Resource Material

The Complete Guide to Modern Day Climate Change

By Scott Mandia

Link to Article at West Coast Climate Equity, posted by Dorothy, April 15, 2010:

Who Can Deny the World is Warming?

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ALBERTA TAR SANDS: JUDGE FOR YOURSELF

The Alberta Tar Sands is the largest fossil fuel project on the planet, lying beneath 141,000 square kilometers of northern Alberta forest, an area almost as large as the state of Florida.   Its development is turning once pristine stretches of forest into desolate landscapes.  Former Premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, was recently quoted on the Tar Sands as saying, “… it is just a moonscape. It is wrong in my judgment, a major wrong.”

Both of Canada’s major party leaders are defending the continuance and further development of the Alberta Tar Sands by saying that carbon capture and storage (CCS) will collect carbon dioxide emissions from Tar Sands operations and make them environmentally and socially sustainable.  Both leaders know that this technology is currently not available and that, if successfully developed, it will be very costly and “the first commercial CCS plant won’t be on stream until 2030 at the earliest” [MIT].   Also not addressed is the vast technological difference between CCS for coal and CCS for Tar Sands, the latter being so much more complex because of the number and diversity of emission sources and locations.

As well, when speaking about the Tar Sands, our leaders do not address the loss of more of our boreal forest and its biodiversity and carbon sequestration values, which is already providing extensive natural carbon capture and storage.  Our leaders also play only minor homage to the development of renewable energy, which does not require any carbon capture and storage.

Greenhouse gas emissions:

• The Alberta Tar Sands are the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and stand as the single greatest obstacle to Canada meeting its global climate change responsibilities.
• Producing a barrel of Tars Sand oil emits three times more greenhouse gases than producing a barrel of conventional oil, making Tar Sands oil some of the dirtiest on the planet.
• If current development plans proceed, by 2020 the Tar Sands will release twice as many greenhouse gases as are currently produced by all the cars and trucks in Canada.
• As one of the largest, most intact old-growth forests left on Earth, containing more carbon per hectare than any other ecosystem, the boreal forest provides ecosystem services that are globally important in mitigating climate change.  The more forest disturbed for the Tar Sands, the more stored carbon released.
• In order to prevent catastrophic consequences from global warming, developed countries are required to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020.  The Conservative federal government’s emissions plan calls for a reduction of 20% below 2006 levels by 2020, which is equivalent to an increase of 2% over 1990 levels.

Resource usage:

• For open pit mining of Tar Sands oil, two tons of overlay rocks and soil are removed and another two tons of tar sands are processed to produce just one barrel of oil (roughly 1/8 of a ton).
• Tar Sands extraction utilizes enough natural gas to heat over 3 million homes in Canada. Its rapid depletion of natural gas is not only hastening the return to coal for domestic heating and power generation, but it is also driving Canada’s so-called nuclear renaissance.  Canada may well become the first nation to use nuclear energy not to retire fossil fuels, but to accelerate their exploitation.
• 2 and 4.5 barrels of water are used to produce each barrel of oil. Every day, Canada exports one million barrels of bitumen to the United States and three million barrels of virtual water.
• Tar Sands operations are currently allowed to draw 349 million cubic metres of water per year, twice that utilized by the city of Calgary. An estimated 82% of this water comes from the Athabasca River, which is already facing loss of glacial water from the Colombia Ice Fields due to global warming.

Environmental concerns:

• Industrial development of the scale of the Alberta Tar Sands could push the boreal ecosystem over its tipping point and lead to irreversible ecological damage and loss of biodiversity.
• About 90% of the water used to process the Tar Sands ends up in acutely toxic tailing ponds that line the Athabaska River and threaten the health of the whole river basin. For every barrel of oil extracted, six barrels of tailings are produced.
• According to a recent Environmental Defense report, the ponds are already leaking over 11 million litres a day of contaminated water into the environment.  Should proposed projects proceed on schedule, 2012 would see a five-fold increase, to over 25 billion litres a year.
• Tailing ‘ponds’ cover more than 50 sq km and can be seen from space.  The largest tailings ‘pond’, controlled by Syncrude, contains 540 million cubic meters of poison waste water, making it, by volume of material, the second largest dam on the earth.
• Tailing ‘ponds’ are so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing on them.  Regardless, they result in over 8,000 oiled and drowned birds annually and in one incident last April, 500 ducks died after landing on one of Syncrude’s ponds, which did not have noisemakers set up.
• A recent report estimated that, because the Tar Sands belt is on the migratory route of North American ducks and other waterfowl, over the next 30 to 50 years, as many as 166 million birds could be lost, due to loss of breeding areas and from birds landing in tailing ponds of waste that look like real bodies of water.
• Canada has no national water policy and one of the worst records of pollution enforcement of any industrial nation.
• Because of the effects of global warming, intact northern forest ecosystems will become very important to the forest birds and wildlife that will need to migrate northward in order to survive.
• Addition to the already massive pipeline network that exists, Tar Sands development plans include pipeline expansions and additions from northern Alberta into the U.S., and to B.C.  The latter could see the building of a supertanker port in Kitimat and oil tankers exporting oil via the Inside Passage of northern B.C. waters.
• A recent recommendation from the Cumulative Environment Management Association (CEMA) asking for a freeze until 2011 on sales of mineral rights in an area marked for conservation was rejected by the Alberta government.  CEMA’s members represent government agencies, environmental groups, aboriginal communities and around 30 oil companies.  Millions of dollars have been spent commissioning studies and making plans.

Health concerns:

• Downstream aboriginal populations are experiencing increased respiratory diseases, rare cancers and cardiovascular problems, suspected to be caused by toxic substances that have leached downstream from Tar Sands production.
• Oil contamination in the local watershed has led to arsenic in moose meat – a dietary staple for the First Nations peoples – up to 33 times acceptable levels.  Game animals are being discovered with tumours and mutations.
• Deformed fish have been found in nearby Lake Athabaska and drinking water has been contaminated.

Youth and future generations:

• The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) provides the basis for global action “to protect the global climate system for present and future generations”.  Canada is a member.
• The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) states, “Present generations should take into account possible consequences for future generations of major projects before these are carried out.”  Canada is a member.
• Last December, the BC Youth Parliament carried a resolution opposing the Alberta Tar Sands, 57-20.

Political greenwashing: Just like filtered cigarettes tried to make people believe it was safe to smoke, so goes the lie of carbon capture and storage (CCS) – capturing CO2 and pumping it underground – for the Tar Sands.

• Canadians are given the impression that CCS is a silver bullet that’s just around the corner.
• According to WWF Canada, the science tells us that it may be technically feasible (though exceedingly expensive) to capture 90% of the carbon emitted by a new coal-fired generator, but just 10% of the greenhouse gases associated with oil from tar sands.  The governments of Canada and Alberta know this.
• “Oil sands operations are very diverse (both geographically and technically) and only a small portion of the carbon dioxide streams are currently amenable for carbon capture and storage,” states a January 2009 report, Canada’s Fossil Energy Future: Carbon Capture and Storage, based on the findings of a joint Canada and Alberta task force on CCS.
• Even if CCS proves feasible for some of the Tar Sands emissions, since there are no commercial scale projects of CSS for tar sands, costs remain highly uncertain, with best estimates that CCS would increase production cost by 30-60%.  Who is going to pay for that?
• A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that “the first commercial CCS plant won’t be on stream until 2030 at the earliest.”  Even Oil-giant Shell “doesn’t foresee CCS being in widespread use until 2050.”  We need to start reducing GHG emissions now.
• Science is currently unable to predict precisely the possible repercussions of storing CO2 underground.  Once buried it may leak out slowly or have a more disastrous potential, for example in the case of an earthquake.  This raises issues around ownership and liability.   The above report also states that “liability will transfer to relevant government jurisdictions once a project moves to the post-abandonment phase.”
• Even if CCS were practical and affordable with the tar sands, we’re still left with the downstream emissions from its combustion by cars, trucks and planes.
• The Conservative’s emission plan calls for intensity based targets for the tar sands industry. This means that emissions have to be reduced per barrel, but overall emissions are allowed to grow as industry increases output.

Viable alternatives:

• If the billions of dollars involved were redirected into renewable energy, we could be well on our way towards a sustainable future.
• Expansion of the renewable energy industry would create jobs that could replace those lost if the Tar Sands were phased out and, at the same time, would address the global warming crisis. According to analysts from the Centre for American Progress, every investment of $1 billion in clean energy programs creates nearly 5,000 more jobs than traditional infrastructure spending.
• Canada should invest at least the dollars slated for CCS and Tar Sands tax incentives to renewable energy research and incentives and join the International Renewable Energy Association so as to connect globally with renewable energy development.  To not do so is to take a step backwards environmentally and economically, which will likely result in renewable energy investments flowing to the US and other countries.  (So far the Canadian government has refused to join this organization.)

Additional information and points:

• Canadians deserve a more honest debate about tar sands development. If the leaders of our two major national parties cling to the outdated notion that we need to promote and endure environmental devastation to grow the economy, then let them say so.
• The current Canadian government is not seen as independent from oil interests. In July 2008 alone, oil sands companies held a total of 36 meetings with Canadian ministers and government officials, according to recently disclosed lobbying reports, while only seven environmental groups and associations reported lobbying activity.
• Canada’s Fossil Energy Future: Carbon Capture and Storage report states, “petroleum resources are expected to dominate Canada’s energy supply needs for the next several decades.”  It appears that the current government has little intention of moving aggressively ahead on renewable energy sources.
• More than $200 billion has been invested so far in the Tar Sands.  The Alberta and federal governments have made a $2.5 billion “investment” in CCS, an unproven technology that will directly benefit the fossil fuel industry – a relatively small investment to keep Tar Sands projects moving ahead.  Meanwhile the Canadian government is putting only $1 billion (over 5 years) towards developing carbon-free technologies such as wind and solar, has cut funding to its Renewable Power program, ecoEnergy, and has not allocated any funding to ‘shovel-ready’ wind-energy projects.
• While other governments push forward with hard caps on emissions, the Canadian government lobbies the U.S. for softer “intensity-based” emission targets.
• Should taxpayers have to pay to reduce the pollution created by the high profit fossil fuel industry?
• Even if CCS were possible and feasible, it cannot mitigate the negative impacts on the boreal forest.
• The main development incentive for the Tar Sands is the Accelerated Capital Cost Allowance (ACCA) which, since 1996, has applied to both surface and underground mining in the Tar Sands. It allows the individual Tar Sands projects to write off all of their capital costs before they start to pay income tax.
• The increasing exploitation of Canada‘s tar sands amounts to a massive investment – locking in a high carbon North American transportation system at the same time that we need to urgently tackle climate change. There can be no energy security, or indeed any kind of lasting security, without a stable climate.
• It is time that Canada take future generations into account and halt future Tar Sands projects and phase out existing ones.
• Enforcing adequate protection measures for the Boreal Forest, a treasure that does not just belong to Alberta or Canada but to the whole planet and to future generations, is a responsibility that Canadians owe to the world.
• A recent Ipsos Reid poll found that overall, 64% of Canadians say development of Alberta’s Tar Sands should be halted until a clean method can be found, as do 47% of Albertans.  Three-quarters of Canadians say we should only adopt stimulus measures that are environmentally sustainable.  It is time our government listens to us.
• If the fossil fuel industry is allowed to proceed with its current plans, greenhouse gas emissions in Canada will grow to 827 million tonnes in 2010, 44% beyond what Canada is permitted under the Kyoto Protocol and a far cry from the 80-100% reduction that scientist say is essential to stabilize the climate.  If the world burned all of Canada’s estimated fossil fuel deposits, global concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere would rise by about 20% beyond 1990 levels.

See also an excerpt from Guy Dauncey’s forthcoming book, The Climate Change Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming, for some very useful information on “clean coal” http://westcoastclimateequity.org/?p=2366

“Legislation will not change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless.”                                   Martin Luther King

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Editor’s note: This Briefing Paper for the Canadian Government, along with its List of References and Excerpts, will be updated from time to time as newer information on global climatic disruption becomes evident. We will keep these documents permantly available on our Resources Page for policy makers in Canada and in other countries as well.

BRIEFING PAPER FOR CANADIAN GOVERNMENT ON ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC URGENCIES OF GLOBAL WARMING:

http://westcoastclimateequity.org/?p=1519

LIST OF REFERENCES AND EXCERPTS TO ACCOMPANY BRIEFING PAPER ON GLOBAL WARMING:

http://westcoastclimateequity.org/?p=1459

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Editor’s note: the following Declaration of Climate Crisis Cooperation was prepared by Jan Slakov for Candidates running for Member of Parliament in the Canadian federal election of 14 October 2008.

INTRODUCTION PAGE FOR DECLARATION FOR CLIMATE CRISIS COOPERATION:

An Invitation to Candidates to “Sign On.”

An important national election will take place in Canada on October 14. Please copy and email this declaration to candidates for Member of Parliament, or print it out and take it with you to candidates’ meetings. Remember to ask them for a response. In view of the impending world climate crisis, we should expect them to agree wholeheartedly to “sign on” and take action.

There can be no doubt that we face a crisis of unparalleled proportions due to the inter-related threats of climate change, peak oil, war, water shortages and ecosystem destruction. Credible scientists and researchers such as George Monbiot, James Hansen and Andrew Weaver are calling on humanity to cut GHG emissions by at least 60% over the next 20 years, which means the rich world will need to cut its emissions by about 90%.

Unless we cut emissions, and soon, we risk, within 100 months, crossing the tipping point for runaway global warming and climate change, after which our efforts to prevent climate change would be futile. Our goal must be to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) levels in the atmosphere, which are already dangerously high, to 350 ppm CO2 or a total GHG level of 400 CO2 equivalents.

However, instead of falling, atmospheric GHG levels are rising at increasing rates. And how could it be otherwise, as we destroy ecosystems that naturally sequester carbon, dig up more fossil fuels, build more petroleum-dependent transportation infrastructure, coal-fired power plants and other unsafe, unsustainable “development” and squander precious resources on war & militarism?

Meanwhile, we know, thanks to the work of Monbiot, Hansen, Guy Dauncey and others, it is entirely feasible to achieve the drastic cuts they recommend.

For more information, you can access our “Background Information” sheet at
http://WestCoastClimateEquity.org
Email: info@westcoastclimateequity.org

DECLARATION FOR CLIMATE CRISIS COOPERATION

As a candidate and potentially an elected representative, I am committed to work with others, within my own party and across party lines, to steer Canada away from economic growth which requires non-renewable resources and towards an innovative green economy that values, protects, and restores ecological health.

1) I support the establishment of a permanent multi-party standing committee on climate change, which would produce policy blueprints for government, based on input from the scientific community and civil society.

2) I support the recommendations of the 2005 Stern Commission on The Economics of Climate Change. Once the costs of fossil fuel pollution are internalized, following the “polluter pays” principle, and fossil fuel subsidies are prohibited, the power of the market will drive the conversion from the suicidal fossil fueled economy towards a safe, renewable energy economy.

3) Canada must respect its international obligations. This includes its commitment to the UN Framework Climate Change Convention (FCCC) as one of the Annex 1, or industrially developed nations.

4) I want to build on previous examples of cross-party cooperation towards sustainability. For example, in 2003 members from all federal parties supported and passed the Well-Being Measurement Resolution. I will work to follow through on this initiative to establish a Canadian Genuine Progress Index.

In June of this year, Canada’s Parliament passed the Sustainable Development Act which will help ensure governments live up to their environmental commitments. This law was inspired by the David Suzuki Foundation’s blueprint for Sustainability Within a Generation and was supported by ALL federal parties. I will work to see that the goals outlined in the act are pursued vigorously and that the Federal government itself studies the blueprint and adopts measures suggested to attain the goals.

Canadians must do their part to prevent the collapse of the ecological systems on which life, and human civilization, depend. Because Canadian levels of GHG emissions are among the highest per capita in the world, and because we enjoy democratic rights and access to resources unavailable to people in most other parts of the world, we have a special responsibility to act.

Background Information for Declaration of Climate Crisis Responsibility:

This “backgrounder” is designed to provide links and quotes from some of the abundant information available relating to the Declaration for Climate Crisis Cooperation.

For information on how serious the crisis is, check out:

http://climatecodered.net
http://www.onehundredmonths.org
http://www.350.org/en/about/science
http://www.earthfuture.com/
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/sbfxot55p5k3kd454n14zvyy01082008141045.pdf

Note: The 4th Global Environmental Outlook (GEO4) by the United Nations Environmental Program published October 2007 issued their last wakeup call that global climate change and the ongoing destruction of global ecosystems now threaten the very survival of humanity.

For more information about the GHG concentration levels required to prevent runaway climate change, check out:
http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/320

One quote from the 350.org website:
As James Hansen of America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the first scientist to warn about global warming more than two decades ago, wrote recently, “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

That will be a hard task, but not impossible. We need to stop taking that carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. Above all, that means we need to stop burning so much coal‹and start using solar and wind energy and other such sources of renewable energy ¬while ensuring the Global South a fair chance to develop. If we do, then the earth will slowly cycle some of that extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and eventually we’ll return to a safe level. By decreasing use of other fossil fuels, and improving agricultural and forestry practices around the world, we could get back to 350 by mid-century. But the longer we remain in the danger zone (above 350) the more likely that we will see disastrous climate impacts.

Some people will argue that the danger from our production of greenhouse gases (GHG) is over-stated or even non-existent. The Suzuki Foundation website at: http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/Science/Skeptics.asp
has convincing responses to the claims of the climate change denial industry.

The Sierra Club of Canada has prepared a comparison of Canada’s federal parties on their climate change platforms, available at: http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/vote-canada/2008/voters-guide-climate-crisis-election.pdf
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With regard to the costs of militarism, it’s worth noting that according to http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29925, the US military is the single largest consumer of energy in the world. In her article, Every War is a War Against the Earth, in the Jan/Feb. 2002 issue of Audubon Magazine, Kathleen Dean Moore describes some of the horrendous consequences of militarism on the natural world. In terms of statistics, she says:

The U.S. Department of Defense “creates more than five times as much toxic waste as the five major U.S. chemical companies,” according to Susan Lanier-Graham, author of The Ecology of War. An F-16 burns in a single hour more fuel than an average American will burn in two years.

The World Game Institute (http://iggi.unesco.or.kr/web/iggi_docs/01/952580686.pdf, p. 6) has tallied up how much it would cost to fund 17 programs for “what the world wants”, including landmine removal, eliminating starvation, providing clean, safe energy through efficiency and renewables, providing health care and AIDS control, stopping deforestation and soil erosion and more. That comes to less than one third of what is squandered on militarism.

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Could we cut our GHG emissions drastically and still have access to the necessities of life? One thing is certain; we have not seriously tried the many options for transforming our economy that researchers suggest. Some useful suggestions can be found in the first 5 websites listed above. Books, such as The Bridge at the Edge of the World by James Gustave Speth, Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change by Guy Dauncey and Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning by George Monbiot also provide useful suggestions for necessary changes if we want the earth to be livable into the next century.

One solution that has been largely over-looked until recently is protecting natural ecosystems, especially forests, wetlands and other areas rich in biological activity, because of their ability to sequester carbon naturally. Soil is an integral part of the natural carbon cycle so farms need to use techniques which protect the soil’s ability to sequester carbon. More information can be found on websites such as:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_sink#Soils_2
http://soilcarboncoalition.org/
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/700.html

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THE BIG ARCTIC MELT – A VERY BIG PROBLEM FOR PLANET EARTH

Dorothy Cutting
December 5, 2007

On Sunday, September 16, 2007, people in the Los Angeles and San Diego area, sitting with their families at the breakfast table, were probably talking about the record drought the state was experiencing and the inconvenience of water rationing. In all likelihood, they could not have known that this day was to mark an historical occurrence that would affect their lives forever. For, thousands of kilometers to the north, the Polar Ice Cap was melting at an unprecedented rate, and on September 16, the extent of the ice surface reached its record low.

According to veteran science writer John D. Cox in a special to the Sacramento Bee on November 4, 2007, a U.S. – Arctic link was discovered in 2004 by climate researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Their computer simulations of shrinking sea ice showed that, outside of the Arctic itself, the most striking impact is the formation of a large, stubborn atmospheric feature off the West Coast that, like a boulder in a stream, deflects winter storms northward. Weather changes in winter would leave California’s water supply especially vulnerable. The state receives roughly 75 percent of its precipitation during the season and depends heavily on capturing the winter excess for use during its long, dry summers.” http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/468894.html

That day in September must not have seemed so unusual to the people of California. It was just another hot, dry day. They might have said, “This can’t last forever.” They didn’t know the horrific November wildfires in Southern California were still to come and that the drought they were experiencing could last well into the future. Indeed, throughout the World, more trouble was ahead, in the form of drought, floods, storms and rising sea level beyond anyone’s imagining.

ARKTOS

The word “Arctic” derives from “Arktos, the Greek word for “bear,” and it is easy to imagine a great white bear lying across our polar north, her mantle spread to protect our cold seas from the heat of the sun. For the last ten thousand years of our civilization, the Polar ice cap has helped keep our planet habitable for the living species found on Earth today. But in the middle of the 20th century, this changed. Slowly and erratically, the ice cover began shrinking and thinning. This weakening continued until the summer of 2007, when our “Arcus” was dealt a death blow. Between 1980 and 2005, according to Dr. James Overland of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, half of the polar ice melted away. An additional 22% or 1.19 million square kilometres, was lost between 2005 and 2007. On September 16th of this year, the Polar ice cap was reduced to an all-time low, represented on a graph as a long, sharp descending line, almost a 180 degree trajectory. The surface ice lost is the same as the area of Texas and California combined.

Put another way, in the years between 1980 and 2003, the Arctic’s ice cover was reduced by 1.6 million square kilometres. It lost nearly as much in this past year alone. Whereas, between 1979 and 2005, the rate of ice retreat, or shrinkage, averaged 7 percent per decade, in the two years between 2005 and 2007, that rate has increased to more than 20 percent.

Scientists are universally shocked. The use of the word, “catastrophic” to describe the huge Arctic thaw this past summer is not uncommon.

The Arctic ice has begun to refreeze now, but slowly, and there will be much less ice next May when the summer thaw starts than there was in 2006. Thus more of the Arctic Ocean will be exposed to the sun, and the warmer ocean water under the ice will speed its melt, causing a classic example of a positive feedback loop, or “vicious circle. The warming created by this feedback loop will drive another one, the melting of the permafrost and the consequent eventual release of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and methane, now in a frozen state. (Methane, by the way, according to Dr. James Lovelock, is 24 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.) And, of course, this GHG release will raise global temperatures even more, causing more melting of the world’s glaciers and ice sheets, which will raise the sea level. And so on, tragically. There is new evidence just released of dramatic warming of the Arctic. Speaking at an American Meteorological Society seminar in Washington, DC on November 26, Dr. Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said that the temperature anomaly this October was 12-14C degrees above normal. http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/ESSSarchiveclimatechange.html#112607

This, by itself, is cause for alarm, but more disturbing is the fact scientists don’t have as yet the ability to predict when all the summer ice will be gone. To determine this with any degree of accuracy, one should know how fast it is thinning. We can see how fast it is shrinking from the outside in from satellite images, but we don’t have a truly precise measurement of the thickness of the ice cap. Dr. Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at the Cambridge University Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, has said in private correspondence, “the real long-term record of thickness (from 1958) comes from submarines.” Satellites do not give a good representation of ice thickness.

This does not mean that efforts have not been made to find an answer. In 2000 the British Royal Navy released its last classified figures for analysis, and on August 23 of that year, in an article in The Guardian, Dr. Wadhams stated, “the average ice thickness in summer has decreased by 40% between the 1970s and now.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2000/aug/23/g2.weather. He was a veteran of Arctic submarine voyages in the Fram Strait area where “upward-looking sonar” was used to measure the thickness of the ice.

Dr. Wadhams was not the only scientist to make these measurements. In 1999, Drew Rothrock, Associate Professor of Oceanography at the University of Washington Polar Science Center in Seattle, published a paper at http://psc.apl.washington.edu/thinning/thinning.html, where he stated that the “volume is down by some 40% (since 1953). The thinning is remarkable in that it has occurred in a major portion of the perennially ice-covered Arctic Ocean.” This information was reported by BBC News Online on December 7, 2000: “Arctic sea ice ‘thins by almost half.’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1058353.stm

Since the year 2000, there has been apparently much more reliance on satellite data than upward looking submarine sonar to measure the Polar ice cap. So we know a great deal about the shrinkage of the ice, but not as much about its thinning. The newer submarines in use by the US Navy do not have the more accurate sonar with which the older ones were equipped. Professor Rothrock says US submarines will have better sonar this coming year, and hopefully this will yield a more accurate picture of the true mass of the ice cap.

CAN WE SAVE THE POLAR ICE CAP?

There has been much debate on this subject, but one thing is now certain. New research shows the Arctic Sea ice to be melting faster than predicted by any of the 18 computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in preparing its 2007 assessments. Many estimates for the year when the summer ice will be gone now range from 2013 to the 2030’s, whereas only a few years ago, the most ominous estimate was for 2050, with the IPCC predicting the Arctic Ice Cap would not melt before the end of this century.

Is there hope the Arctic ice can be restored to its mid-twentieth century state? The answer according to Dr. Overland is “No.” He said a consensus was reached in a meeting of polar scientists he attended in late October that, “it’s never going back.” As the air and water temperatures continue to warm, we can expect a greater rate of ice loss annually, until it’s gone.

The Australian organization Carbon Equity issued a report  in October of this year, “The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007” (http://www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf) that points to the alarming effect the ice loss will have for the world’s climate:

“The data surveyed suggests strongly that in many key areas the IPCC process has been so deficient as to be an unreliable and indeed a misleading basis for policy-making.. Take just one example: the most fundamental and widely supported tenet – that 2°C represents a reasonable maximum target if we are to avoid dangerous climate change – can no longer be defended. Today at less than a 1°C rise the Arctic sea ice is headed for very rapid disintegration, in all likelihood triggering the irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet and catastrophic sea level increases. Many species are on the precipice, climate change-induced drought or changing monsoon patterns are sweeping every continent, the carbon sinks are losing capacity and the seas are acidifying.. The Arctic began to lose volume at least 20 years ago when the global temperature was about 0.5°C over the pre-industrial level. So we can now see that to protect the Arctic the average global temperature rise should be under 0.5°C.” At 0.8 degrees C we are already beyond that point.

The melting Arctic is almost certainly having an effect on global weather, though those effects are not as yet clearly understood. More weather satellites and data collection are needed; for the whole continent of Africa, for example, there are only 28 satellites. But it is nonetheless clear that extreme weather has plagued the globe this year and has caused some of the highest temperatures on record.
For an astoundingly lengthy list of extreme weather events just from July to December, 2007, please click on The Heat is Online: http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=6517&method=full
CONCLUSION

What should be the response of world leaders to this crisis? Instead of the rational response, which would be alarm for the disastrous summer melt in the Arctic this year, and the effect this will have on our biosphere and our species, they are reacting shamefully in a frenzied scrabble to see which country can extract the most resources from this delicate area in the shortest time. Some pundits are calling this the “new cold war.”

Not only will great damage be caused to fragile ecosystems and endangered species in the process, but the eventual burning of the oil and gas removed from the melting Arctic will contribute greatly to global warming. Another powerful positive feedback loop will be set in motion.
It is now known that extreme weather events, in part caused by the melting Arctic, are being felt all over the Planet and will be experienced long into the future.

World and corporate leaders must no longer view the melting Arctic ice as a business opportunity for oil, gas and mining industries. Instead, they should act as stewards to protect this delicate area from further encroachment. It is vital for the sake of all life on our Planet they do all they can to slow the inevitable process of dissolution of the Polar ice cap. They should make public all data they have concerning the thickness and condition of the ice cover in their areas, and then make it a priority to allocate the necessary funds to discover the true state of the ice cap – both the shrinkage and the thinning. It is imperative we learn this in order to make the political and social decisions we need to save ourselves and our biosphere.

Arctic Nations should immediately negotiate a treaty, similar to that of the Antarctic, to protect the Polar north, for this area is crucial to the stabilization of our climate. They should make it clear to the rest of the world that the people of all nations have been put in jeopardy by the runaway melting in the North, and real and immediate advances on limiting greenhouse gas emissions are absolutely critical to our survival.

There are those who will say, appealing to world leaders to protect the Arctic ignores “political reality.” But there is another reality, the “physical reality” of present scientific data and direct observation of the consequences of the climate crisis. As evidence of the destructive effect of abrupt climate change becomes more widely recognized, the political reality will lose relevance for the people of our World. We should make our leaders understand that they are expendable if they don’t act to protect us. As the second-century-BCE Confucian philosopher Xunzi said, “The people are the water, the ruler is a boat. The water can keep the boat afloat; the water can also capsize it.”

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Note: Omitted are references to the over 100 recent articles I have read concerning the 2007 summer melt. They are filed in chronological order and are available on request. In addition, I have available articles and data collected from various institutions, such as the NSIDC, NOAA, Cryosphere Today, Arcus.org, etc.