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A new United Nations study has found that glaciers across the globe are shrinking faster than ever before. The UN says the consequences could be grim for billions of people who depend on glacial melt and urges global leaders to act swiftly on climate change.

Glaciers across the globe are melting faster than at any point in the last century. Many could disappear within decades, and their decline could cause droughts and chaos for billions of people who depend on rivers fed by glaciers.

This was the sobering message delivered Sunday by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), along with a plea to international leaders to act swiftly and drastically to address climate change, which the UNEP says is to blame for the glacial melt.

Glacial melt is the “canary in the climate change coal mine,” said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner in a statement. “It is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and take notice,” he said.

The announcement was based on a study that tracked glacial melt at nearly 30 glaciers across the globe. Some of the most dramatic losses were in Europe; Norway’s Breidalblikkbrea glacier topped the list by shrinking 3.1 meters (10.2 feet) in 2006.

“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,” Wilfried Haeberli, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, a Zurich-based research institute that conducted the study.

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(red emphasis, above, was mine)

On March 12 the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) released the assessment report Impacts of Climate Change and Variability on Transportation Systems and Infrastructure: Gulf Coast Study, Phase 1. This report, 400+ pages long, is a major study of the implications of climate change for Gulf Coast transportation—including roads and highways, transit services, oil and gas pipelines, freight handling ports, transcontinental railroad networks, waterway systems, and airports. Transportation systems and infrastructure are likely to be adversely impacted by climate change, including warmer temperatures and heat waves, changes in precipitation patterns (extreme precipitation events, flooding), sea level rise, increased storm intensity, and damage associated with storm surge. The study talks about how climate change considerations need to be incorporated in transportation planning and investment decisions.

A link to the full report, which was posted on the CCSP Web site at about noon yesterday.

Three hours later DOT issued a pro forma, uninformative, and misleading press release on a different Web site, 3 links away from the report itself. There appears to be no other rollout activity in connection with this major climate change risk assessment-preparedness study. The press release lists only one contact, a press official who is a former Republican congressional staffer. It does not list as contacts any of the lead authors of the report—the individuals with the real expertise to discuss its contents.

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The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.  According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.

The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.

We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa.

Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war.

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- This quote, from the article referenced below, is at the core of Perfect Storm concerns:

Although many nations have been pledging steps to curb emissions for nearly a decade, the world’s output of carbon from human activities totals about 10 billion tons a year and has been steadily rising.

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The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

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An EU report says climate change will have a growing impact on global security, multiplying existing threats such as shortages of food and water.

It warns that climate change could cause millions of people to migrate towards Europe as other parts of the world suffer environmental degradation.

States that are “already fragile and conflict prone” could be over-burdened, the report says.

EU proposals to tackle climate change will be discussed by leaders this week.

The stark warning from the report - drawn up by the EU’s foreign affairs chief Javier Solana and the European Commission - is that climate change is not just a threat in itself - it is “a threat multiplier”.

It says shortages of food and water - even radicalisation and state failure - are likely to get worse if no action is taken.

Africa is likely to be especially at risk, which means migration could intensify, both within Africa itself and towards Europe.

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told the BBC: “If the weakest countries cannot adapt, it may lead to, for instance, more forced migration, and even possibly radicalisation and state failure, causing internal and external security risks.”

Polar icecaps

The report also highlights the Arctic as a possible area of future conflict. With the melting of the polar icecaps, new waterways and trade routes are opening up.

The region is rich in untapped oil and gas resources, and last year Russia staked its claim by planting a flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole.

There is, it says, “an increasing need to address the growing debate over territorial claims and access to new trade routes”.

But the report does not offer much in the way of specific solutions. It recommends more dialogue, international co-operation and further research.

The EU prides itself on being a world leader on climate change, but turning talk into action is not easy.

On the one hand, the EU scheme for carbon emissions trading is being expanded to take in aviation for the first time.

But plans to limit car emissions and switch to renewable energy are being hampered by objections from industries and some member states, which say they are being unfairly penalised.

To the original article… 

New research confirms that ice sheets in West Antarctica are thinning at a far faster rate than in past millennia. Although scientists are divided as to the cause of the melt, many feel it is directly related to climate change.

The boom must have been deafening last fall as the gigantic chunk of ice finally broke off from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica. For almost a year, the creaks and groans from the river of ice had presaged the birth of a new, expansive iceberg. And finally it was there — 34 kilometers long by 20 kilometers wide, an area almost as great as that of New York City.

But as dramatic as the iceberg birth was, it has become a common spectacle in recent years. The gigantic ice shelf that extends into the ocean off of West Antarctica is crumbling — and the glaciers on the continent behind the ice shelf are flowing with increasing speed toward the sea. Concern among scientists is increasing just as quickly. Should the melt-rate continue, or accelerate, many experts fear that the resulting rise in the ocean level could be catastrophic.

Just what is behind the meltdown, however, is not entirely clear. Whereas it is not difficult to pinpoint global warming caused by human activity for increasing temperatures in the Arctic, the southern end of the planet is more difficult. The western side of the continent is thawing out wherever one looks, but on the eastern side, not much is happening.

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The world must respond to climate change and other environmental challenges now while the cost is low or else pay a stiffer price later for its indecision, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Wednesday.

A new report by the 30-nation organization looks at “red light issues” in the environment, including global warming, water shortages, energy, biodiversity loss, transportation, agriculture, and fisheries.

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By Martin Redfern
Rothera Research Station, Antarctica

UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica.

If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level.

The new evidence comes from a group of glaciers covering an area the size of Texas, in a remote and seldom visited part of West Antarctica.

The “rivers of ice” have surged sharply in speed towards the ocean.

David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, explained: “It has been called the weak underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the reason for that is that this is the area where the bed beneath the ice sheet dips down steepest towards the interior.

“If there is a feedback mechanism to make the ice sheet unstable, it will be most unstable in this region.”

There is good reason to be concerned.

Satellite measurements have shown that three huge glaciers here have been speeding up for more than a decade.

The biggest of the glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, is causing the most concern.

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A new NASA study confirms that the surface temperature of Greenland’s massive ice sheet has been rising, stoked by warming air temperatures, and fueling loss of the island’s ice at the surface and throughout the mass beneath.

Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is home to enough ice to raise sea level by about 23 feet if the entire ice sheet were to melt into surrounding waters. Though the loss of the whole ice sheet is unlikely, loss from Greenland’s ice mass has already contributed in part to 20th century sea level rise of about two millimeters per year, and future melt has the potential to impact people and economies across the globe. So NASA scientists used state-of-the-art NASA satellite technologies to explore the behavior of the ice sheet, revealing a relationship between changes at the surface and below.

“The relationship between surface temperature and mass loss lends further credence to earlier work showing rapid response of the ice sheet to surface meltwater,” said Dorothy Hall, a senior researcher in Cryospheric Sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the study.

A team led by Hall used temperature data captured each day from 2000 through 2006 from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. They measured changes in the surface temperature to within about one degree of accuracy from about 440 miles away in space. They also measured melt area within each of the six major drainage basins of the ice sheet to see whether melt has become more extensive and longer lasting, and to see how the various parts of the ice sheet are reacting to increasing air temperatures.

The team took their research at the ice sheet’s surface a step further, becoming the first to pair the surface temperature data with satellite gravity data to investigate what internal ice changes occur as the surface melts. Geophysicist and co-author, Scott Luthcke, also of NASA Goddard, developed a mathematical solution, using gravity data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) twin satellite system. “This solution has permitted greatly-improved detail in both time and space, allowing measurement of mass change at the low-elevation coastal regions of the ice sheet where most of the melting is occurring,” said Luthcke.

The paired surface temperature and gravity data confirm a strong connection between melting on ice sheet surfaces in areas below 6,500 feet in elevation, and ice loss throughout the ice sheet’s giant mass. The result led Hall’s team to conclude that the start of surface melting triggers mass loss of ice over large areas of the ice sheet.

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The level of the Mediterranean Sea is rising rapidly and could increase by up to half a metre in the next 50 years, scientists in Spain have warned.

A study by the Spanish Oceanographic Institute says levels have been rising since the 1970s with the rate of increase growing in recent years.

It says even a small rise could have serious consequences in coastal areas.

The study noted that the findings were consistent with other investigations into the effects of climate change.

The study, entitled Climate Change in the Spanish Mediterranean, said the sea had risen “between 2.5mm and 10mm (0.1 and 0.4in) per year since the 1990s”.

If the trend continued it would have “very serious consequences” in low-lying coastal areas even in the case of a small rise, and “catastrophic consequences” if a half-metre increase occurred, the study warned.

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