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Arctic Ice: Going, Going...Arctic Ice: Going, Going...Seth Borenstein, Associated Press June 30, 2008 -- There's a 50-50 chance that the North Pole will be ice-free this summer, which would be a first in recorded history, a leading ice scientist says. The weather and ocean conditions in the next couple of weeks will determine how much of the sea ice will melt, and early signs are not good, said Mark Serreze. He's a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo. The chances for a total meltdown at the pole are higher than ever because the layer of ice coating the sea is thinner than ever, he said. "A large area at the North Pole and surrounding the North Pole is first-year ice," Serreze said. "That's the stuff that tends to melt out in the summer because it's thin." Preliminary February and March data from a NASA satellite shows that the circle of ice surrounding the North Pole is "considerably thinner" than scientists have seen during the five years the satellite has been taking pictures, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said Friday. He thinks there is slightly less than a 50-50 chance the North Pole will be ice-free. Last year was a record year for ice melt all over the Arctic and the ice band surrounding the North Pole is even thinner now. There is nothing scientifically significant about the North Pole, Serreze said. But there is a cultural and symbolic importance. It's home to Santa Claus, after all. Last August, the Northwest Passage was open to navigation for the first time in memory. A more conservative ice scientist, Cecilia Bitz at the University of Washington, put the odds of a North Pole without ice closer to 1 in 4. Even that is far worse than climate models had predicted, which was 1 in 70 sometime in the next decade, she said. But both she and Serreze agree it's just a matter of time. Read more at http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/06/30/north-pole-melt.html Global Warmiing Twenty Years Later: The Tipping Point Nears http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623.pdf We're toast if we don't stop global warming http://www.smh.com.au/news/global-warming/global-warming-last-chance-or-were-toast/2008/06/24/1214073221343.html
June 24, 2008 - 2:52PM
Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist says the situation has got so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action. James Hansen told US Congress today that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide only for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises. "We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. "This is the last chance." Hansen brought global warming home to the public in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, saying global warming was already here. To mark the anniversary, he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, where he was called a prophet, and addressed a luncheon at the National Press Club, where he was called a hero. To cut emissions, he said coal-fired power plants that do not capture carbon dioxide emissions should not be used in the United States after 2025, and should be eliminated in the rest of the world by 2030. That carbon capture technology is still being developed and not yet cost-efficient for power plants. Burning fossil fuels such as coal is the chief cause of manmade greenhouse gases. Hansen said the Earth's atmosphere has got to get back to a level of 350 parts of carbon dioxide per million. Last month, it was 10 per cent higher: 386.7 parts per million. Hansen said he would testify on behalf of British protesters against new coal-fired power plants. Protesters have chained themselves to gates and equipment at sites of several proposed coal plants in England. "The thing that I think is most important is to block coal-fired power plants," Hansen told the luncheon. "I'm not yet at the point of chaining myself, but we somehow have to draw attention to this." Frank Maisano, a spokesman for many US utilities, including those trying to build new coal plants, said while Hansen has shown foresight as a scientist, his "stop them all approach is very simplistic" and shows that he is beyond his level of expertise. The year of Hansen's original testimony was the world's hottest year on record. Since then, 14 years have been hotter, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Two decades later, Hansen spent his time on the question of whether it is too late to do anything about it. His answer: "There still is time to stop the worst, but not much time." He told the AP before the luncheon: "We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes. The Arctic is the first tipping point, and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would." Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic would be free of sea ice in the summer. A long-time global warming sceptic, Republican Senator James Inhofe, citing a recent poll, said in a statement, "Hansen, [former vice-president Al] Gore and the media have been trumpeting manmade climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it." The response of Democrat Ed Markey, the committee chairman: "Dr
Hansen was right. Twenty years later, we recognise him as a climate
prophet." Are Big Oil and Big Coal Climate CriminalsAre Big Oil and Big Coal Climate Criminals?There were no climate-science bombshells from James E. Hansen on Monday on his trip to Capitol Hill at the invitation of some House Democrats, who wanted to commemorate his momentous global warming testimony 20 years earlier. On that front, he said everything he has been saying for years: unabated warming would erode the ice sheets, flood coastal cities and drive many species into extinction. But there was a much discussed recommendation in both his oral presentation and a written statement he prepared beforehand: that the heads of oil and coal companies who knowingly delayed action on curbing greenhouse gas emissions were committing a crime. “These CEO’s, these captains of industry,” he said in the briefing, “in my opinion, if they don’t change their tactics they’re guilty of crimes against humanity and nature.” He made the point more strongly in a written statement summarizing his talk (posted below). He has used strong words and imagery before to drive home points, including comparing cordons of coal cars heading to power plants to the death trains of the Holocaust (because of the mass extinctions foreseen by many biologists should warming go unabated). Dr. Hansen’s allegations of criminality were already reverberating on the Web earlier in the day after Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators circulated excerpts from a story in the Guardian newspaper of Britain quoting Dr. Hansen on this point. . . . Extreme weather to increase with climate changeExtreme weather to increase with climate changehttp://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jXqXnWulOVVpi1gZO44HR_L01uYAD91DALN8H By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID – 29 minutes ago WASHINGTON (AP) — Droughts will get dryer, storms will get stormier and floods will get deeper with changing climate, a government research report said Thursday. Events that have seemed relatively rare will become commonplace, said the latest report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a joint effort of more than a dozen government agencies. There has been an increase in the frequency of heavy downpours, especially over northern states, and these are likely to continue in the future, Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in a briefing. For example, Karl said, by the end of this century rainfall amounts expected to occur every 20 years could be taking place every five years. Such an increase "can lead to the type of events that we are seeing in the Midwest," said Karl, though he did not directly link the current inundations to climate change. But the report cautioned that preparing for weather than has been relatively common can leave people vulnerable as extreme events occur more and more. "Moderate flood control measures on a river can stimulate development in a now 'safe' floodplain, only to see those new structures damaged when a very large flood occurs," the report said. At the same time heavy rains increase, there'll be more droughts, especially in the Southwest, Karl said. "When it rains, it rains harder and when it's not raining, it's warmer — there is more evaporation, and droughts can last longer," he explained. The Southwestern drought that began in 1999 is beginning to rival some of the greatest droughts on record including those of the 1930s and 1950s, he added. Gerald A. Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there has been a trend toward increasing power in hurricanes since the 1970s in the Atlantic and western Pacific, a change that can be linked to rising sea surface temperatures. There is a statistical connection between rising sea surface temperatures and hurricane activity, Meehl said, but linking changes in hurricanes to human actions will require more study. More easily attributed to human impact, through release of greenhouse gases, is an overall increase in temperatures, he said. It's not getting as cold at night as it did in earlier decades and there are fewer nights with frosts, a trend expected to continue into the future, Meehl said. "A day so hot that it is experienced only once every 20 years would occur every three years by the middle of the century," under the mid-range projections of climate models, the report said. Researchers can use computer models of climate to separate out cause and effect of this warming, he explained — looking at the effect of things like changes in solar radiation or volcanic eruptions — and the result is to attribute climate warming to the burning of fossil fuels. Participating in the Climate Change Science Program are the Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Department of State, Department of Transportation, U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. On the Net:
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