This photo from autumn 2005 shows the glacier in retreat, one visible indication being the more prominent crag in the center of the photo. PHOTO: NVE A 3D model image that shows the glacier's range over time, with the lowest mark coming from around 1750, a period known as Norway's 'little ice age'. PHOTO: NVE

Several years of warm summers and poor snowfall have left Bretunga, the lower part of the glacier, in poor shape.
 

"The glacier is now clearly divided in two. Less than ten years ago it was completely joined there at the bottom," Liss Marie Andreassen, glaciologist at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE), told Aftenposten.no.
 

Andreassen's doctorate focused on Storbreen. She says that the glacier has retreated around 60 meters due to melting since 1997, and since measurements began in 1949, the ice has melted about 500 meters back from its previous edge.
 

More or less all of Norway's glaciers are now on the retreat according to the NVE. They are shrinking in both length and volume, and the trend has been clear since the beginning of the 20th century.
 

According to the research project RegClim, 1,600 Norwegian glaciers can be gone within the next hundred years, leaving only about 30. Andreassen would not give unconditional support to this prognosis.
 

"There is no doubt that many of the smaller glaciers will disappear if global warming continues. And many of the larger glaciers will greatly decrease in volume. But saying something about the situation in 100 years is difficult," she said.
 

"It depends on how warm it will be and how much precipitation falls. For example, it isn't unthinkable that there will be significantly more precipitation in the mountains in coming years. In this case it would lead to better conditions for coastal glaciers," Andreassen said.
 

According to the NVE about 98 percent of all electricity in Norway is generated from hydropower and the glaciers play a vital role in this process.
 

"About 15 percent of the water power comes from water systems with significant amounts of glacial water, and in drier years glaciers regulate water flow," said Andreassen, who also noted that glaciers are an important indicator of climate change.
 

"Glaciers react quickly to changes in temperature and precipitation, and provide much useful information to climate researchers," she said.
 

Melting ice caps are forcing polar bears further inland
  Island people swallowed by the sea

This week saw the launch of International Polar Year, an initiative in which scientists from 60 countries will study the Arctic and Antarctic, with the major focus on climate change.

 

Glacial ice is melting across the Arctic Circle. Dennis Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer, discovered an island in Greenland that had been bound to the mainland. The mainland of Greenland is visible just over his head in the background. (JEFF SHEA / The New York Times)

  An ominous discovery

Islands appear off Greenland as polar ice melts away

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF The New York Times
 

LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland — Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.

When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind. "It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn't it?" Dennis Schmitt said.
 

Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed on a newly revealed island 645 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: He had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.
 

Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orleans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.
 

Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island's distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.
 

Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as one-fifth of a hectare; every hour or so, several more tons of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.
 

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — "lonely mountains" in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland's ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.
 

"We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now. "With 44,400 kilometres of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created. The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by almost seven metres.
 

Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
 

"That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps," Boggild said. "If you lose that much volume you'd definitely see new islands appear."
 

He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. "Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it," he said. "I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometres away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometres."
 

The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime "glacial earthquakes" have been detected within the ice sheet.
 

"The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don't react very quickly to climate," said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "But that thinking is changing right now, because we're seeing things that people have thought are impossible."
 

A study in the Journal of Climate last June observed that Greenland had become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.
 

Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming. The 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential impacts of global warming, based its conclusions about sea-level rise on a computer model that predicted a slow onset of melting in Greenland.

"When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn't work. Which puts us on shaky ground," said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.

There is no consensus on how much Greenland's ice will melt in the near future, Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.

"Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario," said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.
 

On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just a third of a metre would send water hundreds of metres inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world's coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.

"Here in Miami," Leatherman said, "we're going to have an ocean on both sides of us."
 

Such ominous implications are not lost on Schmitt, who says he hopes that the island he discovered in Greenland in September will become an international symbol of the effects of climate change. Schmitt, who speaks Inuit, has provisionally named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island.
 

Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration, said Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions. Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland's northwest, have disappeared for good.
 

"There is a dark side to this," he said about the new island. "We felt the exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something new. But of course, there was also something scary about what we did there. We were looking in the face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the dire consequences."

 http://thechronicleherald.ca/Science/553919.html

 

 

 

15 January 2007

 

World faces hottest year ever, as El Niño combines with global warming

By Cahal Milmo

Published: 01 January 2007

 

A combination of global warming and the El Niño weather system is set to make 2007 the warmest year on record with far-reaching consequences for the planet, one of Britain's leading climate experts has warned.

As the new year was ushered in with stormy conditions across the UK, the forecast for the next 12 months is of extreme global weather patterns which could bring drought to Indonesia and leave California under a deluge.

The warning, from Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was one of four sobering predictions from senior scientists and forecasters that 2007 will be a crucial year for determining the response to global warming and its effect on humanity.

Professor Jones said the long-term trend of global warming - already blamed for bringing drought to the Horn of Africa and melting the Arctic ice shelf - is set to be exacerbated by the arrival of El Niño, the phenomenon caused by above-average sea temperatures in the Pacific.

Combined, they are set to bring extreme conditions across the globe and make 2007 warmer than 1998, the hottest year on record. It is likely temperatures will also exceed 2006, which was declared in December the hottest in Britain since 1659 and the sixth warmest in global records.

Professor Jones said: "El Niño makes the world warmer and we already have a warming trend that is increasing global temperatures by one to two tenths of a degrees celsius per decade. Together, they should make 2007 warmer than last year and it may even make the next 12 months the warmest year on record."

The warning of the escalating impact of global warming was echoed by Jim Hansen, the American scientist who, in 1988, was one of the first to warn of climate change.

In an interview with The Independent, Dr Hansen predicted that global warming would run out of control and change the planet for ever unless rapid action is taken to reverse the rise in carbon emissions.

Dr Hansen said: "We just cannot burn all the fossil fuels in the ground. If we do, we will end up with a different planet.

"I mean a planet with no ice in the Arctic, and a planet where warming is so large that it's going to have a large effect in terms of sea level rises and the extinction of species."

His call for action is shared by Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser, who said that 2006 had shown that the "discussion is now over" on whether climate change is happening. Writing in today's Independent, Sir David says progress has been made in the past year but it is "essential" that a global agreement on emissions is struck quickly. He writes: "Ultimately, only heads of state, working together, can provide the new level of global leadership we need to steer the world on a path towards a sustainable and prosperous future. We need to remember: action is affordable - inaction is not."

The demands came as the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the United Nations agency that deals with climate prediction, issued a warning that El Niño is already established over the tropical Pacific basin. It is set to bring extreme weather across a swath of the planet from the Americas and south-east Asia to the Horn of Africa for at least the first four months of 2007.

El Niño, or "the Christ child" because it is usually noticed around Christmas, is a weather pattern occurring every two to seven years. The last severe El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, caused more than 2,000 deaths and a worldwide damage bill of more than £20bn.

The WMO said its latest readings showed that a "moderate" El Niño, with sea temperatures 1.5C above average, was taking place which, in the worst case scenario, could develop into an extreme weather pattern lasting up to 18 months, as in 1997-98. The UN agency noted that the weather pattern was already having "early and intense" effects, including drought in Australia and dramatically warm seas in the Indian Ocean, which could affect the monsoons. It warned the El Niño could also bring extreme rainfall to parts of east Africa which were last year hit by a cycle of drought and floods.

Its effect on the British climate is difficult to predict, according to experts. But it will probably add to the likelihood of record-breaking temperatures in the UK.

The return of El Niño

* Aside from the seasons, El Niño and its twin, La Niña, are the two largest single causes of variability in the world's climate from year to year.

Both are dictated by shifts in temperature of the water in the tropical Pacific basin between Australia and South America. Named from the Spanish words for "Christ child" and "the girl" because of their proximity to Christmas, they lead to dramatic shifts in the entire system of oceanic and atmospheric factors from air pressure to currents.

A significant rise in sea temperature leads to an El Niño event whereas a fall in temperature leads to La Niña.

The cause of the phenomenon is not fully understood but in an El Niño "event" the pool of warm surface water is forced eastwards by the loss of the westerly trade winds. The sea water evaporates, resulting in drenching rains over South America, particularly Peru and Ecuador, as well as western parts of the United States such as California.

Parts of the western Pacific, including Indonesia and Australia, suffer drought. The effects can last for anything from a few weeks to 18 months, causing extreme weather as far afield as India and east Africa.

The co-relation with global warming is as yet unclear. Archaeological evidence shows El Niños and La Niñas have been occurring for 15,000 years. But scientists are investigating whether climate change is leading to an increase in their intensity or duration.

 

Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by  2012

Hydrate hypothesis illuminates growing climate change alarm

Compiled by John Stokes

A recent scientific theory called the "hydrate hypothesis" says that historical global warming cycles have been caused by a feedback loop, where melting permafrost methane clathrates (also known as "hydrates") spur local global warming, leading to further melting of clathrates and bacterial growth.

In other words, like western Siberia, the 400 billion tons of methane in permafrost hydrate will gradually melt, and the released methane will speed the melting. The effect of even a couple of billion tons of methane being emitted into the atmosphere each year would be catastrophic.

The "hydrate hypothesis" (if validated) spells the rapid onset of runaway catastrophic global warming. In fact, you should remember this moment when you learned about this feedback loop-it is an existencial turning point in your life.

By the way, the "hydrate hypothesis" is a weeks old scientific theory, and is only now being discussed by global warming scientists. I suggest you Google the term.

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing the Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to when we will pass the tipping point and be helpless to stop the runaway Global Warming.

There are enormous quantities of methane trapped in permafrost and under the oceans in ice-like structures called clathrates. The methane in Arctic permafrost clathrates is estimated at 400 billion tons.

Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as CO2, and the atmosphere currently contains about 3.5 billion tons of the gas.

The highest temperature increase from global warming is occurring in the arctic regions-an area rich in these unstable clathrates. Simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show that over half the permafrost will thaw by 2050, and as much as 90 percent by 2100.

Peat deposits may be a comparable methane source to melting permafrost. When peat that has been frozen for thousands of years thaws, it still contains viable populations of bacteria that begin to convert the peat into methane and CO2.

Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. The west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70 billion tonnes of methane. Local atmospheric levels of methane on the Siberian shelf are now 25 times higher than global concentrations.

By the way, warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons have caused microbial activity to increase dramatically in the soil around the world. This, in turn, means that much of the carbon long stored in the soil is now being released into the atmosphere.

Releases of methane from melting oceanic clathrates have caused severe environmental impacts in the past. The methane in oceanic clathrates has been estimated at 10,000 billion tons.

55 million years ago a global warming chain reaction (probably started by volcanic activity) melted oceanic clathrates. It was one of the most rapid and extreme global warming events in geologic history.

Humans appear to be capable of emitting CO2 in quantities comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels releases more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes.

Methane in the atmosphere does not remain long, persisting for about 10 years before being oxidized to CO2 (a greenhouse gas that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years). Chronic methane releases oxidizing into CO2 contribute as much to warming as does the transient methane concentrations.

To summarize, human activity is causing the Earth to warm. Bacteria converts carbon in the soil into greenhouse gasses, and enormous quantities are trapped in unstable clathrates. As the earth continues to warm, permafrost clathrates will thaw; peat and soil microbial activity will dramatically increase; and, finally, vast oceanic clathrates will melt. This global warming chain reaction has happened in the past.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rose by a record amount over the past year. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply. Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear the trend could be the first sign of runaway global warming.

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth's remaining resources.

Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth acellerates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

Bibliographic reference courtesy of Brad Arnold who has an extensive research background on Global Warming.

Make comments about this article in The Canadian Blog.

 

Giant Ice Shelf Snaps Free Near North Pole

By ROB GILLIES, AP

TORONTO (Dec. 29, 2006) - A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event.

The ice shelf, at center of this satellite photo, was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. 
They are packed with ice that is more than 3,000 years old.

The Ayles Ice Shelf - all 41 square miles of it - broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and couldn't believe what he saw.

"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years," Vincent said. "We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."

The ice shelf was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. They are packed with ancient ice that is more than 3,000 years old. They float on the sea but are connected to land.

Some scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and that climate change was a major element.

"It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. "We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.

Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as seismic data - the event registered on earthquake monitors 155 miles away - Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

Copland said the speed with which climate change has effected the ice shelves has surprised scientists.

"Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly," he said.

Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves get weaker and weaker as temperatures rise. He visited Ellesmere Island in 2002 and noticed that another ice shelf had cracked in half.

"We're losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada," Mueller said.

Within days of breaking free, the Ayles Ice Shelf drifted about 30 miles offshore before freezing into the sea ice. A spring thaw may bring another concern: that warm temperatures will release the new ice island from its Arctic grip, making it an enormous hazard for ships.

"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said.

12/29/06 06:40 EST

 

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

 

Inhabited Island Vanishes Beneath the Waves; Global Warming Blamed

Sunday, December 24, 2006

An inhabited island has been wiped off the face of the Earth due to global warming, Britain’s The Independent site reported on Sunday.

The remote Lohachara Island was part of the Sundarbans Island Chain near the Bay of Bengal in India. Rising sea levels have swallowed the island whole, according to the report. It was once home to 10,000 people.

Lohachara’s disappearance wasn’t easy to discover. Satellites monitored it until it finally disappeared.

Two-thirds of a neighboring island, Ghoramara, has also been claimed by water.

The disappearance of Lohachara Island comes eight years after uninhabited islands in the Pacific were overtaken. As a result of their going under, the people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated.

Researchers at Calcutta’s Jadavpur University studying the phenomenon for six years say there are now about a dozen “vanishing islands” in the region.

Click here to read the report in The Independent.

  Sea Levels May Rise Suddenly
04-Dec-2006

Scientists have determined that the Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic could collapse without warning in a matter of days, causing a disastrous worldwide sea level rise of sixteen feet. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet behind it were to then slide into the sea, the increase in sea levels would reach a catastrophic level of over fifty feet, and essentially destroy every coastal city in the world.

Evidence obtained from Antarctic ice cores indicates that the Ross Ice Shelf will collapse, and that the disaster will be sudden, as has happened in the past when, for natural reasons, earth has experienced global warming events such as the one we are causing now. It is not clear when the shelf will fail, but the Larsen Ice Shelf disintegrated in 2002 virtually without warning. The melting of the Larsen shelf did not cause an increase in sea levels because the ice was already floating. This is not true of the entire Ross Shelf, and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is on land, and thus would add its over eighteen million cubic miles of water to the oceans.

The New Zealand Herald reports that the Ross Ice Shelf is a huge piece of ice the size of France. An ice drilling team from New Zealand has discovered that cores from the ice shelf contain three million years of climate history. They reveal that the Ross Ice Shelf has suddenly collapsed in the past.
 

SUV's On Jupiter?
Are humans responsible for climate change on the outer reaches of the solar system, or is it the sun?

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, November 16, 2006

Kofi Annan today slammed global warming skeptics as being "out of step" and "out of time," but how will altering human activity halt climate change when the evidence clearly indicates that the sun itself and not SUV's is heating up the entire solar system?

"The U.N. chief lamented "a frightening lack of leadership" in fashioning next steps to reduce global emissions. "Let us start being more politically courageous," he urged the hundreds of delegates from some 180 member nations of the 1992 U.N. climate treaty," reports Forbes.

But how do we square the fact that almost every planet in our solar system is simultaneously undergoing temperature change and volatile weather patterns. Does this not suggest that global warming is a natural cycle as a result of the evolving nature of the sun? Can Al Gore fill me in on this one?

- Space.com: Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists
In what is largely a reversal of an August announcement, astronomers today said Pluto is undergoing global warming in its thin atmosphere even as it moves farther from the Sun on its long, odd-shaped orbit.

- Space.com: New Storm on Jupiter Hints at Climate Change
The latest images could provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit on different parts of the globe.

- Current Science & Technology Center: Global Warming on Mars?
A study of the ice caps on Mars may show that the red planet is experiencing a warming trend. If both Mars and Earth are experiencing global warming, then perhaps there is a larger phenomenon going on in the Solar System that is causing their global climates to change.

- United Press International: NASA looks at a monster storm on Saturn
NASA says its Cassini spacecraft has found a hurricane-like storm at Saturn's South Pole, nearly 5,000 miles across -- or two-thirds Earth's diameter.

- Science Agogo: Global Warming Detected on Triton
There may not be much industrial pollution on Neptune's largest moon, but things are hotting up nonetheless. "At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming," confirms astronomer James Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Percentage-wise, it's a very large increase."

- Associated Press: Study says sun getting hotter
Solar radiation reaching the Earth is 0.036 percent warmer than it was in 1986, when the current solar cycle was beginning, a researcher reports in a study to be published Friday in the journal Science. The finding is based on an analysis of satellites that measure the temperature of sunlight.

- London Telegraph: The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame
Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.

The simple fact is that throughout the ages the earth has swung wildly between a warm, wet, stable climate, to a cold, dry and windy one - long before the first fossil fuel was burned. The changes we are now witnessing are a walk in the park compared to the battering that our planet has taken in the past.

This is not a defense of the oil cartels or the Neo-Con wreckers, who would have every motivation to ignore global warming whether it is man-made or not.

Nor is it a blanket denial of the fact that the earth is getting very gradually hotter, but how do we reconcile global warming taking place at the farthest reaches of the solar system with the contention that it is caused by human activity? Have our exhaust fumes left earth's atmosphere and slipped through a black hole to Triton?

The assertion that global warming is man made is so oppressively enforced upon popular opinion, especially in Europe, that expressing a scintilla of doubt is akin to holocaust denial in some cases. Such is the insipid brainwashing that has taken place via television, newspapers and exalted talking heads - global warming skeptics are forced to wear the metaphoric yellow star and only discuss their doubts in hushed tones and conciliatory frameworks, or be cat-called, harangued and jeered by an army of do-gooders who righteously believe they are rescuing mother earth by recycling a wine bottle or putting their paper in a separate trash can.

Fearmongering about an imminent climate doomsday also hogs news coverage and important environmental issues like GM food, mad scientist chimera cloning and the usurpation and abuse of corporations like Monsanto flies under the radar.

Global warming is cited as an excuse to meter out further control and surveillance over our daily lives, RFID chips on our trash cans, GPS satellite tacking and taxation by the mile, as well as a global tax at the gas pump.

The extremist wing of the environmentalist movement, characterized by people like Dr. Erik Pianka, advocate the mass culling of humanity via plagues and state sanctioned bio-terrorism, in order to "save" the earth from the disease of humanity. Nazi-like genocidal population control measures and the environmental establishment have always held a close alliance.

The orthodox organized religion of global warming and its disastrous consequences for our freedom of speech, freedom of mobility and our right to remain outside of the system, needs to be questioned on the foundational basis that the phenomenon is solar-system wide and it is mainly caused by the natural evolution of the sun and not human activity.

 

http://www.rense.com/general71/tip.htm

 

Scientists See Arctic Melt
Passing 'Tipping Point'
Meltdown Fear As Arctic Ice Cover
Falls To Record Winter Low
The Guardian - UK
5-19-6

Record amounts of the Arctic ocean failed to freeze during the recent winter, new figures show, spelling disaster for wildlife and strengthening concerns that the region is locked into a destructive cycle of irreversible climate change. Satellite measurements show the area covered by Arctic winter sea ice reached an all-time low in March, down some 300,000 square kilometres on last year -an area bigger than the UK. Scientists say the decline highlights an alarming new trend, with recovery of the ice in winter no longer sufficient to compensate for increased melting in the summer. If the cycle continues, the Arctic ocean could lose all of its ice much earlier than expected, possibly by 2030.   Walt Meier, a researcher at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, which collected the figures, said: "It's a pretty stark drop. In the winter the ice tends to be pretty stable, so the last three years, with this steady decline, really stick out." Experts are worried because a long-term slow decline of ice around the north pole seems to have sharply accelerated since 2003, raising fears that the region may have passed one of the "tipping points" in global warming. In this scenario, warmer weather melts ice and drives temperatures higher because the dark water beneath absorbs more of the sun's radiation. This could make global warming quickly run out of control. Dr. Meier said there was "a good chance" the Arctic tipping point has been reached. "People have tried to think of ways we could get back to where we were. We keep going further and further into the hole, and it's getting harder and harder to get out of it." The Arctic is rapidly becoming the clearest demonstration of the effects of mankind's impact on the global climate. The temperature is rising twice as fast as the rest of the planet and the region is expected to warm by a further 4C-7C by 2100. The summer and winter ice levels are the lowest since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and almost certainly the lowest since local people began keeping records around 1900.  The pace of decline since 2003, if continued, would see the Arctic totally ice-free in summer within 30 years - though few scientists would stake their reputations on a long-term trend drawn from only three years.   Experts at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California think the situation could be even worse. They are about to publish the results of computer simulations that show the current rate of melting, combined with increased access for warmer Pacific water, could make the summertime Arctic ice-free within a decade. Dr. Meier said: "For 800,000 to a million years, at least some of the Arctic has been covered by ice throughout the year. That's an indication that, if we are heading for an ice-free Arctic, it's a really dramatic change and something that is unprecedented almost within the entire record of human species." The winter ice has declined all around the region - bad news for polar bears, which spend summer on land before returning to the ice in spring to catch food.

May 8, 2006

Monster Rogue Iceberg Bites Drygalski's Tongue Off

ANTARCTICA (AMP) --
An enormous iceberg, C-16, measuring 393 square miles, rammed into the well-known Drygalski Ice Tongue, a large sheet of glacial ice and snow in the Central Ross Sea in Antarctica.  It happened on 30 March 2006, breaking off the tongue's easternmost tip and forming a new iceberg.

Now, Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Ocean and Ice Unit, reports of "(C-16) being carried quickly to the north."

The National Ice Center (NIC), located in Maryland, USA, named the new iceberg, the piece of the ice tongue which broke off as a result of the C-16 collision, C-25, which measures 13 kilometres by 11 kilometres.

As seen in ASAR imaging photos, C-25 appears to be heading north as well.  Environmentalists tracking the iceberg have ...>>
http://link.ixs1.net/s/link/click?rc=al&rti=q253762&si=916017383

Antarctic on thin ice

30apr06

TWO weeks ago, a satellite far above the Antarctic recorded the collision of iceberg C-16 with the high, frozen walls of the glacial Drygalski Ice Tongue.

In the ghostly, black-and-white satellite images the impact looked silent, neat and almost surgical as C-16 cut the end from the 80km spear jutting into the Ross Sea.

But the thunderous meeting of the city-sized C-16 with the Drygalski made scientists sit up and pay attention.

C-16, a vast mass of ice measuring 55km - 19km, smashed away the eastern-most tip of the Drygalski Tongue to create another ocean-roaming behemoth, a 13km - 11km iceberg dubbed C-25.

Little over a year earlier, the world's biggest iceberg, B-15A, also slammed into the Drygalski Tongue, tearing away a 25sq km chunk. The gigantic B-15A, a 27km  161km iceberg, is itself only a fragment of the superberg B-15, which broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000.

Events such as these have not been witnessed before. It is only through technology that scientists have been able to see such enormous developments in remote areas.

Lou Sanson, chief executive of the New Zealand Government scientific agency, Antarctica New Zealand, says the largest icebergs ever recorded are now drifting through the oceans.

"None of these events have been seen in our lifetime. These are the biggest icebergs ever seen," he says.

But with more icebergs calving from the Antarctic ice shelf than ever recorded, scientists are wondering not only what's going on in the frozen southern continent, but what it means for the rest of the planet.

Global warming and melting of the polar ice caps is a familiar doomsday scenario at the movies, but scientists are only now starting to understand how polar regions are changing.

The ocean currents which circulate around the planet, re-oxygenating water and affecting the temperature of the atmosphere, are another area of concern.

The life-cycle of the Antarctic is one of gradual growth and renewal ended by occasional and violent destruction, and CSIRO marine research scientist Stephen Rintoul says he is not concerned by the repeated impacts on the Drygalski.

"We know that these long ice tongues wax and wane," he says.

"They push out into the ocean until they become unstable or something comes along and clips off the end. Some ice tongues are retreating and more are expanding."

But the number and size of icebergs is causing some researchers to think hard, even if they're not worried just yet.

Concerns about the impact of human-induced global warming on the Antarctic surfaced in 2002 when a huge ice shelf broke away from the northernmost part of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula.

Glaciologists such as Ian Allison, of the Australian Antarctic Division, believe climate change is not having an impact yet.

"In the 30 years or so of satellite records we have not seen as many bergs calving but we're pretty sure there's nothing wrong," he says.

"There is concern about what will happen long-term if global warming goes on."

Mr Sanson believes the iceberg calving in the Antarctic is a natural phenomenon, although when asked if global warming could be playing a part, he says: "We honestly don't know the answer to that."

Recent iceberg activity has been on a mind-boggling scale.

"The original B-15 iceberg had enough water in it to run the Nile River for 100 years. These are the biggest moving things on the planet," Mr Sanson says. "If you spread all that water across the world's agricultural land it would come to about 10cm of water everywhere."

FROM: http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,18972855%255E912,00.html

Scientists Confirm Unexpected Gulf Stream Slowing
09-May-2005

Gulf Stream

Scientists from Cambridge University have confirmed that the Gulf Stream is weakening, and this is likely to bring much colder temperatures to Europe within a few years. The weakening is significant: the Gulf Stream is flowing at a quarter of the strength that was present five years ago.

This is happening because gigantic chimneys of cold water that were sinking from the surface to the sea bed off Greenland have disappeared. These chimneys are the key engine of world climate as we know it today, and their disappearance signals the beginning of a great catastrophe. There will be a special report about this important story on this week's Dreamland!

This is the first research to show unequivocal evidence of the phenomenon, which was originally predicted in the Coming Global Superstorm, published in 1999.

In Superstorm and in the film based on it, the Day After Tomorrow, the event unfolds over the course of a week. The Cambridge scientists are predicting now that there will be clear water at the North Pole as early as 2020, and that temperatures in Britain are likely to drop by 5-8 degrees Celsius, from an average of 22 at present to 14 to 17 in the future. An average as low as 17 (62 Fahrenheit) will mean that the summer growing season will be catastrophically curtailed in Europe, leading to huge declines in production from one of the world's primary surplus production zones.

It will also mean that winters similar to those in Finland will extend far south into France, and that there is a possibility that a series of "no-melt" summers across the northern latitudes could cause the reflectivity of the planet to increase to the point that new glaciation will begin.

The weakening of the Gulf Stream is destabilizing currents worldwide, and will lead to radical climate changes in other areas. The nature of these changes is not known, and the current US administration has blocked US environmental agencies from studying the phenomenon, so the severity of its effect in this country is not under study. However, it is likely that the eastern US and eastern Canada will experience climate change as radical as that in Europe, as the Gulf Stream drops south. At the least, food production and liveability in the eastern half of North America will be severely challenged.

Scientists are currently assuming that the Gulf Stream will slow and stop over a period of years, not suddenly, as predicted in Superstorm and portrayed in the Day After Tomorrow.

However, there is ample evidence that sudden and extreme changes have taken place worldwide in the past. Unknowncountry.com reported on this phenomenon in December of 2004 and earlier in November of 2003.

There is a mechanism that changes a process of climate change that seems to be unfolding over a period of years into a violent event that takes just hours or days to develop, and then remains in a radically changed condition. This happened 5,200 years ago, as has amply been revealed in the fossil record.

Why it happened remains unknown, but it certainly had to do with the very sort of spiking of temperatures that the world has experienced over the past fifty years, and a reversal.

The changes that are taking place in the Gulf Stream are unstoppable. They will unfold. How that will happen, and whether or not the process will involve sudden and violent worldwide storms such as those that took place 5,200 years ago remains unknown.

It is, however, essential that planning for the change begin at once. At the least, the world faces dramatic economic upheavals and a decline in food production at a time when both energy and food needs are at the highest they have ever been in history.

So far, the only other media outlet that has picked up this story is the Sunday Times of Great Britain, and they have not provided the true perspective, or discussed the scale of the changes that are on their way. For the Times story, click here.

We need to concentrate on cleaning up our problems here on Earth so future generations can inherit a world worth living in, before The Day After Tomorrow arrives. Read the novella based on the hit movie!
 

 It is an event so large that the best seat in the house is in space: a massive iceberg is on a collision course with a floating glacier near the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. NASA satellites have witnessed the 100-mile-long B-15A iceberg moving steadily towards the Drygalski Ice Tongue. Though the iceberg's pace has slowed in recent days, NASA scientists expect a collision to occur no later than January 15, 2005.
It's a clash of the titans, a radical and uncommon event," says Robert Bindshadler, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and if the two giant slabs of ice collide, we could see one of the best demolition derbies on the planet. "Even a 'tap' from a giant can be powerful. It will certainly be a blow far larger than anything else the ice tongue has ever experienced," says Bindshadler.

When the iceberg and the ice tongue collide, the impact will likely "dent their bumpers," says Bindshadler. The edges could crumple and ice could pile or drift into the Ross Sea. But if the B-15A iceberg picks up enough speed before the two collide, the results could be more spectacular. The Drygalski Ice Tongue could break off.

The ice tongue is thick ice that grows out over the Ross Sea from a land-based glacier on Antarctica's Scott Coast. "Ice tongues do break off on occasion," says Bindshadler. "It would only take one thin area on the ice tongue to make it break off." There's no guarantee that the Drygalski Ice Tongue will break off, but "this is the toughest blow it has ever had to deal with."

"That Ice tongue has no reason for staying intact" says Waleed Abdalati, researcher with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, but Bindshadler points out, it may not break up either. The results depend on the movement of the B-15A iceberg.

The B-15A iceberg is a 3,000-square-kilometer (1,200-square-mile) behemoth that has a history of causing problems. It is the largest fragment of a much larger iceberg that broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. Scientists believe that the enormous piece of ice broke away as part of a long-term natural cycle (every 50-to-100 years, or so) in which the shelf, which is roughly the size of Texas, sheds pieces much as human fingernails grow and break off.

The berg initially drifted toward McMurdo Sound and grounded near Cape Crozier on Ross Island. It has since broken into pieces, the largest of which is B-15A.

This year, B-15A has trapped sea ice in McMurdo Sound. The currents that normally break the ice into pieces and sweep it out into the Ross Sea have not been able to clean out the Sound, so winter's thick ice remains intact.

The build-up of ice presents significant problems for Antarctic residents. Penguins must now swim great distances to reach open waters and food. Adult penguins may not be able to make the trip and return with food for their young. As a result, many chicks could starve, says Antarctica New Zealand, the government organization that oversees New Zealand's Antarctic research, in the Associated Press.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) officials said that the B-15A iceberg and the frozen Sound will not interfere with supply ship access to McMurdo Station, the U. S. logistics hub for much of the nation's research activity in Antarctica. Forty miles of ice typically separate the pier at McMurdo from the open sea, but this year the ice stretched 80 miles from the station. So far, the extra ice has not been a problem. The U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star left Seattle, Washington, on Nov. 4 and docked at McMurdo in early January after cutting a channel through the ice for supply ships.

Ironically, a collision between the iceberg and the ice tongue could make things easier for both penguins and ships. If the ice tongue collapses, the way may be opened for sea ice to escape the Sound.

There is no guarantee that satellite will see a great demolition because the berg's fate is unclear. The berg's future depends on unpredictable winds, tides and other forces, but possibilities include colliding with the floating Drygalski Ice Tongue, or continuing north, eventually melting.

If the collision occurs as predicted, this could be an event that we witness again and again. The tides that drive the iceberg's motion tend to push it in circles. "If B-15A bangs the ice tongue once, it could bang it again," says Bindshadler. With multiple daily views of the Ross Sea, NASA satellites will be there to watch the show.

   

CLIMATE COLLAPSE
Growing Evidence of Scary Change
By David Stipp
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,582593,00.html

Scientists used to think that major climate changes, like the onset of an ice age, took thousands of years to unfold. Now they know such dramatic transitions can occur in less than a decade. The probable trigger of abrupt climate changes, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, is the shutdown of a huge ocean current in the Atlantic Ocean. The current is driven by dense, salty water that flows north from the tropics and sinks in the North Atlantic. If fresh water is pumped into the northerly part of the current--which can occur as global warming melts Arctic ice--its salinity drops, making it less dense. This diminishing density can prevent the water from sinking in the North Atlantic, stopping the current's flow. Much of Europe and the U.S. could become colder and drier if that happened.

Many details of this big picture remain hazy, including whether recent global warming threatens to shut down the Atlantic current. But over the past few years, scientists have detected disquieting trends:

* In tandem with rising average temperatures across the globe, 3% to   4% of the Arctic ice cap has melted per decade since about 1970.

* Recently the Arctic's largest ice shelf broke up near Canada's Ellesmere Island, releasing an ice-dammed freshwater lake into the ocean. (Scientists believe that the similar melting of an Arctic ice dam 8,200 years ago triggered an episode of abrupt climate change.)

* The North Atlantic's salinity has declined continuously for the past 40 years--the most dramatic oceanic change ever measured.

* The flow of cold, dense water through a North Atlantic channel near Norway--part of the great ocean current that warms northern Europe --has dropped by at least 20% since 1950, suggesting that the current is weakening.

Scientists still don't know whether a climate disaster is on the way. But taken together, these changes appear strikingly similar to ones that preceded abrupt climate shifts in the past. Many researchers now believe the salient question about such change is not "Could it happen?" but "When?"

From the Feb. 9, 2004 Issue

Record retreat in Swiss glaciers in 2003 due to climate change: scientists
GENEVA (AFP) Jan 13, 2004
http://www.terradaily.com/2004/040113181427.hn018f6z.html

Switzerland's glaciers melted by a record amount during 2003 under the onslaught of long-term climate change, a top Swiss science academy said Tuesday.

The retreat of the glaciers in the Swiss Alps reached up to 150 metres, with an overall melting exceeding that observed in any year since measurements began in the 19th century, according to the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences. And the shrinkage of the mountain ice was not the direct result of record hot summer temperatures in Switzerland and Europe last year, it added. "The overall view that emerges is of a clarity never seen before since annual measurements started in 1880. None of the glaciers progressed or were stationary," the academy in Bern said in a statement. "These observations should not be associated directly with the extreme summer heat, the length of the glaciers reacts with a delay to the change in climate," it added.

One of the academy's scientists explained that the overall length of the glaciers reflected a warming of the climate over several years rather than immediate shifts in temperature. More complex measurements of the thickness of the ice cover -- which is affected by short-term heat -- on three glaciers also showed melting last year exceeding the levels measured through the 1990s, said Andreas Bauder. "The length change sums up all the climatic influences," he told AFP. 

"The glacier measurements are one of the best ways of documenting climate change," Bauder added. The academy also cautioned that the advance of some glaciers occasionally observed in recent years was caused by residues of old snow, and was not due to the freezing of new rainfall during cold weather.

Overall, glaciers in the heart of Europe's biggest mountain range stopped advancing about 50 years ago, Bauder pointed out. The Swiss length measurements were based on regular data recorded on 96 Alpine glaciers.

Climate change has been blamed on global warming caused by the rise in air pollution from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
Bauder said scientists were not able to predict longer term trends for the ice floes but felt confident enough to forecast that the Swiss glaciers would again shrink in 2004. "The glaciers will retreat, just on the signals we had in the last couple of years," he observed.

TERRA.WIRE

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-earthshine,0,1655060,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

  Earth Brightens After Years of Dimming 
       
   By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
  Associated Press Writer

  May 27, 2004, 3:14 PM EDT

  WASHINGTON -- Scientists studying earthshine -- the amount of light reflected by the Earth -- say the planet appeared to dim from 1984 to 2001 and then reversed its trend and brightened from 2001 to 2003.

  The shift appears to have resulted from changes in the amount of clouds covering the planet. More clouds reflect more light back into space, potentially cooling the planet, while a dimmer planet with fewer clouds would be warmed by the arriving sunlight.

  That means the changes in brightness could signal climate change, though it's too early to tell.

  Steven Koonin, a California Institute of Technology physicist and co-author of the paper, said that "at the moment, the cause of these variations is not known, but they imply large shifts in the Earth's radiative budget. Continuing observations ... will be necessary to learn their implications for climate."

  "This work is probably going to be used in arguments for and against global warming. Our paper neither proves or disproves the carbon dioxide effect," said Enric Palle, lead author of the report appearing in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.

  "Our results are only part of the story, since the Earth's surface temperature is determined by a balance between sunlight that warms the planet and heat radiated back into space, which cools the planet," said Palle, of the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California, operated by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

  Climate change "depends upon many factors in addition to (reflected light), such as the amount of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere. But these new data emphasize that clouds must be properly accounted for and illustrate that we still lack the detailed understanding of our climate system necessary to model future changes with confidence."

  The researchers used two sets of records to establish the amount of light reflected from the Earth.

  The records, which partly overlap, include measurements of cloud cover taken by satellites and an analysis of earthshine, which was determined by studying how much it illuminates the dark portion of the moon.

  But the use of two separate types of measurements gave pause to James A. Coakley Jr. of Oregon State University, who studies climate change and satellite cloud data.

  Observations of "sunlight reflected by the Earth are far from being well understood. At this stage, it's too early to tell how useful such observations might be as a measure of climate variability and climate change," said Coakley, who was not part of the research team.

  Philip R. Goode of the New Jersey institute, a co-author of the paper, contended that the moon analysis is in fact quite accurate.

  "Our method has the advantage of being very precise because the bright lunar crescent serves as a standard against which to monitor earthshine, and light reflected by large portions of Earth can be observed simultaneously," said Goode.

  Earthshine brightening the face of the moon, he noted, was first described by Leonardo da Vinci.

  Regular earthshine observations began in 1997, and the researchers suggested that the changes they observed may be part of a natural variation. Continuing the observations through an entire 11-year cycle of solar variability will be important to better understand the changes, they said.

  The research was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Climate Change Rises on Global Agenda

May 23, 2004

By CHARLES J. HANLEY

FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu (AP) - The rising sea is eating at the shores of low-slung Funafuti, a spit of coral and coconut palms in the remote Pacific. Unseen fingers of ocean even reach beneath the sands, surfacing inland in startling places, among nervous islanders. "It used to be puddles. Now it's like lakes," said Hilia Vavae, local meteorologist.

Far to the north in the Marshall Islands, 1,250 miles away, trees are toppling before aquamarine waves. Watching, perplexed, from the edge of a lagoon, teenager Ankit Stephen asked a visitor, "Why is this happening?" Six hundred miles west, on tiny Kosrae, Alokoa Talley pondered the same question. Neighbors are moving their homes up the lush slopes, away from the encroaching Pacific. "I don't know," the government worker said, "but I think it's because of 'green' something." The "greenhouse effect," climate change, has languished on the world's agenda since the 1970s, a seemingly distant threat. But year by year, inch by inch, it is rising to the top - as ocean islets flood, glaciers retreat, Arctic permafrost melts, and leading voices raise new alarms. "We may already be seeing - in the increased incidence of drought, floods and extreme weather events that many regions are experiencing - some of the devastation that lies ahead," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in March, when he urged all governments to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to reduce the world's "greenhouse gas" emissions.

That long-stalled 1997 accord is opposed in Washington, where U.S. government and industry object that emission controls would handicap the U.S. economy. Now only ratification by Russia can revive it, making this a critical year on the political front in a long, difficult debate over what to do about climate change.

On the scientific front, meanwhile, signs of global warming mount. Like the glass of a greenhouse, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and some other gases in the atmosphere let sunlight in but tend to warm the Earth by trapping heat it emits back toward space. That's scientific fact; the scientific puzzle involves other factors that might lessen - or worsen - the warming and what it does to the planet. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of fossil fuels burned in everything from automobiles to electricity plants, reached record levels in the atmosphere this past winter, a Hawaii observatory reported in March.

Then, in April, other U.S. scientists reported NASA satellite readings showed an average increase in the globe's land surface temperatures of 0.77 degrees Fahrenheit between 1981 and 1998. This reinforced earlier findings, from ground stations, that global temperatures rose 1 degree over the 20th century. These rising curves, of greenhouse gas and global temperature, parallel the analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-organized network of hundreds of climatologists and other scientists worldwide.

In a pivotal 2001 report, the IPCC listed as a key finding: "Most of observed warming over last 50 years likely due to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activities." If emissions are brought under control too slowly, temperatures could rise an additional 10.4 degrees by the year 2100, the IPCC said. Even with quick rollbacks in smokestack, tailpipe and other emissions, temperatures could rise 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, the scientists said.

Warming is expected to be unevenly distributed and to change regional climates in powerful ways, shifting climate zones hundreds of miles, possibly making farmlands drier, deserts wetter; melting ice caps; intensifying storms; spreading diseases to new areas; and raising ocean levels - by anywhere from 3.5 inches to almost 3 feet by 2100, depending on emission controls, the IPCC said.

The seas would rise because water expands as it warms, and because of the runoff of ice melt from the continents. In fact, the oceans have expanded, rising an average 1 to 2 millimeters a year - up to one inch every 12 years - during the 20th century, as measured by tide gauges. More recently, satellites show "the rise has been highly accelerated," to 3 millimeters a year, said Walter Munk of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Pacific islanders aren't alone. Rising seas are a growing threat from Alaska, where Eskimos are relocating an Arctic island village, to New Orleans and to Shanghai, China - near-coastal cities already below sea level, sinking on their own, and further endangered by expanding oceans. Prevailing winds, tidal peculiarities and other factors can make sea levels vary from place to place. Here at Funafuti, capital of a mini-nation midway between Hawaii and Australia, the gauges have shown the sea rising 5 to 6 millimeters a year since 1993, meteorologist Vavae said.

But some islands also are subsiding, sinking under their own weight. "In many islands, I think the answer is that both are happening - subsidence and rising levels," said University of Hawaii oceanographer Roger Lukas.

Similarly uncertain: What will a swelling ocean do to a Funafuti? One rule of thumb, disputed among specialists, holds that each millimeter rise in sea level can claim 1.5 meters - 5 feet - of shallow ocean beach. Some theorize, however, that a moderately higher Pacific would "rearrange," but not obliterate, an atoll like Funafuti - a ring of islands around a central lagoon. Rearrangement would be bad enough for Lototele Malie, 75, whose pastel-blue concrete house, with 15 adults and children inside, sits at the edge of Funafuti's dwindling ocean beach.

"A month ago the tide came right here," the sarong-clad old man said, pointing 3 feet away to the lip of his concrete-slab patio. "It's getting dangerous," he said, with the thunder of waves as a backdrop. The Malies and others along Funafuti's fringe have little room to maneuver. Just 300 yards from their rear doors, the choppy waters of the 9-mile-wide lagoon are rising. In between sit other salt-caked plywood or cinderblock houses, beside gaping pits dug in the island's coral foundation long ago, by U.S. troops in World War II. Those pits, filling now with seeping seawater, supplied the crushed material for Funafuti's airport, where today some of Vavae's "lakes" have begun to appear at peak tides. "People got especially worried when the runway flooded. That's new," Margaret Bita, 45, told a visiting reporter after Sunday church services.

The church and little airport lie on the broadest part - 600 yards across - of slender, steamy, 7-mile-long Funafuti, home to about half the 11,000 people of Tuvalu, an impoverished nation getting by on fees from foreign fishing fleets, international aid and money sent home by Tuvaluan merchant seamen.

This main island narrows elsewhere to a mere 50 yards of sand, swaying palms and roadway between lagoon and sea. Its elevation is seldom more than a few feet. When February's "king" tides washed out a small causeway, children swam to school. "I think it would be better if my kids were somewhere else," said hospital worker Beia Fetau, 40, preparing to help with Sunday school in shirt, tie and traditional male "sulu," or skirt.

As recently as the 1980s, Vavae said, the peak king tides came only in January and February. Now, she said, they crash ashore from September to May. But it's the quiet seepage from below that most alarms Tuvaluans. Because of intruding saltwater, many have abandoned their gardens of deep-rooted "pulaka," a tuber crop grown in pits here for centuries. On the nearby islet of Vasafua, the coconut trees are dying. Another small uninhabited island, Tepuka Savilivili, has vanished beneath the waves. "It went under water in the cyclone in 1997," Vavae said. 

Disentangling long-term climate change from short-term natural variability is a challenge at the local level, especially in the Pacific, where the periodic climatic phenomenon El Nino raises and lowers ocean levels, causes droughts and stirs up severe storms. But people across the Pacific feel sure something unusual is happening. 

In Kiribati, another mini-state north of Tuvalu, they've also lost an islet in the main atoll of Tarawa. On Majuro, the Marshalls' capital, the lagoon outside Ankit Stephen's home has undercut dozens of towering coconut palms, as islanders futilely try to stop the waves with piles of debris.

On Kosrae, a "high island" of volcanic peaks in the Federated States of Micronesia, the people have always lived along a flat coastal strip, but some are now dismantling their simple homes and heading for the hills, as recommended by the government. "Nobody remembers such tides before. The sea is actually moving inland," said Simpson Abraham, head of Kosrae's Resources Development Authority. Some offshore islets have vanished, he said. Here in Tuvalu, devoutly Christian since missionary days, many talk not of greenhouses, but of Genesis, reminding each other of God's promise to Noah: As long as rainbows cross the sky, there will be no more great floods. "God will protect us," one woman churchgoer assured a visitor. Saufatu Sopoanga, as Tuvalu's prime minister, must look into the future, not the Bible. He is talking to New Zealand about a kind of 21st century Noah's ark - a standby plan for a mass migration there. "In 50 or 100 years, the islands are expected to go under water. What can we do?" Tuvalu's leader asked, on a day when a tropical morning downpour soon gave way to a rainbow in a blue, very warm sky.

AUSTRALIA TOLD TO EXPECT REFUGEES FROM GLOBAL WARMING AFP
May 3, 2004

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040503/wl_asia_afp/australia_pacific_040503054336

SYDNEY - Environmental activists from Pacific nations threatened by rising sea levels have called on Australia to recognise "environmental refugees"
who try to escape the effects of global warming.

The conservationists currently visiting Australia say climate change is raising sea levels and increasing the frequency of events like cyclones
which will one day make some low-lying Pacific island nations uninhabitable.

Fiu Mataese Elisara-Laulu of Samoa said Australia, as the region's biggest producer of the greenhouse gases which cause global warming, has a special responsibility for the environmental damage caused.

"We have a genuine case for being affected as environmental refugees if they don't do anything," he said on Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

"But unfortunately Australia seems to be a very poor leader in the Pacific," he said. "From our point of view, they want to assume leadership but they don't want to take responsibility."

The conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard joined the United States in 2002 in refusing to ratify a UN treaty on lowering the production of greenhouse gases, saying the pact, known as the Kyoto Protocol was flawed.

Five weeks ago a group of Australian government researchers reported an alarming increase in global greenhouse gas emissions since 2002, due almost entirely to the burning of fossil fuels.

Greenhouse gases have been blamed for a steady warming of the earth's atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

If left unchecked, global warming is projected to cause a significant rise in sea levels over the next century through the melting of polar ice caps and thermal expansion.

It is also blamed for an increase in extreme weather events like floods, droughts and storms and damage to coral reefs and other sensitive ecosystems.

Elisara-Laulu was in Australia along with Siuila Toloa of Tuvalu's Island Care group on a "climate justice tour" to lobby Australia to take a more active role in tackling climate change.

The tour was sponsored by charity Oxfam, AID/WATCH and Friends of the Earth.

Iceberg Melt, Near South Georgia

Astronauts on board the International Space Station took this detailed view of melt water pooled on the surface of iceberg A-39D, an iceberg measuring 2 km wide by 11 km long and currently drifting near South Georgia Island. The different intensities of blue are interpreted as different water depths. From the orientation of the iceberg, the deepest water (darkest blue) lies at the westernmost end of the iceberg. The water pools have formed from snowmelt—late January is the peak of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

This iceberg was part of the original A-38 iceberg that calved from the Ronne Ice Shelf in October 1998. Originally the ice was between 200 and 350 meters thick. This piece of that iceberg is now probably about 150 meters thick, with around 15 m sticking up above the surface of the water.

The top photograph was taken by astronauts looking south over the south Atlantic Ocean from the International Space Station on January 22, 2004. Above, an accompanying oblique view shows all three large remnant pieces of A-38 close to South Georgia Island.

More melt water had formed on the surface of the iceberg when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured two additional images on February 7 and February 9, 2004. The false-color image from February 7 shows the entire top of the iceberg covered in a dark blue pool of liquid water in contrast to the bright blue ice.

Both photographs were taken from the International Space Station using a Kodak DCS760 digital camera and a 400-mm lens on January 6, 2004. ISS008-E-12555 was taken first, and ISS008-E-12564 was taken 2 minutes and 37 seconds later. Information provided by Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center; image provided by the Earth Observations Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

4-18-04

Warming climate disrupts Alaskan natives' lives
Anyone who doubts the gravity of global warming should ask Alaska's Eskimo, Indian and Aleut elders about the dramatic changes to their land and the animals on which they depend.

Native leaders say salmon are increasingly susceptible to warm-water parasites and suffer from lesions and strange behaviour. Salmon and moose meat have developed odd tastes and the marrow in moose bones is weirdly runny, they say.

Arctic pack ice is disappearing, making food scarce for sea animals and causing difficulties for the natives who hunt them. It is feared polar bears, to name one species, may disappear from the northern hemisphere by mid-century.

As trees and bushes march north over what was once tundra, so do beavers, and they are damming new rivers and lakes to the detriment of water quality and possibly salmon eggs.

Still, to the frustration of Alaska natives, many politicians in the lower 48 US states deny global warming is occurring or that a warmer climate could cause problems.

"They obviously don't live in the Arctic," Patricia Cochran, the executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission, said.

The Anchorage-based commission, funded by the National Science Foundation, has been gathering information for years on Alaska's thawing conditions.

The climate changes are disrupting traditional food gathering and cultures, Larry Merculieff, an Aleut leader from the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, said.

Indigenous residents of the far north are finding it increasingly difficult to explain the natural world to younger generations.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1089723.htm

 

Science

Sunday, March 28, 2004

2003 Likely Europe's Hottest in 500 Years WASHINGTON (AP) - Last year's deadly summer in Europe probably was the hottest on the continent in at least five centuries, according to researchers who analyzed old records, soil cores and other evidence. More than 19,000 people died. Researchers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, collected and analyzed temperature data from all over Europe, including such climate measures as tree rings from 1500. They found that the climate has been generally warming and last summer was the most torrid of all. ``When you consider Europe as a whole, it was by far the hottest,'' said Jurg Luterbacher, climatologist and the first author of a study appearing this week in the journal Science. Luterbacher said the study showed that European winters are also warmer now. The average winter and annual temperatures during the three decades from 1973 to 2002 were the warmest of the half millennium, he said. Some studies have linked rising average temperatures in North America and elsewhere to global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, but Luterbacher said his team did not attempt to make such a connection. ``We don't make any analysis of the human influence,'' he said. ``We don't attempt to determine the cause. We only report what we find.'' Other climatologists, however, say the new study agrees with models that have predicted a steady rise in global temperature as the result of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and other sources. Stephen Schneider, a climate expert at Stanford University and a prominent advocate for the theory of human-caused global warming, said the Luterbacher paper is consistent with what climate modelers have been predicting for 20 years. ``The data is starting to line up showing that those projections were correct,'' Schneider said. ``We warned the world that this was likely to happen because we believed the theory, but couldn't actually prove it was happening. Now the data is coming in.'' In the study, Luterbacher and his team analyzed the temperature history of Europe starting in 1500 to the present. For the earliest part of the half millennium, the figures are estimates based on proxy measures, such as tree rings and soil cores. But after about 1750, he said, instrumented readings became generally available throughout Europe. During the 500 years, there were trends both toward cool and toward hot. The second hottest summer in the period was in 1757. That was followed by a cooling trend that continued until early in the 20th century. The summer of 1902, for instance, was the coolest of the entire record. Starting in 1977, the record shows ``an exceptionally strong, unprecedented warming,'' the researchers report, with average temperatures rising at the rate of about 0.36 degrees per decade. Then came last summer. ``The summer of 2003 exceeded 1901 to 1995 European summer temperatures by around 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit),'' the study said. ``Taking into account the uncertainties (in the study method), it appears that the summer of 2003 was very likely warmer than any other summer back to 1500.'' Record temperatures were recorded in most of the major cities of Europe last summer, with many readings over 100 degrees. Authorities have attributed thousands of deaths to the excess heat, making the heat wave one of the deadliest weather phenomena in the past century. In France, the toll was estimated at about 14,802 dead. About 2,000 more than normal died in August in England and Wales. On Aug. 11, Britain's hottest day on record, there were 363 more deaths than average and the temperature reading reached 101.3 in Brogdale in southeastern England. Altogether in Europe, based on official numbers collected by The Associated Press, there were more than 19,000 excess deaths in the summer months. France was hardest hit, but the average number of summer deaths increased by 4,175 in Italy, 1,300 in Portugal and more than 1,000 in the Netherlands. The intense heat also wilted crops, caused wildfires and continued a centurylong trend of melting the continent's glaciers. Luterbacher said some mountain glaciers have shrunk by 50 percent in the past century in Europe, and some ice fields lost 10 percent of their mass last summer alone. In addition, he said, the long trend of warming temperatures is now melting the high altitude permafrost - the soil that usually remains frozen year-round - and that some buildings, bridges and roadways are now threatened with unstable foundations. And it may get worse, said Luterbacher. He said some studies forecast that if the warming trend continues, Europe may have summers like 2003 every other year starting late in this century. On the Net: Science: www.sciencemag.org

 Damage from Warming Becoming 'Irreversible,' Says New Report

Mon Mar 15, 2004 9:50 AM ET

Jim Lobe, OneWorld US

WASHINGTON, D.C., Mar 15 (OneWorld) -- Ten years after the ratification of a United Nations treaty on climate change, greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming are still on the rise, signaling a "collective failure" of the industrialized world, according to the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), a leading environmental think-tank.

"We are quickly moving to the point where the damage will be irreversible," warned Dr. Jonathan Pershing, director of WRI's Climate, Energy and Pollution Program. "In fact, the latest scientific reports indicate that global warming is worsening. Unless we act now, the world will be locked into temperatures that would cause irreversible harm."

WRI researchers estimate that greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide rose 11 percent over the last decade, and will grow another 50 percent worldwide by 2020. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that sets out specific targets to follow up on the treaty, 38 industrialized countries were supposed to reduce their emissions by an average of seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The administration of former President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, but President Bush  withdrew the U.S., which currently emits about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, from negotiations over Kyoto's implementation.

Russia, which indicated initially that it intended to ratify the Protocol, remains undecided. As a result the Protocol--which must be ratified by countries whose greenhouse emissions totaled more than 55 percent of global emissions in 1990 in order to take effect--remains in limbo.

WRI decided to make a relatively rare public statement now, both because the tenth anniversary of the UNFCCC's ratification will take place next weekend and because of the growing pessimism surrounding the international community's ability and will to deal with the problem.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which called for voluntary reductions in greenhouse emissions, was signed by, among others, then-President George H.W. Bush, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and took formal effect March 21, 1994. Today, 188 countries are signatories.

The Kyoto Protocol grew out of the UNFCCC when it became clear that plans for voluntary reductions would not meet the initial targets, and as climate and atmospheric scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have become increasingly convinced that the rise in global temperatures of about one degree Fahrenheit over the last century is due primarily to artificial emissions, notably the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas.

Studies over the past decade have shown that the warming trend continues. "The five warmest years in recorded weather history have taken place over the last six years," noted WRI's president, Jonathan Lash.

"The ten warmest years in recorded weather history have taken place since 1987. Whether it's the retreat of glaciers, the melting of the permafrost in Alaska, or the increase in severe weather events, the world is experiencing what the global warming models predict," he said.

Europe, the main champion of the Kyoto Protocol, suffered its hottest year on record last year. Some 15,000 people in France alone died due to heat stress in combination with pollution, while European agriculture suffered an estimated $12.5 billion in losses.

Britain's most influential scientist, Sir David King, recently excoriated the Bush administration for withdrawing from the Protocol and ignoring the threat posed by climate change. "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today," he wrote in Science magazine, "more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

Even the Pentagon  recently issued a warning that global warming, if it takes place abruptly, could result in a catastrophic breakdown in international security. Based on growing evidence that climate shifts in the past have taken place with breathtaking speed, based on the freshening of sea water due to accelerated melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps.

Given enough freshening, the Gulf Stream that currently warms the North Atlantic would be shut off, triggering an abrupt decline in temperatures that would bring about a new "Ice Age" in Europe, eastern Canada, and the northeastern United States and similar disastrous changes in world weather patterns elsewhere--all in a period as short as two to three years.

Wars over access to food, water, and energy would be likely to break out between states, according to the report. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," according to the report. "Once again, warfare would define human life."

Even if climate change is more gradual, recent studies have argued that as many as one million plant and animal species could be rendered extinct due to the effects of global warming by 2050. A recent report by the world's largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re, predicted that in 10 years the economic cost of disasters like floods, frosts, and famines caused by global warming could reach $150 billion annually.

"Accelerated development of a portfolio of technologies could stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, enhance global energy security, and eradicate energy poverty," noted David Jhirad, WRI's vice president for research. "We urgently need the political will and international cooperation to make this happen."

Global warming has gone to the bogs

By Robert C. Cowen

Forget the melting glaciers. Global warming is revealing itself in subtler ways. Think methane. Swedish bogs are releasing more methane as climate warms and permafrost melts. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with 25 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide (CO2). With more methane in the air, climate warming could accelerate.

Meanwhile, just as global warming theory predicts, the atmosphere's highest layers are getting colder and thinner. Contrary to expectations, high atmospheric cooling is the way greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and methane, interact with infrared (heat) radiation. At low altitudes, they absorb heat coming up from below and radiate some back downward.

But where astronauts live, these gases release most of their heat out into space, which cools the higher altitudes. The outer atmosphere contracts as it cools, thinning out its density.

Satellites orbiting a few hundred miles out would feel less drag as the air through which they travel becomes thinner.

That's how John Emmert and colleagues with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington found evidence that this long-expected global warming effect is under way.

They report in the Journal of Geophysical Research that 30 years of tracking data for 27 satellites and space junk show a steady decline in outer atmospheric density.

That's good news for satellite owners who can use less rocket fuel to keep their birds aloft. The news from Sweden is more troubling.

Bacteria in wetlands release methane as they break down organic matter. It's the marsh gas that sometimes ignites to make spooky lights in the night. This activity slows down when bogs freeze.

Northern peat bogs - especially in subarctic Eurasia - are major sources of methane, which spreads throughout the world. Scientists have wondered what will happen as permafrost continues to melt and bogs become even more biologically active.

An international research team recently provided a window into that future. The group, led by Torben Christensen and colleagues at Lund University's GeoBiosphere Science Center in Sweden, studied 30 years of changes in Sweden's Abisko region. Their results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show Sweden's sub-arctic bogs are losing permafrost rapidly. It's completely gone in some areas. And Dr. Christensen says that, at the Stordalen site, methane emission is up "at least 20 percent, but maybe as much as 60 percent, from 1970 to 2000."

His team report warns that if its findings are typical of the northern subarctic, global warming could accelerate as bogs thaw.

Laurence Smith at the University of California at Los Angeles and colleagues with a joint Russian-American research team expressed a similar concern last January in Nature.

Their studies of vast peat lands in Siberia show the bogs currently absorb a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere while releasing methane. But this could change. If global warming continues, the researchers warn that chemical and biological activity in the bogs could break down organic matter that now stores CO2, releasing a major new source of the gas back into the atmosphere.

The bottom line is that we have to pay attention to subtle effects. We're not going to be drowned by melting glaciers, but we might be bitten by what's sneaking up on us.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0311/p17s01-sten.html

By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - Last year's deadly summer in Europe probably was the hottest on the continent in at least five centuries, according to researchers who analyzed old records, soil cores and other evidence. More than 19,000 people died.

Researchers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, collected and analyzed temperature data from all over Europe, including such climate measures as tree rings from 1500. They found that the climate has been generally warming and last summer was the most torrid of all.

"When you consider Europe as a whole, it was by far the hottest," said Jurg Luterbacher, climatologist and the first author of a study appearing this week in the journal Science.

Luterbacher said the study showed that European winters are also warmer now. The average winter and annual temperatures during the three decades from 1973 to 2002 were the warmest of the half millennium, he said.

Some studies have linked rising average temperatures in North America and elsewhere to global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, but Luterbacher said his team did not attempt to make such a connection.

"We don't make any analysis of the human influence," he said. "We don't attempt to determine the cause. We only report what we find."

Other climatologists, however, say the new study agrees with models that have predicted a steady rise in global temperature as the result of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and other sources.

Stephen Schneider, a climate expert at Stanford University and a prominent advocate for the theory of human-caused global warming, said the Luterbacher paper is consistent with what climate modelers have been predicting for 20 years.

"The data is starting to line up showing that those projections were correct," Schneider said. "We warned the world that this was likely to happen because we believed the theory, but couldn't actually prove it was happening. Now the data is coming in."

In the study, Luterbacher and his team analyzed the temperature history of Europe starting in 1500 to the present. For the earliest part of the half millennium, the figures are estimates based on proxy measures, such as tree rings and soil cores. But after about 1750, he said, instrumented readings became generally available throughout Europe.

During the 500 years, there were trends both toward cool and toward hot. The second hottest summer in the period was in 1757. That was followed by a cooling trend that continued until early in the 20th century. The summer of 1902, for instance, was the coolest of the entire record.

Starting in 1977, the record shows "an exceptionally strong, unprecedented warming," the researchers report, with average temperatures rising at the rate of about 0.36 degrees per decade.

Then came last summer.

"The summer of 2003 exceeded 1901 to 1995 European summer temperatures by around 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)," the study said. "Taking into account the uncertainties (in the study method), it appears that the summer of 2003 was very likely warmer than any other summer back to 1500."

Record temperatures were recorded in most of the major cities of Europe last summer, with many readings over 100 degrees. Authorities have attributed thousands of deaths to the excess heat, making the heat wave one of the deadliest weather phenomena in the past century.

In France, the toll was estimated at about 14,802 dead. About 2,000 more than normal died in August in England and Wales. On Aug. 11, Britain's hottest day on record, there were 363 more deaths than average and the temperature reading reached 101.3 in Brogdale in southeastern England.

Altogether in Europe, based on official numbers collected by The Associated Press, there were more than 19,000 excess deaths in the summer months. France was hardest hit, but the average number of summer deaths increased by 4,175 in Italy, 1,300 in Portugal and more than 1,000 in the Netherlands.

The intense heat also wilted crops, caused wildfires and continued a centurylong trend of melting the continent's glaciers.

Luterbacher said some mountain glaciers have shrunk by 50 percent in the past century in Europe, and some ice fields lost 10 percent of their mass last summer alone.

In addition, he said, the long trend of warming temperatures is now melting the high altitude permafrost — the soil that usually remains frozen year-round — and that some buildings, bridges and roadways are now threatened with unstable foundations.

And it may get worse, said Luterbacher. He said some studies forecast that if the warming trend continues, Europe may have summers like 2003 every other year starting late in this century.

___

On the Net:

Science: www.sciencemag.org

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.


http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html

Global warming: Carbon dioxide levels highest for 650,000 years

---

Levels of carbon dioxide, the principal gas that drives global warming, are now 27 percent higher than at any point in the last 650,000 years, according to research into Antarctic ice cores published on Thursday.

 

The study, adding powerfully to evidence of human interference in the climate system, appears in the runup to a key conference on global warming which opens in Montreal next Monday.

The evidence comes from the world's deepest ice core, drilled at a site called Dome Concordia (Dome C) in East Antarctica by European scientists who battled blizzards and an average year-round temperature of minus 54 Celsius (minus 65 Fahrenheit) and made a thousand-kilometer (650-mile) trek to bring up supplies.

The core, extracted using a 10-centimetre (four-inch) -wide drill bit in three-metre (10-feet) sections, brought up ice that was deposited by snows up to 650,000 years ago, as determined by estimated layers of annual snowfall.

Analysis of carbon dioxide trapped in tiny bubbles in the ancient ice showed that at no point during this time frame did levels get anywhere close to today's CO2 concentrations of around 380 parts per million (380 ppm).

CO2 levels began to rise with the Industrial Revolution, when coal began to be burned in large quantities, and have surged in recent decades as more countries become industrialised and millions more cars take to the road.

As a result, billions of tonnes of CO2 are now being released into the air each year from fossil fuels that previously were underground. In pre-industrial times, the CO2 concentration was just 278 ppm.

Today's rising CO₂ concentrations are 27 percent higher than at the highest level seen over the 650,000-year time scale, according to the study, which appears in the weekly US journal Science.

The Dome C core, extracted by the 10-country European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), outstrips by 210,000 years the previous record-holder, drilled at an Antarctic site called Vostok.

"We have added another piece of information showing that the time scales on which humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere are extremely short compared to the natural time cycles of the climate system," said lead author Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern's Physics Institute in Switzerland.

Skeptics about man-made global warming point out that Earth has been through many periods of higher and lower temperatures in its history as a result of natural processes.

Volcanic eruptions that disgorge CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, oscillations in the planet's axial spin and minor changes in its orbit can have a major impact on surface temperatures, sometimes plunging Earth into prolonged Ice Ages, the last of which ended some 11,000 years ago.

But over the past decade, a mountain of scientific evidence has accumulated about Man's impact on temperatures through the unbridled burning of fossil fuels.

In the past five years, the average global temperature has risen by 0.2 C (0.36 F) -- 100 times higher than is normal for such a short time scale -- and 2005 is on course for being the hottest year on record.

Glaciers in the Alps, Greenland and the Himalayas are shrinking and ice shelves are cracking in the Antarctic peninsula in what appear to be early signs of dangerous climate change, according to recent studies.

The 12-day Montreal talks, gathering members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will focus on the future of the Kyoto Protocol after this pact, aimed at curbing carbon pollution, runs out in 2012.

Scientists say political progress for tackling the problem falls miserably short of what is needed to avoid long-term damage to the climate system.

In the most extreme scenarios, global warming could drive up sea levels and drown coastal cities, cause floods, droughts and freak storms, and create tens of millions of "climate refugees."

© 2005 AFP

---

Inuit alarmed by signs of global warming

'Sentries for the rest of the world' report massive changes to Arctic life

By Doug Struck

Updated: 8:33 a.m. ET March 22, 2006

PANGNIRTUNG, Canada - Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.

Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages.

The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists believe will spread from the north to the rest of the globe.

The Inuit -- with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia -- saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack onto the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 of turbot fishing gear.

In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister, 48, drove his snowmobile onto ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was "lucky to get off" and grab his rifle as the expensive machine was lost. "Someday we won't have any snow," he said. "We won't be Eskimos."

‘It's getting very strange up here’
In Resolute Bay, Inuit people insisted that the dark arctic night was lighter. Wayne Davidson, a longtime weather station operator, finally figured out that a warmer layer of air was reflecting light from the sun over the horizon. "It's getting very strange up here," he said. "There's more warm air, more massive and more uniform."

 

Doug Struck / Washington Post Noah Metuq, right, and Alukie Metuq bring up a seal they shot through the ice. The Inuit rely on wildlife for food and clothing such as the sealskin parka worn by Alukie.

Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it, according to the Nunatsiaq News.

In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik, Iceland, had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 48 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus-20 degrees.

"We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it," said one resident, Donald Mearns.

Confirmed by science
"These are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned," said Enosik Nashalik, 87, the eldest of male elders in this Inuit village. "We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patterns, or the wind or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed."

The Inuit alarms, once passed off as odd stories, are earning confirmation from science. Canada's federal weather service said this month that the country had experienced its warmest winter since measurements began in 1948. Some of the larger temperature increases were in the arctic north.

"That is entirely consistent with the long-range forecasts that indicate the effects of global warming will be most felt in the north," said Douglas Bancroft, director of Oceanography and Climate Science for Canada's federal fisheries department.

"What we see is very clear. We are going to see a reduction in the overall arctic ice. It doesn't mean it goes away. But it brings profound changes," he said by telephone from Ottawa, the Canadian capital. "Weather will get stormier because the more open water you have, the easier it is for storms to brew up."

Bancroft said there would also be significant changes in the region's ecosystems.

---

Warming could push sea levels up six meters by 2100

Polar ice sheets are melting faster than expected and could push sea levels up as much as six meters by 2100, scientists warn in two new studies.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Polar ice sheets are melting faster than expected and could push sea levels up as much as six meters by 2100, scientists warn in two new studies.

Based on current warming trends, average temperatures could jump at least 2.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, resembling the last great global warming surge 129,000 years ago when seas rose that much.

"This is a real eye-opener set of results," said Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona, co-author of the studies with Bette Otto-Bliesner of the Colorado National Center for Atmospheric Research. "The last time the Arctic was significantly warmer than the present day, the Greenland Ice Sheet melted back the equivalent of two to three meters of sea level."

Overpeck and Otto-Bliesner used a powerful climate modeling computer, ice sheet simulation and paleoclimate data to create a picture of Earth's climate 129,000 years ago.

"These ice sheets melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions," Otto-Bliesner said. Overpeck warned "serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases" must start within the next decade.

Their studies are published in the latest issue of Science magazine.

Shawn Marshall, a glaciologist at Canada's University of Calgary who took part in the research, said warming 130,000 years ago was caused by an increase in solar radiation after changes in Earth's tilt and orbit. Today's warming, scientists say, is caused mainly by greenhouse gases.

Overpeck pointed out another apparent difference is that, in the previous period, the warmer temperatures were mostly in the Arctic and only during the summers.

Now, he said, Earth is warming year-round and at both poles.

He said that the warming danger in the Antarctic is not the overall melting of the ice cover, as would happen in Greenland.

Instead, he foresees that the Antarctic ice sheet would fracture, plunging more icebergs into the sea and raising the sea level "just like throwing a bunch of ice cubes into a full glass of water."

Recent studies have noted an accelerating melting of ice sheets and glaciers surrounding the two poles.

In a separate study, seismologists say they have detected an increase in glacial earthquakes - temblors up to a magnitude of 5.1, which they believe result from melting.

The earthquakes, many of them in the summer, involve rapid shifts in chunks of ice "as large as Manhattan." AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

---

New Study Offers Evidence Of Global Warming

POSTED: 4:56 pm EST March 23, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The Earth is already shaking beneath melting ice as rising temperatures threaten to shrink polar glaciers and raise sea levels around the world.

By the end of this century, Arctic readings could rise to levels not seen in 130,000 years -- when the oceans were several feet higher than now, according to new research appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Even now, giant glaciers lubricated by melting water have begun causing earthquakes in Greenland as they lurch toward the ocean, other scientists report in the same journal.

In principal findings:

- At the current warming rate, Earth's temperature by 2100 will probably be at least 4 degrees warmer than now, with the Arctic at least as warm as it was 130,000 years ago, reports a research group led by Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona.

- Computer models indicate that warming could raise the average temperature in parts of Greenland above freezing for multiple months and could have a substantial impact on melting of the polar ice sheets, says a second paper by researchers led by Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Melting could raise sea level one to three feet over the next 100 to 150 years, she said.

- And a team led by Goeran Ekstroem of Harvard University reported an increase in "glacial earthquakes," which occur when giant rivers of ice -- some as big as Manhattan -- move suddenly as meltwater eases their path. That sudden movement causes the ground to tremble.

Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck wrote separate papers and also worked together, studying ancient climate and whether modern computer climate models correctly reflect those earlier times. That allowed them to use the models to look at possible future conditions. The researchers studied ancient coral reefs, ice cores and other natural climate records.

"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," Otto-Bliesner said. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."

According to the studies, increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the next century could raise Arctic temperatures as much as 5 to 8 degrees.

The warming could raise global sea levels by up to three feet this century through a combination of thermal expansion of the water and melting of polar ice, Overpeck and Otto-Bliesner said.

Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, who was not part of the research teams, said, "One point stands out above all others and that is that a modest global warming may put Earth in the danger zone for a major sea level rise due to deglaciation of one or both ice sheets."

Ekstroem and colleagues reported that glacial earthquakes in Greenland occur most often in July and August and have more than doubled since 2002.

"People often think of glaciers as inert and slow-moving, but in fact they can also move rather quickly," Ekstroem said. "Some of Greenland's glaciers, as large as Manhattan and as tall as the Empire State Building, can move 10 meters in less than a minute, a jolt that is sufficient to generate moderate seismic waves."

Melting water from the surface gradually seeps down, accumulating at the base of a glacier where it can serve as a lubricant allowing the ice to suddenly move downhill, the researchers said.

"Our results suggest that these major outlet glaciers can respond to changes in climate conditions much more quickly than we had thought," said team member Meredith Nettles of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved

 

 

 

 

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/07aug_southpole.htm http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update8.htm http://www.worldwatch.org/press/news/2000/03/06/ http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/news/2002/041802mag_flip.shtml http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-03l.html http://www.nature.com/nsu/020729/020729-9.html

Increasing carbon dioxide levels disturb scientists  Quake unblocked distant geysers

GLOBAL WARMING DATABASE


THE MYSTERY OF GLOBAL WARMING
THE MYSTERY OF GLOBAL WARMING. Published by the Department of Navy Look at how warm
it is near the north Pole. ... No Doubts Global Warming Is Real Say US Experts. ...
www.greatdreams.com/warming.htm

SURVIVAL AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY LINKS
... Natural Disaster, Lifelong - Possible scenarios include: severe global warming and
the coming ice age, the greenhouse-effect-gone-wild, warming/cooling of gulf ...
www.greatdreams.com/survival.htm

EARTH DISASTERS DREAMS AND VISIONS - 1989 - 2003
... THE MYSTERY OF GLOBAL WARMING. WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE: WINTER OF 2001-2002. ... NOTE:
See THE PLAGUES. http://www.greatdreams.com/sacred/eighth-gate.htm. ...
www.greatdreams.com/disaster-dreams.htm

THE ENVIRONMENT
... Protection EPA - National Estuary Program EPA ACID RAIN HOME PAGE EPA APPD - US
EPA Atmospheric Pollution Prevention Division EPA - GLOBAL WARMING - The US ...
www.greatdreams.com/environ.htm

NATIONWIDE CHEMTRAILS - VIRULENT BIO-TOXIN SOUP
... control speculation is that the governments of the world are trying to create clouds
so that the earth stays cooler, because global warming is occurring much ...
www.greatdreams.com/chems.htm

THE COMING GLOBAL SUPERSTORM

... Even if the global superstorm doesn't hit us, many people believe that global warming will effect our planet www.greatdreams.com/superstorm.htm -

HAARP VS THE SUN

... One example of how earthquakes (and climate shift including so-called global warming) can be triggered is HAARP, a US military electromagnetic EM installation ... www.greatdreams.com/haarp-sun.htm

JACK KEMP

... April, 1997 - Global Warming and Other Myths. 1997 - Jack Kemp on global Warming.  SEA-LEVEL RISE: IS GLOBAL WARMING TO BLAME? CEI ... www.greatdreams.com/kemp.htm

JACK KEMP DREAM VS GLOBAL WARMING

JACK KEMP DREAM. VS GLOBAL WARMING. 11-13-99. by Dee Finney. ... It didn't take me too long to figure out that Jack Kemp doesn't believe in global warming. ... www.greatdreams.com/warming2.htm

DREAMS OF THE GREAT EARTHCHANGES - MAIN INDEX