Breaking News on Breakup of West Antarctic Ice Shelves
Ice Shelves Disappearing on Antarctic Peninsula – Glacier Retreat and Sea Level Rise are Possible Consequences.
Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide.
Research by the U.S. Geological Survey is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20th century and into the early 21st century.
Newsweek’s Lengthy Attack on Climate Scientists Exposed by ClimateProgress.org
In a new black eye for Newsweek, their lengthy attack on climate scientists has been exposed as relying on massaged data and tawdry innuendo. While they have already corrected a number of mistakes, they left a bunch in, and decided not to change the overall theme of their now baseless story. That would have meant gutting the sensationalistic headline and visuals they apparently believe they need to grab eyeballs for their ever-shrinking magazine.
Rate of ocean acidification the fastest in 65 million years
A new study says the seas are acidifying ten times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. And, the study concludes, current changes in ocean chemistry due to the burning of fossil fuels may portend a new wave of die-offs.
Bill Gates Sees Climate Change as Important Global Problem
Here are two opposing articles on the Bill Gates TED Talk on “Innovating to Zero.” Our opinion, if Gates thinks climate change is important, we should all feel a little more hopeful. His take on this issue may not be all we could wish for, but as he learns more about how very serious is the global treat we face and how extraordinarily complex an adequate solution must necessarily be, he may stop thinking in terms of simplistic formulas and quick technological fixes. He’ll see that like with climatic systems, many positive feedback loops are inherent in the development of economic, technological and social solutions, and these must not be ignored. The big industry in bio-fuels that has sprung up in response to the need for energy efficiency is a case in point.
The CLEAR Act: A Clean, Green and Clear Choice
It’s time for the climate movement to come together, right now, to defend the best option that we have to get decent, badly-needed legislation on climate passed this year, and to push back against the fossil fools. Passage of the CLEAR Act would be a definite step forward, a political tipping point, not the end game but a victory for sure.
Is Cap and Trade Really Dead? Part III
Different models of carbon cap legislation serve different interests. Videos of Parts 4 and 5 of The Real News Network’s coverage of Carbon Cap Legislation. Paul Jay interviews Professor James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who is also associated with the PERI Institute
Can you sit in a snowstorm and imagine a warming world?
The weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms. Here’s how it works: In most places, winter is clearly growing shorter and less intense. We can tell, because Arctic sea ice is melting, because the glaciers on Greenland are shrinking and because a thousand other signals send the same message. Here in the mountains of the Northeast, for instance, lakes freeze later than they used to, and sometimes not at all: Lake Champlain remained open in winter only three times during the 19th century, but it did so 18 times between 1970 and 2007.
But rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren’t trivial — global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970. That means that the number of “extreme events” such as downpours and floods has grown steadily; the most intense storms have increased by 20 percent across the United States in the past century.
Arctic Thick and Thin: A Warning About the Escalating Loss of Sea Ice Mass
Scant ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a “double whammy” of powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said on Thursday.
“It’s not that the ice keeps melting, it’s just not growing very fast.”
“We’ve grown back ice in the winter, but that ice tends to be thin and that’s the problem,” he said. “You set yourself up for a world of hurt in summer. The ice that is there is also thinner than it was before and thinner ice simply takes less energy to melt out the next summer.” – Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.
In January, Arctic sea ice grew by about 13,000 square miles (34,000 sq km) a day, which is a bit more than one-third the pace of ice growth during the 1980s, and less than the average for the first decade of the 21st century.
Arctic ice cover is important to the rest of the world because the Arctic is the globe’s biggest weather-maker, sometimes dubbed Earth’s air-conditioner for its ability to cool down the planet.
Audio: Climatologist Professor Andrew Weaver Answers Questions About “Glaciergate”
Anna Maria Tremonti hosts CBC Radio’s “The Current“. Here’s her program for Wednesday, February 10th. Dorothy’s note: Click on “Listen to Part One,” which after some teasers and commentary, leads off with Tremonti in a challenging interview with Professor Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, BC. She notes the erroneous IPCC prediction that by [...]
Important Resource Material on Carbon Targets, With Links to Dynamic Post-Copenhagen Efforts
The pledges made by governments resulting from the Copenhagen climate conference are nowhere near enough to hold global temperatures to the summit’s agreed goal of no more than a 2C rise, researchers have calculated. The results, which are the most rigorous analyses yet made of pledges submitted to the UN last month, will increase pressure on rich countries to make far deeper cuts in negotiations over the next year. Researchers from the Sustainability Institute, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Ventana Systems in the US conclude that emissions reduction pledges would allow global mean temperature to increase approximately 3.9C, a level that could see global warming run out of control. “Under the current proposals, global emissions of greenhouse gases would increase 0.8C a year between now and 2020, warned the joint report. It concluded that to reach the Copenhagen accord’s goal of no more than a 2C rise, global emissions must peak within the next decade and fall to at least 50% below 1990 levels by 2050, which would require emissions cuts of 3% annually after 2020. “A new degree of collective ambition and cooperation will be required before the world sees a climate agreement consistent with limited warming to even 2C let alone the 1.5C goal named by a growing number of governments and civil society groups,” said Elizabeth Sawin of Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont, referring to a push at Copenhagen by the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) and 48 developing nations for a deal that limits temperature rises to 1.5C. “The situation is serious. An increase of temperature of more than 1C above pre-industrial levels would result in the disappearance of our glaciers in the Andes, and the flooding of various islands and coastal zones,” said Bolivian foreign minister minister, David Choquehuanca, responding to the US study. Scientists are agreed that an overall rise of 2C in world temperatures would be serious for food production, species loss and freshwater supplies. But anything over 3C would lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, crippling water shortages across South America and Australia and the near-extinction of tropical coral reefs, they have said.
