GLACIER MELT COULD SIGNAL FASTER RISE IN OCEAN LEVELS

The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are among the largest reservoirs of fresh water on Earth, and their fate is expected to be a major factor in determining how much the oceans will rise. Rignot and University of Kansas scientist Pannir Kanagaratnam, who published their findings yesterday in the journal Science, declined to guess how much the faster melting would raise sea levels but said current estimates of around 20 inches over the next century are probably too low.

While sea-level increases of a few feet may not sound like very much, they could have profound consequences on flood-prone countries such as Bangladesh and trigger severe weather around the world.

Planet's Population to Hit 6.5 Billion Saturday

A population milestone is about to be set on this jam-packed planet.

On Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:16 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the population here on this good Earth is projected to hit 6.5 billion people.

Once skeptics, Tories now preaching Kyoto climate-change gospel

OTTAWA (CP) - Environment Minister Rona Ambrose is jetting to Bonn this weekend to prepare for talks on extending the Kyoto Protocol, and will soon unveil an ambitious new plan for cutting Canada's greenhouse emissions.

Planktos, Inc. "Seeds of Iron " to Mitigate Climate Change

This story is about a proposal, by Planktos, Inc., to stimulate large-scale natural marine plankton blooms by "iron seeding", in-situ, for the purpose of scouring carbon dioxide from the air. Why do this? One reason is that if our collective response to Climate Change is limited to lessening future CO2 emissions with better technologies today, these same technologies may be used more intensely in the future. Such a narrow focus also overlooks legacy emissions of CO2 that will remain in the stratosphere for decades, possibly capable of cascading us, in one highly uncertain scenario, to a catastrophy which no amount of new technology or life style changing could reverse. The Planktos proposal would mitigate both the legacy CO2 emissions and future emissions from higher performing technologies. The response time for plankton stimulation is relatively short and done with more finality than other biotic mitigation techniques, such as tree planting. And, it does something crucial that "carbon sequestration", can not, which we'll explain a bit later.

Global Warming in Arctic Ocean May Mean Less Food

(AXcess News) Reno, NV - A warmer Arctic Ocean may mean less food for the birds, fish, and baleen whales and be a significant detriment to that fragile and interconnected polar ecosystem, and that doesn't bode well for other ocean ecosystems in the future.

That's the word from University of Miami Rosenstiel School's Dr. Sharon Smith who spoke on "Potentially Dramatic Changes in the Pelagic Ecosystems of the Marginal Seas of the Arctic Ocean due to Anthropogenic Warming," Monday afternoon at the American Geophysical Union's 2006 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu.

Swiss find frozen Siberia is heating up

Temperatures in Central Asia's mountain region have risen a lot more than was thought, according to new research by Swiss and Russian scientists.

The core was drilled in the area

between Belukha's two peaks (PSI)

Ice-core samples analysed at the Swiss-based Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) show that the temperature of the Belukha glacier has increased by 2.5 degrees Celsius in the past 150 years.

Dire Degrees

MAN-MADE greenhouse gases are being released into the atmosphere 30 times faster than at the time when the earth experienced a previous episode of global warming. A study comparing the rate at which carbon dioxide and methane are being emitted now compared to 55 million years ago when global warming also occurred has found dramatic differences in the speed of release.

James Zachos, professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says the speed of the current build-up of greenhouse gases is far greater than during the global warming that took place following the demise of the dinosaurs. “The emissions that caused this past episode of global warming probably lasted 10,000 years. By burning fossil fuels, we’re likely to emit the same amount over the next three centuries,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis.
He warns that studies of global warming events in the geological past indicate that earth’s climate passes a threshold beyond which climate change accelerates with the help of positive feed-backs — vicious circles of warming. Professor Zachos is a leading authority on the episode of global warming known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when average global temperatures increased by up to five degrees Celsius due to a massive release of carbon dioxide and methane. His research into the deep sediments of the ocean suggests that at this time about 4.5 billion tons of carbon entered the atmosphere over a period of 10,000 years. This will be the same amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from cars and industrial emissions over the next 300 years if present trends continue, he says.

Alpine glaciers keep on shrinking

Most of Switzerland's glaciers have continued to melt away, according to the latest measurements published by the Swiss Academy of Sciences.

Last year, 84 of the 91 glaciers studied got smaller, while the seven remaining ones did not change. These measurements confirm the results of previous campaigns, which clearly showed most Swiss glaciers shrinking.

The Trift glacier in central Switzerland was once again top of the list, losing 216 metres in length, while the Aletsch glacier in canton Valais, the longest in Europe, was 66 metres shorter.

Kilimanjaro snows melting faster

By comparing these with past data, they can calculate how much of Kilimanjaro's ice has vanished. About 82 percent of the ice fields were lost between the time they were first mapped in 1912 and 2000.

In 2002, the OSU team assessed the changes in the mountain's ice cover, comparing aerial photos from 2000 with those 1962. That showed that the tops of the ice fields had lowered by at least 17 metres during the period.

The latest expedition revealed that at three places on the margin of the northern ice field, a 50-metre high wall of ice has retreated between 4.8 and 5 metres since 2002.

Global Warming Puts the Arctic on Thin Ice

Average temperatures in the Arctic region are rising twice as fast as they are elsewhere in the world. Arctic ice is getting thinner, melting and rupturing. For example, the largest single block of ice in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, had been around for 3,000 years before it started cracking in 2000. Within two years it had split all the way through and is now breaking into pieces.




Since 1979, the size of the summer polar ice cap has shrunk more than 20 percent. (Illustration from NASA)

2005 Warmest Year Ever

Among fresh reports of warming's impact:

The World Meteorological Association said Thursday that in the Arctic Sea, where average winter temperatures have risen as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit over 50 years, the ice cap this summer was 20 percent smaller than the 1979-2004 average.

British oceanographers reported this month that Atlantic currents carrying warm water toward northern Europe have slowed. Freshwater from melting northern ice caps and glaciers is believed interfering with saltwater currents. Ultimately such a change could cool the European climate.

In southern Africa, beset by four years of drought, average temperatures during the 12-month period ending last July were the warmest on record, British scientists said. The mercury stood more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above a recent 40-year average.

In Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific, rising seas are forcing hundreds of islanders to abandon vulnerable coastal homes for higher ground, according to U.N. and news reports.

A small, vocal minority of climate skeptics, who long theorized manmade emissions weren't influencing the climate, has grown quieter as evidence of global warming and its effects has mounted.

Global warming hits skiing

Up to half of Switzerland's ski resorts are facing ruin because of global warming, and low altitude resorts in Austria, Germany and Italy expect to have no snow within a decade.

"We don't expect to have snow in low lying resorts such as Klosters for more than the next 10 years," Werner Schmultz, a professor at the World Radiation Centre, based in Davos, Switzerland, said last month.

"Our research suggests that since about 1980 the temperature increase from solar activity was steeper than ever. We estimate that 50 per cent of this is as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

"We can already measure climate change, and the rate of change will increase in the future. Politicians have a chance to realise this, and if they don't want to, it is deliberate ignorance."

Global warming prompts polar bear protection

Kassie Siegel: Polar bears are creatures of the Arctic. They're marine mammals, and they occur only in areas where there is sea ice for substantial portions of the year. They are losing their habitat to global warming because it is literally melting away.

Earth 'on fast track' to warming

Greenhouse gases are being released 30 times faster than the rate of emissions that triggered a period of extreme global warming in the Earth's past.

That is the conclusion of scientists who presented results at a conference in St Louis, in the US.

Glacial retreat warrants "endangered" status for U.S.-Canada parks: groups

HELENA, Mont. (AP) - Glacier National Park in Montana and adjacent Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta should be declared endangered, because climate change is eliminating glaciers and harming the park environment, a dozen organizations said in a petition.

Glacier has 27 glaciers, down from about 150 in 1850, said ecologist Dan Fagre, who co-ordinates global change research for the U.S. Geological Survey at West Glacier.

An area of 1,300 square miles of ice shelf in Antarctica shattered over a period of 35 days in early 2002. Scientists say melting ice could have catastrophic effects (EPA)

. A report by Rignot and Pannir Kanagaratnam of the University of Kansas appears Friday in the journal Science.

Gino Casassa, who studies glaciers at Chile's Centro de Estudios Cientificos, called the study a "major finding," since it may provide a missing link to the understanding of shrinking glaciers in Antarctica, Patagonia, Alaska and elsewhere around the globe. Previous studies have only hinted that increased flow rates played such a prominent role, Casassa said.

"This is the first time, with hard data, to conclude this," he said.

Rignot and Kanagaratnam believe warmer temperatures boost the amount of melt water that reaches where the glaciers flow over rock. That extra water lubricates the rivers of ice and eases their downhill movement toward the Atlantic. They tracked the speeds of the glaciers from space, using satellite data collected between 1996 and 2005.

Greenland's glaciers are dumping more than twice as much ice into the Atlantic Ocean now as 10 years ago

Icebergs dot coastal waters on the shores of Greenland in this view taken from a commercial airliner flying at 37,000 feet on September 2, 2004. Greenland's glaciers are dumping more than twice as much ice into the Atlantic Ocean now as 10 years ago because glaciers are sliding off the land more quickly, researchers said on Thursday. REUTERS/Andy Clark

glaciers in Greenland have been breaking off into the Atlantic

The Ilulissat fjord, on Greenland's western coast. Over the past five years, glaciers in Greenland have been breaking off into the Atlantic nearly twice as fast as previously thought, contributing one-sixth to a sea level rise, US researchers said(AFP/File/Slim Allagui)

International study on Arctic climate change produces startling findings

The crux of the research program - known as the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study - was a year-long expedition aboard the Canadian research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, which was deliberately frozen in an ice floe in Franklin Bay in December 2003.

Scientists sampled the winter and spring conditions in the Western Arctic, then continued sampling in the open waters of the MacKenzie Shelf until August 2004.

Further research will be done in the coming years to look at the socio-economic, cultural and geopolitical impact of climate change.

But the Inuit, who spend much of the year living off the sea and ice, are already feeling the negative effects, said Fortier.

The ice is not as safe for travel, houses are being washed away as shorelines erode by as much as six metres a year, and food sources such as caribou and seals could eventually disappear and be replaced by other species from other areas within the next century, he said.

Nasa Scientist grim warning

Hansen's current research explores the relationship between greenhouse gases and changes in temperature and sea level over the past 400,000 years. Climate scientists have looked for this sort of paleoclimate data for decades because it strengthens the argument that earth's current warming cycle is predominantly influenced by our carbon dioxide emissions.

Politics vs. climate reality

Would that the rise and fall of George C. Deutsch, 24, a

NASA

NASA political appointee, could become a metaphor - one taken all the way to its logical conclusion - for the Bush administration's policies on global warming. Deutsch has for months embodied the White House's earth-is-flat take on why the earth is warming, with consequences from melting glaciers to freak weather.

Scientists Warn of Melting Ice in Arctic

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Scientists on Monday painted a gloomy picture of the effects of global warming on the Arctic, warning of melting ocean ice, rising oceans, thawed permafrost and forests susceptible to bugs and fire.

"A lot of the stories you read make it sound like there's uncertainty," said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona. "There's not uncertainty."

January Was America's Warmest on Record

WASHINGTON - Recording the warmest January on record allowed Americans to save on their heating, but like all good things, last month's mildness seems to have been too good to last.

The country's average temperature for the month was 39.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 8.5 degrees above average for January, the National Climatic Data Center said Tuesday. The old record for January warmth was 37.3 degrees set in 1953.

Global warming threatens Tibet rail link

BEIJING (Reuters) - Global warming could threaten the new Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world's highest, within a decade, a Chinese researcher said in remarks published on Sunday.

Wu Ziwang, a frozen soil specialist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the official Xinhua news agency his research over three decades revealed large areas of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau showed signs of shrinking, as they were frozen less of the time.

This could threaten the new railway, which is to start operations this year, Wu said.

"Fast thawing of frozen soil in the plateau might greatly increase the instability of the ground, causing more grave geological problems in the frozen soil areas where major projects such as highways or railways run through," Wu added.

Global warming boosting Greenland glacier flow

LONDON (Reuters) - Two major glaciers in Greenland have recently begun to flow and break up more quickly under the onslaught of global warming, a new study said on Friday, raising the specter of millions drowning from rising sea levels.

The report from the University of Swansea's School of the Environment and Society said the Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim glaciers had doubled their rate of flow to the ocean over the past two years after steady movement during the 1990s.
This spurt meant that current environmental models of the rate of retreat of Greenland's giant ice sheet -- which could add seven meters to the height of the world's oceans if it disappears -- had underestimated the problem.

Warm Winter Weather Not Likely to Last

Just how warm was January?

_Warmest on record in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Green Bay, Wis., Kansas City, Mo., Riverton, Wyo., and Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Neb. It barely missed tying the record for Iowa.

_Second-warmest in Arkansas (tied with January 1933), Maine and in Milwaukee, Wis.

_Third-warmest in Memphis, Tenn., and Detroit.

_Fourth-warmest in New York's Central Park (tied with January 1913), in Greensboro, N.C., and Louisville, Ky.

_Eighth-warmest in Denver, and the warmest since 1986.

_10th warmest in Baltimore.

_Warmest since 1950 in Buffalo, N.Y., and Nashville, Tenn.

_12th-warmest in New Mexico.

Minneapolis and St. Paul had the warmest January in 160 years. Ice sculptures at the St. Paul Winter Carnival melted and broke up nearly as quickly as they were carved, and several big ice-fishing contests in Minnesota were canceled or moved because of thin ice.

highest annual average surface temperature worldwide

A woman throws water on herself at the Copacabana beach, with temperatures around 35 degrees Celsius, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006. Researchers calculated that 2005 produced the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since instrument recordings began in the late 1800s, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)