CLIMATE CHANGE

GLOBAL WARMING IS HUMAN-CAUSED -- SCIENTISTS AGREE

[SMH, February 3, 2007]

The world has been delivered its strongest warning yet that human actions are causing global warming and that greenhouse gas emissions must be reined in by 2020 if humanity wants a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.

A turbulent future of violent storms, devastating drought, higher temperatures and rising sea levels is inevitable, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its 1200-page report in Paris last night. The work of 2500 scientists over six years, it is considered the most authoritative evaluation of climate change ever produced. It details six scenarios under which temperatures are predicted to rise from at least 1.1 degrees and possibly as much as 6.4 degrees by 2100.

The final text of the report says it is "very likely" that human activities led by burning fossil fuels account for most of the warming in the past 50 years. It puts this at a 90 per cent certainty - a significant ramping up of the language of the last report of the panel in 2001, which said the link was "likely." Scientists at the final four-day workshop said this was the most important paragraph of the report.

"There can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities," said the senior US Government scientist, Susan Solomon. She called the warming of the Earth "unequivocal and said greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere were not being cancelled by its normal processes.

The report provides what may be cold comfort in slightly reduced projections on rising sea levels -- from 18 centimetres to 59cm by 2100, instead of 9cm to 88cm, as forecast in 2001. But there is a flat pronouncement that global warming is essentially a runaway train that cannot be stopped for hundreds of years. Human-caused warming and rises in sea levels "would continue for centuries" because the process has already started, "even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised", said the 21-page executive summary, which will be delivered to the world's policy makers.

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," it said.

The Australian of the Year, the scientist Tim Flannery, said the highest temperature forecasts could spell disaster for many species. "[It] lays out a sort of middle-of-the road trajectory, which is alarming enough, I can tell you, for this century," Professor Flannery said. "Three degrees will be a disaster for all life on Earth. We will lose somewhere between two out of every 10 and six out of every 10 species living on the planet at that level of warming. It will set in train a series of climate consequences that will run for a thousand years."

The forecasted temperature rise is likely to mean Australia's average temperature rises by 0.7 within the next 20 years and as much as four degrees by the end of the century, the former head of CSIRO's atmospheric research division, Graeme Pearman, said. Other than a subsequent drop in rainfall, Professor Pearman said temperature and sea rises would have serious consequences for coastal communities. "Australia has continued to develop more and more towards a coastal community," he said.

Building codes had not been developed that would cope with the storms expected to lash the coast in coming years. The report had depressed him, Professor Pearman said. "We've been hoping someone would find we were wrong. It simply confirms the issue. It's the issue of whether human societies in general have the capacity to respond to a major threat like this. At the moment I'm not sure we are going to have that. I'm not sure we're going to respond in time."

The 2001 report led scientists to castigate the Australian Government for not taking urgent action six years ago. Labor will now head into the federal election determined to stake out the green vote with a climate policy that argues the cost of doing nothing will destroy the economy and the environment.

The Minister for Environment and Water, Malcolm Turnbull, said people needed to learn how to adapt to hotter temperatures. "We have to deal with our built environment in terms of how we deal with heat and energy efficiency and, of course, we have to use water more efficiently," Mr Turnbull said. He said meeting the Kyoto target - which allows Australia's emissions to continue to rise - was "virtuous" but would not change anything. "Of course we should seek to reduce them [emissions], because we are committed to becoming a good global citizen," he said.

The Government is exploring an emissions trading scheme and nuclear power as part of its climate-change strategy and has already committed millions of dollars to experimental technology such as clean coal and geosequestration. But these strategies are unlikely to deliver significant reductions in emissions for several decades. Polling by green groups shows voters see the environment as a big point of difference between the Government and the Opposition.

A meeting of Labor's shadow cabinet last week agreed to keep the former leader Kim Beazley's pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050. The Opposition has already promised to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, introduce emissions trading and boost the use of renewable energy, but it has not provided any clear timetable for how it would achieve the cuts. "We cannot deal with the water crisis without dealing with the climate-change crisis at the same time," said the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd.

The CSIRO says Australia's emissions must fall 60 per cent by 2050 compared with 1990. But the latest government figures show that by the end of this decade alone, gas emissions from electricity production will have risen by half on their 1990 levels. The president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck, said yesterday: "This intensive review of the past five years' scientific evidence was undertaken by hundreds of scientists worldwide and confirms what we already know -- we have now lost five years that could have been used in implementing remedial actions."

At the Paris meeting, there was a last-ditch bid to water down the statement from two nations — Saudi Arabia and another unnamed country (not the US or Australia) among the 130 countries represented at the plenary. It eventually passed intact after the meeting accepted a suggestion - initiated by the small Australian delegation - to deal with the dissenting country's concerns in a footnote. It states that there are remaining uncertainties over climate change "based on current methodologies."

Other areas of disagreement were over how much sea levels would rise, and concerns about the ferocity of future cyclones, said Dr Geoff Love, head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and a member of the Australian team. But he said it was not so much about the science as about the semantics in the summary. As the report co-author Philip Mote, the Washington state climatologist, said in translating his fellow scientists' language: "We did it."

He added: "Scientists are pretty well done arguing about whether the warming in the last 50 years is related to burning fossil fuels."

Professor Flannery said: "It's our problem. We have to do something about it. We have the tools. We're so far lacking the will."

ICE SHELF BREAKS AWAY FROM CANADA'S ARCTIC

[Associated Press, December 29, 2006]

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists say. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north.

Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake. Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the newly formed ice island and could not 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. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead," Vincent said today. In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said.

The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up tremors from it. The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 66 square kilometres in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic.

Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor. "It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 per cent 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. He 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 US and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

"What surprised us was how quickly it happened," he said. "It's pretty alarming. 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, but the big surprise is that for one they are going, but secondly that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour."

Within days, the floating ice shelf had drifted a few kilometres offshore. It travelled west for 50 kilometres until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early northern winter. The Canadian ice shelves are packed with ancient ice that dates back over 3,000 years. They float on the sea but are connected to land.

Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves got weaker and weaker as the temperature rose. He visited Ellesmere's Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in 2002 and noticed it 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," he said. "In the global perspective Antarctica has many ice shelves bigger than this one, but then there is the idea that these are indicators of climate change."

The spring thaw may bring another concern as the warming temperatures could release the ice shelf from its Arctic grip. Prevailing winds could then send the ice island southwards, deep into the Beaufort Sea.

"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said. "There's significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we'll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years."

Melting Arctic Ice May Be Leaving Walrus Pups Stranded

[Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and World Science staff, April 16, 2006]

Melting Arctic Ocean ice may be leaving walrus pups stranded, according to researchers.

“We were on a station for 24 hours, and the calves would be swimming around us crying. We couldn’t rescue them,” said Carin Ashjian, a member of the research team studying the animals.

[Picture shows a walrus pup alone in the Arctic Ocean, one of nine calves seen swimming far from shore and presumed to have died.]

Most scientists believe widespread melting of polar ices is due to global warming, a gradual increase in the Earth’s temperature caused by human use of fossil fuels. Last December, researchers claimed the melting may be pushing polar bears to suicidal swims and cannibalism.

Ashjian’s group reported seeing an unprecedented number of lone walrus calves. The melting may be forcing mothers to abandon them as the mothers follow the rapidly retreating ice edge north, according to the scientists.

Researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy reported seeing nine lone pups swimming in deep water far from shore during a cruise in the Canada Basin, two summers ago. The calves were likely to drown or starve, the scientists said.

Lone walrus calves far from shore had not been described before, the researchers wrote in the April issue of the research journal Aquatic Mammals. The strandings could cause “a significant population decline of this species,” the paper warned. The lead author is Lee W. Cooper, a biogeochemist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tenn.

Warmer oceans may have melted ice over a shallow continental shelf north of Alaska where walruses dive for clams and crabs, the researchers wrote. Walrus use the ice as a resting platform, and mothers leave the young there while they dive. Pacific walrus, Odobenus rosmarus divergens, forage for food by diving as far as 200 meters (about 630 feet) to the seafloor.

“The young can’t forage for themselves,” said Ashjian, a biologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Mass. “They don’t know how to eat,” and depend on their mothers’ milk for up to two years.

The researchers reported a mass of water as warm as 44° F (7° C) moving onto parts of the shelf from the Bering Sea to the south in 2004. This warm-water intrusion was more than six degrees higher than temperatures at the same time and place in 2002, they wrote.

NATIVE ALASKANS PROVIDE WEALTH OF INFORMATION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

[BBC, August 7, 2005]

For the past 20 years climatologists and ice and atmosphere scientists have been working in Alaska studying climate change. Now they have discovered a rich new source of records extending their knowledge back by decades through the oral history of native Alaskans.

Barrow [pictured] is the most northerly town in the United States, lying 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle. And 92-year-old Bertha Leavitt is its oldest inhabitant.

"When I was a child", she says, "it was so much colder and the winds in winter used to be fierce." She remembers her elders telling in their stories that the weather was going to change. And since her childhood she believes this has come true.

In a land where not just the rivers but also the sea freezes over, it is impossible not to be aware of the seasons. The ice in the arctic is getting much thinner, locals say Barrow whaling captain Percy Nusunginya has particular reason to be alert to change. Each autumn and spring his crew ventures out on the ice to fish at air holes. He says that working out on the Arctic Sea has become very dangerous.

"Nowadays ice conditions are thinner than in the 1970s and 80s. The ice used to be 20 to 30 feet thick but now it is more like 10 feet thick. But what can we do? Sometimes I feel sad but we just have to go with what we have got. Up here in the Arctic we are definitely warming up, the polar pack ice has all but gone."

Percy says Western nations need to have scientific proof that the climate is warming rather than believing the word of the native people but he adds: "The white man, the climatologists are just learning what we knew was going on."

Richard Glenn is a native Alaskan and a member of the Inupiat people, as well as an ice scientist. He is also president of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium which is helping to combine the rich environmental knowledge of the local people with the scientific study of climate change. There is a real camaraderie, a real sharing, he says, between the local people and the visiting experts.

One of the first to realise the value of local knowledge was Mike Spindler, a US fish and wildlife refuge manager from the Koyukuk and Nowitna National Wildlife Refuge several hundred miles away in the interior of Alaska. He first began collecting environmental observations from elders when he found that there had been no scientific research carried out in the area before 1980, when the Wildlife Refuge was created. He says elders have been providing a wealth of information about their environment which needed documenting.

Benedict Jones is an elder who still maintains a subsistence lifestyle. "I used to have glaciers up at my camp on the Koyukuk River, where the salmon berries used to grow. But the glaciers have all melted and the ground is drying up so there are no more salmon berries."

Further research projects to tap into elders' knowledge concerning climate change are under way at the University of Alaska's International Arctic Research Centre. And the recordings gathered are available to scientists. "In many of the interviews elders make reference to the 1970s as the time that they began to notice changes in the climate," says Mike.

An area near Mike's base is referred to as a "drunken forest". He explains that the spruce trees are falling over because of thawing permafrost. This could be due to changing climate, he says, or natural succession. But in the interviews elders have spoken of what they describe as crazy changes in the climate.

Margie Attla, an elder from the village of Galena, says "The last couple of years has been really crazy. It is kind of scary when the wind comes up at the wrong time and we have rain in the winter, the change is really there and I am not very comfortable with it."

SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE OZONE HOLE MAY BE ONE OF THE LARGEST EVER

[BBC, August 30, 2005]

New readings from the European satellite Envisat suggest that this year's southern hemisphere ozone hole may be one of the largest on record The hole covers an area of 10 million sq km (four million sq miles) -- approximately the same size as Europe. It is expected to continue expanding for two to three weeks.

There have been signs over the last two years that damage to the ozone layer has reduced, but a full recovery is not expected until around 2050.

The data comes from the Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (Sciamachy) on board Envisat, launched in 2002 and operated by the European Space Agency (Esa). Esa's Envisat is the largest Earth observation craft ever built (Image: EADS Astrium)

They show that the Antarctic ozone hole was larger in mid-August this year than at the same period in any year since 2000.

"We expect that depletion will continue for another month or so," Geir Braathen, senior scientific officer with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told the BBC News website. Typically, it reaches a maximum around mid-September, though the exact date varies from year to year. The biggest holes on record came in 2000 and 2003. This year's may be as big, but we will have to wait another two or three weeks to be sure."

Ozone depletion is caused by the release of various human-produced substances including chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and methyl bromide. An unstable molecule consisting of three oxygen atoms, ozone is constantly being produced and destroyed in the stratosphere, where it forms a protective layer against harmful ultra-violet radiation from the Sun.

Ozone depletion accelerates as sunlight returns at the end of the Antarctic winter Naturally, across the globe, production and destruction are roughly in equilibrium, though ozone concentrations above the poles rise each summer and decline during the winter months.

This seasonal variation is especially pronounced in the Antarctic, where a huge vortex spins above the continent, isolating its air from the rest of the atmosphere and preventing ozone from migrating in.

In the 1920s, the natural order began to change with the invention of CFCs, subsequently used widely for refrigeration and in various industrial applications. In cold conditions, polar stratospheric clouds form which contain ice crystals; compounds derived from CFCs lodge on their surfaces.

The polar sunlight falling onto these compounds transforms them further, into substances which catalyse the destruction of ozone. This process is much more active in winter, which adds to the seasonal dips in ozone concentration at both poles.

As well as varying from summer to winter, polar ozone levels also show changes from year to year. "The Arctic is far more variable than the Antarctic," commented Geir Braathen, "but there is inter-annual variation in the Antarctic which is down to variations in weather.

"There is something called the quasi-biennial oscillation, or QBO, where the wind above the Equator blows either east or west. That changes with a period of 26 months, and has ramifications for the Antarctic vortex - which is why we see inter-annual changes in ozone depletion there."

Two years ago researchers produced the first evidence that damage to the ozone layer is slowing down; globally, they showed, destruction continues, but at a slower rate than before. That is down to the Montreal Protocol, established in 1987, which has limited production and use of CFCs and related substances. But the indications are that the ozone layer will not be back to its pre-industrial condition for at least another 50 years.

AUSTRALIA JOINS FOUR OTHER NATIONS IN NEW GREENHOUSE PACT

[The Australian, July 27, 2005]

Australia has joined the US, China, India and South Korea in a secret regional pact on greenhouse emissions to replace the controversial Kyoto climate protocol. The alliance, which is yet to be announced, will bring together nations that together account for more than 40 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

To be known as the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate, the grouping will aim to use the latest technologies to limit emissions and to make sure the technologies are available in the areas and industries that need them most.

The US and Australia have refused to sign the Kyoto protocol -- an international agreement setting greenhouse gas emission targets for developed countries by 2012. China and India are not limited by it because they are considered developing economies.

The US initiative has been discussed between the five nations for five months and is viewed as a practical attempt to rein in greenhouse emissions without harming development or economic growth in the region. Prime Minister John Howard discussed the greenhouse strategy with US President George W.Bush and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a series of meetings at the White House during Mr Howard's trip to Washington last week. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held meetings with Mr Bush on the same topic on the same day.

The US has been driving the negotiations but Australia has been part of the deal, given its vital interests in coal and gas exports to China and South Korea, as well as negotiations with China on uranium sales for nuclear energy. While Mr Howard and Mr Bush concede there is a threat from climate change, they have refused to sign the Kyoto protocol and are instead looking at a "post-Kyoto" strategy.

The Howard Government, which believes Kyoto will harm Australia's economy and hurt coal exports, yesterday released a report on greenhouse gas emissions.

The report warned climate change was inevitable and Australia should expect higher temperatures, more droughts, severe cyclones and storm surges in the next 30-50 years. In Australia, the CSIRO predicts temperatures could rise between 1C and 6C by 2070. Average global temperatures have already risen 0.6C in the past 100 years as a result of accumulated greenhouse gases.

The report identifies Cairns, the Murray Darling Basin and south west West Australia as the three regions most vulnerable to the expected consequences of climate change. Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell conceded Australia would have to do more to reduce greenhouse gases but said the Kyoto protocol was not the answer.

"You need a comprehensive agreement that involves all of the major emitters. At the moment we don't have that," he said. "By moving more and more towards renewable (energy), such as solar and wind, and a whole range of technologies that we can develop here in Australia and ultimately export to places like China and India -- building partnerships with these countries is going to be the solution."

In April, The Australian revealed Australia's role in brokering the new-generation greenhouse reduction plan. Discussions at that stage focused on moving away from binding greenhouse gas reduction targets to voluntary emission reductions for industry. Mr Bush and Mr Howard are convinced modern technology, which can improve efficiency and reduce waste in industry and power generation, is the key to reducing greenhouse emissions.