By Jennifer Chu

For the past three decades, as the climate has warmed, the massive plates of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean have shrunk: in 2007, scientists observed nearly 50 percent less summer ice than had been seen in 1980.

While the Arctic Ocean as a whole seems to be storing more carbon than in previous years, the increase in carbon sink capacity may not be as large as scientists predicted. Photo credit: NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the receding Arctic sea ice, Sept. 3, 2010.

Dramatic changes in ice cover have, in turn, altered the Arctic ecosystem—particularly in summer months, when ice recedes and sunlight penetrates surface waters, spurring life to grow. Satellite images have captured large blooms of phytoplankton in Arctic regions that were once relatively unproductive. When these organisms die, a small portion of their carbon sinks to the deep ocean, creating a sink, or reservoir, of carbon.

Now researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (MIT) have found that with the loss of sea ice, the Arctic Ocean is becoming more of a carbon sink. The team modeled changes in Arctic sea ice, temperatures, currents and flow of carbon from 1996 to 2007, and found that the amount of carbon taken up by the Arctic increased by one megaton each year.

But the group also observed a somewhat paradoxical effect: A few Arctic regions where waters were warmest were actually less able to store carbon. Instead, these regions—such as the Barents Sea, near Greenland—were a carbon source, emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

While the Arctic Ocean as a whole remains a carbon sink, MIT principal research scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz says places like the Barents Sea paint a more complex picture of how the Arctic is changing with global warming.

“People have suggested that the Arctic is having higher productivity, and therefore higher uptake of carbon,” Dutkiewicz says. “What’s nice about this study is, it says that’s not the whole story. We’ve begun to pull apart the actual bits and pieces that are going on.”

A paper by Dutkiewicz and co-authors Mick Follows and Christopher Hill of MIT, Manfredi Manizza of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Dimitris Menemenlis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

The Ocean’s Carbon Cycle

The cycling of carbon in the oceans is relatively straightforward: as organisms like phytoplankton grow in surface waters, they absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Through photosynthesis, carbon dioxide builds cell walls and other structures; when organisms die, some portion of the plankton sink as organic carbon to the deep ocean. Over time, bacteria eat away at the detritus, converting it back into carbon dioxide that, when stirred up by ocean currents, can escape into the atmosphere.

The MIT group developed a model to trace the flow of carbon in the Arctic, looking at conditions in which carbon was either stored or released from the ocean. To do this, the researchers combined three models: a physical model that integrates temperature and salinity data, along with the direction of currents in a region; a sea ice model that estimates ice growth and shrinkage from year to year; and a biogeochemistry model, which simulates the flow of nutrients and carbon, given the parameters of the other two models.

The researchers modeled the changing Arctic between 1996 and 2007 and found that the ocean stored, on average, about 58 megatons of carbon each year—a figure that increased by an average of one megaton annually over this time period.

These numbers, Dutkiewicz says, are not surprising, as the Arctic has long been known to be a carbon sink. The group’s results confirm a widely held theory: with less sea ice, more organisms grow, eventually creating a bigger carbon sink.

A New Counterbalance

However, one finding from the group muddies this seemingly linear relationship. Manizza found a discrepancy between 2005 and 2007, the most severe periods of sea ice shrinkage. While the Arctic lost more ice cover in 2007 than in 2005, less carbon was taken up by the ocean in 2007—an unexpected finding, in light of the theory that less sea ice leads to more carbon stored.

Manizza traced the discrepancy to the Greenland and Barents seas, regions of the Arctic Ocean that take in warmer waters from the Atlantic (in warmer environments, carbon is less soluble in seawater). Manizza observed this scenario in the Barents Sea in 2007, when warmer temperatures caused more carbon dioxide to be released than stored.

The results point to a subtle balance: an ocean’s carbon flow depends on both water temperature and biological activity. In warmer waters, carbon is more likely to be expelled into the atmosphere; in waters with more biological growth—for example, due to less sea ice—carbon is more likely to be stored in ocean organisms.

In short, while the Arctic Ocean as a whole seems to be storing more carbon than in previous years, the increase in the carbon sink may not be as large as scientists had previously thought.

“The Arctic is special in that it’s certainly a place where we see changes happening faster than anywhere else,” Dutkiewicz says. “Because of that, there are bigger changes in the sea ice and biology, and therefore possibly to the carbon sink.”

Manizza adds that while the remoteness of the Arctic makes it difficult for scientists to obtain accurate measurements, more data from this region “can both inform us about the change in the polar area and make our models highly reliable for policymaking decisions.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Visit EcoWatch’s WATER and CLIMATE CHANGE pages for more related news on this topic.

Australia vs Big Tobacco

Oliver MacColl – Avaaz.org

To Me

Today at 9:50 AM

Dear friends across Australia,

The laws that protect Australians are under threat. Our anti-smoking laws, the best in the world, could be trampled by Big Tobacco as a US-led trade treaty threatens to put corporations above people. And it’s all being written in secret. Send a message now to call on Minister Robb to not sign onto laws we didn’t vote for:

Australia has the strongest anti-smoking laws in the world. They’re so successful that other countries want to do the same. But Big Tobacco isn’t happy about this — and the Australian government is about to agree to a deal that lets them trample all over us whenever they want.  

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a US-driven trade pact that that could let companies sue us to get rid of whichever of our hard-fought protections they don’t like. The whole deal is being negotiated in secret, and this weekend Trade Minister Robb is set to agree to rules none of us had a say in. 

But opposition is building in Australia and other countries. The ALP and The Greens have just joined together to demand transparency. Abbott’s team is on the ropes from the Indonesian spying scandal, let’s use this crucial opportunity to stall the talks and stand up for our health — send a message to Minister Robb now!

http://www.avaaz.org/en/selling_out_australias_democracy/?bBYMjdb&v=32100

Tobacco giant Philip Morris is suing the government this year for billions of dollars after Australian anti-smoking rules threatened their bottom line. They did it through a loophole that the TPP would turn into floodgates, giving legal rights to foreign corporations to challenge any Australian law they claim would harm their profits in secret international tribunals closed to the public.

And tobacco could be just the start. Leaked TPP drafts read like a corporate wish-list that bends our rules in favour of companies, where everything from medicine to software could end up more expensive for Australian consumers. It’s SO secretive that only a few people in each treaty country have seen the whole thing — even our lawmakers can’t see the text we’re signing up to, and it’s up to us to stop this secretive treaty before the corporate crackdown.

We’ve known all along that there’s a lot at stake, but have had to rely on leaked snippets like the chapter Wikileaks just published to understand exactly how much. Let’s not stand for this kind of secrecy undermining our democracy — send a message now to shine a light on the secret treaty:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/selling_out_australias_democracy/?bBYMjdb&v=32100

It can be easy to feel small in the face of big forces, and big interests, driving our governments. But people, not money, are the true source of their power. Last year 750,000 people sent a message to TPP negotiators to stop this deal. Now’s the critical moment for us to speak up. Let’s join together, once again, and bring our power to stop this unprecedented threat to our democracies.

With hope,

Oliver, Jamie, David, Emily, Allison, Nadia, Alex and the entire Avaaz team

SOURCES

Australians may pay the price in Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement (Sydney Morning Herald)
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australians-may-pay-the-price-in-transpacific-…

Secret TPP Negotiations Resume in Salt Lake City (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/secret-tpp-negotiations-resume-salt-lake-city

Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (Wikileaks)
http://wikileaks.org/tpp/#QQG6

The Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty is the complete opposite of ‘free trade’ (The Guardian)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/19/trans-pacific-partnership-corporate-

Coffs Harbour CBD (Fiona Poole – ABC Local)

By 2031 some parts of the Mid North Coast will see population growth ahead of the national average while smaller towns set back from the coast could face a population decline.

Demographer Mark McCrindle says that the region is forecast to grow by 19% with Port Macquarie leading with an expected 20% growth followed by 13% growth for Coffs Harbour.

The NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure (DoPI) published statistics in September that predicted there would be a slight drop in the Macleay’s population.

However Mr McCrindle does not see any evidence for that.

“We can’t understand why the forecast is that Kempsey will decline its population by 2.3% as we approach 2031.”

“In fact it’s grown by 3.2% in the last 5 years and normally those trend lines continue on, so our forecast would be that it will have a population increase by 2031,” he told ABC Radio.

The expected population growth is based on three factors; natural increase (births minus deaths), interstate migration and the net overseas migration.

“Kempsey is doing very well form a natural increase perspective, and it’s also doing very well from intrastate migration, people moving from other areas.”

“That’s why the forecast has raised so many eyebrows,” Mr McCrindle said.

ABS and DoPI are forecasting that the Bellingen region will increase by 3.3%, Nambucca by 12%.

“As for the town of Dorrigo it’s in one of those tricky spots where being inland with an aging population and low birth rates it’s probably going to struggle to hit some growth,” Mr McCrindle said.

“When areas have slow growth they have a benefit in that house prices don’t go up and they become more affordable.”

“So the slow growth of Dorrigo might actually lead to more people making a tree change, but on current trend its probably going to have very slow growth if any growth at all.”

Coffs Harbour is expected to reach double digit growth, which puts it ahead of the state and national average.

“About 71,000 is the current population and it should get to more than 80,000 by 2031,” Mr McCrindle said.

Japanese firm proposes belt of solar panels around moon

Climate Progress

The Japanese construction and engineering company Shimizu has released a plan to ring the moon’s equator with a 248-mile wide solar panel belt that would, in effect, turn the moon into a minor sun — supplementing solar energy to a planet in need.

As if taken directly from a science-fiction novel, the introduction of the report reads, “a shift from economical use of limited resources to the unlimited use of clean energy is the ultimate dream of all mankind.”

And it is of sci-fi proportions indeed — according to Shimuzu, the belt, which would beam energy back to earth via antennas 12 miles in diameter, could generate the colossal sum of 13,000 terrawatts of energy. The U.S. generated 4,500 terawatts in 2011.

Germany is the world leader in solar power, with 32.3 gigawatts installed as of December 2012. In the U.S. solar power growth is on pace for a record year, with 4,400 megawatts of photovoltaic (PV) and over 900 megawatts of concentrating solar power (CSP) projected to come online this year. Currently five countries have reached the 10-gigawatt milestone for cumulative PV capacity — Germany, Italy, China, Japan, and the US.

CREDIT: SHIMIZU CORP

Shimuzu proposes building most of the solar belt with robots and using lunar resources as much as possible in construction process. For example, the company says water can be produced by reducing lunar soil with hydrogen imported from earth, and that, “bricks, glass fibers and other structural materials can be produced by solar-heat treatments.” The company proposes to start building the Luna Ring in 2035.

Shimuzu is known for shooting for the moon with projects, and has previously come up with concepts including an environmental island, a pyramid city, and a space hotel. Regarding the solar belt, the company says that, “virtually inexhaustible, nonpolluting solar energy is the ultimate source of green energy,” that could fulfill all of our energy needs.

Not everyone is convinced. Professor Werner Hofer, director of the Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy at the University of Liverpool, told The Independent that, “Doing this in space is not a good idea because it is fantastically expensive and you probably never recover the energy you have to invest.”

Beaming power back to earth from space is a complex, expensive, and mostly untested realm. Other challenges to the project include maintenance and upkeep, a hostile space environment that degrades panels faster, and the on-the-ground costs of building the infrastructure required to transmit the energy.

Back on earth, solar energy is soaring in Japan even without harnessing the moon’s infinite resources. Recent projections show Japan’s solar power market growing 350 percent from 2012 to 2013.

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Japan is projected to add more solar energy generation than any other country this year. The Japanese government has a target of installing 28 gigawatts of solar by 2020.

In a small step backward for mankind, however, last month Japan announced it was slashing its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reductions target from 25 percent to just 3.8 percent based on 2005 figures. The country’s previous commitment, set in 2009, sought to reduce emissions 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. Officials blamed the lowered target on the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 that caused the country to temporarily abandon all nuclear power. This is also part of the reason why solar power is growing so rapidly in Japan.