Arctic Record Proves Global Warming is Caused by Man

The Arctic’s geological record provides all the evidence we need that global warming is man’s doing, experts say. A closer look at the sediment timeline has shown that increased ice melt falls right in line with the birth of the Industrial Age, when those billowing clouds of greenhouse gases first started to flow from factory smokestacks.

From the LA Times:

For more than 2,000 years, a natural wobble in Earth’s axis has caused the Arctic region to move farther away from the sun during the region’s summer, reducing the amount of solar radiation it receives. The Arctic is now 600,000 miles farther from the sun than it was in AD 1, and temperatures there should have fallen a little more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since then.

Instead, the region has warmed 2.2 degrees since 1900 alone, and the decade from 1998 to 2008 was the warmest in two millenniums, according to a team headed by climatologist Darrell S. Kaufman of Northern Arizona University.

Not only was the last half-century the warmest of the last 2,000 years, “but it reversed the long-term, millennial-scale trend toward cooler temperatures,” Kaufman said.

The results seem to negate the primary argument of those who say the current warming of Earth is simply a natural variation, he said.

It’s not too difficult to understand the argument that people have against anthropomorphic global warming – that we, as humans, are simply too small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things to cause such changes in the earth and its natural balance. After all, nature is quite an amazing force.

But, to believe that we aren’t capable of causing global warming is to ignore the massive destruction we have unleashed upon this planet as we rose to the top of the food chain and began industrializing. We have changed the atmosphere. We have destroyed ecosystems and decimated much of the rainforest that would otherwise be helping to balance the greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the air.

It’s real, it’s happening, and we did it. Now we have to find a way to make up for it.

Link [LA Times]

Photo credit: Flickr user A6U571N

Sea Ice Images from Spy Satellites Made Public

For the past 10 years, spy satellites have captured super high-resolution images of sea ice at the North and South Poles, but until now, the public –and even most scientists – hasn’t seen them. Finally, hours after a National Academy of Sciences committee recommended that the intelligence community should release the images, they were published by the United States Geological Service.

From Wired:

The new data provides what NAS committee member Thorsten Markus called “a dramatic improvement” in what we can see. The previously off-limits sea ice data has a resolution of one meter. The previous scientific standard sea ice images from the Landsat program have a resolution of 15 meters.

With the new info in hand, scientists should be able to build better models of smaller sea-ice features like melt ponds and ridges. Both are believed to have important roles in sea ice dynamics, but how important they are remains unclear.

It’s not just the high resolution of the satellite data that’s got scientists excited. The intelligence community has also been snapping photos of more locations and for longer than anyone else.

“[The data] is better in quality, it’s longer in duration and it’s broader in coverage,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, who did not contribute to the new report, but is looking at similar issues for the National Academy of Sciences.

You can view sets of images from a number of locations including the Canadian Arctic, Barrow Alaska and the East Siberian Sea. For each location, there are high quality images from the years 2000, 2001, 2002-2006 and 2007-2008. It’s fascinating stuff.

Hopefully these images will help scientists get more information about how polar sea ice has changed over the past ten years. It will be interesting to see the influence they might have on current global warming science.

Link [Wired]

Scientists: Climate Change is Happening Faster than You Think

And you thought the news about global warming was already bleak: well, now scientists are saying it’s even worse than we’ve been told. Because greenhouse gas emissions have increased faster than expected and higher temps are triggering self-reinforcing biofeedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, the pace of climate change is likely to be much faster than recent predictions.

From The Washington Post:

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel’s 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

According to scientists on the panel, unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as a result of ‘feedback loops’, which are speeding up natural processes. Among the most prominent examples is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere.

Christopher Field warns that the permafrost holds over 1 trillion tons of carbon and as much as 10% of that could be released this century. And that’s not all: the permafrost also contains methane, which is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.

Similar feedback loops are taking place in the oceans and on land, with rising carbon dioxide levels making sea water more acidic and shrinking ice cover causing the Northern Hemisphere to absorb, rather than reflect, the sun’s energy.

The U.N.’s next assessment of Earth’s climate trends will, for the first time, include policy proposals – but it’s not scheduled for release until 2014.  Nations with high greenhouse gas emissions simply can’t wait that long – they’ve got to start doing whatever they can. The time for serious action was yesterday, but there’s still a hope of catching up. It’s just going to take serious commitment, which we can only hope the leaders of the world can muster up in time.

Link [The Washington Post]

Photo credit: NASA via MSNBC

2 Trillion Tons of Ice Gone Since 2003

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Alaska and Antarctica have been lost since 2003 due to melting, according to new NASA satellite data. It’s the latest round of evidence of the toll global warming is taking around the world, and scientists say this is just the beginning.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years occurred in Greenland, and the rate of ice melt seems to be accelerating. NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke says the water melting from Greenland between 2003 and 2008 would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays.

From MSNBC:

The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large winter snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.

In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend.

Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn’t add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about half a millimeter of sea level rise a year, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said in a telephone interview from the conference.

Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.

That’s not the only bad news that will be presented today at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Other research points to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice. Scientists are expected to announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, which is a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That’s when the Arctic warms faster than predicted and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere around the world.

Two other studies being presented at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The methane production is caused by a loss of sea ice warming the water, which then melts the permafrost in Alaska.  The second study shows that large amounts of frozen methane trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms in Siberia are starting to bubble to the surface in alarming amounts. The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released.

Link [MSNBC]

Experts Reveal ‘Dramatic Evidence’ of Arctic Warming

Sea ice is melting at a rapid pace, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty and reindeer herds are declining, experts revealed in a report released Thursday. The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. warns that people should take notice, because the planet is interconnected and what happens in the Arctic will affect the rest of the world.

MSNBC gives details of the third annual Arctic Report Card for the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

“There continues to be widespread and, in some cases, dramatic evidence of an overall warming of the Arctic system,” the experts stated in their report.

Compiled by 46 scientists from 10 countries, the report looks at six areas in the Arctic: atmosphere, sea ice, Greenland, ocean, biology and land. It found a “warming” trend in the first three signals and “mixed” signals in the latter three.

“Changes in the Arctic show a domino effect from multiple causes more clearly than in other regions,” said James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “It’s a sensitive system and often reflects changes in relatively fast and dramatic ways.”

For example, autumn air temperatures in the Arctic are at a record 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

The report noted that 2007 was the warmest year on record the Arctic, leading to a record loss of sea ice. This year’s sea ice melt was second only to 2007.

The study also noted a warming trend on land, with an increase in greenness as shrubs move north into areas that were formerly permafrost. Other findings include increased warming in Greenland, an unprecedented rate of sea level rise, a decline in reindeer herds and increasing goose populations.  Experts stress that increased solar output only accounts for about 10 percent of global warming, saying “You can’t use solar to say that greenhouse gases are not a major factor.”

Still in denial?

Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: Bob Strong/Reuters