The National Snow & Ice Data Centre in the USA has declared that this year’s minimum Arctic sea ice extent has been reached – 4.52 million square kilometres on September 12th, only 390,000 km2 more than the record 2007 minimum (and 2.24 m km2 below the 1979-2000 average minimum). It looks as though their line may bump along the bottom of the graph for a while, so there may be some potential for that number to reduce a little. Their figure for Sept 12 is 9.4 percent above the 2007 minimum, so unless there’s some unprecedented melt over the next couple of weeks, I am prepared to accept that I have lost my bet with Malcolm (see comments here and at Poneke! here), which was based on NSIDC numbers. My cheque book is at the ready.
Author: Gareth
On the road, again
It’s going to be a busy weekend for your blogger. On Friday afternoon I’m off to deepest Titirangi to prepare for a Saturday morning panel on coverage of the climate issue at the Going West Books & Writer’s Festival. Warming Up – A Hot Topic will be chaired by Francesca Price, presenter of Wasted and editor of Good magazine, and my co-panellist will be Nikki Harré from Auckland University, who edited the recent book Carbon Neutral by 2020. Full details of the weekend, which looks very interesting, here. Sadly, I have to return to Waipara, because on Sunday I’m off to Wellington…
On Monday and Tuesday next week, I’ll be chairing the Climate Change Law Summit at Te Papa. Two full days of presentations by some of NZ’s top people in their fields – including Julia Hoare, Karen Price, Vernon Rive, Rachel Devine, Prof Martin Manning and Guy Salmon. There’s a full agenda at the link above. Should be a fascinating couple of days. If anyone is interested in attending, I might be able to wangle a guest pass – which if you check the fees, is a pretty generous offer. Please email me ASAP (gareth at the hot topic domain), and I’ll see what can be done.
I will be posting on the Arctic soon, I promise.
Everybody’s somebody’s fool
It’s possible that Bill Ralston believes that his columns in The Listener are amusing. Perhaps he also thinks they’re challenging. It’s plausible that his editor agrees on both counts, or the columns might no longer appear – as is true of so many fine Listener columnists of recent memory. How sad then that Ralston so miserably fails, so often, on both counts. This week (full text available next week), he rails against “scares”, and after chastising Time magazine for herpes, Aids, Y2K and bird flu panics, launches into climate change.
At the risk of being labelled a “climate change denier”, a phrase that deliberately feasts on the resonance of the last word, implying one is the kind of disgraceful person that would also deny the Holocaust, I wonder if we are being fed another massive overreaction to a natural phenomenon.
OK, I’ll bite. If you deny the reality of a problem, then you are a denier. No Holocaust reference implied or intended. A statement of fact – it’s what the word means. And if you’re still wondering about the reality of the problem, you are simply displaying your ignorance. There are few spectacles so unedifying (or unamusing) as an ill-informed would-be curmudgeon interviewing his typewriter on a such a well-documented issue. Ralston even manages apparently approving references to Rodney Hide’s astonishing display of ignorance last week.
Twaddle, Bill. Complete twaddle.
Beat the retreat
New Zealand’s glaciers lost 2.5 km3 (2.2 billion tonnes) of permanent ice from April 2007 to March 2008, leaving 44.9 km3 of ice in the Southern Alps – the lowest amount since NIWA began regular surveys 32 years ago. The picture (credit: “Mr Ice” Trevor Chinn, click for larger image) shows the Marion Glacier in the Arawata Valley in South Westland which has recently retreated above its proglacial lake. The annual survey uses a fixed wing aircraft to record the height of the snowline at the end of summer (and Trevor gets to take the pix). Jim Salinger, NIWA’s principal scientist, says that the survey shows that the glaciers had lost a lot more ice than they had gained over the preceding winter [press release]:
“As a result of La Niña conditions over New Zealand, more easterlies, and warmer than normal temperatures, there was less snowfall in the Southern Alps and more snowmelt. The higher the snow line, the more snow is lost to feed the glacier. On average, the snow line this year was about 130 metres above where it would need to be to keep the ice mass constant.â€
More below the fold…
Would you give this man any creedence?
It’s YouTube weekend chez Hot Topic: Sunday’s offering is the Two-Mile Time Machine man and all-round ice expert, Dr Richard B Alley, giving a (ahem) creditable rendering of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary, with a message about coal and climate.
[youtube]6mziX8yuq7w[/youtube]
(Full story of Alley’s rock videos at Dot Earth). [References]
Alley’s riffing on coal captures the zeitgeist, what with Greenpeace campaigners in the UK escaping conviction for vandalising a coal-burning power station chimney by painting UK PM Gordon Brown’s name on it (over here they’d fall foul of the Electoral Finance Act), thanks in no small part to testimony by James Hansen (testimony (pdf), recent paper).
Way off-topic, but I can’t let this video weekend pass without mentioning the Large Hadron Rap. Damn catchy, and didactic to boot – even features a guest appearance from MC Hawking. New frontiers in science communication…