Global Warming Bits & Pieces
Post
15/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, Scientist who refused to be silenced, (Source).
15/09/06, Independent, Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice, (Source).
17/02/06, Jim Hansen, Climate Change: On the Edge, (Source (no longer on-line)).
15/09/06, Independent, From Alaska to Australia, the world is changing in front of us, (Source).
14/09/06, Reuters, Milan fashionistas fear Spanish skinny model ban, (Source).
15/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, Scientist who refused to be silenced, (Back).
Two things about Jim Hansen have remained near-constant for the past 30 years. He has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the science of global warming, issuing warning after warning about the consequences for the planet if we do nothing to stop the creation of greenhouse gases. And he has run up against a wall of resistance from politicians and policy-makers who simply don't want to believe what they hear from him.
Under the current Bush administration, he has accused political appointees in the public affairs department at NASA, the space agency where he works, of deliberately blocking his access to the media and censoring the published fruits of his research. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, they responded to his warnings about climate change by paring his staff to the bone and cutting his funding.
Hansen is the very picture of reasonableness: a 65-year-old gentleman from Iowa who insists on presenting scientific fact without political spin. That has made him a menace in the eyes of the energy industry. His first testimony before Congress in 1988 drew considerable ire because he said he was only "99 per cent certain" of some of his claims - falling short of the absolute certainty expected of academic scientists.
Hansen, in turn, accused his adversaries of misrepresenting his testimony - whether it is congressional staffers seeking to minimise the impact of global warming or Michael Crichton, the novelist and global warming sceptic, picking holes in his claims in his novel State of Fear. "Some 'greenhouse sceptics'," he wrote in 2004, "subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a viewpoint."
According to Hansen: "Human-made forces, especially greenhouse gases, soot and other small particles, now exceed natural forces, and the world has begun to warm at a rate predicted by climate models."
Two things about Jim Hansen have remained near-constant for the past 30 years. He has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the science of global warming, issuing warning after warning about the consequences for the planet if we do nothing to stop the creation of greenhouse gases. And he has run up against a wall of resistance from politicians and policy-makers who simply don't want to believe what they hear from him.
Under the current Bush administration, he has accused political appointees in the public affairs department at NASA, the space agency where he works, of deliberately blocking his access to the media and censoring the published fruits of his research. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, they responded to his warnings about climate change by paring his staff to the bone and cutting his funding.
Hansen is the very picture of reasonableness: a 65-year-old gentleman from Iowa who insists on presenting scientific fact without political spin. That has made him a menace in the eyes of the energy industry. His first testimony before Congress in 1988 drew considerable ire because he said he was only "99 per cent certain" of some of his claims - falling short of the absolute certainty expected of academic scientists.
Hansen, in turn, accused his adversaries of misrepresenting his testimony - whether it is congressional staffers seeking to minimise the impact of global warming or Michael Crichton, the novelist and global warming sceptic, picking holes in his claims in his novel State of Fear. "Some 'greenhouse sceptics'," he wrote in 2004, "subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a viewpoint."
According to Hansen: "Human-made forces, especially greenhouse gases, soot and other small particles, now exceed natural forces, and the world has begun to warm at a rate predicted by climate models."
15/09/06, Independent, Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice, (Back).
Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice sparks global warning
Arctic meltdown is speeding up ... sea ice is vanishing faster than ever before ... polar bears face extinction ... and America's top climate scientist warns we only have a decade to save the planet
by Michael McCarthy and David Usborne
The melting of the sea ice in the Arctic, the clearest sign so far of global warming, has taken a sudden and enormous leap forward, in one of the most ominous developments yet in the onset of climate change.
Two separate studies by Nasa, using different satellite monitoring technologies, both show a great surge in the disappearance of Arctic ice cover in the last two years.
One, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, shows that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrank by 14 per cent in just 12 months between 2004 and 2005.
The overall decrease in the ice cover was 720,000 sq km (280,000 sq miles) - an area almost the size of Turkey, gone in a single year.
The other study, from the Goddard Space Flight Centre, in Maryland, shows that the perennial ice melting rate, which has averaged 0.15 per cent a year since satellite observations began in 1979, has suddenly accelerated hugely. In the past two winters the rate has increased to six per cent a year - that is, it has got more than 30 times faster.
The changes are alarming scientists and environmentalists, because they far exceed the rate at which supercomputer models of climate change predict the Arctic ice will melt under the influence of global warming - which is rapid enough.
If climate change is not checked, the Arctic ice will all be gone by 2070, and people will be able to sail to the North Pole. But if these new rates of melting are maintained, the Arctic ice will all be gone decades before that.
The implications are colossal. It will mean extinction in the wild - in the lifetime of children alive today - for one of the world's most majestic creatures, the polar bear, which needs the ice to hunt seals.
It means the possibility of a lethal "feedback" mechanism speeding up global warming, because the dark surface of the open Arctic ocean will absorb the sun's heat, rather than reflect it as the ice cover does now - and so the world will get even hotter.
But most of all, the new developments add to the growing concern that climate change as a process is starting to happen much faster than scientists considered it would, even five years ago when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its last report.
"These are the latest in a long series of recent studies, all telling us that climate change is faster and nastier than we thought," said Tom Burke, a former government green adviser and now a visiting professor at Imperial College London. "An abyss is opening up between the speed at which the climate is changing and the speed at which governments are responding.
"We must stop thinking that this is just another environmental problem, to be dealt with when time and resources allow, and realise that this is an increasingly urgent threat to our security and prosperity."
Yesterday, Jim Hansen, the leading climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, issued a now-or-never warning to governments around the world, including his own, telling them they must take radical action to avert a planetary environmental catastrophe. He said it was no longer viable for nations to adopt a "business as usual" stance on fossil-fuel consumption.
"I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most," he said.
Early in his first term, President George Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto Treaty that is meant to bind nations to lower emissions of warming gases. However, opinion in the US is starting to change, as evidenced by the huge success of the documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, narrated by the former US vice-president Senator Al Gore.
The two Nasa Arctic studies, released simultaneously, break fresh ground in dealing with the perennial, or "multi-winter" ice, rather than the "seasonal" ice at the edge of the icefield, which melts every summer.
Concern about the melting rate has hitherto focused on the seasonal ice, whose summer disappearance and retreat from the landmasses of Arctic Canada and Siberia is increasingly obvious. In September 2005, it retreated to the lowest level recorded. Such rapid shrinkage of the perennial ice has not been shown before. "It is alarming," said Joey Camiso, who led the Goddard study. "We've witnessed sea ice reduction at 6 per cent per year over just the last two winters, most likely a result of warming due to greenhouse gases."
Dr Son Nghiem, who led the team which carried out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory study, said that in previous years there had some variability in the extent of perennial Arctic ice. "But it is much smaller and regional," he said. "However, the change we see between 2004 and 2005 is enormous." Britain's Professor Julian Dowdeswell, the director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, agreed the changes shown in the American studies were "huge", adding: "It remains to be seen whether the rate of change is maintained in future years."
The melting of the Arctic ice will not itself contribute to global sea-level rise, as the ice floating in the sea is already displacing its own mass in the water. When the ice cube melts in your gin and tonic, the liquid in your glass does not rise.
There are great volumes of land-based ice - the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, and mountain glaciers - which are subject to exactly the same temperature rises as the Arctic ice, and which have also started to melt. They will add to sea levels. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet would, if it were to collapse, raise sea levels around the world by 16ft (5m), submerging large parts of Bangladesh and Egypt - and London.
17/02/06, Jim Hansen, Climate Change: On the Edge, (Back).
Greenland Ice Cap Breaking Up at Twice the Rate It Was Five Years Ago, says Scientist Bush Tried to Gag.
A satellite study of the Greenland ice cap shows that it is melting far faster than scientists had feared - twice as much ice is going into the sea as it was five years ago. The implications for rising sea levels - and climate change - could be dramatic.
Yet, a few weeks ago, when I - a NASA climate scientist - tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the NASA public affairs team - staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration - tried to stop me doing so. I was not happy with that, and I ignored the restrictions. The first line of NASA 's mission is to understand and protect the planet.
This new satellite data is a remarkable advance. We are seeing for the first time the detailed behavior of the ice streams that are draining the Greenland ice sheet. They show that Greenland seems to be losing at least 200 cubic kilometers of ice a year. It is different from even two years ago, when people still said the ice sheet was in balance.
Hundreds of cubic kilometers sounds like a lot of ice. But this is just the beginning. Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid. The issue is how close we are getting to that tipping point. The summer of 2005 broke all records for melting in Greenland. So we may be on the edge.
Our understanding of what is going on is very new. Today's forecasts of sea-level rise use climate models of the ice sheets that say they can only disintegrate over a thousand years or more. But we can now see that the models are almost worthless. They treat the ice sheets like a single block of ice that will slowly melt. But what is happening is much more dynamic.
Once the ice starts to melt at the surface, it forms lakes that empty down crevasses to the bottom of the ice. You get rivers of water underneath the ice. And the ice slides towards the ocean.
Our NASA scientists have measured this in Greenland. And once these ice streams start moving, their influence stretches right to the interior of the ice sheet. Building an ice sheet takes a long time, because it is limited by snowfall. But destroying it can be explosively rapid.
How fast can this go? Right now, I think our best measure is what happened in the past. We know that, for instance, 14,000 years ago sea levels rose by 20m in 400 years - that is five meters in a century. This was towards the end of the last ice age, so there was more ice around. But, on the other hand, temperatures were not warming as fast as today.
How far can it go? The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today - which is what we expect later this century - sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon. None of the current climate and ice models predict this. But I prefer the evidence from the Earth's history and my own eyes. I think sea-level rise is going to be the big issue soon, more even than warming itself.
It's hard to say what the world will be like if this happens. It would be another planet. You could imagine great armadas of icebergs breaking off Greenland and melting as they float south. And, of course, huge areas being flooded.
How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree. That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable. If we are to stop that, we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have. This decade, that means focusing on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy that do not burn carbon. We don't have much time left.
Jim Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is President George Bush's top climate modeller.
15/09/06, Independent, From Alaska to Australia, the world is changing in front of us, (Back).
by Daniel Howden, Andrew Buncombe, & Justin Huggler
Europe
In Greenland the barley is growing for the first time since the Middle Ages. In Britain gardeners were warned this week that the English country garden will be a thing of the past within the next 20 years. In Italy skiers were told yesterday that melting glaciers will mean an end to their pastime unless they can get above 2,000 metres.
Even those enjoying the warmer temperatures in unpredictable bursts by venturing into the sea have been confronted by swarms of jellyfish, who have flourished in record numbers in Europe in the warmer waters. Those same waters are rising in Venice, prompting arguments over costly plans to seal off the lagoon from the sea.
The prospect of flooded squares on the scale of Venice's Piazza San Marco is driving plans to expand and reinforce the Thames flood barrier. In Holland the battle has been lost and 500,000 hectares, an area more than twice the size of greater London, will be strategically flooded instead and people will move to floating homes.
Last summer Spain and Portugal experienced cauldron-like temperatures and prolonged drought. This summer that drought has expanded into central and northern Europe.
Africa
The poorest continent has inevitably found itself on the frontline of climate change. Natural disasters, extreme weather floods and droughts have always been common in southern Africa but the severity of the wet and dry periods is intensifying with disastrous results.
A barrage of meteorological studies have found a pattern of increasing climatic variability and unpredictability. Throughout the Horn of Africa debilitating droughts this year have culled the region's wildlife and disrupted the migrations across the Masai Mara and the Serengeti.
Human populations have been devastated by the soaring temperatures and freak dry seasons. Herdsmen in the north of Kenya have been driven to war over the few cattle that have survived the drought.
The breaking of the drought has seen torrential flooding wreak havoc in Ethiopia's Omo Valley, home to numerous indigenous tribes. More than 800 people were killed last month and tens of thousands more made homeless after weeks of heavy rain following prolonged drought, which caused a number of rivers to burst their banks.
North America
In Alaska there has been millions of dollars of damage to buildings and roads caused by melting permafrost. The region has been blighted by the world's largest outbreak of spruce bark beetles, normally confined to warmer climes. Rising sea levels have forced the relocation of Inuit villages and polar bears have been drowning because of shrinking sea ice. The caribou population is in steep decline due to earlier spring and the west is suffering one of the worst droughts for 500 years.
In Louisiana about 1 million acres of wetlands have been lost to sea-level rise. In the north-west there has been dramatic shrinkage of glaciers in Glacier National Park and the South Cascade Glacier in Washington is at smallest size ever in the last 6,000 years. In the Rockies there has been a 16 per cent reduction in snowpack. Spring snow melt begins nine days earlier.
Hawaii has seen first large-scale coral bleaching. And scientists now believe that the strength of hurricanes that strike the south-east and the Caribbean is linked to climate change.
South America
Few images have offered such stark evidence of the advance of climate change as those of the dry bed of the Amazon river. Last year, the largest river in the world was reduced to a trickle by an unprecedented drought. This year sand banks have already appeared in the deltas of the Amazon and fears are rising that a drought cycle that was previously measured in multiples of decades may now be an annual event.
As the most important carbon sink in the world, the Amazon's impact on global patterns of rainfall is only now beginning to be fully understood and scientists warned in July that this extraordinary planetary air conditioner could be malfunctioning critically. The drying of the world's most biologically diverse forest has already been instrumental in a 1,000-fold increase in the extinction rate of plant and animal species, according to leading botanist Sir Ghillean Prance.
In the Peruvian Andes the alpacas that have for centuries provided indigenous farmers with a means of survival have died in cold snaps where temperatures plummeted to -30C. In the summer, melted glaciers revealed rock faces burnt red by their first contact with direct sunlight.
Australia
Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, twice singles out Australia for lagging behind the rest of the world on climate change. It has, along with the US, refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol. The Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane, dismissed as "just entertainment" Mr Gore's film, which documents the scientific consensus that climate change in Australia has increased the duration and intensity of cyclones, and prompted a drop in rainfall in agricultural areas.
All around the region further evidence of climate change is to be found in the rising sea levels already starting to inundate Pacific islands, where the people, agricultural land, tourist resorts and infrastructure are concentrated on the coast. Temperature increases in the Pacific are killing off coral reefs. Some scientists say it is already too late to prevent their destruction.
Asia
Some of the most visible effects of climate change are in Asia. From the frozen wastes of Afghanistan, where the river bed in Kabul has become a dry rubbish tip, to south India, where thousands of farmers have killed themselves after successive years of drought wrecked their crops, global warming is a problem.
Most ominous of all, environmentalists are warning of disaster in the Himalayas, where glaciers are melting. Several glacier lakes have already burst in Nepal and Bhutan. The disappearance of the glaciers could dry up major rivers as far away as China, India and Vietnam.
14/09/06, Reuters, Milan fashionistas fear Spanish skinny model ban, (Back).
MILAN (Reuters) - Italy's fashion capital is in a tizzy over a ban on overly thin models at Madrid's fashion week, fearing it could be next with its own catwalk extravaganza less than two weeks away.
Milan's mayor, Letizia Moratti, told a newspaper this week that she may bring the Spanish ban on underweight models to Italian shows.
Madrid is turning away models whose body mass index, based on weight and height, falls below a certain level.
"With those kind of rules, we'd have to turn away 80 percent of models. Naomi Campbell wouldn't be able to walk down the catwalk, she'd be too thin," said Riccardo Gay, head of the model agency of the same name that used to represent Campbell in Milan.
He also said Madrid had exaggerated the issue.
"Some designers have used extremely thin models, but we haven't. We tell models to exercise, eat well, go to bed early -- sensible rules," he added.
Madrid's regional government imposed the rules on fashion week to protect the models as well as teenagers who may develop anorexia as they try to copy underweight catwalk stars.
Mario Boselli, head of the Italian fashion industry's chamber of commerce, said anorexia was a "rare phenomenon" in the fashion business.
"You don't solve these problems with new rules. We have to use common sense and work with everyone in the industry -- including the models -- to spread awareness and deal with the problem," Boselli told Reuters.
Moratti was unavailable for comment, having left on a trip to Japan.
Milan fashion week, which brings together top designers such as Versace, Armani, Gucci and Prada, starts on September 23.
(Back)
15/09/06, Independent, Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice, (Source).
17/02/06, Jim Hansen, Climate Change: On the Edge, (Source (no longer on-line)).
15/09/06, Independent, From Alaska to Australia, the world is changing in front of us, (Source).
14/09/06, Reuters, Milan fashionistas fear Spanish skinny model ban, (Source).
15/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, Scientist who refused to be silenced, (Back).
Two things about Jim Hansen have remained near-constant for the past 30 years. He has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the science of global warming, issuing warning after warning about the consequences for the planet if we do nothing to stop the creation of greenhouse gases. And he has run up against a wall of resistance from politicians and policy-makers who simply don't want to believe what they hear from him.
Under the current Bush administration, he has accused political appointees in the public affairs department at NASA, the space agency where he works, of deliberately blocking his access to the media and censoring the published fruits of his research. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, they responded to his warnings about climate change by paring his staff to the bone and cutting his funding.
Hansen is the very picture of reasonableness: a 65-year-old gentleman from Iowa who insists on presenting scientific fact without political spin. That has made him a menace in the eyes of the energy industry. His first testimony before Congress in 1988 drew considerable ire because he said he was only "99 per cent certain" of some of his claims - falling short of the absolute certainty expected of academic scientists.
Hansen, in turn, accused his adversaries of misrepresenting his testimony - whether it is congressional staffers seeking to minimise the impact of global warming or Michael Crichton, the novelist and global warming sceptic, picking holes in his claims in his novel State of Fear. "Some 'greenhouse sceptics'," he wrote in 2004, "subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a viewpoint."
According to Hansen: "Human-made forces, especially greenhouse gases, soot and other small particles, now exceed natural forces, and the world has begun to warm at a rate predicted by climate models."
Two things about Jim Hansen have remained near-constant for the past 30 years. He has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the science of global warming, issuing warning after warning about the consequences for the planet if we do nothing to stop the creation of greenhouse gases. And he has run up against a wall of resistance from politicians and policy-makers who simply don't want to believe what they hear from him.
Under the current Bush administration, he has accused political appointees in the public affairs department at NASA, the space agency where he works, of deliberately blocking his access to the media and censoring the published fruits of his research. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, they responded to his warnings about climate change by paring his staff to the bone and cutting his funding.
Hansen is the very picture of reasonableness: a 65-year-old gentleman from Iowa who insists on presenting scientific fact without political spin. That has made him a menace in the eyes of the energy industry. His first testimony before Congress in 1988 drew considerable ire because he said he was only "99 per cent certain" of some of his claims - falling short of the absolute certainty expected of academic scientists.
Hansen, in turn, accused his adversaries of misrepresenting his testimony - whether it is congressional staffers seeking to minimise the impact of global warming or Michael Crichton, the novelist and global warming sceptic, picking holes in his claims in his novel State of Fear. "Some 'greenhouse sceptics'," he wrote in 2004, "subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a viewpoint."
According to Hansen: "Human-made forces, especially greenhouse gases, soot and other small particles, now exceed natural forces, and the world has begun to warm at a rate predicted by climate models."
15/09/06, Independent, Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice, (Back).
Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice sparks global warning
Arctic meltdown is speeding up ... sea ice is vanishing faster than ever before ... polar bears face extinction ... and America's top climate scientist warns we only have a decade to save the planet
by Michael McCarthy and David Usborne
The melting of the sea ice in the Arctic, the clearest sign so far of global warming, has taken a sudden and enormous leap forward, in one of the most ominous developments yet in the onset of climate change.
Two separate studies by Nasa, using different satellite monitoring technologies, both show a great surge in the disappearance of Arctic ice cover in the last two years.
One, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, shows that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrank by 14 per cent in just 12 months between 2004 and 2005.
The overall decrease in the ice cover was 720,000 sq km (280,000 sq miles) - an area almost the size of Turkey, gone in a single year.
The other study, from the Goddard Space Flight Centre, in Maryland, shows that the perennial ice melting rate, which has averaged 0.15 per cent a year since satellite observations began in 1979, has suddenly accelerated hugely. In the past two winters the rate has increased to six per cent a year - that is, it has got more than 30 times faster.
The changes are alarming scientists and environmentalists, because they far exceed the rate at which supercomputer models of climate change predict the Arctic ice will melt under the influence of global warming - which is rapid enough.
If climate change is not checked, the Arctic ice will all be gone by 2070, and people will be able to sail to the North Pole. But if these new rates of melting are maintained, the Arctic ice will all be gone decades before that.
The implications are colossal. It will mean extinction in the wild - in the lifetime of children alive today - for one of the world's most majestic creatures, the polar bear, which needs the ice to hunt seals.
It means the possibility of a lethal "feedback" mechanism speeding up global warming, because the dark surface of the open Arctic ocean will absorb the sun's heat, rather than reflect it as the ice cover does now - and so the world will get even hotter.
But most of all, the new developments add to the growing concern that climate change as a process is starting to happen much faster than scientists considered it would, even five years ago when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its last report.
"These are the latest in a long series of recent studies, all telling us that climate change is faster and nastier than we thought," said Tom Burke, a former government green adviser and now a visiting professor at Imperial College London. "An abyss is opening up between the speed at which the climate is changing and the speed at which governments are responding.
"We must stop thinking that this is just another environmental problem, to be dealt with when time and resources allow, and realise that this is an increasingly urgent threat to our security and prosperity."
Yesterday, Jim Hansen, the leading climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, issued a now-or-never warning to governments around the world, including his own, telling them they must take radical action to avert a planetary environmental catastrophe. He said it was no longer viable for nations to adopt a "business as usual" stance on fossil-fuel consumption.
"I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most," he said.
Early in his first term, President George Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto Treaty that is meant to bind nations to lower emissions of warming gases. However, opinion in the US is starting to change, as evidenced by the huge success of the documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, narrated by the former US vice-president Senator Al Gore.
The two Nasa Arctic studies, released simultaneously, break fresh ground in dealing with the perennial, or "multi-winter" ice, rather than the "seasonal" ice at the edge of the icefield, which melts every summer.
Concern about the melting rate has hitherto focused on the seasonal ice, whose summer disappearance and retreat from the landmasses of Arctic Canada and Siberia is increasingly obvious. In September 2005, it retreated to the lowest level recorded. Such rapid shrinkage of the perennial ice has not been shown before. "It is alarming," said Joey Camiso, who led the Goddard study. "We've witnessed sea ice reduction at 6 per cent per year over just the last two winters, most likely a result of warming due to greenhouse gases."
Dr Son Nghiem, who led the team which carried out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory study, said that in previous years there had some variability in the extent of perennial Arctic ice. "But it is much smaller and regional," he said. "However, the change we see between 2004 and 2005 is enormous." Britain's Professor Julian Dowdeswell, the director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, agreed the changes shown in the American studies were "huge", adding: "It remains to be seen whether the rate of change is maintained in future years."
The melting of the Arctic ice will not itself contribute to global sea-level rise, as the ice floating in the sea is already displacing its own mass in the water. When the ice cube melts in your gin and tonic, the liquid in your glass does not rise.
There are great volumes of land-based ice - the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, and mountain glaciers - which are subject to exactly the same temperature rises as the Arctic ice, and which have also started to melt. They will add to sea levels. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet would, if it were to collapse, raise sea levels around the world by 16ft (5m), submerging large parts of Bangladesh and Egypt - and London.
17/02/06, Jim Hansen, Climate Change: On the Edge, (Back).
Greenland Ice Cap Breaking Up at Twice the Rate It Was Five Years Ago, says Scientist Bush Tried to Gag.
A satellite study of the Greenland ice cap shows that it is melting far faster than scientists had feared - twice as much ice is going into the sea as it was five years ago. The implications for rising sea levels - and climate change - could be dramatic.
Yet, a few weeks ago, when I - a NASA climate scientist - tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the NASA public affairs team - staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration - tried to stop me doing so. I was not happy with that, and I ignored the restrictions. The first line of NASA 's mission is to understand and protect the planet.
This new satellite data is a remarkable advance. We are seeing for the first time the detailed behavior of the ice streams that are draining the Greenland ice sheet. They show that Greenland seems to be losing at least 200 cubic kilometers of ice a year. It is different from even two years ago, when people still said the ice sheet was in balance.
Hundreds of cubic kilometers sounds like a lot of ice. But this is just the beginning. Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid. The issue is how close we are getting to that tipping point. The summer of 2005 broke all records for melting in Greenland. So we may be on the edge.
Our understanding of what is going on is very new. Today's forecasts of sea-level rise use climate models of the ice sheets that say they can only disintegrate over a thousand years or more. But we can now see that the models are almost worthless. They treat the ice sheets like a single block of ice that will slowly melt. But what is happening is much more dynamic.
Once the ice starts to melt at the surface, it forms lakes that empty down crevasses to the bottom of the ice. You get rivers of water underneath the ice. And the ice slides towards the ocean.
Our NASA scientists have measured this in Greenland. And once these ice streams start moving, their influence stretches right to the interior of the ice sheet. Building an ice sheet takes a long time, because it is limited by snowfall. But destroying it can be explosively rapid.
How fast can this go? Right now, I think our best measure is what happened in the past. We know that, for instance, 14,000 years ago sea levels rose by 20m in 400 years - that is five meters in a century. This was towards the end of the last ice age, so there was more ice around. But, on the other hand, temperatures were not warming as fast as today.
How far can it go? The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today - which is what we expect later this century - sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon. None of the current climate and ice models predict this. But I prefer the evidence from the Earth's history and my own eyes. I think sea-level rise is going to be the big issue soon, more even than warming itself.
It's hard to say what the world will be like if this happens. It would be another planet. You could imagine great armadas of icebergs breaking off Greenland and melting as they float south. And, of course, huge areas being flooded.
How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree. That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable. If we are to stop that, we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have. This decade, that means focusing on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy that do not burn carbon. We don't have much time left.
Jim Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is President George Bush's top climate modeller.
15/09/06, Independent, From Alaska to Australia, the world is changing in front of us, (Back).
by Daniel Howden, Andrew Buncombe, & Justin Huggler
Europe
In Greenland the barley is growing for the first time since the Middle Ages. In Britain gardeners were warned this week that the English country garden will be a thing of the past within the next 20 years. In Italy skiers were told yesterday that melting glaciers will mean an end to their pastime unless they can get above 2,000 metres.
Even those enjoying the warmer temperatures in unpredictable bursts by venturing into the sea have been confronted by swarms of jellyfish, who have flourished in record numbers in Europe in the warmer waters. Those same waters are rising in Venice, prompting arguments over costly plans to seal off the lagoon from the sea.
The prospect of flooded squares on the scale of Venice's Piazza San Marco is driving plans to expand and reinforce the Thames flood barrier. In Holland the battle has been lost and 500,000 hectares, an area more than twice the size of greater London, will be strategically flooded instead and people will move to floating homes.
Last summer Spain and Portugal experienced cauldron-like temperatures and prolonged drought. This summer that drought has expanded into central and northern Europe.
Africa
The poorest continent has inevitably found itself on the frontline of climate change. Natural disasters, extreme weather floods and droughts have always been common in southern Africa but the severity of the wet and dry periods is intensifying with disastrous results.
A barrage of meteorological studies have found a pattern of increasing climatic variability and unpredictability. Throughout the Horn of Africa debilitating droughts this year have culled the region's wildlife and disrupted the migrations across the Masai Mara and the Serengeti.
Human populations have been devastated by the soaring temperatures and freak dry seasons. Herdsmen in the north of Kenya have been driven to war over the few cattle that have survived the drought.
The breaking of the drought has seen torrential flooding wreak havoc in Ethiopia's Omo Valley, home to numerous indigenous tribes. More than 800 people were killed last month and tens of thousands more made homeless after weeks of heavy rain following prolonged drought, which caused a number of rivers to burst their banks.
North America
In Alaska there has been millions of dollars of damage to buildings and roads caused by melting permafrost. The region has been blighted by the world's largest outbreak of spruce bark beetles, normally confined to warmer climes. Rising sea levels have forced the relocation of Inuit villages and polar bears have been drowning because of shrinking sea ice. The caribou population is in steep decline due to earlier spring and the west is suffering one of the worst droughts for 500 years.
In Louisiana about 1 million acres of wetlands have been lost to sea-level rise. In the north-west there has been dramatic shrinkage of glaciers in Glacier National Park and the South Cascade Glacier in Washington is at smallest size ever in the last 6,000 years. In the Rockies there has been a 16 per cent reduction in snowpack. Spring snow melt begins nine days earlier.
Hawaii has seen first large-scale coral bleaching. And scientists now believe that the strength of hurricanes that strike the south-east and the Caribbean is linked to climate change.
South America
Few images have offered such stark evidence of the advance of climate change as those of the dry bed of the Amazon river. Last year, the largest river in the world was reduced to a trickle by an unprecedented drought. This year sand banks have already appeared in the deltas of the Amazon and fears are rising that a drought cycle that was previously measured in multiples of decades may now be an annual event.
As the most important carbon sink in the world, the Amazon's impact on global patterns of rainfall is only now beginning to be fully understood and scientists warned in July that this extraordinary planetary air conditioner could be malfunctioning critically. The drying of the world's most biologically diverse forest has already been instrumental in a 1,000-fold increase in the extinction rate of plant and animal species, according to leading botanist Sir Ghillean Prance.
In the Peruvian Andes the alpacas that have for centuries provided indigenous farmers with a means of survival have died in cold snaps where temperatures plummeted to -30C. In the summer, melted glaciers revealed rock faces burnt red by their first contact with direct sunlight.
Australia
Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, twice singles out Australia for lagging behind the rest of the world on climate change. It has, along with the US, refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol. The Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane, dismissed as "just entertainment" Mr Gore's film, which documents the scientific consensus that climate change in Australia has increased the duration and intensity of cyclones, and prompted a drop in rainfall in agricultural areas.
All around the region further evidence of climate change is to be found in the rising sea levels already starting to inundate Pacific islands, where the people, agricultural land, tourist resorts and infrastructure are concentrated on the coast. Temperature increases in the Pacific are killing off coral reefs. Some scientists say it is already too late to prevent their destruction.
Asia
Some of the most visible effects of climate change are in Asia. From the frozen wastes of Afghanistan, where the river bed in Kabul has become a dry rubbish tip, to south India, where thousands of farmers have killed themselves after successive years of drought wrecked their crops, global warming is a problem.
Most ominous of all, environmentalists are warning of disaster in the Himalayas, where glaciers are melting. Several glacier lakes have already burst in Nepal and Bhutan. The disappearance of the glaciers could dry up major rivers as far away as China, India and Vietnam.
14/09/06, Reuters, Milan fashionistas fear Spanish skinny model ban, (Back).
MILAN (Reuters) - Italy's fashion capital is in a tizzy over a ban on overly thin models at Madrid's fashion week, fearing it could be next with its own catwalk extravaganza less than two weeks away.
Milan's mayor, Letizia Moratti, told a newspaper this week that she may bring the Spanish ban on underweight models to Italian shows.
Madrid is turning away models whose body mass index, based on weight and height, falls below a certain level.
"With those kind of rules, we'd have to turn away 80 percent of models. Naomi Campbell wouldn't be able to walk down the catwalk, she'd be too thin," said Riccardo Gay, head of the model agency of the same name that used to represent Campbell in Milan.
He also said Madrid had exaggerated the issue.
"Some designers have used extremely thin models, but we haven't. We tell models to exercise, eat well, go to bed early -- sensible rules," he added.
Madrid's regional government imposed the rules on fashion week to protect the models as well as teenagers who may develop anorexia as they try to copy underweight catwalk stars.
Mario Boselli, head of the Italian fashion industry's chamber of commerce, said anorexia was a "rare phenomenon" in the fashion business.
"You don't solve these problems with new rules. We have to use common sense and work with everyone in the industry -- including the models -- to spread awareness and deal with the problem," Boselli told Reuters.
Moratti was unavailable for comment, having left on a trip to Japan.
Milan fashion week, which brings together top designers such as Versace, Armani, Gucci and Prada, starts on September 23.
(Back)
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