Eight years ago, I heard oceanographer Sylvia Earle keynote an international GIS conference. Her talk deepened my understanding of the importance of the oceans, which I pretty much got anyway, and of their fragility. They don't look fragile. I grew up in sailing family and they often felt vast, beautiful, awe-inspiring, moody, etc. But I wouldn't have used the word fragile until I heard Sylvia talk.
This morning, the Seattle Times reports that ocean acidification is happening faster than climate change models predicted (remember - one of my predictions for 2008 was that many indicators would, unfortunately, come faster than predicted). Apparently our coastlines are plagued by water that is hard for marine life to live in. As our might be soon (is? In some places, for sure, because of the same things we're doing that cause climate change).
Here is a short quote from the article, "All along the coast, the scientists found regions where the water was acidic enough to dissolve the shells and skeletons of clams, corals and many of the tiny creatures at the base of the marine food chain. Acidified water also can kill fish eggs and a wide range of marine larvae."

[BLOGGER'S NOTE: Every once in a while I like to post some older news articles in order to keep our memories fresh. For centigrade to Fahrenheit conversions, click here: http://www.wbuf.noaa.gov/tempfc.htm ]

by Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independent, Wednesday, 3 October 2007

Parts of the Arctic have experienced an unprecedented heatwave this summer, with one research station in the Canadian High Arctic recording temperatures above 20C, about 15C higher than the long-term average. The high temperatures were accompanied by a dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice in September to the lowest levels ever recorded, a further indication of how sensitive this region of the world is to global warming. Scientists from Queen's University in Ontario watched with amazement as their thermometers touched 22C (71.6F) during their July field expedition at the High Arctic camp on Melville Island, usually one of the coldest places in North America.

"This was exceptional for a place where the normal average temperatures are about 5C. This year we frequently recorded daytime temperatures of between 10C and 15C and on some days it went as high as 22C," said Scott Lamoureux, a professor of geography at Queen's.

"Even temperatures of 15C are higher than we'd expect and yet we recorded them for between 10 and 12 days during July. We won't know the August and September recordings until next year when we go back there but it appears the region has continued to be warm through the summer."

The high temperatures on the island caused catastrophic mudslides as the permafrost on hillsides melted, Professor Lamoureux said. "The landscape was being torn to pieces, literally before our eyes."

Other parts of the Arctic also experienced higher-than-normal temperatures, which indicate that the wider polar region may have experienced its hottest summer on record, according to Walt Meir of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

"It's been warm, with temperatures about 3C or 4C above normal for June, July and August, particularly to the north of Siberia where the temperatures have reached between 4C and 5C above average," Dr Meir said.

Unusually clear skies over the Arctic this summer have caused temperatures to rise. More sunlight has exacerbated the loss of sea ice, which fell to a record low of 4.28 million square kilometres (1.65 million square miles), some 39 per cent below the long-term average for the period 1979 to 2000. Dr Meir said: "While the decline of the ice started out fairly slowly in spring and early summer, it accelerated rapidly in July. By mid-August, we had already shattered all previous records for ice extent."

An international team of scientists on board the Polar Stern, a research ship operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, also felt the effects of an exceptionally warm Arctic summer. The scientists had anticipated that large areas of the Arctic would be covered by ice with a thickness of about two metres, but found that it had thinned to just one metre.

Instead of breaking through thicker ice at an expected speed of between 1 and 2 knots, the Polar Stern managed to cruise at 6 knots through thin ice and sometimes open water.

"We are in the midst of a phase of dramatic change in the Arctic," said Ursula Schauer, the chief scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, who was on board the Polar Stern expedition. "The ice cover of the North Polar Sea is dwindling, the ocean and the atmosphere are becoming steadily warmer, the ocean currents are changing," she said.

One scientist came back from the North Pole and reported that it was raining there, said David Carlson, the director of International Polar Year, the effort to highlight the climate issues of the Arctic and Antarctic. "It makes you wonder whether anyone has ever reported rain at the North Pole before."

Another team of scientists monitoring the movements of Ayles Ice Island off northern Canada reported that it had broken in two far earlier than expected, a further indication of warmer temperatures. And this summer, for the first time, an American sailing boat managed to traverse the North-west Passage from Nova Scotia to Alaska, a voyage usually made by icebreakers. Never before has a sail-powered vessel managed to get straight through the usually ice-blocked sea passage.

Inhabitants of the region are also noticing a significant change as a result of warmer summers, according to Shari Gearheard, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. "People who live in the region are noticing changes in sea ice. The earlier break-up and later freeze-up affect when and where people can go hunting, as well as safety for travel," she said.

Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: "We may see an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer within our lifetimes. The implications... are disturbing."

The North-west Passage: an ominous sign

The idea of a North-west Passage was born in 1493, when Pope Alexander VI divided the discovered world between Spain and Portugal, blocking England, France and Holland from a sea route to Asia. As it became clear a passage across Europe was impossible, the ambitious plan was hatched to seek out a route through north-western waters, and nations sent out explorers. When, in the 18th century, James Cook reported that Antarctic icebergs produced fresh water, the view that northern waters were not impossibly frozen was encouraged. In 1776 Cook himself was dispatched by the Admiralty with an Act promising a £20,000 prize, but he failed to push through a route north of Canada. His attempt preceded several British expeditions including a famous Victorian one by Sir John Franklin in 1845. Finally, in 1906 Roald Amundsen led the first trip across the passage to Alaska, and since then a number of fortified ships have followed. On 21 August this year, the North-west Passage was opened to ships not armed with icebreakers for the first time since records began.

Link to article: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/record-22c-temperatures-in-arctic-heatwave-394196.html

ScienceDaily (Jan. 17, 2008) — Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth's second warmest year in a century. Goddard Institute researchers used temperature data from weather stations on land, satellite measurements of sea ice temperature since 1982 and data from ships for earlier years.

The greatest warming in 2007 occurred in the Arctic, and neighboring high latitude regions. Global warming has a larger affect in polar areas, as the loss of snow and ice leads to more open water, which absorbs more sunlight and warmth. Snow and ice reflect sunlight; when they disappear, so too does their ability to deflect warming rays. The large Arctic warm anomaly of 2007 is consistent with observations of record low geographic extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2007.

"As we predicted last year, 2007 was warmer than 2006, continuing the strong warming trend of the past 30 years that has been confidently attributed to the effect of increasing human-made greenhouse gases," said James Hansen, director of NASA GISS.

"It is unlikely that 2008 will be a year with truly exceptional global mean temperature," said Hansen. "Barring a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature clearly exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next few years, at the time of the next El Nino, because of the background warming trend attributable to continuing increases of greenhouse gases."

The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.

A minor data processing error found in the GISS temperature analysis in early 2007 does not affect the present analysis (see green bars in the figure below for the changes). The data processing flaw was failure to apply NOAA adjustments to United States Historical Climatology Network stations in 2000-2006, as the records for those years were taken from a different data base (Global Historical Climatology Network). This flaw affected only 1.6% of the Earth's surface (contiguous 48 states) and only the several years in the 21st century.

The data processing flaw did not alter the ordering of the warmest years on record and the global ranks were unaffected. In the contiguous 48 states, the statistical tie among 1934, 1998 and 2005 as the warmest year(s) was unchanged. In the current analysis, in the flawed analysis, and in the published GISS analysis, 1934 is the warmest year in the contiguous states (but not globally) by an amount (magnitude of the order of 0.01°C) that is an order of magnitude smaller than the certainty.

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[BLOGGER'S NOTE: A lot of people doing google searches for Konrad Steffen get sent to this blog, so I am posting again the article from December 2007 on the Greenland Ice Sheet. The latest results on the ice sheet will not be published for many more months, so these are the most up-to-date results available, at the present time.]

Greenland Melt Accelerating, According To Climate Scientist

ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2007) — The 2007 melt extent on the Greenland ice sheet broke the 2005 summer melt record by 10 percent, making it the largest ever recorded there since satellite measurements began in 1979, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder climate scientist.

The melting increased by about 30 percent for the western part of Greenland from 1979 to 2006, with record melt years in 1987, 1991, 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2007, said CU-Boulder Professor Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Air temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet have increased by about 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991, primarily a result of the build-up of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, according to scientists.

Steffen gave a presentation on his research at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union held in San Francisco from Dec. 10 to Dec. 14. His team used data from the Defense Meteorology Satellite Program's Special Sensor Microwave Imager aboard several military and weather satellites to chart the area of melt, including rapid thinning and acceleration of ice into the ocean at Greenland's margins.

Steffen maintains an extensive climate-monitoring network of 22 stations on the Greenland ice sheet known as the Greenland Climate Network, transmitting hourly data via satellites to CU-Boulder to study ice-sheet processes.

Although Greenland has been thickening at higher elevations due to increases in snowfall, the gain is more than offset by an accelerating mass loss, primarily from rapidly thinning and accelerating outlet glaciers, Steffen said. "The amount of ice lost by Greenland over the last year is the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps, or a layer of water more than one-half mile deep covering Washington, D.C."

The Jacobshavn Glacier on the west coast of the ice sheet, a major Greenland outlet glacier draining roughly 8 percent of the ice sheet, has sped up nearly twofold in the last decade, he said. Nearby glaciers showed an increase in flow velocities of up to 50 percent during the summer melt period as a result of melt water draining to the ice-sheet bed, he said.

"The more lubrication there is under the ice, the faster that ice moves to the coast," said Steffen. "Those glaciers with floating ice 'tongues' also will increase in iceberg production."

Greenland is about one-fourth the size of the United States, and about 80 percent of its surface area is covered by the massive ice sheet. Greenland hosts about one-twentieth of the world's ice -- the equivalent of about 21 feet of global sea rise. The current contribution of Greenland ice melt to global sea levels is about 0.5 millimeters annually.

The most sensitive regions for future, rapid change in Greenland's ice volume are dynamic outlet glaciers like Jacobshavn, which has a deep channel reaching far inland, he said. "Inclusion of the dynamic processes of these glaciers in models will likely demonstrate that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment underestimated sea-level projections for the end of the 21st century," Steffen said.

Helicopter surveys indicate there has been an increase in cylindrical, vertical shafts in Greenland's ice known as moulins, which drain melt water from surface ponds down to bedrock, he said. Moulins, which resemble huge tunnels in the ice and may run vertically for several hundred feet, switch back and forth from vertical to horizontal as they descend toward the bottom of the ice sheet, he said.

"These melt-water drains seem to allow the ice sheet to respond more rapidly than expected to temperature spikes at the beginning of the annual warm season," Steffen said. "In recent years the melting has begun earlier than normal."

Steffen and his team have been using a rotating laser and a sophisticated digital camera and high-definition camera system provided by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to map the volume and geometry of moulins on the Greenland ice sheet to a depth of more than 1,500 feet. "We know the number of moulins is increasing," said Steffen. "The bigger question is how much water is reaching the bed of the ice sheet, and how quickly it gets there."

Steffen said the ice loss trend in Greenland is somewhat similar to the trend of Arctic sea ice in recent decades. In October, CU-Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center reported the 2007 Arctic sea-ice extent had plummeted to the lowest levels since satellite measurements began in 1979 and was 39 percent below the long-term average tracked from 1979 to 2007.

[BLOGGER'S NOTE: there are many more articles on the Greenland Ice Sheet on the same page as the above article, at this link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211233433.htm ]

CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For more information on Steffen's research, visit the Web site at: http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/steffen/.

The end quote of an interview that CNN published today with T. Boone Pickens is, "But we are going to have to do something different in America. You can't keep paying out $600 billion a year for oil."
The guts of the story are that Mr. Pickens is going into wind farming. I can't think of better people to do this than oilmen and oilwomen (surely there must be oilwomen?). These are people that understand the energy markets and know how to make viable energy businesses. And it takes their money - hopefully a lot of it -- out of the losing game of squeezing ever more oil out of every possible source.
Nice to have a bit of good news in this generally bad-news era.

Friday, 16 May 2008 03:31 UK

Over-fishing and demand for their fins as a delicacy have hit shark numbers Between a quarter and a third of the world's wildlife has been lost since 1970, according to data compiled by the Zoological Society of London. Populations of land-based species fell by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29%, it says. Humans are wiping out about 1% of all other species every year, and one of the "great extinction episodes" in the Earth's history is under way, it says. Pollution, farming and urban expansion, over-fishing and hunting are blamed. River dolphin The Living Planet Index, compiled by the society in partnership with the wildlife group WWF, tracks the fortunes of more than 1,400 species of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, using scientific publications and online databases. DEMANDING HUMANS See the pressure we are putting on the planet It said numbers had declined by 27% in the 35 years from 1970 to 2005. Some of the worst hit are marine species which saw their numbers plummet by 28% in just 10 years, between 1995 and 2005. Populations of ocean birds have fallen by 30% since the mid 1990s, while land-based populations have dropped by 25%. Reduced biodiversity means millions of people face a future where food supplies are more vulnerable to pests and disease and where water is in irregular or short supply James Leape Director general, WWF UK Among the creatures most seriously affected have been African antelopes, swordfish and hammerhead sharks. Another, the baiji - or Yangtze River Dolphin - may have been lost altogether. The findings were released ahead of a meeting of the Convention on Biodiversity in the German city of Bonn. The convention was signed in 1992 with the aim of stabilising the loss of species. In 2002, member states pledged to achieve a "significant reduction" in the current rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. But the Zoological Society said governments had since failed to put in place policies necessary to achieve that goal. It said that while species' decline does appear to have flattened off in recent years, it is "very unlikely" that the 2010 target will be reached. Impact on humans The WWF said that over the next 30 years, climate change was also expected to become a significant threat to species. Land-based species, such as African antelopes, have fallen by 25% Colin Butfield, head of campaigns at WWF UK, said: "Biodiversity underpins the health of the planet and has a direct impact on all our lives, so it is alarming that despite an increased awareness of environmental issues we continue to see a downward trend." The charity also warned that a failure to stop biodiversity loss would have a direct impact on humans. Director general James Leape said: "Reduced biodiversity means millions of people face a future where food supplies are more vulnerable to pests and disease and where water is in irregular or short supply. "No-one can escape the impact of biodiversity loss because reduced global diversity translates quite clearly into fewer new medicines, greater vulnerability to natural disasters and greater effects from global warming." The WWF is calling on governments meeting in Bonn to honour their commitments to put in place effective protected areas for wildlife and to adopt a target to achieve net annual zero deforestation by 2020. The UK's Biodiversity Minister, Joan Ruddock, said the report showed that the international community had to work together to stem the decline. "The fact that human activities have caused more rapid changes in biodiversity in the last 50 years than at any other time in human history should concern us all," she said. "Supporting wildlife is critical to all our futures and the UK will continue to give strong support to international action. "Schemes such as the Darwin Initiative have used UK expertise to help more that 490 wildlife conservation, regeneration and research projects in 146 countries." Lifestyles and the consumption of resources vary widely from country to country. On average each person needs 2.2 global hectares to support the demands they place on the environment, but the planet is only able to meet consumption levels of 1.8 global hectares per person.

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7403989.stm