts for precipitation would require another 5 to 20 years of research, depending on the region.

In addition to drought, climate change could also produce more extreme weather, more outbreaks of pests and weeds, and changes in sea level as polar ices melts. Most of the world’s increase in rice production over the last quarter-century has occurred close to sea level, in the deltas of rivers like the Mekong in Vietnam, Chao Phraya in Thailand and Ganges-Brahmaputra in Bangladesh.

Yet the effects of climate change are not uniformly bad for rice. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, can actually help rice plants and other crops — although the effect dwindles or disappears if the plants face excessive heat, inadequate water, severe pollution or other stresses.

Still, the flexibility of farmers and ranchers here has persuaded some climate experts that, particularly in developed countries, the effects of climate change may be mitigated, if not completely avoided.

“I’m not as pessimistic as most people,” said Will Steffen, the director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University. “Farmers are learning how to do things differently.”

Meanwhile, changes like the use of water to grow wine grapes instead of rice carry their own costs, as the developing world is discovering.

“Rice is a staple food,” said Graeme J. Haley, the general manager of the town of Deniliquin. “Chardonnay is not.”

Link to article:

" 'Sleeping giants' at the ends of the Earth are awakening," NASA expert Waleed Abdalati says

Waleed Abdalati: “With an ice-free Arctic--more heat is absorbed by the planet. Throughout recorded history, we’ve counted on this ice being there.”

University of Delaware, 3:42 p.m., April 16, 2008--The “sleeping giants” at the ends of the Earth--the polar ice sheets--are “awakening,” Waleed Abdalati, head of NASA's Cryospheric Sciences Branch, told an audience of more than 200 at the University of Delaware on Thursday evening, April 10.

These “awakening” or thawing ice sheets will affect the world, from raising sea levels and threatening the existence of polar bears, to expanding maritime commerce and impacting national security, Abdalati noted.

One of the world's pre-eminent experts in the study of climate change, Abdalati provided evidence that the polar ice sheets are shrinking, drawing on data yielded by some 14 different scientific models used for predicting climate, to striking images of Greenland's and Antarctica's ice cover taken by NASA satellites.

The presentation was the latest installment in UD's William S. Carlson International Polar Year Events--a series of public programs named after UD's president from 1946-50 who conducted research in the Arctic. The lecture also was Webcast and simulcast to UD's island in the virtual world of Second Life.

Abdalati said he “fell in love with NASA” as a youngster, after watching the lunar landings. Today, he leads a group of scientists who monitor the planet's changing ice cover using satellites and other airborne instruments. He also is a veteran of nine field expeditions to the Greenland Ice Sheet.

“It's nature in its most austere form,” Abdalati said, showing a slide of a helicopter hovering along the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf towering taller than a football field above the waterline. “Does it matter that a place like this is changing?” he asked.

It does when 23 feet of sea-level rise is contained in the Greenland ice sheet, and 200 feet of sea-level rise is contained in the Antarctic, and this ice affects world climate and a whole host of other issues, he went on to explain.

While Abdalati says the polar ice sheets “won't go tomorrow,” how much sea level rises in the future and how well we are prepared for it has huge social, political and economic implications for the world.

The impact of a one-meter (3.2 foot) rise in sea level in the world's oceans would amount to the inundation of 2.2 million square miles of coastline around the globe, the equivalent of one-quarter of the continental United States. It would affect 45 million people and cost a trillion dollars, Abdalati said.

Tools such as ice-penetrating radar and NASA's ICESat satellite have revealed that the Greenland Ice Sheet has a “weakened underbelly,” eroded by meltwater from thawing ice on the surface.

Since 1979, sea ice has been shrinking by about 8 percent per decade, Abdalati said. Every summer, sea ice thaws until it reaches a summer minimum. Then nature “presses a re-set button,” and the sea ice grows back in winter, he noted. However, the thick, old ice no longer exists in many places, leaving much thinner ice, more vulnerable to melting.

In 2007, scientists were stunned by the 23 percent reduction in sea ice that occurred from 2005-07. In 2007, a 76-year-old farmer from Minnesota navigated the largely ice-free Northwest Passage in a sailboat, he noted.

An ice-free Arctic Ocean has both negative and positive implications, Abdalati noted, providing the means for moving goods from Asia to Europe more quickly, and reducing the need to use the Suez Canal, not to mention increasing access to the Arctic's tremendous economic resources.

“With an ice-free Arctic--more heat is absorbed by the planet,” he said, which has huge implications for climate patterns. “Throughout recorded history, we've counted on this ice being there.”

Besides the plight of the polar bears, whose numbers are diminishing, a warmer Arctic means melting permafrost.

As this frozen ground melts, it releases methane, a strong greenhouse gas. Melting permafrost already is costing Alaska some $35 million per year, where homes, highways and other infrastructure are affected by the sinking ground.

“Climatologically, we're in unfamiliar territory,” Abdalati noted. “The effectiveness of society's response depends on how big the changes are, how fast they come and how fast our ability will be to anticipate the changes.”

For information on UD's polar research and outreach activities, visit [www.udel.edu/research/polar].

Photos by Jon Cox and Debbie Jeffers

Link to article: http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/apr/giants041608.html

Peter Cox: Rising temperatures bring their own CO2, article by Fred Pearce

BLOGGER'S NOTE: Please read this article all the way to the end to get the real point of this research -- unfortunately, if true, the situation is far worse than we thought it was.

by Fred Pearce, New Scientist, 22 March 2008

CLIMATE sceptics are right. Temperature increases do precede rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide - the opposite of what you would expect if changes in CO₂ levels were really driving climate change. That's the verdict of leading atmospheric modeller Peter Cox, a climate expert at the University of Exeter, UK. Yet far from dismissing the threat of global warming, Cox says this means things are worse than we thought. Events in the Little Ice Age, 400 years ago, prove the point, he says.

One of the most important pieces of evidence linking climate change to greenhouse gas emissions is that for tens of thousands of years, temperature changes have been in lockstep with atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. But sceptics keep pointing out that temperature changes seem to come first.

That charge is true, says Cox. "In climate predictions, we have been in denial about how temperature changes CO₂." But that certainly does not mean we don't need to worry about rising CO₂ levels, he stresses. "People on both sides want a one-way link, but the historical record shows that causality goes both ways." Rising - or falling - temperatures and CO₂ concentrations reinforce each other. Embarrassingly for climate modellers, Cox added: "Actually, CO₂ is more sensitive to temperature than the other way round." This is supported by a study of the Little Ice Age by Cox and colleagues (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, p L10702).

The cool period began with reduced solar radiation reaching the Earth due to natural variation in sunspots. But after about 50 years, CO₂ levels fell and this amplified the cooling. This is not surprising, says Cox, because in colder conditions oceans absorb more CO₂, and the carbon cycle on land slows, absorbing yet more.

"There seems to be a change of about 40 parts per million (ppm) in CO₂ levels for every 1 °C change in temperature," says Cox, who has revisited the Little Ice Age data. Since further global warming is inevitable in the near future, it means we're heading for big natural increases in CO₂ on top of human-made emissions.

This extra increase will boost global warming in the coming century to about 50 per cent above mainstream climate projections, says Cox, because they only include the effect of CO₂ on temperature, and not temperature's effect on CO₂.

"The system turns out to be more sensitive than we thought. If we get 4 °C of warming in the coming century, that by itself will raise CO₂ levels by an extra 160 ppm. And that may be rather conservative." Current levels are 380 ppm, compared with pre-industrial levels of 270 ppm. Many scientists believe anything above 450 ppm will create a devastating global climate.

Cox's findings were among many unnerving observations about past climate change presented at the meeting suggesting existing climate models are too optimistic.

"We are headed into unknown territory and the only things we have to guide us are physics and our knowledge of the past," says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Climate Change - Want to know more about global warming: the science, impacts and political debate? Visit New Scientist's continually updated special report.

From issue 2648 of New Scientist magazine, 22 March 2008, page 11: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19726483.800-rising-temperatures-bring-their-own-cosub2sub.html

BBC News: Forecast for big sea level rise

People in low-lying poor nations, such as Bangladesh, are at most risk

by Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, April 15, 2008

Sea levels could rise by up to one-and-a-half metres by the end of this century, according to a new scientific analysis.

This is substantially more than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in last year's landmark assessment of climate science.

Sea level rise of this magnitude would have major impacts on low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

The findings were presented at a major science conference in Vienna.

The research group is not the first to suggest that the IPCC's forecast of an average rise in global sea levels of 28-43cm by 2100 is too conservative.

The IPCC was unable to include the contribution from "accelerated" melting of polar ice sheets as water temperatures warm because the processes involved were not yet understood.

Melt water

The new analysis comes from a UK/Finnish team which has built a computer model linking temperatures to sea levels for the last two millennia.

"For the past 2,000 years, the [global average] sea level was very stable, it only varied by about 20cm," said Svetlana Jevrejeva from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL), near Liverpool, UK.

"But by the end of the century, we predict it will rise by between 0.8m and 1.5m.

"The rapid rise in the coming years is associated with the rapid melting of ice sheets."

The model, she told reporters here at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting, is able to mimic accurately sea levels reliably observed by tide gauges over the last 300 years.

There is little concrete evidence on sea levels for the thousands of years before that, explained POL's Simon Holgate, who was not involved in the new study.

"There is some limited archaeological evidence [based on] the sill heights of fish enclosures that the Romans used, that's probably the strongest evidence that there hasn't been any significant change in sea level over the last 2,000 years."

Against that, he said, the currently observed rise of about three mm per year is significant, and many scientists working in the field expect to see an acceleration.

Last year, German researcher Stefan Rahmstorf used different methodology but reached a similar conclusion to Dr Jevrejeva's group, projecting a sea level rise of between 0.5m and 1.4m by 2100.

Space-eye view

The latest satellite data indicates that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass, though the much bigger East Antarctic sheet may be gaining mass.

A full melting of Greenland and West Antarctica would raise sea levels by many metres; but the process, if it happened, would take centuries.

"We know what's happening today from satellite data, but trying to predict what that means in the future is very difficult science," noted Steve Nerem from the University of Colorado, whose own research concerns global sea levels.

"There's a lot of evidence out there that we're going to see at least a metre of sea level rise by 2100," he said.

"We're seeing big changes in Greenland, we're seeing big changes in West Antarctica, so we're expecting this to show up in the sea level data as an increase in the rate we've been observing."

However, a rise of even a metre could have major implications for low-lying countries - especially, noted Dr Holgate, those whose economies are not geared up to build sophisticated sea defence systems.

"Eighty to 90% of Bangladesh is within a metre or so of sea level," he said, "so if you live in the Ganges delta you're in a lot of trouble; and that's an awful lot of people."

Dr Jevrejeva's projections have been submitted for publication in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7349236.stm

Is this the beginning of water wars?

by Catherine Brahic, NewScientist, April 11, 2008

As Barcelona runs out of water, Spain has been forced to consider importing water from France by boat. It is the latest example of the growing struggle for water around the world – the "water wars".

Barcelona and the surrounding region are suffering the worst drought in decades. There are several possible solutions, including diverting a river, and desalinating water. But the city looks like it will ship water from the French port of Marseilles.

The water services authority in Marseille say that no contracts have been signed, and would not say how much the water would cost, although it is unlikely to cost any more than it costs the inhabitants of Marseilles. And the amounts of water than have been discussed are small – 25,000 cubic metres, less than what's needed to grow an acre of wheat, and not enough to keep 30 Spaniards going for a year, based on their average consumption.

But the proposal is interesting because it turns a local drought into an international situation.

Water conflict

Climatologists predict that certain regions, the Mediterranean basin among them, will increasingly suffer from water shortages as global temperatures are pushed up by greenhouse gas emissions.

Combined with reports that water scarcity can escalate conflicts, the forecasts have raised fears that climate change could bring about water wars.

"People will not fight over water," says Mark Zeitoun, from the London School of Economics' Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance in the UK. "But that's not to say water shortages will not contributing to existing tensions."

This is already happening. Zeitoun advises the Palestinian authorities in their water negotiations with Israel. The latter controls 90% of the two territories' shared water resources. "The fact that the Palestinians are deprived of their water doesn't help the situation," Zeitoun says.

Like Spain, the Palestinian authorities are considering their options, and like Spain one of them is to import water – in this case from Turkey, a country which is already involved in its own water disputes with Syria and Iraq.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers start in Turkey and supply Syria and Iraq. The Turkish government is building dams on those rivers, reducing the flow downstream and stoking long-standing tensions with its neighbours. "Iraq desperately needs that water," says Zeitoun.

Water for arms

Turkey already exports water to Cyprus and in 2004 signed a "water for arms" deal with none other than Israel, an agreement which sees Turkey deliver converted oil tankers full of water to Israel in exchange for tanks and air force technology.

Israel's situation is typical of a state that is severely mismanaging its water resources, says Zeitoun. Climate change models predict that while water will become scarcer in some regions, it will be more abundant elsewhere, suggesting efficient water management is key.

"If Spain is drawing a lot of water to grow oranges for the UK, the city of Barcelona doesn't benefit. The only people profiting are a few large farmers," he says.

So while the water wars may not spark conflict between states, Zeitoun's colleague Elena Lopez-Gunn says we could well see water riots. "Whether the political systems can cope with that, we don't know," she says.

Link to article: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13655-is-this-the-beginning-of-water-wars.html

Med to get five times as many dangerously hot days

by Catherine Brahic, NewScientist, June 18, 2007

Countries around the Mediterranean are set to suffer up to five times as many dangerously hot summer days if greenhouse gas emissions continue their relentless rise, say researchers.

France will see the greatest increase in extreme summer temperatures, they predict.

Noah Diffenbaugh at Purdue University, US, and colleagues used a climate model for the Mediterranean region, which was so precise that they were able to resolve regional changes in temperature for every 20 square kilometres.

The model calculated an overall increase in temperature and also an increase in number of extremely hot days. Of all the Mediterranean countries, France will experience the greatest increase in extremely hot temperatures – in some French regions, summer days will be 8°C hotter than they were between 1961 and 1989.

Dangerously hot

But the thin strip of coast around the Med will see the largest increase in the number of dangerously hot days – up to 40 more days per year along the coastlines of Spain, Egypt and Libya.

The researchers compared two possible futures with their model. In the first, rapid population growth and few "green" policy measures meant that greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise exponentially during the 21st century. In the second, the global population did not rise as fast and governments and societies adopted more environmentally-friendly lifestyles (for instance, greener fuels).

Results from the first, more severe scenario, showed that the number of dangerously hot days could increase by between 200% and 500% by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue their exponential rise. As a result, temperatures currently experienced during the hottest two weeks of the summer would become typical of the coldest two weeks of the summer.

"One might expect that an average warming of four degrees would equate to each day warming by 4 degrees, but in fact the hottest days warm quite a bit more," says Diffenbaugh.

Sensitive region

Results from the second scenario suggest that reducing emissions levels could cut the increase in temperatures by half. But the researchers say governments should brace themselves for summer heatwaves like the one that struck Europe in 2003 to become commonplace, even if they adopt climate-friendly policies.

"We find that decreases in greenhouse gas emissions greatly reduce the impact, but we see negative effects even with reduced emissions," explains Diffenbaugh.

He says that what makes the Mediterranean region so sensitive to climate change is a "surface moisture feedback": as temperatures rise, the landmass not only gets hotter, it gets drier too. "This means there is less evaporative cooling," explains Diffenbach.

The 2003 heatwave is thought to have killed 35,000 people across Europe, nearly 15,000 of which were in France.

Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2007GL030000)

Link to article: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn12086-med-to-get-five-times-as-many-dangerously-hot-days.html

World Bank and IMF focus on world food prices, market woes

by Harry Dunphy, Associated Press Writer, April 13, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Finance ministers and central bankers are focusing their spring meetings on ways to deal with the unfolding financial crisis that has roiled economies around the world and led to higher food and energy prices.

Sessions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank end Sunday with a look by the bank's policy-setting committee at the effect on developing countries, especially poor ones where the bank is trying to reduce poverty.

"We must respond to the immediate emergency situation," Robert Zoellick, the bank president, said before the meeting, but in a way that helps developing countries achieve objectives such as improved health care and reduced malnutrition and infant mortality.

The officials are also talking about climate change, investment in Africa and rising food prices.

"In the U.S and Europe over the last year we've been focused on the prices of gasoline at the pump," Zoellick said. "While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it's getting more and more difficult every day." The poor already spend up to 75 percent of their income on food in many developing countries, he said.

Zoellick has said that to deal with the immediate crisis, the international community must fill a food shortage valued at a minimum of $500 million by the U.N. World Food Program.

A similar warning was sounded Saturday by the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He said there would be dire consequences if food prices remain high in developing countries, especially in Africa.

He added that the problem could also create trade imbalances that would hurt advanced economies, "so it is not only a humanitarian question."

Governments in Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines are among those already facing social unrest because of food prices and shortages. If the price increases continue, Strauss-Kahn said, "Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will be starving. Children will be suffering from malnutrition, with consequences for all their lives."

The development group Oxfam, a frequent IMF critic, said rich countries are largely responsible for the food crisis because they have been cutting aid to developing countries and encouraging biofuel production, which the IMF says is responsible for almost half the increase in the demand for food crops.

"Rich countries demand for biofuel is driving up food prices and is a big part of the problem," said Elizabeth Stuart, an Oxfam policy adviser. "Meanwhile, by cutting aid levels, they are doing precious little to be part of the solution."

Germany's development minister urged greater regulation of the global biofuels market to prevent its expansion from driving up food prices. "It is unacceptable for the export of agrofuels to pose a threat to the supply situation of the very people already living in poverty," Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul said in a statement.

Associated Press writer Desmond Butler contributed to this report.

Link to article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080413/ap_on_bi_ge/finance_meetings

Lula Ignácio da Silva: Biofuels not the cause of increases in food prices

[BLOGGER'S NOTE: hmmm, does this guy really know what he is talking about?]

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Brazil's president insisted Thursday that crops used for ethanol are not responsible for driving up food prices, and said Haiti -- where food riots have erupted recently -- could benefit from a biofuel industry.

Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, left, visits Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende on Thursday.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was speaking after meeting Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende at the start of a two-day state visit during which he hopes to boost Dutch investment in Brazil's biofuel industry.

Ministers from both countries were signing an agreement to intensify cooperation on biofuels Friday.

While biofuels produced from plants such as sugar cane are promoted as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels, they also have come under fire for elbowing out traditional food crops in developing countries because they are more profitable.

There also are fears that tracts of Brazil's rain forests could be felled to make way for biofuels or other crops because of the pressure to increase farmland.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization says world food prices have gone up by 45 percent in the last nine months, and noted serious shortages of rice, wheat and corn. FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said in India on Wednesday the demand for biofuels was one of several factors in the price surge.

Ethanol production "can be the hope for a development model for many countries, particularly in Africa, Latin America and Asia," Lula da Silva told reporters.

"Just look at Haiti today. We can see how many benefits we can take to Haiti if rich and emerging countries like Brazil can make partnerships to invest in third countries and produce [biofuels] there."

Brazil, which claims to be the world's main producer of ethanol from sugar cane, wants ethanol included in a U.S.-European Union plan within the World Trade Organization to cut import taxes on climate-friendly products such as solar panels and wind turbines.

For Brazil, which would reap billions of dollars in revenue from widespread ethanol liberalization, getting its fuel accepted as a cheap, eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuels has become a priority.

While business has boomed amid soaring oil prices and global warming concerns, the Latin American country says exports are still being held back by high U.S. and European tariffs. It notes that petroleum products, such as gasoline, face no tariffs.

Lula da Silva said food prices are rising because more of the world's poor are earning enough to buy more and better food, and because people are living longer.

"There is ... no relation with biofuels," he said.

Balkenende, however, said energy demand is influencing inflation.

He appealed for development of an international energy strategy to ensure the world can meet the soaring demand from booming markets such as China and India.

"We have to talk about biofuels; we have to talk about sustainability and we have to talk about renewables," he said.

Speaking earlier this year, Brazil's foreign minister also said there was no competition in his country between food and ethanol.

Sugar cane for ethanol amounts to less than 1 percent of Brazilian territory and 3 percent of its farmland, Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said in an AP interview. "So there is no problem."

Link to article: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/04/10/brazil.biofuel.ap/index.html

James Hansen's letter to Houghton Mifflin on the high school textbook "American Government": Junk Science Taught in High School Classrooms!

People, do you happen to know if your child is being taught from this book?

Friends of the Earth has received a copy of American Government, published by Houghton Mifflin, which is used in AP government classes in high schools nationwide. The latest edition's chapter on "Environmental Policy" contains a discussion of global warming so biased and misleading it would humble a tobacco industry PR man:

• "It is a foolish politician who today opposes environmentalism. And that creates a problem, because not all environmental issues are equally deserving of support. Take the case of global warming." (p. 559)
• "On the one hand, a warmer globe will cause sea levels to rise, threatening coastal communities; on the other hand, greater warmth will make it easier and cheaper to grow crops and avoid high heating bills." (p. 559)

Please note that researchers at the University of Illinois (smack dab in the middle of our agricultural heartland) have been studying the effect of higher temperatures combined with higher levels of CO2, and they have come to quite the opposite conclusion -- the effect will be of decreased productivity! This has been known by the scientific community since at least 2006.

And, what a joke! Avoiding high heating bills (yeah, in the winter!) -- what about the high electric bills for air conditioning while everyone fries in triple-digit temperatures like they did all summer last year?

Dr. James Hansen has written to complain about this in a letter (see below) to the publisher, using NASA stationery (people have actually complained about this -- I say, "More power to him! Finally, some of our tax dollars are being used for the benefit of the American people!"):

March 28, 2008

Houghton Mifflin Company
222 Berkeley Street
Boston, MA 02116-3764

To Whom It May Concern:

Through the efforts of a public high school student, I recently became aware of the discussion of global warming and climate change in you textbook American Government (by James Q. Wilson and John Dilulio, Jr. Tenth Edition for Advanced High School Students). I am the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Colombia University. For more than three decades, I have studied the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the earth's climate system. On numerous occasions I have testified before Congress on the science of climate change. When I read the book's discussion of global warming (in chapter 21, on "Environmental Policy"), I was shocked to find a large number of clearly erroneous statements. These statements are aimed at giving students the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain. I hope that you will give significant and immediate attention to correcting these erroneous statements.

The textbook’s authors repeatedly attempt to cast doubt on the accepted science of global warming. Among other things, the authors state that "scientists do no know how large the greenhouse effect is, whether it will lead to a harmful amount of global warming, or (if it will) what should be done about it" (p. 560); that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all: (p. 569); and that global warming is "enmeshed in scientific uncertainty: (p. 573).

Each of these statements is profoundly mistaken in ways that will mislead students about the facts and science of global warming. In recent decades the scientific community has gathered overwhelming evidence that the earth's climate is undergoing a period of significant heating, of which human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are a major cause. The scientific community no longer doubts whether global warming is happening. Scientific academies from across the globe, including the National Academy of Sciences, have stated unambiguously that human generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are the primary cause of well-documented global warming.

The most comprehensive scientific assessments of the causes and probable effects of global warming appear in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The IPCC's most recent report is summarized in the attached Summary for Policymakers. The IPCC report concludes that global warming is "unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level." The IPCC report further concludes that there is greater that a 90% probability that "Most of the observed increased in average global temperatures since the mid-20th century" has resulted not from natural causes, but from anthropogenic (i.e., human-induced) greenhouse gas concentrations. The report predicts that human-induced global warming will lead to rising seal levels, intensification of tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes), further increased in surface temperatures, and other disruptive changes.

I find it alarming that a widely-used textbook from a respected publisher would contain so many gross errors. I strongly urge that you update the textbook to reflect the broad consensus of the scientific community. Failure to correct the book's errors will leave students gravely misinformed about the fact and science of global warming, of the most serious problems that we as a society and as a species face.

Thank you for you attention to this matter. Please contact me if I can be of any further assistance.

Sincerely,

James E. Hansen, Ph.D.

Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Scientists call Arctic Sea Ice Return Illusory: Arctic Sea Ice, April 11, 2008

Update of April 16, 2008:

Arctic sea ice has continued to crack up, including the remnant of older ice located just north of Greenland and along the northernmost Canadian islands. The satellite image directly above this paragraph is from today, April 16. To compare it to the amount of older ice that was still around in February, look at the right side of the NASA graphic (click HERE) -- the second image below this paragraph -- at the areas of purple and green. Please click on any image to enlarge it.



Please click on the image to enlarge it (from the University of Illinois/University of Colorado). Link to site: http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=04&fd=11&fy=2007&sm=04&sd=11&sy=2008

The above graphic is a side-by-side comparison of the Arctic sea ice concentrations (indicated by color, burgundy being the most solid) and land snow cover on April 11, 2007, and April 11, 2008. If you were to judge solely by the amount of burgundy, you might assume that the situation this year is better than it was at this time last year. However, the graphic cannot show the thickness of the sea ice.

Below is a graphic from NASA showing the average age of Arctic sea ice during 1985 to 2000 (on the left) and the age of the sea ice this year in February. The age of the sea ice can tell us something about its thickness. The oldest ice is represented by the colors purple and green (6+ and 5 years of age, respectively). Red indicates ice that is only one year old. Notice that in February of this year there was very, very little older ice, and it was mostly located just north of Greenland and the northern islands of Canada. One-year-old ice now represents a good 70% of the coverage, and it is quite thin and will break and melt much more readily.

Please click on the graphic below to enlarge it. There is a good explanatory article on NASA's website concerning the condition of the sea ice this year. It may be found at the following link: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/seaice_conditions_feature.html




The next image (below) is a satellite photo taken on April 4, 2008. Again, please click to enlarge it and observe the detail. Updated images may be found at this link (note that some have a lot of static and you can try again in an hour or so): http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg

You can see that there are already cracks running through the oldest sea ice.

Now, have a look at this image from April 11, 2008. Please click on the image to enlarge it and show the detail.

These changes cannot be seen on the graphics produced by University of Illinois/University of Colorado.

Here is a repeat of the article I posted on April 7:

"Arctic Sea Ice Return Called Illusory"

Thin layer vulnerable to summer melting, federal scientists say

by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, March 19, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Critical Arctic sea ice this winter made a tenuous partial recovery from last summer's record melt, federal scientists said Tuesday.

But that's an illusion, like a Hollywood movie set, scientist Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center said. The ice is very thin and vulnerable to heavy melting again this summer.

Overall, Arctic sea ice has shrunk precipitously in the past decade and scientists blame global warming caused by humans.

Last summer, Arctic ice shrank to an area that was 27 percent smaller than the previous record. This winter, it recovered to a maximum of 5.8 million square miles, up 4 percent and the most since 2003, NASA ice scientist Josefino Comiso said. It is still a bit below the long-term average level for this time of year.

"What's going on underneath the surface is really the key thing," Meier said after a news conference. What's happening is not enough freezing, he said.

Summer Arctic sea ice is important because it's intricately connected to weather conditions elsewhere on the globe. It affects wind patterns, temperatures farther south and even the Gulf Stream, acting as a sort of refrigerator for the globe, according to scientists.

"What happens there, matters here," said Waleed Abdalati, chief ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Climate for the period of human record has depended on the ice being there."

Viewing the Arctic from space via NASA satellites might make you think the Arctic ice cover is on its way back.

But more than 70 percent of that sea ice is new, thin and salty, having formed only since September, Comiso said. The more important ice is perennial sea ice that lasts through the summer, and that ice has hit record low levels.

Compared to the 1980s, the Arctic has lost more than half of its perennial sea ice and three-quarters of its "tough as nails" sea ice that is six years or older, Meier said. The amount of lost old sea ice is twice the area of the state of Texas, he said.

On top of that, a change in Arctic atmospheric pressure this winter is pushing a large amount of the valuable older ice out of the Arctic to melt, Meier said.

That means next summer when temperatures warm, expect lots of melting, the scientists said.

"We're in for a world of hurt this summer," ice center senior scientist Mark Serreze told the Associated Press. Depending on the weather, there could be as much melting this year as last, maybe more, Serreze and Meier said.

At the South Pole, in Antarctica, sea ice seems stable, even slightly above normal, the scientists reported. However, ice levels in Antarctica always are quite different from the Arctic and aren't as connected to the world's weather.

Leo Hickman: Driven by mischief: Judging by their ads, some companies now revel in taunting environmentalists

by Leo Hickman, The Guardian, Thursday, January 24, 2008

Any advertiser flicking through the Advertising Standards Authority's code of practice quickly arrives at Section 2.2. "All marketing communications," it decrees, "should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society."

What a shame this sense of responsibility isn't extended to the environment, too. Given that we are bombarded with, on average, 3,000 adverts every day -- there are about 50 in this paper today -- it doesn't take long before you come across one that promotes a product that, in its own small way, is harming the environment.

But beyond the mundane adverts for cheap flights, plasma TVs and patio heaters, there is a new generation of advert that almost appears to be goading society's newfound environmental sensibilities. The website ClimateDenial.org, which "explores the psychology of climate change denial with observations and anecdotes about our weird and disturbed response to the problem", has been inviting visitors to send in their best examples from around the world and, surprise, surprise, the motoring industry has been generous enough to dream up the majority of candidates for "Best in Show".

First to India, where an advert for the Ford Endeavour finds this 4x4 behemoth leaving slushy tracks on a melting polar landscape. Behind the two-tonne, seven-seater vehicle, which does just 7.5 km per litre in city driving conditions (compared to 22kmpl for India's new "People's Car", the Tata Nano), stand two rather forlorn-looking polar bears, an animal that has become the symbol of climate change. Could Ford India have chosen a more inappropriate setting to sell its wares? A children's playground, perhaps?

Ford in the UK goes for a much simpler approach with its Fiesta Zetec Climate (why would you ever use the word "climate" to name a car?) ads by accompanying a picture of the car with just a short sentence: "Most people would prefer a hot climate." It wouldn't appear as if Ford's survey of people's climatic preferences extended to those living in already parched regions of the planet now fearing the kinds of sharp temperature rises predicted by climatologists.

Using a short, punchy sentence is a popular tactic, it seems. Jeep has settled on using "The End of the World is Never Nigh" as an ideal sentiment to attract customers. Buy a Jeep and you will never have to worry about anything that those doom-mongers keep banging on about - instead you will be cruising along well above those lapping waves.

The messaging still not blunt enough for you? Try Hyundai's "Greed is Good" adverts then. Reprising the mantra of Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas's odious city-trader character from the film Wall Street, is exactly what the environment needs right now, isn't it? Oh, how we need a return to the devil-may-care, me-want-now consumerism of the 1980s.

Playing car-chase computer games at home is certainly less polluting than speeding along in cars outside on the roads, but the games manufacturer Electronic Arts appears to have misread the current popular use of the term "carbon" when naming a game "Need for Speed: Carbon". It seems to think that it is a reference to the thrill-seeking sentiments that spur us to get behind the wheel instead of referring to the emissions that pour from the exhaust.

French advertisers are altogether more subtle, choosing instead to use anthropological and ethnographical references. Citroën, for example, deems it suitable a ride. "When Héyoka came back to his tribe," gushes the blurb beneath the picture, "he brought together his people in order to tell them about his vision: it was the new C3 X-TR. In his vision, Héyoka felt first much robustness and security - then much comfort and adaptability - and also a true pleasure in driving ... Even the oldest people in the tribe had never had such a vision." No reference by Héyoka, then, to the Amazon's desperate environmental plight?

The French energy giant EDF appears not to have done its homework before deciding to use the statues of Easter Island to reinforce its message that, "We develop tomorrow's energies for future generations." EDF is one of the world's largest suppliers of nuclear energy, an irony that ClimateDenial.org is quick to point out: "The Easter Island civilization collapsed from deforestation and overpopulation. The statues are a symbol of hubris and denial in the face of an impending environmental disaster. What staggering stupidity to use them to promote nuclear power".

See more Climate change denial adverts here

· Send in your own examples by visiting guardian.co.uk/environment

· Post questions and answers to Ask Leo The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1 3ER Fax: 020-7713 4366. Email: ethical.living@guardian.co.uk Please include your address and telephone number.

Link to article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/24/ethicalliving.climatechange

United Nations: Food price rises threaten global security

Hunger riots will destabilise weak governments, says senior official

by David Adam, environment correspondent, The Guardian, Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the UN's top humanitarian official warned yesterday after two days of rioting in Egypt over the doubling of prices of basic foods in a year and protests in other parts of the world.

Sir John Holmes, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN's emergency relief coordinator, told a conference in Dubai that escalating prices would trigger protests and riots in vulnerable nations. He said food scarcity and soaring fuel prices would compound the damaging effects of global warming. Prices have risen 40% on average globally since last summer.

"The security implications [of the food crisis] should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe," Holmes said. "Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity."

He added that the biggest challenge to humanitarian work is climate change, which has doubled the number of disasters from an average of 200 a year to 400 a year in the past two decades.

As well as this week's violence in Egypt, the rising cost and scarcity of food has been blamed for:

· Riots in Haiti last week that killed four people

· Violent protests in Ivory Coast

· Price riots in Cameroon in February that left 40 people dead

· Heated demonstrations in Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal

· Protests in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia

UN staff in Jordan also went on strike for a day this week to demand a pay rise in the face of a 50% hike in prices, while Asian countries such as Cambodia, China, Vietnam, India and Pakistan have curbed rice exports to ensure supplies for their own residents.

Officials in the Philippines have warned that people hoarding rice could face economic sabotage charges. A moratorium is being considered on converting agricultural land for housing or golf courses, while fast-food outlets are being pressed to offer half-portions of rice.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says rice production should rise by 12m tonnes, or 1.8%, this year, which would help ease the pressure. It expects "sizable" increases in all the major Asian rice producing countries, especially Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines and Thailand.

Holmes is the latest senior figure to warn the world is facing a worsening food crisis. Josette Sheeran, director of the UN World Food Programme, said last month: "We are seeing a new face of hunger. We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before. We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

The programme has launched an appeal to boost its aid budget from $2.9bn to $3.4bn (£1.5bn to £1.7bn) to meet higher prices, which officials say are jeopardising the programme's ability to continue feeding 73 million people worldwide.

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said "many more people will suffer and starve" unless the US, Europe, Japan and other rich countries provide funds. He said prices of all staple food had risen 80% in three years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises.

In the UK, Professor John Beddington, the new chief scientific adviser to the government, used his first speech last month to warn the effects of the food crisis would bite more quickly than climate change. He said the agriculture industry needed to double its food production, using less water than today.

He said the prospect of food shortages over the next 20 years was so acute it had to be tackled immediately: "Climate change is a real issue and is rightly being dealt with by major global investment. However, I am concerned there is another major issue along a similar time-scale -- that of food and energy security."

Link to article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/09/food.unitednations

James Hansen et al.: Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?

Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?

by J. Hansen, M. Sato, P. Kharecha, D. Beerling, V. Masson-Delmotte, M. Pagani, M. Raymo, D. Royer, & J. C. Zachos

ABSTRACT
Paleoclimate data show that climate sensitivity is ~3°C for doubled CO2, including only fast feedback processes. Equilibrium sensitivity, including slower surface albedo feedbacks, is ~6°C for doubled CO2 for the range of climate states between glacial conditions and icefree Antarctica. Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 425±75 ppm, a level that will be exceeded within decades, barring prompt policy changes. If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. The largest uncertainty in the target arises from possible changes of non-CO2 forcings. An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

INTRODUCTION
Human activities are altering Earth’s atmospheric composition. Concern about global warming due to long-lived human-made greenhouse gases (GHGs) led to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1) with the objective of stabilizing GHGs in the atmosphere at a level preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2) and others (3) used several
“reasons for concern” to estimate that global warming of more than 2-3°C may be dangerous. The European Union adopted 2°C above pre-industrial global temperature as a goal to limit human-made warming (4). Hansen et al. (5) argued for a limit of 1°C global warming (relative to 2000, 1.7°C relative to pre-industrial time), aiming to avoid practically irreversible ice sheet and species loss. This 1°C limit, with nominal climate sensitivity of ¾°C per W/m2 and plausible control of other GHGs (6), implies maximum CO2 ~ 450 ppm (5).

Our current analysis suggests that humanity must aim for an even lower level of GHGs.
Paleoclimate data and ongoing global changes indicate that ‘slow’ climate feedback processes not included in most climate models, such as ice sheet disintegration, vegetation migration, and GHG release from soils, tundra or ocean sediments, may begin to come into play on time scales as short as centuries or less (7). Rapid on-going climate changes and realization that Earth is out of energy balance, implying that more warming is ‘in the pipeline’ (8), add urgency to investigation of the dangerous level of GHGs.

A probabilistic analysis (9) concluded that the long-term CO2 limit is in the range 300-500 ppm for 25 percent risk tolerance, depending on climate sensitivity and non-CO2 forcings. Stabilizing atmospheric CO2 and climate requires that net CO2 emissions approach zero (10), because of the long lifetime of CO2.

We use paleoclimate data to show that long-term climate has high sensitivity to climate forcings and that the present global mean CO2, 385 ppm, is already in the dangerous zone. Despite rapid current CO2 growth, ~2 ppm/year, we show that it is conceivable to lower CO2 this century to less than the current amount, but only via prompt policy changes.

Climate sensitivity
A global climate forcing, measured in W/m2 averaged over the planet, is an imposed perturbation of the planet’s energy balance. Increase of solar irradiance (So) by
2% and doubling of atmospheric CO2 are each forcings of about 4 W/m2 (11).

Charney (12) defined an idealized climate sensitivity problem, asking how much global
surface temperature would increase if atmospheric CO2 were instantly doubled, assuming that slowly-changing planetary surface conditions, such as ice sheets and forest cover, were fixed. Long-lived GHGs, except for the specified CO2 change, were also fixed, not responding to climate change. The Charney problem thus provides a measure of climate sensitivity including only the effect of ‘fast’ feedback processes, such as changes of water vapor, clouds and sea ice. Classification of climate change mechanisms into fast and slow feedbacks is useful, even though time scales of these changes may overlap. We include as fast feedbacks aerosol changes, e.g., of desert dust and marine dimethylsulfide, that occur in response to climate change (7). Charney (12) used climate models to estimate fast-feedback doubled CO2 sensitivity of 3 ± 1.5°C. Water vapor increase and sea ice decrease in response to global warming were both found to be strong positive feedbacks, amplifying the surface temperature response. Climate models in the current IPCC (2) assessment still agree with Charney’s estimate.

Climate models alone are unable to define climate sensitivity more precisely, because it is difficult to prove that models realistically incorporate all feedback processes. The Earth’s history, however, allows empirical inference of both fast feedback climate sensitivity and longterm sensitivity to specified GHG change including the slow ice sheet feedback.

Pleistocene Epoch
Atmospheric composition and surface properties in the late Pleistocene are known well
enough for accurate assessment of the fast-feedback (Charney) climate sensitivity. We first compare the pre-industrial Holocene with the last glacial maximum [LGM, 20 ky BP (before present)]. The planet was in energy balance in both periods within a small fraction of 1 W/m2, as shown by considering the contrary: an imbalance of 1 W/m2 maintained a few millennia would melt all ice on the planet or change ocean temperature an amount far outside measured variations (Table S1 of 8). The approximate equilibrium characterizing most of Earth’s history is unlike the current situation, in which GHGs are rising at a rate much faster than the coupled climate system can respond.

[The rest of this article may be found in pdf format at this link: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf ]

Arctic sea ice return called illusory

Thin layer vulnerable to summer melting, federal scientists say

by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, March 19, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Critical Arctic sea ice this winter made a tenuous partial recovery from last summer's record melt, federal scientists said Tuesday.

But that's an illusion, like a Hollywood movie set, scientist Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center said. The ice is very thin and vulnerable to heavy melting again this summer.

Overall, Arctic sea ice has shrunk precipitously in the past decade and scientists blame global warming caused by humans.

Last summer, Arctic ice shrank to an area that was 27 percent smaller than the previous record. This winter, it recovered to a maximum of 5.8 million square miles, up 4 percent and the most since 2003, NASA ice scientist Josefino Comiso said. It is still a bit below the long-term average level for this time of year.

"What's going on underneath the surface is really the key thing," Meier said after a news conference. What's happening is not enough freezing, he said.

Summer Arctic sea ice is important because it's intricately connected to weather conditions elsewhere on the globe. It affects wind patterns, temperatures farther south and even the Gulf Stream, acting as a sort of refrigerator for the globe, according to scientists.

"What happens there, matters here," said Waleed Abdalati, chief ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Climate for the period of human record has depended on the ice being there."

Viewing the Arctic from space via NASA satellites might make you think the Arctic ice cover is on its way back.

But more than 70 percent of that sea ice is new, thin and salty, having formed only since September, Comiso said. The more important ice is perennial sea ice that lasts through the summer, and that ice has hit record low levels.

Compared to the 1980s, the Arctic has lost more than half of its perennial sea ice and three-quarters of its "tough as nails" sea ice that is six years or older, Meier said. The amount of lost old sea ice is twice the area of the state of Texas, he said.

On top of that, a change in Arctic atmospheric pressure this winter is pushing a large amount of the valuable older ice out of the Arctic to melt, Meier said.

That means next summer when temperatures warm, expect lots of melting, the scientists said.

"We're in for a world of hurt this summer," ice center senior scientist Mark Serreze told the Associated Press. Depending on the weather, there could be as much melting this year as last, maybe more, Serreze and Meier said.

At the South Pole, in Antarctica, sea ice seems stable, even slightly above normal, the scientists reported. However, ice levels in Antarctica always are quite different from the Arctic and aren't as connected to the world's weather.

ON THE WEB

NASA images and graphics about sea ice:

www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/seaice--conditions--media.html

Link to this article: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080319/NEWS08/803190352

James Hansen invites Duke Energy CEO James E. Rogers into CO2 debate (and he accepts!)

Duke Energy CEO James E. Rogers says Duke will try to "decarbonize" its coal-fired power plants.

by Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post, April 6, 2008

WASHINGTON -- James E. Hansen -- perhaps the best-known scientific advocate for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions -- sent a letter recently to the head of one of the nation's largest power companies calling on him to confront the role that his coal-fired plants play in global warming. Hansen proposed they meet.

On Wednesday, James E. Rogers of Duke Energy accepted Hansen's invitation, though he made clear he does not foresee calling off plans to build more of the power plants that Hansen considers a main culprit in climate change.

The exchange -- carried out in full public view -- highlights both a recent shift in the climate debate and the difficulty of translating this change into concrete action.

Rogers does not question humans' contribution to global warming, and he has pledged to largely "decarbonize" his company's operations by mid-century. But he is not moving as fast as environmental activists would like, and some academics are now arguing that scientists have greatly underestimated the technological leap that will be required in coming decades to curb dangerous warming.

The same day Rogers informed Hansen that he was willing to meet, Roger Pielke Jr., a scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, co-wrote a commentary piece in the journal Nature that said the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made assumptions about technological advances that are "optimistic at best and unachievable at worst" when it comes to increasing energy efficiency.

While industrialized nations such as the United States and those in Europe have made gains in recent years, developed nations such as China and India have not.

The European Union released preliminary data last week indicating that emissions from facilities covered by Europe's cap-and-trade system rose 1 percent in 2007, instead of declining. That means it will be harder than expected for companies to meet tighter emissions limits this year.

Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that the United States and other countries could wean themselves off coal rapidly if they put a greater emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable resources.

"We simply cannot burn the coal and put the CO2 in the atmosphere and avoid having serious changes in the atmosphere," Hansen said. "The scientists are beginning to realize we have to have a much more dramatic change in direction."

Former vice president Al Gore said in an interview last week that he backs Hansen's approach, with one modification: Because carbon capture and storage technology is still not widely available, he said, "I think we ought to have a moratorium on any coal-fired power plant that doesn't have the capacity to capture carbon."

But Rogers -- who praised Hansen as "an early voice in the wilderness" on climate change -- said the scientist's demand reflects a "snap-your-fingers, instant transition of the economy" mind-set.

"My requirement is to balance reliability, affordability and clean energy," Rogers said. "He's apparently focused on the clean perspective."

In his letter, Hansen took aim at two of Duke's planned power plants, in Cliffside, N.C., and Edwardsport, Ind., telling Rogers: "Your suggestion that new, more efficient coal-fired power plants, which do not capture CO2, can be part of a solution ignores the basic facts and urgency of terminating coal emissions.

Rogers responded that he will be shutting down 1,000 megawatts of capacity from older power plants as part of the Cliffside project, and that the Edwardsport facility is a commercial coal-gasification plant that "is located in an area with excellent geology" to experiment with technologies for capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them underground.

Comment by Carol Overland:
Duke's Edwardsport is NOT going to capture CO2, and it isn't going to pump 5+ million tons of CO2 that it generates each year underground. It's old news that storage of CO2 is a pipedream, and it's old news that "capture-ready" as these plants are means nothing more than they plants have "flange A" to attach expensive equipment that they have no plan of installing. If CO2 is captured, it sucks energy, cutting efficiency by 25% or more, and that's just for the easy 30-35% of CO2, and the rest is so pricy... For Excelsior's Mesaba project, the project developer estimated just the easy 30-35% of capture would have a capital cost of a billion dollars (!) and the state estimated cost of electricity would go up $50/MWhr! Added to a base cost of $96-104/MWhr, give it up, NO NEW COAL. IGCC is not a workable option. At least the Delaware PSC gets this.

Link to article: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080406/NEWS08/804060339

Earth in crisis, warns NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen

Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (AFP/HO file photo)

by Rita Farrell, April 7, 2008

WILMINGTON, Delaware (AFP) -- Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis, and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist says.

"We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," James Hansen, 67, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told AFP here.

"But there are ways to solve the problem" of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the "tipping point" of 385 parts per million.

In a paper he was submitting to Science magazine on Monday, Hansen calls for phasing out all coal-fired plants by 2030, taxing their emissions until then, and banning the building of new plants unless they are designed to trap and segregate the carbon dioxide they emit.

The major obstacle to saving the planet from its inhabitants is not technology, insisted Hansen, named one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006 by Time magazine.

"The problem is that 90 percent of energy is fossil fuels. And that is such a huge business, it has permeated our government," he maintained.

"What's become clear to me in the past several years is that both the executive branch and the legislative branch are strongly influenced by special fossil fuel interests," he said, referring to the providers of coal, oil, and natural gas and the energy industry that burns them.

In a recent survey of what concerns people, global warming ranked 25th.

"The industry is misleading the public and policy makers about the cause of climate change. And that is analogous to what the cigarette manufacturers did. They knew smoking caused cancer, but they hired scientists who said that was not the case."

Hansen says that with an administration and legislature that he believes are "well oiled, our best hope is the judicial branch."

Last year, Hansen testified before the US Congress that "interference with communication of science to the public has been greater during the current administration than at any time in my career."

Government public relations officials, he said, filter the facts in science reports to reduce "concern about the relation of climate change to human-made greenhouse gas emissions."

While he recognizes that he has stepped outside the traditional role of scientists as researchers rather than as public policy advocates, he says he does so because "in this particular situation we've reached a crisis."

The policy makers, "the people who need to know are ignorant of the actual status of the matter, and the gravity of the matter, and most important, the urgency of the matter," he charged.

"It's analogous to an engineer who sees that there's a flaw in the space shuttle before it is to be launched. You don't have any choice. You have to say something. That's really all that I'm doing," he explained.

Hansen was in Wilmington to receive a 50,000 dollar Common Wealth Award for outstanding achievement, along with the former prime minister of Australia John Howard, the US actress Glenn Close, and NBC news anchor Ann Curry.

The awards are provided by a trust of the late Ralph Hayes, a former director of Coca Cola and Bank of Delaware, now PNC. In 29 years, 165 former honorees in seven fields have included former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former US newsman Walter Cronkite, French marine biologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Howard, who would not sign the Kyoto protocol when he was in office, told AFP, "I thought it was the right policy at the time because the major emitters were not on board."

He added, "You need a new Kyoto protocol with all the major emitters committed to it. Then you are cooking with gas."

Link to article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080407/ts_alt_afp/usclimateenvironmentnasa;_ylt=Aop04aMwdS9rnWbA7QnKeEdpl88F

Andrew Revkin: A Shift in the Debate Over Global Warming

by Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, April 6, 2008

The charged and complex debate over how to slow down global warming has become a lot more complicated.

Most of the focus in the last few years has centered on imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies.

Leaders of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change — the scientists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year with former Vice President Al Gore — have emphasized that market-based approach. All three presidential candidates are behind it. And it has framed international talks over a new climate treaty and debate within the United States over climate legislation.

But now, with recent data showing an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency, a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late.

The economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, stated the case bluntly in a recent article in Scientific American: “Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”

What is needed, Mr. Sachs and others say, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which they say will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A Manhattan-like Project, so to speak.

And time is critical, they say, as China, India and other developing nations march headlong into the modern world of cars and electric consumption on their way to becoming the dominant producer of greenhouse gases for decades to come. Indeed, China is building, on average, one large coal-burning power plant a week.

In an article in the journal Nature last week, researchers concerned with the economics, politics, and science of climate also argued that technology policy, not emissions policy, must dominate.

“There is no question about whether technological innovation is necessary — it is,” said the authors, Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado; Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Christopher Green, an economist at McGill University. “The question is, to what degree should policy focus directly on motivating such innovation?”

Proponents of treaties and legislation that would cap emissions don’t disagree with this call to arms for new, low-carbon technologies. But they say the cap approach should not be ignored, either.

One of them is Joseph Romm, a blogger on climate and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit group pushing for federal legislation to restrict greenhouse gases.

“Of course we need aggressive investments in R. and D. — I for one have been arguing that for two decades,” Mr. Romm wrote in a post to his blog, climateprogress.org. “But if we don’t start aggressively deploying the technologies we have now for the next quarter century, then all the new technologies in the world won’t avert catastrophe.”

Another expert who has emphasized the importance of capping emissions, Adil Najam of Boston University, said he hoped this emerging debate would not distract from doing whatever is possible now to curb emissions.

“You can do a tremendous lot with available technology,” said Professor Najam, one of the authors of the intergovernmental panel’s report on policy options. “It is true that this will not be enough to lick the problem, but it will be a very significant and probably necessary difference.”

But Professor Pielke and his co-authors say that a recent rise in emissions — particularly in fast-growing emerging powers — points to the need for government to push aggressively for technological advances instead of waiting for the market to force reductions in emissions.

Mr. Sachs pointed to several promising technologies — capturing and burying carbon dioxide, plug-in hybrid cars and solar-thermal electric plants. “Each will require a combination of factors to succeed: more applied scientific research, important regulatory changes, appropriate infrastructure, public acceptance and early high-cost investments,” he said. “A failure on one or more of these points could kill the technologies.”

In short, what is needed, he said, is a “major overhaul of energy technology” financed by “large-scale public funding of research, development and demonstration projects.”

At the same time, China and India continue to insist that economic growth is both their priority and right. They argue that the established economic powers should be responsible for spearheading the research to reduce carbon emissions. After all, the United States and Europe spent more than a century growing wealthy by burning fossil fuels.

Developing countries repeatedly made that point last week in Bangkok in the latest round of United Nations talks over the shape of a new climate agreement. But the United States rejected a proposal from China that 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product of industrialized countries be used to disseminate nonpolluting energy technologies.

As if to underscore the energy and emissions trajectories in Asia’s emerging powerhouses —and the priority placed on growth there and among important international institutions — the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank is planning to vote on Monday on helping to finance a four-billion-watt complex of coal-burning power plants, the “Ultra Mega” complex, in Gujarat State in India.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/weekinreview/06revkin.html

NASA scientist James Hansen presses U.S. on climate

Climatologist 1 of 4 Common Wealth Award winners

by Cris Barrish, The News Journal, April 6, 2008

WILMINGTON -- To stem the spread of global warming, the public must pressure governments and power companies to stop the construction of coal-fired plants that don't capture pollutants, one of the nation's leading climate scientists urged Saturday night.

"Politicians just don't seem to get it,'' said James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, before accepting a Common Wealth Award at the Hotel du Pont. "But we've got to get on a different path in the next couple of years."

Hansen, who has been sounding a clarion call on global warming for more than a generation, joined three other winners -- actress Glenn Close, NBC's Today show anchor Ann Curry, and former Australia Prime Minister John Howard [BLOGGER'S NOTE: OK, this is weird, i.e., having James Hansen share an award with John Howard; maybe Howard has finally come round] -- at the gala awards ceremony.

The four shared a $200,000 prize presented by PNC Bank, Delaware, which administers a philanthropic trust that recognizes outstanding achievement in science, dramatic arts, mass communications and government.

In a report he finished last week and is submitting to Science magazine, Hansen said he calls for an immediate moratorium on building coal-fired plants and phasing out existing ones as a critical step to halting the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that Hansen and other scientists blame in large part on the rise in the temperatures worldwide. Currently, he said, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at 385 parts per million and rising because of poor environmental practices.

The crisis is accelerating, and there is international disappointment that America, one of the leading emitters of carbon dioxide, has dragged in addressing global warming, said Hansen, who has often clashed with the White House over his views.

"The United States has not exercised the leadership that is needed to solve the problem," Hansen said. "But there's a recognition that you can't give up on the United States. It has to happen very soon, though, or it may be too late to avoid tipping points in the climate system that have major repercussions for humanity and a large number of sections of the planet."

Those consequences, Hansen said, are being felt already, with the melting of large parts of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets setting the stage for sea level to start rising around the world.

"More than half the cities in the world are located near a coastline," he said. "More than 1 billion people live within a 25-meter elevation of sea level."

Much attention has been focused on pollution, smog and carbon dioxide releases in China, host of this summer's Olympic Games, but the West is responsible for the bulk of excess emissions, he said.

"We are several times more responsible than they are,'' Hansen said. "Unless we begin to take steps ourselves, we can't reasonably expect them to respond in a positive way to reduce their emissions.''

Hansen isn't entirely pessimistic. As America prepares to elect a new president in November, he said, "both political parties recognize the problem much more than the current administration does.''

But his hope is tempered with the wisdom gained by observing political reality for decades.

"You still have to get change through Congress and Congress is influenced by the fossil fuel industry,'' the scientist said. "Everybody's about trying to influence the political process and people with a lot of money are sometimes effective."

Hansen believes the price of inaction would be devastating.

"The scary thing is that we build in future change without seeing it until much later," Hansen said.

"Right now we're getting the fruits of the fossil fuel energy yet leaving the problem for the next several decades for our children and grandchildren. That needs to be understood."

Contact senior reporter Cris Barrish at 324-2785 or cbarrish@delawareonline.com

Link to article: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080406/NEWS08/804060353

Arctic Sea Ice Crumbling, April 7, 2008

Please, click on the image to enlarge it.

Link to updated images: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg

'No Sun link' to climate change (and thus no cosmic ray link)

by Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, 3 April 2008

Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity.

The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics," that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature.

The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity.

But Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years.

Presenting their findings in the Institute of Physics journal, Environmental Research Letters, the UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation and found virtually none.

This is the latest piece of evidence which at the very least puts the cosmic ray theory, developed by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark at the Danish National Space Center (DNSC), under very heavy pressure.

Dr Svensmark's idea formed a centrepiece of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Wrong path

"We started on this game because of Svensmark's work," said Terry Sloan from Lancaster University.

"If he is right, then we are going down the wrong path of taking all these expensive measures to cut carbon emissions; if he is right, we could carry on with carbon emissions as normal."

Cosmic rays are deflected away from Earth by our planet's magnetic field, and by the solar wind -- streams of electrically charged particles coming from the Sun.

The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth.

That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate.

The planet warms up when the Sun's output is strong.

Professor Sloan's team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.

"For example; sometimes the Sun 'burps' -- it throws out a huge burst of charged particles," he explained to BBC News.

"So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing."

Over the course of one of the Sun's natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover -- but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness.

And for the following cycle, no correlation was found.

Limited effect

Dr Svensmark himself was unimpressed by the findings.

"Terry Sloan has simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds," he told BBC News.

"He predicts much bigger effects than we would do, as between the equator and the poles, and after solar eruptions; then, because he doesn't see those big effects, he says our story is wrong, when in fact we have plenty of evidence to support it."

But another researcher who has worked on the issue, Giles Harrison from Reading University, said the work was important "as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data."

Dr Harrison's own research, looking at the UK only, has also suggested that cosmic rays make only a very weak contribution to cloud formation.

The Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory.

He showed that over the last 20 years, solar activity has been slowly declining, which should have led to a drop in global temperatures if the theory was correct.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its vast assessment of climate science last year, concluded that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of solar variability by a factor of about 13 to one.

According to Terry Sloan, the message coming from his research is simple.

"We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC -- the IPCC has got it right."

"So we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions."

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7327393.stm

Arctic Sea Ice and Today's Temperatures (April 5, 2008)

Today, temperatures rose to 46 degrees (CORRECTION OF APRIL 6: the high in southern Greenland, yesterday, was 50 degrees) Fahrenheit in southern Greenland and to 57 in Moscow.
The image above is a satellite photo of today's sea ice in the Arctic, showing extensive cracking most everywhere. Please click on the image to enlarge it.

Current images can be found at this link: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg

World Bank Climate Profiteering by Daphne Wysham and Shakuntala Makhijani of Foreign Policy In Focus

March 31, 2008

The World Bank’s long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a “knowledge bank” didn’t work, it devised a new identity as a “Green Bank.” Really? Yes, it’s true. Sure, the Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects globally, but never mind. The World Bank has seized upon the immense challenges climate change poses to humanity and is now front and center in the complicated, international world of carbon finance. It can turn the dirtiest carbon credits into gold.

How exactly, does this work, you ask?

Quite simply: The Bank finances a fossil fuel project, involving oil, natural gas, or coal, in Poor Country A. Rich Country B asks the Bank to help arrange carbon credits so Country B can tell its carbon counters it’s taking serious action on climate change. The World Bank kindly obliges, offering carbon credits for a price far lower than Country B would have to pay if Country B made those cuts at home. Country A gets a share of the cash to invest in equipment to make fossil fuel project slightly more efficient, the World Bank takes its 13% cut, and everyone is happy.

Everyone, that is, who is cashing in on this deal. If you’re after a real solution to the climate crisis, these shenanigans can and should make you unhappy.

Aiding the Tata Group

Consider a project the International Finance Corporation (IFC) had scheduled for board consideration on March 27, but is now, according to its press office, slated for approval in April. (The World Bank Group’s boards virtually never reject anything sent to them). The IFC, the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, plans to back a massive coal-fired power plant in Mundra, a town in the Indian state of Gujarat. The complex of five 800-megawatt plants will cost $4.14 billion to build and be owned and operated by Tata Power Company Limited, a scion of India’s largest multinational corporation, the Tata Group.

To put this in perspective, Tata Motors, a division of the same conglomerate, recently announced plans to buy the luxury car companies, Jaguar and Range Rover from U.S. automaker Ford for $2.3 billion. And Tata Power’s 2007 revenues totaled $1.6 billion. So, it’s hard not to ask how much help Tata needs from the World Bank, which has as its motto: “our dream is a world free of poverty.” Several other corporations are involved. Toshiba, for example, will supply the steam turbine generators.

Once operational, the Mundra power plant will be India’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it doesn’t stop there. Now, the World Bank has planned for the Tata coal burner to be eligible for carbon credits under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism. Carbon credits for a coal burner, you ask?

In the bizarre logic of the carbon market, a market the World Bank is both shaping and investing in, yes, Country B can get credits for helping a corporation, even one of the world’s wealthiest corporations such as Tata, capture a few carbon emissions, as long as these emissions are captured in a “poor” country, like India, regardless of how rich the company involved may be.

Indonesian Coal

And it gets stranger still. One would hazard a guess that the IFC is lending $450 million, “considering investing up to $50 million in equity as part of its exposure to the project,” and possibly helping Tata obtain $300 from other sources at favorable rates for the Tata burner because India has no other choice but to burn its own abundant supply of coal. But, no, the IFC plans to import coal from Indonesia to fuel the plant in India. In fact, Tata bought a 30% stake in two Indonesian coal-mining units for $1.3 billion in April 2007 in order to secure the coal resources for the Mundra plant.

On its Website, the World Bank division offered this feeble justification for this transaction: “IFC is supporting thermal power projects which have better GHG (greenhouse gas) and environmental performance than the average plants in India, given the country’s large needs for incremental electricity supply.”

Surely, if the Bank is involved, the poor, if not in India, then somewhere else are better off as a result of this project? Well, in a word, no. Indonesian coal regulations are largely incoherent and open to manipulation, giving often-corrupt local officials control over the resource wealth, stripping local communities of their resources, and leaving them with a legacy of environmental problems.

Indeed, Indonesia’s coal sector is the rule, not the exception, in its posture toward the poor: A three-year review of the World Bank’s investments in the extractive industries, the Extractive Industries Review, launched under former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, found that the poor were worse off as a result of investments in extractive industries, and recommended the World Bank get out of coal immediately. (That was back in 2004.)

The Extractive Industries Review, ironically, was developed with input from industry, government, and civil society participants, and overseen by former Indonesian environment minister under Suharto, Emil Salim, who himself sat on the board of a large coal company. Nevertheless, Salim was unequivocal that the World Bank should cease lending for coal, and phase out of oil by 2008. The World Bank’s board voted to overrule these recommendations.

Sadly, the IFC isn’t the only powerful international financial agency backing the Mundra power project. The Asian Development Bank, The Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), and the Korea Export Insurance Corporation are also involved.

Climate Change Mitigation?

O.K. The poor are worse off, the corporations are better off, and the Bank is double-dipping on carbon trading. Bad enough. But here’s a final, scary twist: The World Bank is increasingly being given a leadership role in various climate investment funds by the world’s wealthy countries. In an initiative with pledged contributions from the United States, the UK, and Japan, the Bank will oversee $7-$12 billion for “climate change mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries.” The funds (i.e., the Clean Technology Fund, the Forest Investment Fund, the Adaptation/Climate Resilience Pilot Fund, and the Strategic Climate Fund) are moving forward despite having come under fire from developing countries as well as from environment and development organizations. They are concerned that the funds will, once again, give wealthy Northern governments, and, in particular, their bank of choice, the World Bank, more control over funds intended to “help” developing countries.

Rather than a “Green Bank,” the World Bank is revealing itself to be a banker for the super-powerful corporate elite. In addition, it’s turning into a climate change profiteer. If the Bank were the only one fooled by its new identity, the image would be pathetic if not outright laughable. Unfortunately, the Bank has seemingly fooled some of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Or maybe, when they look at the Bank, what these wealthy countries really see is not “green” but “greenbacks.”

Daphne Wysham is a fellow and Shakuntala Makhijani is an intern with the Institute for Policy Studies. They are both contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Link to article: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5110

Global Warming Myths and Facts

BLOGGER'S NOTE: please see the link below to the paper (pdf file) by Drs. James Wang and Michael Oppenheimer.

MYTH: The science of global warming is too uncertain to act on.

FACT: There is no debate among scientists about the basic facts of global warming.

The most respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it by burning fossil fuels (like coal, oil and natural gas) and cutting down forests. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which in 2005 the White House called "the gold standard of objective scientific assessment," issued a joint statement with 10 other National Academies of Science saying "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions." (Joint Statement of Science Academies: Global Response to Climate Change [PDF], 2005)

The only debate in the science community about global warming is about how much and how fast warming will continue as a result of heat-trapping emissions. Scientists have given a clear warning about global warming, and we have more than enough facts — about causes and fixes — to implement solutions right now.

MYTH: Even if global warming is a problem, addressing it will hurt American industry and workers.

FACT: A well designed trading program will harness American ingenuity to decrease heat-trapping pollution cost-effectively, jumpstarting a new carbon economy.

Claims that fighting global warming will cripple the economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs are unfounded. In fact, companies that are already reducing their heat-trapping emissions have discovered that cutting pollution can save money. The cost of a comprehensive national greenhouse gas reduction program will depend on the precise emissions targets, the timing for the reductions and the means of implementation. An independent MIT study found that a modest cap-and-trade system would cost less than $20 per household annually and have no negative impact on employment.

Experience has shown that properly designed emissions trading programs can reduce compliance costs significantly compared with other regulatory approaches. For example, the U.S. acid rain program reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 30 percent from 1990 levels and cost industry a fraction of what the government originally estimated, according to EPA. Furthermore, a mandatory cap on emissions could spur technological innovation that could create jobs and wealth. Letting global warming continue until we are forced to address it on an emergency basis could disrupt and severely damage our economy. It is far wiser and more cost-effective to act now.

MYTH: Water vapor is the most important, abundant greenhouse gas. So if we’re going to control a greenhouse gas, why don’t we control it instead of carbon dioxide (CO₂)?

FACT: Although water vapor traps more heat than CO₂, because of the relationships among CO₂, water vapor and climate, to fight global warming nations must focus on controlling CO2.

Atmospheric levels of CO₂ are determined by how much coal, natural gas and oil we burn and how many trees we cut down, as well as by natural processes like plant growth. Atmospheric levels of water vapor, on the other hand, cannot be directly controlled by people; rather, they are determined by temperatures. The warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapor it can hold. As a result, water vapor is part of an amplifying effect. Greenhouse gases like CO₂ warm the air, which in turn adds to the stock of water vapor, which in turn traps more heat and accelerates warming. Scientists know this because of satellite measurements documenting a rise in water vapor concentrations as the globe has warmed.

The best way to lower temperature and thus reduce water vapor levels is to reduce CO₂ emissions.

MYTH: Global warming and extra CO₂ will actually be beneficial — they reduce cold-related deaths and stimulate crop growth.

FACT: Any beneficial effects will be far outweighed by damage and disruption.

Even a warming in just the middle range of scientific projections would have devastating impacts on many sectors of the economy. Rising seas would inundate coastal communities, contaminate water supplies with salt and increase the risk of flooding by storm surge, affecting tens of millions of people globally. Moreover, extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts and floods, are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity, causing loss of lives and property and throwing agriculture into turmoil.

Even though higher levels of CO₂ can act as a plant fertilizer under some conditions, scientists now think that the "CO₂ fertilization" effect on crops has been overstated; in natural ecosystems, the fertilization effect can diminish after a few years as plants acclimate. Furthermore, increased CO₂ may benefit undesirable, weedy species more than desirable species.

Higher levels of CO₂ have already caused ocean acidification, and scientists are warning of potentially devastating effects on marine life and fisheries. Moreover, higher levels of regional ozone (smog), a result of warmer temperatures, could worsen respiratory illnesses. Less developed countries and natural ecosystems may not have the capacity to adapt.

The notion that there will be regional “winners” and “losers” in global warming is based on a world-view from the 1950’s. We live in a global community. Never mind the moral implications — when an environmental catastrophe creates millions of refugees half-way around the world, Americans are affected.

MYTH: Global warming is just part of a natural cycle. The Arctic has warmed up in the past.

FACT: The global warming we are experiencing is not natural. People are causing it.

People are causing global warming by burning fossil fuels (like oil, coal and natural gas) and cutting down forests. Scientists have shown that these activities are pumping far more CO₂ into the atmosphere than was ever released in hundreds of thousands of years. This buildup of CO₂ is the biggest cause of global warming. Since 1895, scientists have known that CO₂ and other greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the earth. As the warming has intensified over the past three decades, scientific scrutiny has increased along with it. Scientists have considered and ruled out other, natural explanations such as sunlight, volcanic eruptions and cosmic rays. (IPCC 2001)

Though natural amounts of CO₂ have varied from 180 to 300 parts per million (ppm), today's CO₂ levels are around 380 ppm. That's 25% more than the highest natural levels over the past 650,000 years. Increased CO₂ levels have contributed to periods of higher average temperatures throughout that long record. (Boden, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center)

As for previous Arctic warming, it is true that there were stretches of warm periods over the Arctic earlier in the 20th century. The limited records available for that time period indicate that the warmth did not affect as many areas or persist from year to year as much as the current warmth. But that episode, however warm it was, is not relevant to the issue at hand. Why? For one, a brief regional trend does not discount a longer global phenomenon.

We know that the planet has been warming over the past several decades and Arctic ice has been melting persistently. And unlike the earlier periods of Arctic warmth, there is no expectation that the current upward trend in Arctic temperatures will reverse; the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases will prevent that from happening.

MYTH: We can adapt to climate change — civilization has survived droughts and temperature shifts before.

FACT: Although humans as a whole have survived the vagaries of drought, stretches of warmth and cold and more, entire societies have collapsed from dramatic climatic shifts.

The current warming of our climate will bring major hardships and economic dislocations — untold human suffering, especially for our children and grandchildren. We are already seeing significant costs from today's global warming which is caused by greenhouse gas pollution. Climate has changed in the past and human societies have survived, but today six billion people depend on interconnected ecosystems and complex technological infrastructure.

What's more, unless we limit the amount of heat-trapping gases we are putting into the atmosphere, we will face a warming trend unseen since human civilization began 10,000 years ago. (IPCC 2001)

The consequences of continued warming at current rates are likely to be dire. Many densely populated areas, such as low-lying coastal regions, are highly vulnerable to climate shifts. A middle-of-the-range projection is that the homes of 13 to 88 million people around the world would be flooded by the sea each year in the 2080s. Poorer countries and small island nations will have the hardest time adapting. (McLean et al. 2001)

In what appears to be the first forced move resulting from climate change, 100 residents of Tegua island in the Pacific Ocean were evacuated by the government because rising sea levels were flooding their island. Some 2,000 other islanders plan a similar move to escape rising waters. In the United States, the village of Shishmaref in Alaska, which has been inhabited for 400 years, is collapsing from melting permafrost. Relocation plans are in the works.

Scarcity of water and food could lead to major conflicts with broad ripple effects throughout the globe. Even if people find a way to adapt, the wildlife and plants on which we depend may be unable to adapt to rapid climate change. While the world itself will not end, the world as we know it may disappear.

MYTH: Recent cold winters and cool summers don’t feel like global warming to me.

FACT: While different pockets of the country have experienced some cold winters here and there, the overall trend is warmer winters.

Measurements show that over the last century the Earth’s climate has warmed overall, in all seasons, and in most regions. Climate skeptics mislead the public when they claim that the winter of 2003–2004 was the coldest ever in the northeastern United States. That winter was only the 33rd coldest in the region since records began in 1896. Furthermore, a single year of cold weather in one region of the globe is not an indication of a trend in the global climate, which refers to a long-term average over the entire planet.

MYTH: Global warming can’t be happening because some glaciers and ice sheets are growing, not shrinking.

FACT: In most parts of the world, the retreat of glaciers has been dramatic. The best available scientific data indicate that Greenland's massive ice sheet is shrinking.

Between 1961 and 1997, the world’s glaciers lost 890 cubic miles of ice. The consensus among scientists is that rising air temperatures are the most important factor behind the retreat of glaciers on a global scale over long time periods. Some glaciers in western Norway, Iceland and New Zealand have been expanding during the past few decades. That expansion is a result of regional increases in storm frequency and snowfall rather than colder temperatures — not at all incompatible with a global warming trend.

In Greenland, a NASA satellite that can measure the ice mass over the whole continent has found that although there is variation from month to month, over the longer term, the ice is disappearing. In fact, there are worrisome signs that melting is accelerating: glaciers are moving into the ocean twice as fast as a decade ago, and, over time, more and more glaciers have started to accelerate. What is most alarming is the prediction, based on model calculations and historical evidence, that an approximately 5.4 degree Fahrenheit increase in local Greenland temperatures will lead to irreversible meltdown and a sea-level rise of over 20 feet. Since the Arctic is warming 2-3 times faster than the global average, this tipping point is not far away.

The only study that has shown increasing ice mass in Greenland only looked at the interior of the ice sheet, not at the edges where melting occurs. This is actually in line with climate model predictions that global warming would lead to a short-term accumulation of ice in the cold interior due to heavier snowfall. (Similarly, scientists have predicted that Antarctica overall will gain ice in the near future due to heavier snowfall.) The scientists who published the study were careful to point out that their results should not be used to conclude that Greenland's ice mass as a whole is growing. In addition, their data suggested that the accumulation of snow in the middle of the continent is likely to decrease over time as global warming continues.

MYTH: Accurate weather predictions a few days in advance are hard to come by. Why on earth should we have confidence in climate projections decades from now?

FACT: Climate prediction is fundamentally different from weather prediction, just as climate is different from weather.

It is often more difficult to make an accurate weather forecast than a climate prediction. The accuracy of weather forecasting is critically dependent upon being able to exactly and comprehensively characterize the present state of the global atmosphere. Climate prediction relies on other, longer ranging factors. For instance, we might not know if it will be below freezing on a specific December day in New England, but we know from our understanding of the region's climate that the temperatures during the month will generally be low. Similarly, climate tells us that Seattle and London tend to be rainy, Florida and southern California are usually warm, and the Southwest is often dry and hot.

Today’s climate models can now reproduce the observed global average climates over the past century and beyond. Such findings have reinforced scientist’s confidence in the capacity of models to produce reliable projections of future climate. Current climate assessments typically consider the results from a range of models and scenarios for future heat-trapping emissions in order to identify the most likely range for future climatic change.

MYTH: As the ozone hole shrinks, global warming will no longer be a problem.

FACT: Global warming and the ozone hole are two different problems.

The ozone hole is a thinning of the stratosphere's ozone layer, which is roughly 9 to 31 miles above the earth's surface. The depletion of the ozone is due to man-made chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). A thinner ozone layer lets more harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation to reach the earth's surface.

Global warming, on the other hand, is the increase in the earth's average temperature due to the buildup of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activities.

For more information, see our in-depth scientific report [PDF] on the myths and facts of global warming by Dr. James Wang and Dr. Michael Oppenheimer.

Posted: 18-Jan-2007; Updated: 03-Jan-2008

Link to the Environment Defense org.: http://www.environmentaldefense.org/page.cfm?contentID=1011

CLIMATE CHANGE: What, ME worry? by David Ropeik

Anyone interested in climate change paid close attention to the December meetings in Bali, where the world’s leaders worked on how to deal with this unprecedented global threat. The meetings took place under the challenge of the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, who said “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

But as policy makers focused their attention on the Bali meetings, the rest of us were paying attention to the same things we always do; our health, our jobs, our personal budget, our spouses or love lives, the daily commute, etc. The policy makers in Bali considered climate change from their usual perspective, as if looking down on the earth from high above. But we don’t live up there. We live down here. We don’t live on a planet. We live in our homes and our neighborhoods. We don’t live in the climate of the earth. We live in the weather of our daily lives.

That chasm in perspectives, between the global view and the local, could be the biggest obstacle to meeting Dr. Pachauri’s challenge. The things we need to do at the system level will have impacts at the personal. But we may not be willing to accept those impacts, because most of us don’t see how climate change actually threatens us. The wisest policies agreed to in Bali and subsequently will come to little without public support. The leaders dealing with climate change at ’defining moment’ must devise solutions that will work globally, and appeal locally.

Ask yourself this; Over the next 20 years, can you name one specific way that climate change will have a serious, negative, direct impact on you or your family? Most of us can’t answer that question. You probably know that climate change will have all sorts of serious negative impacts, but not how it’s going to impact you directly. A survey of public perceptions of climate change by Anthony Leiserowitz, “Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values” found that while an overwhelming majority of respondents believed that climate change is real and that we should do something about it, only 12% were most concerned about the effects of climate change on them. 50% were most concerned about effects on the U.S. as a whole. 18% were most worried about effects on nonhuman nature. 10% weren’t worried about the effects of climate change at all. Small wonder, then, that the study found the following support in the United States for various ways to deal with climate change.

US Reduce Emissions - 90%
Kyoto Protocol - 88%
Increase CAFE standards - 79%
Regulate CO2 - 77%
Business tax - 31%
Gas tax - 17%


People are ready to support ideas. Fewer are ready to support spending what it will take to make those ideas reality.

Or consider a Globescan survey of 22,000 people in 21 nations released by the BBC in November. 83% said personal changes in lifestyle are needed to help combat climate change. But when asked if they themselves would be willing to make such changes, the number goes down. It’s still large, 70%, but note that it goes down. Fewer still, 61%, agree with the idea of paying higher energy costs. Ask them if they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to combat the problem and it effectively becomes a toss up, 50% saying yes, 44% saying no.

The trend is similar in most surveys. An overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. and around the world believe that climate change is a real threat, but when you ask people what should be done about it, as the cost to them goes up, their readiness to act goes down. That bodes poorly for the prospect of public support for the changes we need to make to address the problem.

Research into the ways humans perceive risk has found that, not surprisingly, we worry more about things that could happen to us than about things which threaten others. The survey evidence makes pretty clear that the “ME” factor is not much at work in most people’s perceptions of climate change. Which makes it unduly hopeful to expect people to give up the benefits of maintaining their current lifestyles? Why would they agree to pay higher energy bills, or gasoline taxes, or more for goods and services whose prices rise because of CO2 trading? The benefits of the comfortable status quo outweigh the minimal risks that we think climate change poses to us personally.

The science and policy communities tend to see the issue through their own professional lenses of fact and science and reason. The science of human behavior, particularly the psychology of risk perception, robustly shows that we use two systems to make judgments about risk; reason and affect, facts and feelings. It is simply naïve to disregard this inescapable truth and presume that reason and intellect alone will carry the day. That's just not how the human animal behaves. Even as potentially catastrophic as climate change might be, if people don't sense climate change as a direct personal threat, reason alone won't convince them that the costs of action are worth it.

There are still too few scientists and policy leaders describing the potential impacts of climate change on a local level. This is an admittedly dicey business because it’s hard to know specifically what changing the climate of the planet is going to do to Denver or Delhi or Dusseldorf. But there is plenty of scientific evidence of the harm climate change might do at the local level. These potential local risks need to be emphasized, in the concrete terms that will give people more of an idea of what climate change might do to them.

The costs of policies to deal with this global challenge also have to be presented in local terms. What will carbon sequestration or CO2 trading do to the prices of the goods and services we buy? What will requiring renewable energy sources do to our electricity bills? How might energy efficiency requirements cost us money, or perhaps save us money?


Many scientists from a wide range of fields have built the evidentiary case for climate change, and identified a range of solutions. But far too little attention has been given to the science of risk perception, and the tools of risk communication, to build a base of support for those solutions. Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program, said that the ominous IPCC report released last fall sends a message; “What we need is a new ethic in which every person changes lifestyle, attitude and behavior.” A wonderful goal, but unlikely to happen unless individuals are more worried about how climate change might affect them directly. As the leaders of the world move on in the wake of Bali, they need to remember the real people in the local neighborhoods of our global village who will have a lot to say about whether the policies they choose will succeed.

Link to the blog: http://onrisk.blogspot.com/2008/02/climate-change-what-me-worry_08.html

Hansen to Australian PM: stop coal plants now

Posted by Oilism.com on March 31st, 2008 at 06:00 p.m.

James Hansen has written an (apparently) open letter to Kevin Rudd, urging that all new coal fired power plants be halted - via Energy Bulletin, original at Australian Science Media Centre (pdf).

27 March 2008
The Hon Kevin Rudd, MP
Prime Minister of Australia
Australian Parliament
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, 2600

Dear Prime Minister,

Your leadership is needed on a matter concerning coal-fired power plants and carbon dioxide emission rates in your country, a matter with ramifications for life on our planet, including all species. Prospects for today's children, and especially the world's poor, hinge upon our success in stabilizing climate.

For the sake of identification, I am a United States citizen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute. I am a member of our National Academy of Sciences, have testified before our Senate and House of Representatives on many occasions, have advised our Vice President and Cabinet members on climate change and its relation to energy requirements, and have received numerous awards including the World Wildlife Fund's Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal from Prince Philip.

I write, however, as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, USA. I was assisted in composing this letter by colleagues, including Australians, Americans, and Europeans, who commented upon a draft letter. Because of the urgency of the matter, I have not collected signatures, but your advisors will verify the authenticity of the science discussion.

[break]

I recognize that for years you have been a strong supporter of aggressive forward-looking actions to mitigate dangerous climate change. Also, since your election as Prime Minister of Australia, your government has been active in pressing the international community to take appropriate actions. We are now at a point that bold leadership is needed, leadership that could change the course of human history.

I have read and commend the Interim Report of Professor Ross Garnaut, submitted to your government. The conclusion that net carbon emissions must be cut to a fraction of current emissions must be stunning and sobering to policy-makers. Yet the science is unambiguous: if we burn most of the fossil fuels, releasing the CO2 to the air, we will assuredly destroy much of the fabric of life on the planet. Achievement of required near-zero net emissions by mid-century implies a track with substantial cuts of emissions by 2020. Aggressive near-term fostering of energy efficiency and climate friendly technologies is an imperative for mitigation of the looming climate crisis and optimization of the economic pathway to the eventual clean-energy world.

Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.

Feasible actions now could still point the world onto a course that minimizes climate change. Coal clearly emerges as central to the climate problem from the facts summarized in the attached Fossil Fuel Facts. [See note below] Coal caused fully half of the fossil fuel increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air today, and on the long run coal has the potential to be an even greater source of CO2. Due to the dominant role of coal, solution to global warming must include phase-out of coal except for uses where the CO2 is captured and sequestered. Failing that, we cannot avoid large climate change, because a substantial fraction of the emitted CO2 will stay in the air more than 1000 years.

Yet there are plans for continuing mining of coal, export of coal, and construction of new coal-fired power plants around the world, including in Australia, plants that would have a lifetime of half a century or more. Your leadership in halting these plans could seed a transition that is needed to solve the global warming problem.

Choices among alternative energy sources - renewable energies, energy efficiency, nuclear power, fossil fuels with carbon capture - these are local matters. But decision to phase out coal use unless the CO2 is captured is a global imperative, if we are to preserve the wonders of nature, our coastlines, and our social and economic well being.

Although coal is the dominant issue, there are many important subsidiary ramifications, including the need for rapid transition from oil-fired energy utilities, industrial facilities and transport systems, to clean (solar, hydrogen, gas, wind, geothermal, hot rocks, tide) energy sources, as well as removal of barriers to increased energy efficiency.

If the West makes a firm commitment to this course, discussion with developing countries can be prompt. Given the potential of technology assistance, realization of adverse impacts of climate change, and leverage and increasing interdependence from global trade, success in cooperation of developed and developing worlds is feasible.

The western world has contributed most to fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, on a per capita basis. This is not an attempt to cast blame. It only recognizes the reality of the early industrial development in these countries, and points to a responsibility to lead in finding a solution to global warming.

A firm choice to halt building of coal-fired power plants that do not capture CO2 would be a major step toward solution of the global warming problem. Australia has strong interest in solving the climate problem. Citizens in the United States are stepping up to block one coal plant after another, and major changes can be anticipated after the upcoming national election.

If Australia halted construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester the CO2, it could be a tipping point for the world. There is still time to find that tipping point, but just barely. I hope that you will give these considerations your attention in setting your national policies. You have the potential to influence the future of the planet.
Prime Minister Rudd, we cannot avert our eyes from the basic fossil fuel facts, or the consequences for life on our planet of ignoring these fossil fuel facts. If we continue to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture, we will lock in future climate disasters associated with passing climate tipping points. We must solve the coal problem now.

For your information, I plan to send a similar letter to the Australian States Premiers.

I commend to you the following Australian climate, paleoclimate and Earth scientists to provide further elaboration of the science reported in my attached paper (Hansen et al., 2008):

Professor Barry Brook, Professor of climate change, University of Adelaide
Dr Andrew Glikson, Australian National University
Professor Janette Lindesay, Australian National University
Dr Graeme Pearman, Monash University
Dr Barrie Pittock, CSIRO
Dr Michael Raupach CSIRO
Professor Will Steffen, Australian National University

Sincerely,

James E. Hansen
Kintnersville, Pennsylvania
United States of America

Link to article: http://www.oilism.com/oil/2008/03/31/hansen-to-australian-pm-stop-coal-plants-now/