Tag: EV

Hole in the ice

BremenAMSR-E080702crop.jpg The National Snow & Ice Data Centre in the US is issuing regular (monthly, though they might have to become more frequent soon) updates on the progress of this year’s Arctic melt season. Today they released their report for June, and like their earlier reports (accessed from the drop down menu top right on the page), it includes a lot of very interesting reading. Here’s a highlight:

June sea ice extents in 2008 and 2007 are essentially identical, and near the lowest values for June ever recorded by satellite for the Arctic.

They note that the spatial pattern of melt this year is very different to last year, with much less melting in the Chuckchi Sea (top left on the pic at top – click for a bigger version), and much more to the north of Greenland and the Canadian archipelago. But the big news is that this year’s melt season started much earlier than usual. Take a look at this graphic:200807NSIDCmelt2.jpg

The blue bits show the areas that start melting latest. 2007 was close to the long term average in that respect, and the difference with this year is striking:

This year, sea ice in the Beaufort Sea began to melt on average 15 days earlier than normal, and 15 days earlier than last year. Surface melt in the Chukchi and East Siberian seas was 6 days earlier than normal, and 14 days earlier than in 2007. In the central Arctic Ocean, melt began around June 9th, which was 12 days earlier than normal and 9 days earlier than the year before.

Even the areas where the ice still looks pretty solid (north of Siberia) started melting weeks ahead of normal. The next month is going to be extremely interesting. The odds are tipping my way again…

Note: my new favourite site for monitoring the current sea ice area is the University of Bremen’s imagery. I don’t mean to be disloyal to Cryosphere Today, which remains essential, but Bremen’s images are higher resolution, and to my eye make what’s going on easier to follow. If we could just get some of CT’s features at Bremen, and vice versa… 😉

[This post updated July 4 to reflect amended NSIDC graphic and text (see comments). Doesn’t look as bad as it did – but that’s not much cause for comfort.]

Love is hot, truth is molten

Tuatara.jpg It’s a bleak outlook for sexual equality in tuatara refuges in the Cook Strait. By the end of the century, their nesting sites could have warmed up enough to make all hatchlings male. Nature News reports on new, detailed modelling of how tuatara’s island homes will respond to climate warming:

With the aid of computer software, the researchers combined the physics of heat transfer with terrain data for the four-hectare North Brother Island in New Zealand’s Cook Strait. Using the exact coordinates of 52 known nesting sites of the rarest species of tuatara (Sphenodon guntheri), along with a database of current soil properties and their constant temperature equivalent, the researchers simulated climate change and then monitored its effect on specific points across the island. They found that based on maximum warming predictions, tuatara, which hatch as males when nest temperature during development moves above 21.5°C, will be incapable of producing females.

Fortunately there’s a solution: tuatara tents, and camping holidays in cool places.

“We can put shade cloth over their nesting sites to effectively change their sex ratio back to a 1-to-1 ratio even if the planet warms — or start translocating them to other places that would be more suitable, ” [research leader Nicola] Mitchell [of the University of Western Australia in Perth] adds. “Translocations are already occurring to the mainland and we now have a tool to identify which locations would produce favourable sex ratios.”

[Mitchell, N. J. , Kearney, M. R. , Nelson, N. J. & Porter, W. P. Proc. R. Soc. B doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0438 (2008).]

Mrs O’Leary’s Cow

homer.jpg Did you know that all cows are carbon neutral? That all the fuss about forcing farmers into an emissions trading scheme is stuff and nonsense? You do now, thanks to the sterling efforts of the Carbon Sense Coalition, an Australian organisation. They issued a press release yesterday, news of which reached me via the Royal Society‘s daily news alert:

News release: Farm lobbies abandon farmers. The Carbon Sense Coalition today accused the big farming lobby groups, government departments, politicians and Ministers representing agriculture of ignoring science and abandoning farmers to unjustified carbon taxation.

Ignoring science, eh? I went in search of what they might be on about…

[Warning: do not read while drinking – extreme beverage/screen interface risk]

Continue reading “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow”

Santa’s blues

Polarbear.jpg What’s a Christmas icon to do, when all the ice at the North Pole disappears in summer? This startling question is posed by the latest flush of media attention to events in the Arctic. First there was a National Geographic story on June 20th speculating that the North Pole would be ice free this summer (note: this is nothing to do with record minima, just do with ice around the pole itself). This was picked up by CNN, who went to Mark Serreze of the NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado for comment:

“We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is ‘does the North Pole melt out this summer?’ and it may well,” said the center’s senior research scientist, Mark Serreze. It’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said.

And then everything went quiet, until The Independent in Britain (referred to as The Indescribablyoverhyped on climate matters by Stoat) picked up the story and ran with it under the headline – Exclusive: no ice at the North Pole:

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

They seem to be having problems with their choice of tense, and quite how they can justify the “exclusive” tag escapes me… The Drudge Report noticed, and then everyone in the world had to have a go [Telegraph, AP(*)]. Andy Revkin at DotEarth covers it well, and RealClimate chips in with its own analysis. It won’t be long before the usual denialist sites will be spluttering with indignation, despite the fact that the North Pole has a very good chance of being open ocean this summer – even if a new record minimum is not set.

None of this has any relevance to the odds of my winning my various sea-ice bets, but it does give me a chance to post a few interesting Arctic-related links from the last week… As part of its beat-up, The Independent went to Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, for his impressions on the changes in the Arctic, and the BBC’s been carrying a blog from Liz Kalaugher aboard a Canadian icebreaker that over-wintered near Banks Island. Interesting stuff – note Liz’s comments about the weather. Meanwhile, across the melting ice, the Russian defence establishment is beginning to get worried about the impact of melting permafrost.

(*) The AP story uncovers this truly remarkable and hitherto unnoticed fact: “That pushed the older thicker sea ice that had been over the North Pole south toward Greenland and eventually out of the Arctic, Serreze said. That left just a thin one-year layer of ice that previously covered part of Siberia.” So that ice has somehow left the land and started floating towards the Pole. Be afraid, be very afraid…

Whispering wind

windturbine.gif A bit more on wind, and some worthwhile weekend reading. The British government has announced that it is planning a huge expansion in the use of wind power, building up to 7,000 turbines at a cost of up to £10bn, and expects renewable energy to account for 15% of all energy use by 2020. The BBC reports the somewhat lukewarm reaction, but Fred Pearce in The Guardian is cautiously optimistic that this time they might mean business. Electric vehicles are an important part of the package.

The Economist provides the weekend reading: an excellent overview of the energy options available over the coming decades, and why they look like the next big business opportunity. The leader’s here, and the special feature starts here. The sections on wind, solar and electric vehicles are especially interesting. Joe Romm at Climate Progress isn’t too keen on their enthusiasm for nuclear power, but read the lot and make up your own mind.

For a laugh, I refer you to a column excoriating electric vehicles in The Guardian by Matt Master, who is “a writer and road tester for Top Gear magazine” and who amply demonstrates how ignorance only makes you look like a tosser. Perhaps he doesn’t read The Economist, which headlines its article on EVs “The end of the petrolhead”.