Tag: ice

In the land of make believe

NZETS.jpg Today’s lesson is taken from Jane Clifton’s Politics column in this week’s Listener (full text on the web next week). Her take on the current fuss over the Emissions Trading Scheme perfectly illustrates how the debate around this issue is being misunderstood and misrepresented, occasionally wilfully, sometimes from ignorance. This is not Clifton’s fault. She is reflecting only a certain kind of reality – the perception of the issue that is driving press coverage and political actions. Here’s a key passage:

“… most people have gotten the drift by now: to reduce carbon emissions means to reduce activities we currently benefit from and enjoy. And we will have to pay handsomely for our lack of pleasure.”

She then considers why the government is struggling with the scheme:

“It’s the ultimate non sequitur. A government that addressed this crisis seriously would become massively unpopular and lose office. A government that didn’t would be hideously irresponsible and deserve to lose office. Hard to avoid a certain fatalism.”

If the first part of the argument were true, then her “non sequitur” would follow. Happily, her assumption is completely wrong, so it doesn’t have to. But you’d be hard-pressed to glean that from the current discussion in NZ (or indeed from Clifton’s column).

Continue reading “In the land of make believe”

Sugar coated iceberg

Polarbear.jpg Prognostications on the fate of the Arctic sea ice this boreal summer are coming in thick and fast. The National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the US has updated its summer news page with the latest data and some projections of what might happen:

Spring has arrived in the Arctic. After peaking at 15.21 million square kilometers (5.87 million square miles) in the second week of March, Arctic sea ice extent has declined through the month of April. April extent has not fallen below the lowest April extent on record, but it is still below the long-term average. Taken together, an assessment of the available evidence, detailed below, points to another extreme September sea ice minimum. Could the North Pole be ice free this melt season? Given that this region is currently covered with first-year ice, that seems quite possible.

Most striking are the estimates of this summer’s likely minimum based on the melting rates observed over the last 25 years.

Icepredict0805.png

“To avoid beating the September 2007 record low, more than 50% of this year’s first-year ice would have to survive; this has only happened once in the last 25 years, in 1996.”

Meanwhile, Andy Revkin at the New York Times has been asking sea ice researchers for their views. You can read their replies in the comments to his post. A number of well-known names are backing a new record, including BIll Chapman, the researcher responsible for the excellent Cryosphere Today site (I want to get an iPhone so that I can try out the special graphics CT provides), who writes:

The two wild cards remaining would be (1) how thick is this first-year ice and (2) will it be warm enough to melt the first-year ice this summer? Since temperatures over the central Arctic were normal to above normal this past winter and spring, I don’t think the thickness will be too great. The key will be June temperatures and cloud cover in the central Arctic. Given relatively clear conditions and an early to average start to the melt of the central Arctic, the albedo will lower and the process will be in motion to easily melt that first year ice. In fact, the only thing that could prevent a record would be a colder than average summer – especially early summer. Given recent history and our penchant for burning fossil fuels, I’d consider this somewhat unlikely.

I say the odds favor a new NH record minimum – put my money there.

My money’s already there… Good to know I’m backing the form horse, even if I would rather lose.

So it goes

NZETS.jpg The cacophony of lobbying around the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), coupled with high petrol prices, has prompted the government to announce a couple of changes to the scheme. Liquid fuels were supposed to enter the ETS in 2009, but this has now been delayed to 2011, and the phase out of the free allocation of emissions units to big emitters will now be postponed five years until 2018 [Herald, Radio NZ, Dominion Post].

Announcing the changes to the proposed legislation, Helen Clark also released the latest figures for the Kyoto liability:

… the provisional net position is projected to be a deficit of 21.7 million units during the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2008-2012). This compares with the projected deficit reported in May 2007 of 45.5 million units, and is a drop of 52 per cent. This means the liability halves from $1 billion to $481.6 million.

When the ETS was announced last year, it was projected that the net liability would be about 22 million units after taking the expected effects of the scheme on emissions into account. The government is clearly confident that high petrol prices will achieve the same effect as the ETS over the two year extension period. That’s a defensible position at the moment, but if fuel prices fall the Kyoto liability could increase. It signals, perhaps, that the government is reasonably confident that petrol prices won’t fall. Or perhaps simply that in an election year contentious new policy is up for grabs. The word pusillanimous springs unbidden to my mind…

The fuel move is getting the most attention, but the five year extension on allocations of free units to big emitters is a direct response to intensive lobbying from those sectors. It will significantly reduce the business costs of cutting emissions in the longer run, but also amounts to an extension of a tax payer subsidy to those businesses. It will be interesting to see how they respond. Looking into my crystal ball, I confidently predict someone will say “it’s a welcome move, but not big enough”.

Cool for cats

FishThe second climate forecast for the next decade has been published [Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector, Keenlyside et al, Nature, behind a firewall but available here], and the world’s media – and a fair number of blogs – have jumped all over its suggestion that there might be some regional cooling over the next decade. Richard Black at the BBC headlined his piece “Next decade ‘may see no warming'” , the New York Times‘ Andy Revkin settled for “In a New Climate Model, Short-Term Cooling in a Warmer World”, which becomes “Next decade may see no warming” at frogblog and “Global Warming on hold until 2015 claim Germans” at Kiwiblog. So what’s going on? Is global warming really on hold?

Continue reading “Cool for cats”

Skating away (on the thin ice of a new day)

Mar-2008-Ice-Age.jpg A new forecast for this summer’s Arctic sea ice melt suggests that there’s a 60% chance that this year’s minimum will set a new record. Work by researchers at the University of Colorado’s Center for Astrodynamics Research shows that the current ice is much thinner than usual:

“The current Arctic ice cover is thinner and younger than at any previous time in our recorded history, and this sets the stage for rapid melt and a new record low,” said Research Associate Sheldon Drobot, who leads CCAR’s Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department. Overall, 63 percent of the Arctic ice cover is younger than average, and only 2 percent is older than average, according to Drobot.

The image above shows the age of the current ice cover compared to average for this time of year (you can click on the image to see a larger version). Yellow is the same as average, red is younger. For the bigger picture, visit the Arctic Ice Forecasting System pages at UC.

This has prompted me to increase my sea ice bet with William “Stoat” Connolley by £10 to £30 (plus a signed copy of Hot Topic). With the seasonal melt speeding up, the race is on…

[Hat-tip to Eli Rabett]