Category: Climate chaos

A total meltdown would take centuries but global warming, which climate experts blame mainly on human use of fossil fuels, is heating the Arctic faster than anywhere else on Earth.

"When I was a child, I remember hunters dog-sledding 50 miles on ice across the bay to Disko Island in the winter," said Judithe Therkildsen, a retiree from Aasiaat, a town south of Ilulissat on Disko Bay.

"That hasn’t happened in a long time."

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is mostly covered by an ice cap of about 624,000 cubic miles that accounts for a 10th of all the fresh water in the world.

Over the last 30 years, its melt zone has expanded by 30 percent.

"Some people are scared to discover the process is running faster than the models," said Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at University of Colorado at Boulder and a Greenland expert who serves on a U.S. government advisory committee on abrupt climate change.

In the past 15 years, winter temperatures have risen about 9 degrees Fahrenheit on the cap, while spring and autumn temperatures increased about 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Summer temperatures are unchanged.

Swiss-born Steffen is one of dozens of scientists who have peppered the Greenland ice cap with instruments to measure temperature, snowfall and the movement, thickness and melting of the ice.

Since 1990, Steffen has spent two months a year at Swiss Camp, a wind-swept outpost of tents on the ice cap, where he and other researchers brave temperatures of minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit to scrutinize Greenland’s climate change clues.

The more the surface melts, the faster the ice sheet moves towards the ocean. The glacier Swiss Camp rests on has doubled its speed to about 9 miles a year in the last 12 years, just as its tongue retreated 10 km into the fjord.

"It is scary," said Steffen. "This is only Greenland. But Antarctica and glaciers around the world are responding as well."

Two to three days’ worth of icebergs from this glacier alone produce enough fresh water to supply New York City for a year.

The rush of new water leaves scientists with crucial questions about how much sea levels could rise and whether the system of ocean currents that ensures Western Europe’s mild winters — known as the "conveyor belt" — could shut down.

"Some models can predict a change in the conveyor belt within 50 to 100 years," said Steffen. "But it’s one out of 10 models. The uncertainty is quite large."

If you’re a fisherman in Greenland, however, global warming is doing wonders for your business.

Warmer waters entice seawolf and cod to swim farther north in the Atlantic into Greenlandic nets. In this Disko Bay town, the world’s iceberg capital, the harbor is now open year-round because winter is no longer cold enough to freeze it solid.

Warmer weather also boosts tourism, a source of big development hopes for the 56,000 mostly Inuit inhabitants of Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark.

Hoping to lure American visitors, Air Greenland launched a direct flight from Baltimore last month, and there is even talk of "global warming tourism" to see Warming Island.

One commentator, noting the carbon dioxide emissions such travel would create, has called that "eco-suicide tourism."

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The rest of the panel included ABN AMRO’s director financial markets Craig McBurnie, IAG’s sustainability research manager Elayne Grace, AMP Capital senior analyst Ian Woods and Origin Energy communications and government relations manager Tony Wood.

Along with Mr Hughes they discussed the "opportunities side" of climate change.

Origin Energy’s Mr Wood said emissions trading produced a least-cost pathway for business to reduce their greenhouse output.

Mr Wood presented a package of proposed action that included a long-term emissions target in line with global action, market-based carbon pricing scheme introduced from 2010, funding for research and development of low and zero-emission technologies and more focused support for renewable energy projects.

AMP’s Dr Woods said there was already a significant market for carbon trading, with 374 million tonnes of Co2 traded in 2005 under the Kyoto Protocol, which was about two-thirds of Australia’s annual greenhouse emissions.

"Institutional investors have a unique view on climate change as we are exposed to all aspects of climate change," he said.

Dr Woods said polices would be put in place that would help determine the price of carbon.

He said that when that happens, the price would be determined very quickly, leaving businesses behind that had not prepared themselves for a carbon-constrained economy.

In Europe this week, a research note by investment bank UBS said forward hedging of power production by utilities would push the price of carbon up to 30.00 euros/tonne in 2008.

According to website information service Point Carbon, the price of "phase two" carbon dioxide allowances in the European Union have climbed by 70 per cent since February from a low of 12 euros.

The increases caused UBS to revise upwards its previous carbon price forecast of 20 euros to 30 euros for 2008.

UBS said one reason for the increase was a dearth of credits from clean development mechanism (CDM) and joint implementation (JI) projects, allowed under the Kyoto Protocol, which generate carbon credits from greenhouse gas reduction projects.

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Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are now 385 parts per million. The continued burning of fossil fuels has been increasing levels of the gas annually by 2 parts per million.

That rise represents only half the carbon dioxide emitted each year. The rest is absorbed, in roughly equal portions, by two carbon "sinks" — land vegetation and the oceans.

The oceans also expel carbon, coughed up from deep waters where it is stored as carbonic acid.

The new study, published in the journal Science, focused on the Southern Ocean because it is extremely isolated. With only barren, ice-covered land nearby, the researchers could rule out interference from vegetation.

They analyzed data from 11 monitoring stations in the Southern Ocean that measured carbon dioxide concentration just above the surface. The data covered 1981 to 2004.

Using those readings, they estimated how much carbon the water absorbed. They estimated that in 1981, the Southern Ocean absorbed 0.6 billion metric tons of carbon from the air and released 0.3 billion metric tons, for a net absorption of 0.3 billion metric tons. In 2004, the ocean took in 0.8 billion metric tons of carbon and spat out 0.5 billion metric tons — resulting in the same net absorption as in 1981.

The researchers compared the results to computer predictions of what the ocean should have absorbed given the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. In 2004, the net absorption should have been 0.5 billion metric tons, the study said.

"The ocean sink is weakening," said lead author Corinne Le Quere, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey.

The changes, she said, are probably the result of temperature increases that have intensified the westerly winds circling Antarctica. The winds stir up the ocean, bringing deep carbon-rich water to the surface. As a result, the surface waters cannot absorb as much carbon dioxide as they would have otherwise.

Le Quere said she believed the phenomenon could apply to other oceans.

Other scientists disagree, saying the Southern Ocean is so cold, deep and isolated that it may be a unique case.

Rupert Murdoch may own a hybrid car but he’s found an even more carbon-neutral way of getting to work: walking. Plenty of footprints, none of them carbon.

He walked to work, even if it was only a short stroll from Fifth Avenue to Sixth, where News Corp headquarters are located, on the day he announced that his company was taking a leading role in the climate change debate. Not that he is about to grow a beard and wear sandals. He’s still got the corporate jet.

Last week’s announcement that News Corp intends to produce zero net carbon emissions by 2010 was the emphatic sign that at 76, Murdoch remains as pragmatic, unorthodox and up-to-date as ever.

Although his various newspapers have long been on the sceptics’ side of the climate change issue, for close Murdoch watchers the announcement was not surprising. Last year, at a corporate retreat at the famed Pebble Beach Golf Course in California, he invited Al Gore along to show An Inconvenient Truth.

Last November, while in Japan, he announced his change of heart. "I have to admit that, until recently, I was somewhat wary of the warming debate. I believe it is now our responsibility to take the lead on this issue," he said then.

"Some of the presumptions about extreme weather, whether it be hurricanes or drought, may seem far-fetched. What is certain is that temperatures have been rising and that we are not entirely sure of the consequences. The planet deserves the benefit of the doubt."

The person most influential in the greening of Rupert is his son James, who runs Murdoch’s part-owned satellite television franchise, British Sky Broadcasting. James has always been portrayed as the leftie sibling. He did have a beard, and once ran a hip-hop music label. He drives a Toyota Prius to work and a hybrid SUV on the weekends, while his wife, Kathryn, works for the Clinton Global Initiative.

James has led the greenhouse gas charge, turning BSkyB into a carbon neutral company. It was apparently this example that led Rupert to take the plunge and commit the whole global empire to greenhouse gas neutrality by 2010.

According to Murdoch snr, the process – which was only announced this week but which has been under way for almost a year – has made good business sense. Reducing energy usage not only cuts greenhouse gas emissions but saves money, too. Admittedly, a media and entertainment conglomerate is not exactly a smokestack industry. But it is slightly surprising that its activities generated 641,150 tonnes of greenhouse gases last year.

The report says the world then needs to at least halve annual emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050 to keep global warming in check.

The panel agreed on measures to cut emissions, describing them as both achievable and affordable.

"The assessment says that it will cost less than 3 per cent of the global GDP," said report co-author Dr Joshi Roy,.

"So that’s really not very bad if you look into the kind of benefits that the world will be getting due to the lesser temperature. "

The wording of the agreement includes an implicit warning that the planet will not cope if developing countries aspire to the consumer lifestyles of those in the West.

Western nations are told to cut fossil fuel consumption and developing nations will have to find a cleaner path to prosperity.

The final text will controversially include a paragraph saying nuclear power could be part of the solution.

Germany tried to block this, but delegates said it was up to individual countries to decide.

– AFP/BBC

A review paper by Serreze and Julienne Stroeve of CU-Boulder’s NSIDC and Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research titled "Perspectives on the Arctic’s Shrinking Sea Ice Cover" appears in the March 16 issue of Science.

The loss of Arctic sea ice is most often tied to negative effects on wildlife like polar bears and increasing erosion of coastlines in Alaska and Siberia, he said. But other studies have linked Arctic sea ice loss to changes in atmospheric patterns that cause reduced rainfall in the American West or increased precipitation over western and southern Europe, he said.

The decline in Arctic sea ice could impact western states like Colorado, for example, by reducing the severity of Arctic cold fronts dropping into the West and reducing snowfall, impacting the ski industry and agriculture, he said. "Just how things will pan out is unclear, but the bottom line is that Arctic sea ice matters globally," Serreze said.

Because temperatures across the Arctic have risen from 2 degrees to 7 degrees F. in recent decades due to a build-up of atmospheric greenhouse gases, there is no end in sight to the decline in Arctic sea ice extent, said Serreze of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Arctic sea ice extent is defined as the total area of all regions where ice covers at least 15 percent of the ocean surface.

"While the Arctic is losing a great deal of ice in the summer months, it now seems that it also is regenerating less ice in the winter," said Serreze. "With this increasing vulnerability, a kick to the system just from natural climate fluctuations could send it into a tailspin."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, shifting wind patterns from the North Atlantic Oscillation flushed much of the thick sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean and into the North Atlantic where it drifted south and eventually melted, he said. The thinner layer of "young" ice that formed it its place melts out more readily in the succeeding summers, leading to more open water and more solar radiation being absorbed by the open ocean and fostering a cycle of higher temperatures and earlier ice melt, he said.

"This ice-flushing event could be a small-scale analog of the sort of kick that could invoke rapid collapse, or it could have been the kick itself," he said. "At this point, I don’t think we really know."

Researchers also have seen pulses of warmer water from the North Atlantic entering the Arctic Ocean beginning in the mid-1990s, which promote ice melt and discourage ice growth along the Atlantic ice margin, he said. "This is another one of those potential kicks to the system that could evoke rapid ice decline and send the Arctic into a new state."

The potential for such rapid ice loss was highlighted in a December 2006 study by Holland and her colleagues published in Geophysical Research Letters. In one of their climate model simulations, the Arctic Ocean in September became nearly ice-free between 2040 and 2050.

"Given the growing agreement between models and observations, a transition to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean as the system warms seems increasingly certain," the researchers wrote in Science. "The unresolved questions regard when this new Arctic state will be realized, how rapid the transition will be, and what will be the impacts of this new state on the Arctic and the rest of the globe."