Global warming and the future of New Zealand
There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no doubt make its way over here eventually.
[Much more below the fold]
Continue reading “Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.”
Hot Topic has devoted a lot of posts to events in the Arctic over the last northern hemisphere summer. The loss of sea ice was dramatic – there was 25% less ice in September than the previous record, set in 2005. The little graph to the left shows just far off the trend line last year’s September area really was. And as I posted yesterday, recent studies suggest that the Arctic is primed for more significant losses in the near future. If the reduction in summer sea ice continues, there are some pretty major implications for the climate of the northern hemisphere and for our modelling of the global climate, and it’s those things that I want to consider in this post. Please note: I am not a climate scientist, and there are a lot of ifs and handwaves in this argument, but bear with me…
Time for an ice update. There’s more bad news about the Arctic sea ice, some interesting video from Greenland, and confirmation that the Antarctic is losing significant amounts of ice. A team lead by James Maslanik of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Astrodynamics Research has tracked the age of perennial Arctic sea ice (the stuff that survives through summer), and found that since the 1980s the ice has become thinner and younger. Of the ice that survived last year’s melt back, 58% is thin and only 2 to 3 years old:
The portion of ice more than five years old within the multi-year Arctic icepack decreased from 31 percent in 1988 to 10 percent in 2007, according to the study. Ice 7 years or older, which made up 21 percent of the multi-year Arctic ice cover in 1988, made up only 5 percent in 2007, the research team reported. [Science Daily, UC release]
This sets the Arctic up for more rapid ice loss, and makes it much harder for the sea ice to recover to its historic size. Meanwhile, Andy Revkin at the New York Times describes what’s been happening in Greenland [you might have to register, but it’s worth it]. The video from a camera being lowered down a moulin is amazing. That’s our world going down the gurgler (as I said at the HT launch). More from Revkin (and more video) at his Dot Earth blog supporting the article.
In our neck of the woods the news isn’t flash, either. A new study confirms that Antarctica has been losing ice over the last 10 years, and finds that the rate of loss has increased by 75% over that time [Herald]. The East Antarctic ice sheet remains more or less stable, but the West Antarctic and Antarctic Peninsula are losing significant amounts of ice mass – a total of 192 billion tonnes of ice in 2006. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that the mass loss is down to increased glacier flow:
Changes in glacier dynamics are significant and may in fact dominate the ice sheet mass budget. This conclusion is contrary to model simulations of the response of the ice sheet to future climate change, which conclude that it will grow due to increased snowfall.
The Christian Science Monitor provides a good overview of what’s going on south of us here.
Meanwhile, to quote a Prebble, I’ve been thinking, and before too long I shall blog about the implications of what’s happening in the Arctic. More questions than answers – but perhaps we can start thinking about how to get the answers we need. More soon…
It’s climate sceptic week at the Herald. On Monday they provided a platform for Bryan Leyland of the NZ C”S”C to repeat his tired old opposition to government energy strategy (nicely rebutted by I/S at No Right Turn), and this morning they give room to Garth George to offer his thoughts under the headline “Great global warming debate a bunch of hot air“. Garth’s views are not news – he’s been running this line for ages – but I am frankly astonished that the powers that be at the Herald allow him to repeat lies. Since fact-checking at the paper seems to have gone on holiday, it falls to me to provide the correction.
One of the more bumptious of NZ’s tame sceptics is University of Canterbury philosopher and “eminent scientist” Associate Professor Denis Dutton. A key member of the NZ C”S”C, he is perhaps best known for creating the rather good Arts & Letters Daily web site – and selling it for a considerable sum. He has now embarked on a new site – currently in beta – called Climate Debate Daily, with another UC philosopher, Doug Campbell. You might expect me to welcome a new and “neutral” climate site, but I believe it completely misrepresents the reality of any “debate” that might exist, and is in effect a new tactic to give credence to sceptic effluvia. Here’s how they describe their aims:
Continue reading “False equivalence and the climate “debate””
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