ACCRA (AFP) — Time is running out in the fight against global warming, the UN's top climate change official warned as a new round of UN talks got started here Thursday.
"There is little time left to get a solid negotiating text on the table. Clearly the clock is ticking," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
"People in a burning house cannot afford to lose time in an argument," he said, citing an Ashanti proverb.
The Accra gathering must strive to "reach agreement on the rules and tools" that developed countries will use to cut greenhouse gas emissions, he told more than 1,600 delegates from 160 nations.
Ghana's President John Kufuor echoed the sense of urgency in his opening remarks, noting that his country was already suffering the consequences of global warming.
Rainfall in Ghana has decreased by 20 percent in three decades, and 1,000 square kilometres (400 square miles) of fertile agricultural land in the upper Volta Delta will be lost to rising sea levels and flooding if temperatures rise at their current pace, he said.
The expert-level meeting, which runs through August 27, is the third UN climate change conference since nations committed to adopting a binding climate accord no later than December 2009.
It is the last meeting ahead of a ministerial summit in Poznan, Poland in December where rich countries will be under intense pressure to nail down near-term commitments for reducing greenhouse gases.
The Group of Eight industrialised powers pledged to halve emissions by 2050, but critics say intermediate goals are needed.
"The real political commitment is short- and medium-term," Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, told delegates.
"We have to speed up the pace. The negotiations here in Accra must deliver concrete results" about what technologies will be used to cut emissions, she said.
Africa is arguably the continent most vulnerable to the potential ravages of climate change, which range from extreme drought to violent storms to rising sea levels.
De Boer challenged delegates to be "ambitious," and said if they failed Africa would continue, in terms of climate change, to be the "forgotten continent".
He insisted that rich countries step up financial assistance to help Africa with global warming.
African produces the fewest emissions, he pointed out, but will likely well pay the heaviest price.
De Boer and Kufuor underlined the threat of deforestation, which is destroying one of nature's most powerful natural buffers against global warming.
The world's forests -- which are disappearing at a rate of about 30 million hectares (74 million acres) per year -- soak up more than 20 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
"Governments need to focus on reducing emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation," and on how to reward countries that protect forests, said de Boer.
The problem is particularly acute in Amazonia, central Africa and Indonesia, experts note.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an environmental group, called on the Accra meeting to adopt the Olympic motto of "faster, higher, stronger."
"Progress on substance ... must be swifter, the level of ambition by both developed and developing countries higher, and the measures to reduce CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions stronger," said Kim Carstensen, director of the WWF's Global Climate Change Initiative.
Link to article: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5isWchF3RS1ANEuNQHhuyL-_te_FA
WASHINGTON — In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday.
And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year.
If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in southern Greenland.
The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier.
"The pictures speak for themselves," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University who spotted the changes while studying new satellite images. "This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It's just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off.... It is imminent."
The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn't worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists.
"As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north — and Petermann is as far north as you can get — it certainly adds to the concern," said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado.
The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming?
"It certainly is a major event," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. "It's a signal but we don't know what it means."
It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don't like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.
University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: "The crack is not alarming... I would say it is normal."
However, scientists note that it fits with the trend of melting glacial ice they first saw in the southern part of the massive island and seems to be marching north with time. Big cracks and breakaway pieces are foreboding signs of what's ahead.
Further south in Greenland, Box's satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland.
That concerns Colorado's Abdalati: "It could go back for miles and miles and there's no real mechanism to stop it."
Ohio State University images and data: http://bprc.osu.edu/MODIS/
Link to article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080821/ap_on_sc/sci_greenland_glaciersThe scientists also said that the margin of the massive Jakobshavn glacier has retreated inland further than at any time in the past 150 years of observation.
They believe, moreover, that it has not retreated so far inland "in at least the last 4,000 to 6,000 years."
Jakobshavn's northern branch has broken up in the last several weeks and the glacier has lost at least 10 square kilometers (three square miles) since the end of the last melt season, the researchers said.
About one-tenth of Greenland's icebergs come from Jakobshavn, making it the island's most productive glacier.
The glacier lost 94 square kilometers (36 square miles) of ice field betwen 2001 and 2005, a phenomenon that drew international attention to the impact of global warming on glaciers, the scientists said.
Meanwhile, the roof of an ice tunnel in Argentina's gigantic Perito Morena glacier, 60 meters high and weighing thousands of tonnes, suddenly collapsed July 8, a phenomenon unheard of in the dead of the southern hemisphere winter.
Scientists blamed global warming for the collapse.
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080821/sc_afp/usenvironmentclimategreenland_080821233046
A 29 sq. km (11 sq. mi.) area of the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland (80˚N, 60˚W) broke away between July 10th and by July 24th, 2008.
Petermann has a floating section 16 km (10 mi.) wide and 80 km (50 mi.) long, that is, 1295 sq. km (500 sq. mi.), the longest floating glacier in the Northern Hemisphere.
Here is an animation of the breakup
This 2008 breakup is actually not the largest observed. Between 2001 and 2000, 86.8 sq. km (33.5 sq. mi.) broke away from the Petermann front. However, more breakup is imminent in the next year, for a large crack has widened while moving toward the calving front.
ASTER image courtesy of Ian Howat showing Petermann Glacier crack.
Here is an annual (2001-2007) animation Ian Howat made of the crack flowing toward the glacier front while widening.
If the Petermann glacier breaks up back to the upstream rift, the loss would be as much as an additional 160 sq. km (60 sq. mi), a loss of one-third of the massive Petermann ice tongue.
The Petermann glacier thins from 600 m thickness at the grounding line to 70 m at the terminus, see [1]. The crack is advancing to a point where a massive breakup seems imminent, in which case, the area of break-up would be 56-60 sq. mi. (147-160 sq. km).
Animations:
Figures:
Contact:
+1 614 292 8384
; Holland.8@osu.edu
by Andy Coghlan, NewScientist Environment, 20 August 2008
FEELING blue about climate change? Don't despair. Psychologists say they can switch our mindset from fatalism to "can-do" optimism, making a unique and vital contribution to the fight against global warming.
On 15 August at the American Psychological Association meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, delegates vowed to expose, and help overcome, the psychological barriers individuals face. "It's so easy to feel overwhelmed and think: 'What can little me do?'," says David Uzzell of the University of Surrey, U.K.
Most people now accept that global warming is real and caused by human activity. Uzzell cites surveys carried out by the U.K. government this year showing that 80% of Brits are at least "fairly concerned" about climate change. A Stanford University poll conducted this August shows that 75% of Americans believe warming can only be reduced if individuals change their lifestyles. So why aren't we doing more?
A key deterrent, says Paul Stern of the U.S. National Research Council, is a lack of guidance on which actions would have the greatest positive impact. "Seeing a list of 50 things you can do to save the planet paralyses people," he says. "The usual behavioural reaction is to do nothing or pick a step you can do easily, such as switching out the lights when you leave a room. While alleviating people's anxiety, the actual effect of this is negligible."
To prompt people to take more effective steps, Stern has created a more manageable list of just 17 actions that have the biggest impact on energy use (http://tinyurl.com/59k2qo). These include changes to car use, which accounts for about 40% of a U.S. household's energy consumption, and indoor heating and cooling, which together make up 25%.
Equally crucial is telling those who take the plunge how much they are saving. "Instant feedback is really important," says Uzzell. "People need to see that their actions have effects that are local, immediate and concrete." Stern advocates energy monitoring devices that make savings more visible.
An under-appreciated barrier to action is the status conferred by some energy-guzzling products, such as large cars. "They're often sold as part of an image of masculinity," says Uzzell. "You're selling something larger than the product itself."
Though not at the meeting, Susie Burke of the Australian Psychological Society (APS) agrees. "One of the most vital things psychology can do is to help change social norms, so it becomes fashionable to recycle, for example," she says. "It's not brainwashing, it's acknowledging that humans like to behave in a socially acceptable way.
.”It's not brainwashing, it's acknowledging that humans like to behave in socially acceptable ways
This week, Stern, Uzzell and others are drafting a global policy for applying psychology to climate change, building on a similar initiative last year from the APS.
MODIS image of Jakobshavn Glacier with lines indicating continued retreat.
The Jakobshavn Glacier front retreated 14 sq. km (5 sq. mi.) between 6-15 August 2008. [BLOGGER'S NOTE: Obviously, there is something wrong either with the sentence just above or with the notes on the photo. The conservative guess would be to say that the glacier has retreated 5 sq. mi. in the past year, not in just 9 days, although, on one occasion a glacier was seen to rush out at a speed of over a kilometer per hour.]
Jakobshavn Glacier is the world’s fastest continuously flowing glacier and the main outlet from the vast 1.69 million sq. km Greenland ice sheet. Jakobshavn drains 6.5% of the ice sheet, producing 35–50 cubic km of icebergs per year.
The 2008 retreat is to a position further inland than any time over the past 150 years of direct observation and likely is further back than during any time since the Holocene Thermal Maximum 4-8 thousand years before present, because the interim period ends with the Little Ice Age c. 1250 AD - 1850 AD glacier advance.
Of distinction from a retreat trend mainly at the faster southern branch of Jakobshavn Glacier since 2001, is the northern branch has retreated in the past weeks. Repeat altimeter measurements show the northern branch thinning in recent years at an accelerated rate (Ian Howat, personal communication).
Image with end of summer positions indicated. We measure interannual changes using end of summer images because glaciers reach a seasonal minimum at the end of summer.
Between 2001 and 2005, a collapse of the Jakobshavn Glacier floating tongue removed 94 sq. km (36 sq. mi.).
Additional Figures:
Animations:
Page Constructed by Jason Box, Russ Benson, and David Decker, Byrd Polar Research Center.
Contact:
Link to article: http://bprc.osu.edu/MODIS/?p=24
