(Also see “Manhattan-Size Ice Island Cracks in Half.”)

The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA’s Terra satellite in October and featured this week as a NASA Image of the Day.

Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles (907 square kilometers)—versus 303 square miles (785 square kilometers) for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.

As for when the iceberg might shove off, “that is very difficult to predict,” said oceanographer Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “but in the coming months for sure.”

Glacier “Contributing Most to Sea Level”

Usually there’s nothing extraordinary about a glacier calving, said glaciologist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

Glaciers that flow into the sea, like the Pine Island Glacier, go through a normal cycle in which the floating section grows, stresses mount, and an iceberg breaks off, Scambos said.

“That is nothing unusual in most cases.”

But when the pattern deviates, glaciologists take notice. In this case, the crack is forming significantly farther “upstream” than has previously been the case. That “signifies that there are changes in the ice,” he said.

When “that point of rifting starts to climb upstream, generally you see some acceleration of the glacier.” That means that the ice will flow into the ocean at a faster rate, contributing even more to sea level rise.

(Related: “Hundreds of Glaciers Melting Faster in Antarctica.”)

 Such an acceleration is of particular concern at the Pine Island Glacier, because, among Antarctic glaciers, it’s “the one that’s contributing the most to sea level rise.”

In fact, he said, ice flows from that glacier alone account for a quarter to a third of Antarctica’s total contribution to sea level rise.

“It’s moving at about three kilometers [almost two miles] per year,” Scambos said. And, he noted, “it’s been accelerating quite a bit.”

(Pictures: Antarctica Warming.)

Cracking Glacier “Really Important”

As far as sea levels are concerned, changes in the Pine Island Glacier and other West Antarctic glaciers are far more important than shifts among the continent’s other glaciers, such as East Antarctica’s Mertz Glacier—despite Mertz’s much publicized release of a Luxembourg-size iceberg in early 2010.

That’s because the “Luxembourg” iceberg came from a glacial ice tongue that had just been “sitting there,” said oceanographer Doug Martinson of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

By contrast, “West Antarctica has ice streams, of which Pine Island is one. Those are fast-flowing streams of ice,” said Martinson, who specializes in polar oceans.

When ice breaks off the Pine Island Glacier, he said, more ice can flow in faster from the mountains above—ice that will eventually wind up contributing to sea level rise.

“This glacier,” NSIDC’s Scambos added, “is really important.”

Source National Geographic

The Reality is a future we must change for all who will inherit the future we have left them, my children, your children and theirs.

The Reality is that those with vested interests to protect (big oil and coal; amongst others) have the status quo to protect. They have successfully done this with misinformation about climate change, as others have done in the past. :– Smoking is not addictive or a heath hazard!

The Climate Reality Project is to raise awareness of a need for collective understanding that the single (multiple) ‘extreme weather events’ around the world over recent times are related to a change in climate, directly resulting from the pollution of our atmosphere by the burning of once safely stored carbon (fossil fuels ) along with the increase of other greenhouse gases resulting from positive feedbacks linked with these emissions. We have entered unknown and very dangerous territory with our giant chemical experiment with the atmosphere.

Join with us now on this global action day to ask those still sitting on the inactive fence of comfortable complacency, to demand action from our policy makers, to move to a future, safe, for those who will inherit what we are leaving behind; my children and yours.

Join us in the live discussion

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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

An irreversible climate “tipping point” could occur within the next 20 years as a result of the release of huge quantities of organic carbon locked away as frozen plant matter in the vast permafrost region of the Arctic, scientists have found.Billions of tons of frozen leaves and roots that have lain undisturbed for thousands of years in the permanently frozen ground of the northern hemisphere are thawing out, with potentially catastrophic implications for climate change, the researchers said.

A study into the speed at which the permafrost is melting suggests that the tipping point will occur between 2020 and 2030 and will mark the point at which the Arctic turns from being a net “sink” for carbon dioxide into an overall source that will accelerate global warming, they said.

The study is the first global investigation of what will happen in a warmer world to the huge amounts of frozen plant matter that has remained undegraded in the soil since it was incorporated into the permafrost about 30,000 years ago.

It also found that by 2200 about two-thirds of the Earth’s permafrost will have melted, releasing an estimated 190 billion tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the air – about half of all the fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases since the start of the industrial revolution.

“Our results indicate that, as the Arctic warms up, this frozen carbon will thaw out, allowing microbial decay to resume and releasing carbon into the atmosphere,” said Kevin Schaefer of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado.

“Our research shows that the release of carbon from permafrost will result in an irreversible climate tipping point in only 20 years… Once the frozen carbon thaws out and decays, there is no way to put it back into the permafrost,” Dr Schaefer said.

The Arctic has experienced some of the greatest climatic changes in the world over recent decades. Summer sea ice has melted back to record minimums, average temperatures have increased dramatically, and scientists have documented significant melting of the underground permafrost, from Alaska to eastern Siberia.

The rising temperatures have lengthened the growing season of the Arctic summer, which has increased plant growth and the consequent uptake of carbon dioxide. However, by around 2025 this will go into reverse and the thawing permafrost will release more carbon than is being taken up by the tundra growing above it, Dr Schaefer said.

“There are two important messages from this study. The first is that the melting permafrost can release huge amounts of carbon and, secondly, the process is irreversible on a human timescale and will affect our targets for reducing fossil fuel emissions,” he said.

“All our emission reduction strategies are designed to hit a target atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration corresponding to a target climate. If we do not account for carbon released from thawing permafrost, we will overshoot this target concentration and end up with a warmer climate than we want,” Dr Schaefer said.

Permanently frozen ground covers about a quarter of the northern hemisphere and starts about a metre below the surface, extending up to 500 metres. The top three metres contain most of the frozen plant matter, primarily grass roots caught up in the last ice age.

Source Independent UK

Economic recession has failed to curb rising emissions, undermining hope of keeping global warming to safe levels Photograph: Dave Reede/All Canada Photos/Corbis

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said.

“Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

Birol said disaster could yet be averted, if governments heed the warning. “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding,” he said.

The IEA has calculated that if the world is to escape the most damaging effects of global warming, annual energy-related emissions should be no more than 32Gt by 2020. If this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree.

Emissions from energy fell slightly between 2008 and 2009, from 29.3Gt to 29Gt, due to the financial crisis. A small rise was predicted for 2010 as economies recovered, but the scale of the increase has shocked the IEA. “I was expecting a rebound, but not such a strong one,” said Birol, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on energy.

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said time was running out. “This news should shock the world. Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world’s last remaining reserves of fossil fuels – even from under the melting ice of the Arctic. You don’t put out a fire with gasoline. It will now be up to us to stop them.”

Most of the rise – about three-quarters – has come from developing countries, as rapidly emerging economies have weathered the financial crisis and the recession that has gripped most of the developed world.

But he added that, while the emissions data was bad enough news, there were other factors that made it even less likely that the world would meet its greenhouse gas targets.

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol.

He urged governments to take action urgently. “This should be a wake-up call. A chance [of staying below 2 degrees] would be if we had a legally binding international agreement or major moves on clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and other technologies.”

Governments are to meet next week in Bonn for the next round of the UN talks, but little progress is expected.

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions. Initially, the agency had hoped the resulting reduction in emissions could be maintained, helping to give the world a “breathing space” and set countries on a low-carbon path. The new estimates suggest that opportunity may have been missed.

Source Guardian

New University of Washington research shows that rising sea surface temperatures in the area of the Pacific Ocean along the equator and near the International Date Line drive atmospheric circulation that has caused some of the largest shifts in Antarctic climate in recent decades.

The warmer water generates rising air that creates a large wave structure in the atmosphere called a Rossby wave train, which brings warmer temperatures to West Antarctica during winter and spring.

Antarctica is somewhat isolated by the vast Southern Ocean, but the new results “show that it is still affected by climate changes elsewhere on the planet,” said Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the UW Quaternary Research Center.

Steig is the corresponding author of a paper documenting the findings that is being published April 10 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The lead author is Qinghua Ding, a postdoctoral researcher in the UW Quaternary Research Center. Co-authors are David Battisti, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, and Marcel Küttel, a former UW postdoctoral researcher now working in Switzerland.

The scientists used surface and satellite temperature observations to show a strong statistical connection between warmer temperatures in Antarctica, largely brought by westerly winds associated with high pressure over the Amundsen Sea adjacent to West Antarctica, and sea surface temperatures in the central tropical Pacific Ocean.

They found a strong relationship between central Pacific sea-surface readings and Antarctic temperatures during winter months, June through August. Though not as pronounced, the effect also appeared in the spring months of September through November.

The observed circulation changes are in the form of a series of high- and low-pressure cells that follow an arcing path from the tropical Pacific to West Antarctica. That is characteristic of a textbook Rossby wave train pattern, Ding said, and the same pattern is consistently produced in climate models, at least during winter.

Using observed changes in tropical sea surface temperatures, the researchers found they could account for half to all of the observed winter temperature changes in West Antarctica, depending on which observations are used for comparison.

“This is distinct from El Niño,” Steig said. That climate phenomenon, which affects weather patterns worldwide, primarily influences sea-surface temperatures farther east in the Pacific, nearer to South America. It can be, but isn’t always, associated with strong warming in the central Pacific.

Steig noted that the influence of Rossby waves on West Antarctic climate is not a new idea, but this is the first time such waves have been shown to be associated with long-term changes in Antarctic temperature.

The findings also could have implications for understanding the causes behind the thinning of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains about 10 percent of all the ice in Antarctica.

Steig noted that the westerly winds created by the high pressure over the Amundsen Sea pushes cold water away from the edge of the ice sheet and out into the open ocean. It is then replaced by warmer water from deeper in the ocean, which is melting the seaward edge of the ice sheet from below.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source Science Daily

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.