Tag: RMA

Ice in the sun

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…

A lie repeated is still a lie

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.

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False equivalence and the climate “debate”

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:

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Clearing the decks #2

Time to catch up with some climate stuff that I’ve accumulated over the last couple of weeks.

  • Auckland lawyers Lowndes Associates have become the first legal firm in NZ to achieve CarbonZero certification – which means that they’ve taken steps to measure their carbon emissions, actively reduce them, and then have bought credible offsets to cover the rest.
  • The first hints of NIWA’s new regional climate projections are beginning to emerge. By the end of the century, Southland could be as warm as today’s Bay Of Plenty. And Jim Salinger, who first noticed that we were warming up, was given a good profile by the Herald.
  • A belated mention for the Be The Change campaign, a climate change awareness campaign that trundled up the country in a bus in the last couple of months of the year. As the SST reported: “From Bluff to Kerikeri, the Be The Change bus tour is a Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Forest and Bird campaign to get ordinary New Zealanders working to stop climate change.”
  • The NZ Stock Exchange’s carbon trading market, TZ1, is aiming for a mid-year launch, and has appointed former Vector CEO Mark Franklin to head up the operation.
  • The German developed SkySail system for sail-assisted shipping (as featured in HT) is about to get an extended sea trial on a voyage from Europe to Venezuela, Boston and back: “Under favorable wind conditions, the 160-square meter kite shaped like a paraglider is expected to reduce fuel costs by up to 20 percent or more ($1,600 per day) and cut, by a similarly significant amount, its carbon dioxide emissions.” [Yahoo News, Guardian [UK]] There’s lively discussion of the pros and cons over at Frogblog.
  • Some new science: another study confirms that IPCC sea level rise projections are conservative – pointing out that in the last interglacial levels rose by up to 1.6m per century. Work on the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, considered the best historical analogue for the present situation, confirms that initial warming caused massive carbon cycle feedbacks that boosted temperatures even further. In the Arctic, warming peaked at about +24C.
  • Some turn of the year roundups: Technology Review covers the year in energy and nanotech (good news for batteries), The Independent [UK] rounds up the climate news, New Scientist brings an earth science perspective, while NOAA presents a nice graphic of the year’s extreme weather events.
  • At Gristmill, Tom Athanasiou takes a perceptive look at the post-Bali world, and Joe Romm explores some of the latest thinking on what sort of target we should be aiming for. Bottom line: we may already be overshooting. And at the New York Times, Jared Diamond explains the collision between population growth and consumption growth. There’s a crunch coming.
  • Finally, NZine reviewed Hot Topic, and liked it: “I strongly recommend everyone to read this book, but especially recommend it to those who make decisions on action to counter the impact of global warming and those who are able to influence the thinking of others on this issue.”

The Herald sends good sense on holiday

The silly season is obviously taking a toll on editorial judgement at the Herald. Yesterday they ran an astonishing column by Malcolm McPhee – Climate of fear starting to make my temperature rise – which is breathtakingly nonsensical, and also provided space for Jim Hopkins to take a (ritual for him, tired and boring for the rest of us) swipe at climate science in his column. Today, Fran O’Sullivan includes amongst her top ten stories for 2008 – at number three, no less – climate change science consensus breaks – basing her judgement on a list of 400 “scientists” issued by a Republican Senator and his team of tame climate deniers. McPhee and O’Sullivan deserve debunking (see below), but Hopkins’ taste in eyewear is so atrocious ( 😉 ) that I’ll take pity on him and leave him alone (for now).

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