The map, along with an associated animation (below) developed by NASA, reveals that ice is flowing fastest in coastal ice shelves and their tributaries, shown in this illustration in bright purple and blue. Though it’s ice that’s moving, not water, “you can imagine it like a river system,” says Bernd Scheuchl, one of the map’s creators. The fastest ice flows out to sea at a rate of a few kilometers a year. Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers on the west coast are the most active.

The team was surprised by how far inland they found fast-moving ice, Scheuchl says. So, if Antarctica loses a great deal of its coastal ice to climate change in the coming decades, large quantities of interior ice could follow. “That’s critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise,” NASA polar scientist Thomas Wagner said in a prepared statement.

To create this view of Antarctic ice flow, the UC Irvine researchers relied on data from satellites operated by Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency. Flow was tracked from 2007 to 2009 during a period of intense scientific monitoring of Earth’s poles that researchers all over the world had agreed to do. A report on the map was published online August 18 in Science.

Source Scientific America

Despite America’s intense political polarization over climate change, the scientific measurement of global warming is not in dispute. Since 1900, the earth as a whole has warmed by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, an empirical fact that has become an official statistic of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It is a seemingly minuscule and barely perceptible increase of average temperature, but spread over the entire surface of the earth that extra energy accumulates into an enormous force. Just what the impact is on the climate system is something that scientists are only now beginning to understand.

“Seemingly very small changes can have very big implications,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

The 1.4 degree rise in average temperature means the entire surface of earth’s 500 million square kilometers has become home to between 250 and 500 million megawatts of energy that used to escape the planet’s atmospheric shell into space. That’s an extra 0.5 to one watt, or roughly one Christmas light bulb’s worth of heat, falling on every square meter of land and sea.

“It might seem small, but it actually is very significant when you look at earth’s history,” said Pushker Kharecha, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and The Earth Institute at Columbia University. For the climate to be relatively stable, he said, the energy balance must remain “within a small fraction of a watt [per square meter].”

“No question about it, it’s a lot of energy,” said Warren Washington, a senior scientist at NCAR.

In a year’s time, this energy imbalance is roughly equivalent to 15 to 30 times the global energy consumption of 2007, or to the amount of power generated by 250,000 to half a million large coal-fired power plants.

Natural fluctuations in solar output are “somewhat” responsible, Kharecha said. But “when we look at the interdecadal trends, it’s very clear that the human force is what’s causing the vast majority of change in recent decades.”

“What humans are doing is creating an imbalance,” said Jeff Kiehl, a senior scientist in the climate modeling section of NCAR. “We’re … putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which limits the amount of flow of infrared radiation [heat] going back out into space.”

As a result, the planet as a whole is heating up, Kiehl said, because “[earth's] response is to warm up or cool down in response to any energy imbalance.”

“It’s a fundamental law of physics that energy is conserved. It can’t be created or destroyed. It can be transferred or transformed,” he continued. “If we’re trapping infrared radiation on this planet that energy has to go somewhere. It can’t just disappear.”

Extra Energy and Extreme Weather

So where exactly does all the extra energy go, and how does it influence earth’s complex weather phenomena? “Some goes into the oceans and some as latent heat in the atmosphere, and that energy is available to be transformed into things like storms,” Kiehl explained.

Scientists say most of the extra energy ends up warming the world’s seas because of water’s enormous capacity to trap heat. The rest goes into the ground or toward raising temperatures in the atmosphere. That captured heat can melt ice caps and evaporate water, creating additional water vapor, a greenhouse gas.

The extra moisture can also power climatic extremes, including severe thunderstorms.

Consistent with this picture of rising heat and moisture in the atmosphere, Kiehl said, is that the “frequency and intensity of extreme weather events should also increase,” including record heat waves, floods, blizzards and droughts.

“The big question is, is that what we’re seeing today?”

Climate scientists say the lack of uniform and lengthy historical data and the complexity of the climate system makes it difficult to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between the extra heat and extreme weather events, which seem to be occurring with alarming frequency in recent years.

“There’s a lot of complexity,” said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at NCAR. “You can’t understand the [climate] system with simple links.”

But amid the current wild extremes the question is growing in importance. A quick look at some recent devastating weather events reveals why:

Across the U.S. Midwest and East Coast, temperatures climbed to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this month. According to NOAA’s National Weather Service, 1,149 daily high maximum temperature records were broken between July 1 and July 19.

July 2010 was Russia’s hottest July in at least 130 years. Temperatures reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Moscow as wildfires burned hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and peatlands. The fires destroyed about a third of Russia’s cultivable land, leading to a temporary ban on wheat exports that sent food prices soaring.

The ongoing drought in East Africa is the worst to strike the region in six decades. Somalia has been particularly hard-hit as crop failure exacerbates a humanitarian crisis caused by military conflict and years of famine. The UN estimates that 10 million people are threatened by starvation.

In May 2011, the combination of heavy rains and snowmelt from a stormy winter fueled the worst floods to hit the Mississippi River Basin since at least 1937, prompting the Army Corps of Engineers to blow up levees to save cities from the surging waters.

Last year in Australia heavy precipitation triggered mass flooding from Dec. 2010 to Jan. 2011. In Queensland, flooding covered an area equal to the size of France and Germany. Thousands were evacuated from their homes, with total damage estimated to be $20 billion.

Not So Simple

“These things are consistent with the kind of changes we expect to see [from global warming],” said Kathleen Miller, a NCAR scientist who studies natural resource systems and the impact of climate change on societies. But she was wary of identifying global warming’s role.

“Anything you see is some combination of natural internal variability and the effects of climate change,” she said. “For any particular event, you can’t clearly separate out what is the primary influence.”

“We’re more certain of some things than others,” said Meehl. “Temperature is the one where there’s the greatest certainty.”

For instance, the United States had twice as many record-high daily temperatures than record lows from 2000-2009 compared to the 1950s, when the two were about equal, according to a study by Meehl.

That same trend is seen in decadal average temperatures, said Washington of NCAR, which “have gone up over time.” Other statistics show “the number of heat waves is increasing and the number of cold waves is decreasing,” he said.

Hurricanes, which get their power from hot humid air over the oceans, are also on the rise in parts of the world. Trenberth says there is a direct causal link with extra atmospheric heat.

“It’s now one degree Fahrenheit warmer and there’s four percent more moisture [over the oceans] than 30 to 40 years ago. That’s the environment in which all storms now develop … [and these are] conditions that tend to make storms more intense.”

In the tropical North Atlantic, said Kharecha, there’s a “strong correlation” between increasing sea surface temperatures and the “frequency and intensity” of hurricanes since the 1950s. But that trend cannot be found in hurricane trends worldwide, and the lack of reliable data before the 1960s — when satellites were first put into use — means more research is needed.

Extremes in rainfall patterns are also likely being affected, data shows. In the U.S., the amount of heavy precipitation events increased 16-20 percent from 1958 to 2007, said Washington, referencing a 2009 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

“The hydrological cycle of the earth is spinning up as we put more energy into the climate system,” said Kiehl.

A Key Metric

With global average temperature expected to rise another 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of the current century, scientific certainty over just how the extra energy will ripple through the climate system will likely lag behind the occurrence of extreme weather events.

But there remains little doubt among scientists that a planetary energy imbalance is changing the weather system. This, more than rising average temperatures, is perhaps the most important metric for understanding changes to the climate system.

“Temperature is a way to measure the heat, it’s a great metric,” Kharecha said. But energy imbalance is “the most fundamental gauge of the state of the climate system at any given time” and can help provide insight into “how much we must reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to restore the planet’s energy balance.”

Source IBTimes Canada

The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.

Now they are working with a new computer model – compiled partly in response to those criticisms – that produces a “best guess” date of 2016.

Their work was unveiled at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting.

The new model is designed to replicate real-world interactions, or “couplings”, between the Arctic ocean, the atmosphere, the sea ice and rivers carrying freshwater into the sea.

“In the past… we were just extrapolating into the future assuming that trends might persist as we’ve seen in recent times,” said Dr Maslowski, who works at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

“Now we’re trying to be more systematic, and we’ve developed a regional Arctic climate model that’s very similar to the global climate models participating in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments,” he told BBC News.

“We can run a fully coupled model for the past and present and see what our model will predict for the future in terms of the sea ice and the Arctic climate.”

And one of the projections it comes out with is that the summer melt could lead to ice-free Arctic seas by 2016 – “plus or minus three years”.

It does not make predictions about the Greenland ice cap.

Thin evidence

One of the important ingredients of the new model is data on the thickness of ice floating on the sea.

Satellites are increasingly able to detect this, usually by measuring how far the ice sits above the sea surface – which also indicates how far the ice extends beneath.

Inclusion of this data into the team’s modelling was one of the factors causing them to retrench on the 2013 date, which raised eyebrows – and subsequently some criticism – when it emerged at a US science meeting four years ago.

Since the spectacularly pronounced melting of 2007, a greater proportion of the Arctic Ocean has been covered by thin ice that is formed in a single season and is more vulnerable to slight temperature increases than older, thicker ice.

Even taking this into account, the projected date range is earlier than other researchers believe likely.

But one peer – Dr Walt Meier from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado – said the behaviour of sea ice becomes less predictable as it gets thinner.

“[Maslowski's] is quite a good model, one thing it has is really high resolution, it can capture details that are lost in global climate models,” he said.

“But 2019 is only eight years away; there’s been modelling showing that [likely dates are around] 2040/50, and I’d still lean towards that.

“I’d be very surprised if it’s 2013 – I wouldn’t be totally surprised if it’s 2019.”

Crystal method

The drastic melt of 2007 remains the record loss of ice area in the satellite era, although subsequent years have still been below the long-term average.

But some researchers believe 2010′s melt was equally as notable as 2007′s, given weather conditions that were favourable to the durability of ice.

Although many climate scientists and environmental campaigners are seriously concerned about the fate of the Arctic sea ice, for other parts of society and other arms of government its degradation presents challenges and opportunities.

The Russian and Canadian governments, for example, are looking to the opportunities for mineral exploitation that will arise; while the US military has expressed concern about losing a natural defence around the country’s northern border for part of the year.

“I’m not trying to be alarmist and not trying to say ‘we know the future because we have a crystal ball’,” said Dr Maslowski.

“Basically, we’re trying to make policymakers and people who need to know about climate change in the Arctic realise there is a chance that summer sea ice could be gone by the end of the decade.

“For the national interest, the defence interest, I think it’s important to realise that 2040 is not a crystal ball prediction.”

Source BBC News

We are entering a future of increased uncertainty. Extreme weather events will continue at an increased pace and stretch many to the limit.

Recently we also suffered from an extreme weather event that left our home damaged by storm. The insurance company; I am pleased to say, will be picking up the cost of repair – this time. But how long can this continue before the insurance domino falls as discussed in ZERO Greenhouse Emissions, is only a matter of time.

The following was received as an economic alert and I thought it worthwhile to share it with you:-

Hi Bob

Is a Disaster Looming for the U.S. Treasuries Market and the Global Monetary System from Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami?

As if watching the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami and the ongoing nuclear reactor problems in Japan wasn’t enough, there is now a major threat to the U.S economy and the global monetary system as a result of the Japan earthquake and tsunami.

Japan’s economy is the fourth largest in the world, behind that of Europe, the United States and China.  Any major decline in Japan’s economy will definitely impact the global economic system.  Some estimates now indicate that the cost of the disaster in Japan may lower global economic growth by a full percentage point for 2011.

Despite the unknown cost of rebuilding, it’s premature to suggest an imminent collapse of the global monetary system or for that matter the market for U.S. Treasuries.

But, there are major potential threats to both the market for Treasuries as well as the global monetary system.

The question now starting to be asked is “Where will Japan get the enormous sums of money required to pay for rebuilding its infrastructure and economy?”  Japan is the third largest holder of U.S. Treasuries behind the U.S. Federal Reserve, and China.  If Japan is forced to start liquidating its $877 billion in U.S. Treasuries to pay for rebuilding, it would more than likely have a huge impact on the global market for U.S. Treasuries as well as U.S. interest rates. Author Jeffrey Friedland.

Regards 

CA

Chairman

Extracted from the Greenhouse Neutral Foundations article in Green Lifestyle Magazine in 2010 Soy -SOy what are we doing?  - ‘The Amazon lost some 10,000 square miles of forest cover last year alone — 40 percent more than the year before.” Among the players responsible for this rainforest destruction are multinational, international agribusinesses such as Cargill, Bunge and Archer Daniels Midland, companies investing in growing genetically modified soy. The U.S. company, Cargill, built a soy processing and port facility in Santarém, Brazil, without the environmental impact assessment required by the Brazilian government.
   Wikipedia lists the main producers of soy around the world as the United States (32%), Brazil (28%), Argentina (21%), China (7%) and India (4%). Of the 32% of global production of soy in the U.S., 85% percent was genetically modified by 2004, accounting for some 63.6 million acres of soybeans.
   Who is driving this steam engine of environmental destruction?  You guessed it, Monsanto.

Along the isolated coastline of northern Tanzania there is a 90 kilometre strip between Moa, Kwale, Tanga, Tongoni, Kigombe and Pangani. Here there is something that can be done with your help, to save from extinction the Hawksbill Turtle. With your help the Tanzania Environmental Conservation and Social Economic Development Association (TECSEDA) can educate key team leaders to take the message into the broader community and eliminate many of the causes of death of these unique turtles.

The Hawksbill turtle is listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union. It is the only species in its genus, which makes it so much more important to save.

Justin Damian pictured here from TECSEDA made contact with the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation to raise much needed funds to run the education campaign

With your help and a small donation directly to TECSEDA at KCB Bank Tanzania Limited, Account no: 3300440998 Swift code: KCBLTZTZ You can make a difference or you can contact Justin at tecseda@rocketmail.com for further information.

Please give so that these local inhabitants can learn how to live and coexist with this unique and very special species. 

Named by the French in 1792 the Peak stands 262 metres above sea level. At the base of the impressive rock formation, signs point the way to what is described as a two hour round trip to the summit. Being a very hot and humid day and with the suggestion that it should only be attempted by fit hikers, I decided to give the summit climb a miss!

There was another sign at the base that caught my attention. The origins of the rock. Geologists had established that the massive granite formation was formed 120 million years ago; a long time. The sign went on to detail how the cave on the top of Frenchman’s Peak was formed by waves over thousands of years, 40 million years ago during the Middle Eocene period, when sea level was 250 metres higher than today.

Excerpt from SkepticalScience.com

Around 40 million years ago, sea surface temperatures rose around 5°C in a period called the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO). A new study Transient Middle Eocene Atmospheric CO₂ and Temperature Variations (Bijl et al 2010) has found atmospheric CO2 was the primary driver of this global warming event. During this period, CO2 levels rose dramatically to 2 to 3 times previous levels. This study gives us further insight into how climate responds to changing CO2 levels and provides evidence for strong climate sensitivity. Read more Skeptical Science article

As you watch the following YouTube videos, it may strike you as it did me that everything viewed from the top of Frenchman’s Peak by these visitors; 40 million years ago was below the sea! A very different world!

With continuing rises in greenhouse emissions Frenchman’s Peak may one day return to its origins.

Another sign from the research community that Earth’s temperature is rising: The volume of fresh water flowing down the world’s rivers has increased markedly since 1994, new satellite data confirms.

The study (also see here) led by the University of California, Irvine, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 4, “is the first to estimate global fresh-water flow into the world’s oceans using observations from new satellite technology rather than through computer or hydrological models,” Margot Roosevelt of the Los Angeles Times reported in a blog October 5. Science News, among other news outlets, also reported on the findings.

Annual fresh-water flow increased 18 percent from 1994 to 2006, the study found. The trend suggests that the global cycles of rainfall and evaporation are accelerating — a development that could intensify storms, floods, and droughts.

The U.C. Irvine findings coincide with other work by California researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and elsewhere who have tracked earlier snowmelt in the Sierra — one consequence of warming temperatures over several decades in the American West.

“Until now, we have had no continuous record of global-scale river discharge,” Jay Famiglietti, the principal investigator for the U.C. Irvine study, said in Roosevelt’s blog. “If these trends persist, they will be a smoking gun that the water cycle intensification, predicted by climate scientists, is already upon us.”

The new study showed ice sheets like the Greenland Ice Sheet can respond to such warming on the order of decades rather than the centuries projected by conventional thermal models. Ice flows more readily as it warms, so a warming climate can increase ice flows on ice sheets much faster than previously thought, said the study authors.

“We are finding that once such water flow is initiated through a new section of ice sheet, it can warm rather significantly and quickly, sometimes in just 10 years, ” said lead author Thomas Phillips, a research scientist with Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. CIRES is a joint institute between CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Phillips, along with CU-Boulder civil, environmental and architectural engineering Professor Harihar Rajaram and CIRES Director Konrad Steffen described their results in a paper published online in Geophysical Research Letters.

Conventional thermal models of ice sheets do not factor in the presence of water within the ice sheet as a warming agent, but instead use models that primarily consider ice-sheet heating by warmer air on the ice sheet surface. In water’s absence, ice warms slowly in response to the increased surface temperatures from climate change, often requiring centuries to millennia to happen.

But the Greenland ice sheet is not one solid, smooth mass of ice. As the ice flows towards the coast, grating on bedrock, crevasses and new fractures form in the upper 100 feet of the ice sheet. Melt water flowing through these openings can create “ice caves” and networks of “pipes” that can carry water through the ice and spreading warmth, the authors concluded.

To quantify the influence of melt water, the scientists modeled what would happen to the ice sheet temperature if water flowed through it for eight weeks every summer — about the length of the active melt season. The result was a significantly faster-than-expected increase in ice sheet warming, which could take place on the order of years to decades depending on the spacing of crevasses and other “pipes” that bring warmer water into the ice sheet in summer.

“The key difference between our model and previous models is that we include heat exchange between water flowing through the ice sheet and the ice,” said Rajaram.

Several factors contributed to the warming and resulting acceleration of ice flow, including the fact that flowing water into the ice sheets can stay in liquid form even through the winter, slowing seasonal cooling. In addition, warmer ice sheets are more susceptible to increases of water flow, including the basal lubrication of ice that allows ice to flow more readily on bedrock.

A third factor is melt water cascading downward into the ice, which warms the surrounding ice. In this process the water can refreeze, creating additional cracks in the more vulnerable warm ice, according to the study.

Taken together, the interactions between water, temperature, and ice velocity spell even more rapid changes to ice sheets in a changing climate than currently anticipated, the authors concluded. After comparing observed temperature profiles from Greenland with the new model described in the paper, the authors concluded the observations were unexplainable unless they accounted for warming.

“The fact that the ice temperatures warm rather quickly is really the key piece that’s been overlooked in models currently being used to determine how Greenland responds to climate warming,” Steffen said. “However, this process is not the ‘death knell’ for the ice sheet. Even under such conditions, it would still take thousands of years for the Greenland ice sheet to disappear, Steffen said.

This study was funded by NASA’s Cryosphere Science Program.

Source Science Daily