Can national parks be saved from global warming

From: Margot Roosevelt, LA Times

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The federal government must take decisive action to avoid "a potentially catastrophic loss of animal and plant life," in the national parks, according to a new report that details the effect of global warming on the country's most treasured public lands.

The 53-page report from the National Parks Conservation Assn., a Washington-based advocacy group, contains a litany of concerns related to climate change in the parks, from the bleaching of coral reefs in Florida to the disappearance of high-altitude ponds that nurture yellow-legged frogs in California.

The group, which has offices in California and 10 other states, called on the National Park Service to come up with a detailed plan and funding to adapt to temperature-related ecosystem changes.

"Right now, no national plan exists to manage wildlife throughout their habitat, which often is a patchwork of lands managed by multiple federal agencies, states, tribes, municipalities and private landholders," wrote Tom C. Kiernan, president of the group.

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NOAA Confirms Presence of Global Warming

This is a welcome piece from NOAA. It generally confirms that the global climate has warmed over the past three decades. Presently it appears to be on a slight downtrend for the past decade, but still well above the preceding norms. Enough to nicely eliminate the attempt to link it all to CO2 but not sufficient to claim that the general warming is now over.

We still have no particular comfort regarding causation but we do now have comfort that for the past thirty years we have been able to measure enough variables properly so that when the next cooling event come on, we will figure it all out.

I am more and more inclined to think that the global climate system if left undisturbed will rise to levels a half degree warmer than present. We have been undisturbed many times for great periods of time. Yet when disturbed, we are knocked back sharply.

The Arctic sea ice is now degrading heavily and we are losing huge swathes of freed multi year ice this year. As posted before, mass loss has been consistent for three decades. Because of that, I projected that the bulk would be gone by 2012 back in 2007. I did this before NASA came out and said the same thing (likely because they did not want to say it first) . The press has yet to pick up on all this

If we are now irretrievably losing a third or so of the remaining multi year ice this year alone then we are very much on schedule. Commencing in 20012 we will have a decade of open late summer waters throughout the Arctic with only swathes of one and two year ice to knock though from time to time depending on winds.

Global warming is 'undeniable', says NOAA

Jul 29, 2010

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/43369

The 2009 State of the Climate report, issued on 28 July by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is unequivocal: the past decade was Earth's warmest on record, continuing a 50-year trend.

The report is "an annual scorecard for the climate system", incorporating every type of measurement from around the world, says Tom Karl, transitional head of NOAA's proposed Climate Service.

In a conference call briefing for reporters, Karl said the 218pp report has 303 authors from 48 countries, all of whom worked under extreme time pressure to complete it in a timely manner.

Deke Arndt, of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, described the report as normally like the annual check-up one might receive at a doctor's office, "but because 2009 was the end of a decade, we wanted to take stock of a longer term view", just as one might at one's medical check-up in a decadal birthday year. To do so, the authors focused on 10 key indicators of climate change, using multiple data-sets to track each indicator over several decades.

The climate-indicators project was led by the UK Met Office. Peter Thorne, then at the Met Office and now with the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, told reporters that it is difficult to keep track of the massive amount of climate data arriving daily, so scientists decided to step back and look at the proverbial forest, rather than at individual trees. They identified the key indicators as:

· Near-surface (tropospheric) temperature

· Specific humidity

· Ocean heat content

· Sea level

· Sea-surface temperature

· Temperature over the ocean

· Temperature over land

· Snow cover

· Glaciers

· Sea ice

"Together with colleagues from around the world, we then went out and found, to our knowledge, every existing scientific analysis of global-scale changes in these indicators," Thorne said.

"These produced a compelling picture of our changing climate. Each indicator is changing as we would expect if the world truly were warming," continued Thorne. "The bottom-line conclusion that the world has been warming is simply undeniable."

Scientists at the briefing emphasized the role of the ocean, which absorbs over 93% of Earth's warming and, in particular, the role of the Arctic in determining global climate. The decline of Arctic summer sea ice over three decades, and especially 2000–2009, has been "dramatic", said Walt Meier of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and National Snow and Ice Data Center. In addition, accelerated glacial loss, especially in Greenland, was the major contributor to sea-level rise over the past decade, he said.

"Greenland has actually been quite a surprise for us, because of these new measurements, in terms of how fast it has been moving mass," said Meier. In short, he said: "The Arctic is not at all like Las Vegas. What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic, and that's one of the reasons why the Arctic is a big concern and why it's an indicator of what we expect to see in the future."

Asked whether human activity is the cause of the observed warming, Karl said that this annual report has traditionally been limited to observations, including of atmospheric composition. It does not seek "to make the link between the cause and what we observe," he said, "but this is the basis for the next step, because without this data, it's impossible to take the next step".

As in previous years, the 2009 report has been published as a peer-reviewed supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).

Ribbon Seal Protection Sought by Activists

From: Dan Joling, AP via Discovery News

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Ribbon seals should be listed as threatened or endangered because global warming is quickly melting sea ice, which the seals depend on for several months each year, two environmental groups said in a lawsuit filed against the federal government in San Francisco Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in December denied a listing under the Endangered Species Act for the seals found off the coasts of Alaska and Russia.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace sued in U.S. District Court, claiming the agency ignored the best science available on global warming.

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Abrupt reversal detected in Arctic cooling trend

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

The Arctic climate has been warmer over the past decade than during any 10-year period in 2,000 years, according to a study by an international research team that adds powerful new evidence that human-generated greenhouse gases have speeded the pace of the planet's recent warming.

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The report from an international team of climate scientists concludes that climate change in the Arctic has accelerated since the Industrial Revolution, abruptly reversing a long-term worldwide cooling trend.

"The study provides a clear example of how increased greenhouse gases are now changing our climate," said Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a co-author of the report published Thursday in the journal Science.

To deduce the Arctic's decade-by-decade climate trend over the centuries, the leading scientists in the international study analyzed sediment cores in 14 Arctic lakes that revealed the varied growth rates of long-buried plants. They also studied Arctic tree rings to determine their growth rates and ages as well as ice cores from glaciers across the Arctic that showed patterns of relative warm and cold.

Researchers at other institutions, seeking to look for patterns of climate change even further back in time, used astronomical records to study the well-known wobble of the globe as it spins on its axis. They found that the Northern Hemisphere has long been moving away from the sun's warmth. During the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere is now a million kilometers - about 621,000 miles - farther away from the sun than it was 2,000 years ago, according to the scientist's computer models.

The result was a global period of relative cold that would have continued, the scientists found. But about 1850, at the beginning of the Industrial Age, the planet's climate began overcoming the cooling trend, and the Arctic climate has warmed decade by decade ever since as greenhouse gas emissions have increased, the scientists say.

Stephen Schneider, a Stanford climate expert and biologist who did not participate in the study, called the seven-year study, involving seven major research institutions in three nations, "a heroic effort."

The study, he said, "shows that nature has been, unfortunately, cooperating with theory and showing us on a long-time scale of millennia that the mainstream view is once again bolstered."

It is clear again, Schneider said, that anthropogenic influences - the increasing emission of greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere - are the prime cause of global warming.

For the rest of the article go to:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/04/MNB219HIRT.DTL&tsp=1

Vast expanses of Arctic ice melt in summer heat

From Japan Today

Monday 10th August, 05:38 AM JST

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories —

The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square kilometers of ice on Sunday in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching through satellite eyes for a possible record low polar ice cap.

From the barren Arctic shore of this village in Canada’s far northwest, 2,414 kilometers north of Seattle, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice retreating more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend the ice edge lay some 128 kilometers at sea.

“Forty years ago, it was 40 miles (64 kilometers) out,” said Gruben, 89, patriarch of a local contracting business.

Global average temperatures rose 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius) in the past century, but Arctic temperatures rose twice as much or even faster, almost certainly in good part because of manmade greenhouse gases, researchers say.

In late July the mercury soared to almost 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in this settlement of 900 Inuvialuit, the name for western Arctic Eskimos.

“The water was really warm,” Gruben said. “The kids were swimming in the ocean.”

As of Thursday, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported, the polar ice cap extended over 6.75 million square kilometers after having shrunk an average 106,000 square kilometers a day in July—equivalent to one Indiana or three Belgiums daily.

The rate of melt was similar to that of July 2007, the year when the ice cap dwindled to a record low minimum extent of 4.3 million square kilometers in September.

In its latest analysis, the Colorado-based NSIDC said Arctic atmospheric conditions this summer have been similar to those of the summer of 2007, including a high-pressure ridge that produced clear skies and strong melt in the Beaufort Sea, the arm of the Arctic Ocean off northern Alaska and northwestern Canada.

In July, “we saw acceleration in loss of ice,” the U.S. center’s Walt Meier told The Associated Press. In recent days the pace has slowed, making a record-breaking final minimum “less likely but still possible,” he said.

Scientists say the makeup of the frozen polar sea has shifted significantly the past few years, as thick multiyear ice has given way as the Arctic’s dominant form to thin ice that comes and goes with each winter and summer.

The past few years have “signaled a fundamental change in the character of the ice and the Arctic climate,” Meier said.

Ironically, the summer melts since 2007 appear to have allowed disintegrating but still thick multiyear ice to drift this year into the relatively narrow channels of the Northwest Passage, the east-west water route through Canada’s Arctic islands. Usually impassable channels had been relatively ice-free the past two summers.

“We need some warm temperatures with easterly or southeasterly winds to break up and move this ice to the north,” Mark Schrader, skipper of the sailboat Ocean Watch, e-mailed The Associated Press from the west entrance to the passage.

The steel-hulled sailboat, with scientists joining it at stops along the way, is on a 40,232-kilometer, foundation-financed circumnavigation of the Americas, to view and demonstrate the impact of climate change on the continents’ environments.

Environmentalists worry, for example, that the ice-dependent polar bear will struggle to survive as the Arctic cap melts. Schrader reported seeing only one bear, an animal chased from the Arctic shore of Barrow, Alaska, that “swam close to Ocean Watch on its way out to sea.”

(The rest of the article is available at: http://www.japantoday.com/category/world/view/vast-expanses-of-arctic-ice-melt-in-summer-heat)

Arctic Ocean may be polluted soup by 2070

From: Kate Ravilious, NewScientist

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WITHIN 60 years the Arctic Ocean could be a stagnant, polluted soup. Without drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, the Transpolar Drift, one of the Arctic's most powerful currents and a key disperser of pollutants, is likely to disappear because of global warming.

The Transpolar Drift is a cold surface current that travels right across the Arctic Ocean from central Siberia to Greenland, and eventually out into the Atlantic. It was first discovered in 1893 by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who tried unsuccessfully to use the current to sail to the North Pole. Together with the Beaufort Gyre, the Transpolar Drift keeps Arctic waters well mixed and ensures that pollution never lingers there for long.

To better understand the dispersal of pollution in the Arctic Ocean, Ola Johannessen, director of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway, and his colleagues studied the spread of radioactive substances such as strontium-90 and caesium-137 from nuclear testing, bomb factories and nuclear power-plant accidents. Measurements taken between 1948 and 1999 were plugged into a high-resolution ocean circulation model and combined with a climate model to predict Arctic Ocean circulation until 2080.

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CAN WE BUILD MORE EFFICIENT ENGINES

Stop global warming


Yes, I think we can. The present internal combustion engine was mostly developed in a time when fuel cost and efficiency were not imperatives. We need to go back to the early days of engine devleopment and reassess the way designers handled branches in the design road. We may have overlooked some better choices way back when the discovery of oil in Oklahoma and Texas seemed to say that there would be cheap gasoline forever.

One of these early branches in the road was a choice between four-stroke cycle engines and two-stroke cycle engines for automobiles. At the time, we used carburetors to feed fuel to the cylinders. In this context, the four-stroke engine is a far better choice. (More efficient and less polluting.)

But, the trend today is toward injection of fuel directly into the cylinders. With this modern option, the two-stroke cycle actually provides a far more efficient engine. Here are some other choices that need to be reviewed:

1. Engines are only designed for either gasoline or diesel, and nothing else.
2. Compression ratios are lower than one would choose for best efficiency.
3. Engine design principles are not based on a need to reduce weight.

Some people are looking at the exciting possibilities still left to be explored. A possible outcome may be radically new engine types in the near future.

Ernie Rogers