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A Nasa satellite has documented startling changes in Arctic sea ice cover between 2004 and 2005. The extent of “perennial” ice – thick ice which remains all year round – declined by 14%, losing an area the size of Pakistan or Turkey.

The last few decades have seen summer ice shrink by about 0.7% per year.

The drastic shrinkage may relate partly to unusual wind patterns found in 2005, though rising temperatures in the Arctic could also be a factor.

The research is reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the global average; and recent studies have shown that the area of the Arctic covered by ice each summer, and the ice thickness, have been shrinking.

September 2005 saw the lowest recorded area of ice cover since 1978, when satellite records became available.

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WASHINGTON – Global warming gases trapped in the soil are bubbling out of thawing permafrost in amounts far higher than previously thought and may trigger what researchers warn is a climate time bomb.

Methane – a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide – is being released from permafrost at a rate five times faster than thought, according to a study being published today in the journal Nature. The findings are based on new, more accurate measuring techniques.

The effects can be huge,” said lead author Katey Walter of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. “It’s coming out a lot and there’s a lot more to come out.”

Scientists worry about a vicious global warming cycle that was not part of their already-gloomy climate forecast: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that has been frozen for thousands of years. Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and the cycle continues.

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research credit -> Candice

The September 9th-15th, 2006 issue of the Economist Magazine has Global Climate Change as its front page story.

The Economist Magazine, along with the Wall Street Journal, have long been staunch defenders of the POV that the various impending ecological, climatic and economic problems in the world are overblown. After all, many business readers, who are their bread and butter, don’t want to hear this kind of news.

It’s interesting to see, as the problems loom larger and larger, how those who previously denied the problems come to grips with the necessity of revising their public positions on the issues. Some, like the current administration, are still deep into denial and bluffing it out. Others, like the Economist, just take up a new line and never mention their previous doubts. And others, like Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, come out directly and admit their change of heart and openly discuss the factors that turned them around.

This slow permeation of awareness, whether it be for ecological awareness, democracy or human rights, is what advances humanity in its evolution towards more enlightened ways of doing things. It’s just a shame that we hardly have time for everyone to ‘wake up’. The problems are approching much faster than our awareness of them is growing and therein lies our core problem.

The release of trapped greenhouse gases is pushing the world past the point of no return on climate change

Robin McKie and Nick Christian
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer

The frozen bogs of Siberia are melting, and the thaw could have devastating consequences for the planet, scientists have discovered.

They have found that Arctic permafrost, which is starting to melt due to global warming, is releasing five times more methane gas than their calculations had predicted. That level of emission is alarming because methane itself is a greenhouse gas. Increased amounts will therefore accelerate warming, cause more melting of Siberian bogs and Arctic wasteland, and so release even more. ‘It’s a slow-motion time bomb,’ said climate expert Professor Ted Schuur, of the University of Florida.

The discovery of these levels of methane release, revealed in a report in Nature last week, suggests that the planet is rapidly approaching a critical tipping point at which global warming could trigger an irreversible acceleration in climate change. ‘The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it has to become a more vicious cycle,’ said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. ‘That’s the thing that is scary about this.’

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NORWICH, England (Reuters) — Global warming over the coming century could mean a return of temperatures last seen in the age of the dinosaur and lead to the extinction of up to half of all species, a scientist said on Thursday.

Not only will carbon dioxide levels be at the highest levels for 24 million years, but global average temperatures will be higher than for up to 10 million years, said Chris Thomas of the University of York.

Between 10 and 99 percent of species will be faced with atmospheric conditions that last existed before they evolved, and as a result from 10-50 percent of them could disappear.

“We may very well already be on the breaking edge of a wave of mass extinctions,” Thomas told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Human-induced climate change must be treated as an immediate threat to national security and prosperity, says John Ashton, the UK’s climate change envoy. He argues that we must secure a stable climate whatever the cost, as failure to do so will cost far more.

The first priority of any government is to provide the conditions necessary for security and prosperity in return for the taxes that citizens pay.

Climate change is potentially the most serious threat there has ever been to this most fundamental of social contracts.

On 28 August 2005, New Orleans was a prosperous, stable and relatively harmonious city. By the next evening, most of its population had been driven from their homes and lacked access to electricity, food, fresh water and medical services.

Within a week, gunmen roamed the streets as law and order broke down; simmering racial and political tensions exploded as the buck for dealing with the catastrophe – as well as preventing it – was hurled about. For months, neighbouring cities and states were inundated with refugees as the political and racial stresses spilled across the country. New Orleans is unlikely ever fully to recover.

Hurricane Katrina hit a city in the world’s richest nation. If anywhere should have been resilient enough to deal with the force of nature, it was the United States.

The economic and security impacts of extreme climatic events in more vulnerable regions, such as Africa and South Asia, or more strategically important regions, like the Middle East, will be more dramatic.

We can see this already in Africa. A major contributing factor to the conflict in Darfur has been a shift in rainfall that has put nomadic herders and settled pastoralists into conflict with each other.

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Rising temperatures will increase the risk of forest fires, droughts and flooding over the next two centuries, UK climate scientists have warned.

Even if harmful emissions were cut now, many parts of the world would face a greater risk of natural disasters, a team from Bristol University said.

The projections are based on data from more than 50 climate models looking at the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers gathered results from 52 computer simulations to calculate the risks from climate-induced changes to the world’s key ecosystems.

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