The picture was captured by marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan while on an annual voyage to observe the glacier and its surrounding wildlife.

Here’s more about soaring arctic temperatures at CBC and what it means for the planet.

While Anthony Watts runs around trying to convince Americans that the temperature record is flawed and global warming is a socialist commie plot, the Urban Heat Island Effect is melting the magical place that is Canada’s High Arctic.

I mean, if you’re a denier, that has to be how you rationalize it, right? It can’t be global warming because Anthony Watts says that climate change is nothing more than a scary fairy tale.

It follows then that all Inuit are alarmists, and that the same heat island effect that invalidates the temperature readings throughout ALL of the good ole US of A is causing temperatures to soar in Northern Canada. Obviously, Resolute — the city town village hamlet settlement community whistle stop lonely outpost on Cornwallis Island, population 229, is so bustling with activity during the summer that’s it’s melting the ice throughout The Land of the Midnight Sun, and causing temperatures to soar in Canada, Siberia, and Greenland.

What else could it be? The fact that Arctic Amplification was predicted by climate models is further proof that it CAN’T possibly be happening.

But surely… even a denier wouldn’t believe that tiny Resolute could be melting Northern Canada and Siberia.

We need to look elsewhere. Maybe the big cities. Yeah, that’s it. Big cities like Toronto, Montreal, and New York — 4,000 kilometres to the south — are somehow sending their incredble urban island warmth northward, and mimicking arctic amplification, fooling all those naive scientists.

Man… the mental gymnastics that deniers have to go through must hurt their brains.

I think it’s far easier to blame the whole problem on the socialists in our midst. Like this one comrade scientist and arctic researcher from Lotus Land who is just spreading panic and alarmism in order to secure funding for his trips to Resolute and beyond.

Here’s a brief story on Arctic Amplification from Reuters.

The Arctic region is warming by about 1°C per decade — far greater than most other regions — and releasing greenhouse gases on a scale that will likely accelerate global warming. But that’s the not the only change that University of British Columbia researcher Greg Henry has seen during his career, for the higher temperatures are causing the tree line to extend northward, bringing larger plants to areas that once only held shrubs, lichen and ice, so the Arctic region is darkening and absorbing more heat. In fact, virtually every summer since 1990 has set a new record temperature.

“We’re finding that the tundra is actually giving off a lot more nitrous oxide and methane than anyone had thought before,” said Henry told reporters from Resolute, in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. “We’re really trying to get a handle on this because if (further tests show) that’s true, this actually changes the entire greenhouse gas budget for the North, and that has global implications.”

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*I’m just trying to be funny. Let me know if you think I’ve succeeded.

Our finger is on the trigger. If we don’t cut carbon in the developed world, we’re taking lives in the emerging world.

This Guardian photo series shows courageous people in Bangladesh trying to keep rising sea levels from destroying their villages.

Global warming has serious consequences for the international fishing community — and for humanity. A study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that individual fish have lost half their average body mass, that fish populations have thinned drastically, and that smaller species are starting to dominate European fishing grounds. Although overfishing may have played a role, the long, steady increase in ocean temperatures caused by global warming takes the lion’s share of the blame.

“It’s huge,” said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and Environmental Research Institute in Lyon, France. “Size is a fundamental characteristic that is linked to a number of biological functions, such as fecundity — the capacity to reproduce.”

Marine biologists know that smaller fish have fewer innate resources, and tend to produce fewer eggs, and so fewer offspring. Lower individual weights also mean that the same number of fish feed fewer people and, by extension, fewer predators along the food chain. This study builds on previous work and establishes that marine life has shifted migratory and breeding patterns in response to rising sea temperatures, and that warmer seas seem to favor smaller breeds of fish.

Dr. Daufresne and his colleagues examined long-term surveys of fish populations in rivers, streams and the Baltic and North Seas and also performed experiments on bacteria and plankton. They have determined that many individual species have lost 50 percent of their mass in just 25 years, and that stocks have declined by 60 percent.

While commercial and recreational fishing does affect some of the fisheries studied, it “cannot be considered as the unique trigger” for the changes in size, Daufresne’s group found. “Although not negating the role of other factors, our study provides strong evidence that temperature actually plays a major role in driving changes in the size structure of populations and communities.”

Editor’s Note: I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic on television which filled with a deep and abiding awe for the creatures that share the world with us. The worst case scenarios suggest that warming this century will place 50 to 70 percent of the world’s species at risk.

Is this really the world we want to leave our children and grandchildren?

Well, at least that clears up the mystery. Over the past year I’ve been fretting over an intractable contradiction. The government has promised spectacular cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. It is also pushing through new roads and runways, approving coal-burning power stations, bailing out car manufacturers and ditching regulations for low-carbon homes. How can these policies be reconciled?

Monbiot is always persuasive. But this is required reading.

The news from the Arctic isn’t good, for polar bears or for humanity. Arctic sea ice has thinned dramatically since 2004, with older, thicker ice giving way to fragile young ice that can easily melt during the long, cool northern summer days. Researchers have long known that the overall area covered by arctic ice was decreasing, but these new satellite studies by NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) demonstrate that the overall volume is decreasing dramatically — with unfortunate consequences for the planet.

Older, thicker arctic sea ice is more resistant to melting, and a persistent ice cover in the arctic helps cool the planet by reflecting a substantial amount of the sun’s rays back into space. On the other hand, open water absorbs the once-reflected heat, and this accelerates the warming of the planet.

Using NASA’s ICESat spacecraft, scientists have determined that the overall thickness Arctic sea ice has thinned by an average 2.2 feet over four winters. The total area covered by thicker, older ice that has survived at least one summer shrank has nosedived to 32 percent of the total — down from 62 percent in 2003. It’s the first time that older sea ice hasn’t been dominant.

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Dot Earth has a good interview with the JPL scientists.

In advance of the G8 Summit in Italy, Oxfam has released a new paper suggesting that hunger will become the defining issue of this century, and that climate change is to blame. The report, called Suffering the Science: Climate Change, People, and Poverty (PDF) argues that hundreds of millions of farmers are now struggling to grow food, and that drought, heat waves, and uncertain rainfall patterns threaten to make hunger and malnutrition common throughout the world’s most vulnerable regions. Centuries of farming and traditional methods are no longer working in a warming world.

The Oxfam International study is comprehensive, but it particularly focuses on the toll that climate change will take on humanity. Staple crops will be among the hardest hit by changing weather patterns and drought, and the implications are devastating. “Climate change’s most savage impact on humanity in the near future is likely to be in the increase in hunger … the countries with existing problems in feeding their people are those most at risk… Millions of farmers will have to give up traditional crops as they experience changes in the seasons that they and their ancestors have depended on. Climate-related hunger [may become] the defining human tragedy of this century.”

In creating this report, Oxfam staff in 15 countries collected records from communities at risk. While their comments are anecdotal, they jibe with information and statistics coming from the scientific community. Among the observations included in the Oxfam report:

Unseasonal events such as storms, dense fogs and heavier rains are more common.

But the report is about more than farming and food. It also speaks to water shortages, the spread of disease, and increasing incidence of violent storms due to a warming planet.
The report ends with a dire warning that an entire century of developmental advances in the poorest countries will be wiped out with rising temperatures over the next few decades.

“Climate change is happening today,” says Oxfam Director Jeremy Hobbs, “and the world’s poorest people, who already face a daily struggle to survive, are being hit hardest.”

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Note: The photo comes from the Oxfam report, copyright EPA/Francis R.Malsaig.

Filipino children are wading through flood waters during heavy rains during Typhoon Fengshen. Recent scientific studies suggest that climate change is making tropical storms more severe, and increasing the frequency of cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes.

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On the latest G8 Climate Scorecard (PDF) released in advance of the L’Aquila, Italy G8 Summit, Canada has fallen into last place now that the Obama administration is reversing the global warming policies of his predecessor. The report chastises Canada as one of the few developed countries in the world with dramatically rising greenhouse gas emissions, and no real plan to control them. The scorecard also notes that Germany is the acknowledged G8 leader when it comes to climate change, and that UK, Germany and France have all been enacting successful policies to cut emissions, with all three nations expected to exceed their Kyoto obligations.

But the report argues that this still isn’t good enough. By a long shot.

The scorecard was released by the WWF and financial services giant Allianz SE. It noted that Canada’s emissions have risen by 26% over 1990 levels, and that telling statistic means that Canada’s per capita emissions will soon surpass the US. And the sad truth is that per capita emissions in Canada and the US are double those in Europe.

“We emit more greenhouse gases than half the countries in the world put together,” said Keith Stewart, WWF-Canada’s climate change campaign manager. “We have the resources — financially, intellectually, ecologically — to be leaders, and we’ve simply chosen not to… Canada is becoming increasingly isolated in clinging to the fossil economy while the rest of the world is moving on to green economy.”

Stewart argues that Canada’s poor showing is especially irksome given country’s inherent natural wealth. “Nowhere else on Earth do fewer people steward more resources, yet Canada now stands dead last amongst the G8 Nations in protecting our shared home from the threat of dangerous climate change.Canada’s future lies in creating green jobs on a living planet, not in becoming the energy sweatshop for the world.”

The report suggests that while some countries are pulling their weight, much remains to be done, and the lack of leadership among G8 nations is discouraging. Even the top countries are not committing to medium-term emission reductions by recent scientific studies. In the report’s foreword , James Leape, Director General of WWF International and Allianz board member Joachim Faber, urged the nations to take dramatic action now to seal the deal in Copenhagen.

“While there might be a bailout possibility for the financial system, no amounts of money will save the planet once climate change crosses the danger threshold. It is therefore crucial to limit the rise of global temperature to below two degrees compared to pre-industrial levels.”

]]> http://one-blue-marble.com/blog/2009/07/01/oh-canada-dead-last-in-new-g8-climate-rankings/feed/ 1 http://one-blue-marble.com/blog/2009/07/01/le-grande-derangement-de-louisiana/ http://one-blue-marble.com/blog/2009/07/01/le-grande-derangement-de-louisiana/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:43:40 +0000 Richard http://one-blue-marble.com/blog/?p=510

A vast swath of the coastal lands around New Orleans will be underwater in 90 years because of rising sea levels due to climate change, according to a study published this week in Nature Geoscience. The new report suggests that up to 13,500 square kilometers — an area the size of Connecticut — could be lost to the sea, which is much greater than earlier estimates. The findings suggest that some hard decisions will have to be made about how best to protect coastal areas under threat from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and an expected increase in hurricane intensity.

Hurricane Katrina started the ball rolling in 2005 by seriously reducing the land mass of the barrier island chain sheltering New Orleans, and that loss of protection is much greater than expected. Rising waters and thousands of dams are also affecting the Mississippi’s ability to bear sediment downstream, and that too is weakening the region’s natural defenses. Up to 24 billion tons of sediment would be required to shore up the coastline, and that’s just outside the realm of possibility.

“I think every geologist that has worked on this problem realises the future does not look very bright unless we can come up with some innovative ways to get that sediment in the right spot,” said Professor Harry Roberts, one of the study’s co-authors. “For managers and people who are squarely in the restoration business, this is going to force them to make some very hard decisions about which areas to save and which areas you can’t save.”

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* Le Grand Dérangement of 1755 sent many of my Acadian forebears to Louisiana.

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