The Moron!
There's an upside to the extreme cold temperatures northern Canadians have endured in the last few weeks: scientists say it's been helping winter sea ice grow across the Arctic, where the ice shrank to record-low levels last year.
Temperatures have stayed well in the -30s C and -40s C range since late January throughout the North, with the mercury dipping past -50 C in some areas.
Satellite images are showing that the cold spell is helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years.
"It's nice to know that the ice is recovering," Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, told CBC News on Thursday.
"That means that maybe the perennial ice would not go down as low as last year."
Canadian scientists are also noticing growing ice coverage in most areas of the Arctic, including the southern Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.
"Clearly, we're seeing the ice coverage rebound back to more near normal coverage for this time of year," said Gilles Langis, a senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa.
Winter sea ice could keep expanding
The cold is also making the ice thicker in some areas, compared to recorded thicknesses last year, Lagnis added.
"The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that's a significant increase," he said.
If temperatures remain cold this winter, Langis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.
But he added that it's too soon to say what impact this winter will have on the Arctic summer sea ice, which reached its lowest coverage ever recorded in the summer of 2007.
That was because the thick multi-year ice pack that survives a summer melt has been decreasing in recent years, as well as moving further south. Langis said the ice pack is currently located about 130 kilometres from the Mackenzie Delta, about half the distance from where it was last year.
The polar regions are a concern to climate specialists studying global warming, since those regions are expected to feel the impact of climate change sooner and to a greater extent than other areas.
Sea ice in the Arctic helps keep those regions cool by reflecting sunlight that might otherwise be absorbed by darker ocean or land surfaces.
Off the northern Canadian Atlantic coast is an annual event of the bays and ocean waters freezing and then breaking up with a spring thaw. Icebergs drift off the coast and disappear in late summer and the cycle repeats. The cycle is variable over time as the earth for its four billion year history oscillates around a state of equilibrium. Equilibrium is not the same as a static state. To achieve equilibrium the planet spends nearly all of its time in disequilibrium as it oscillates through the cycles of life. The history of the planet is tidal and the earth clock is in epochs not the nonosecond of a human life. Capiche?BBC
Melting icebergs release minerals into the surrounding water
Drifting icebergs are "ecological hotspots" that enable the surrounding waters to absorb an increased volume of carbon dioxide, a study suggests.
US scientists found that minerals released from the melting ice triggered blooms of CO2-absorbing phytoplankton.
These microscopic plants were then eaten by krill (shrimp-like organisms), whose waste material containing the carbon sank to the ocean floor.
The findings are published in the online journal Science Express.
The study, carried out in the Southern Ocean's Weddell Sea in December 2005, has helped researchers understand the impact of free-floating icebergs on the marine environment.
Floating feeding stations
The number of icebergs found in waters around Antarctica has increased in recent decades as a result of global warming, the researchers wrote in the paper.
"We got a satellite image that covered roughly 11,000 sq km (4,200 sq miles), and counted the number of icebergs within that area," explained Ken Smith, an oceanographer from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, California.
"We had almost 1,000 icebergs."
The team focused its attention on two icebergs, one measuring 2km by 0.5km (1.2 miles by 0.3 miles) and another 21km in length and 5km wide (13 miles by 3 miles).
Using instruments that included a trawl net and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with a video camera, the researchers sampled waters from the ice blocks to 9km away (5.5 miles).
They found a "substantial enrichment" of minerals, phytoplankton, krill and seabirds in the surrounding water up to 3.7km away (2.3 miles) compared with areas with no icebergs.
"These results suggest that free-drifting icebergs can substantially impact the (open sea) ecosystem of the Southern Ocean and can serve as areas of enhanced production and sequestration of organic carbon to the deep sea," the scientists wrote.
Dr Smith said these findings would be followed up next year by a much more intensive examination.
"Ninety percent [of the icebergs in the area] were smaller than the ones we studied," he told BBC News.
"We are going to go back and look at smaller icebergs to see how important they are, and to see if they also have an associated enrichment of the surrounding water."
There are technology solutions to energy resources and political considerations, but all the money, planning and implimentation is meaningless without the cooperation of China and India. The big problem is coal fired electric plants. Cnet news has something to say Electric power worldwide is over 40 percent of total global carbon dioxide releases, and it is the fastest-growing portion (in terms of human-released greenhouse gases). India, China and other countries are rapidly industrializing and bringing basic electric power services to their peoples. Their development, like U.S. electric power, follows least-cost options.
Our least-cost electric power options--coal-fired power plants--are by far our most destructive and dangerous ones. Coal burning directly kills hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in particulate, sulfate and mercury releases, thousands of tons of radioactive emissions yearly, and emits over twice as much carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour (kWh) as any other form of power generation. The coming costs from worsening droughts from Africa to Indiana, intensified storms, and rising sea levels will bring misery to billions.
To achieve these goals, we must provide services that consumers want and prefer over their non-sustainable fossil competitors, while at the same time be profitable for business.
Nevertheless, U.S. utilities and their banking partners are planning to build about 150 new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. over the next five years, and China is building roughly 60 large plants every year. (The recent TXU settlement is a step in the right direction but will probably not make a dent.) Electric power is an engine of economic growth, bringing light, cooling, and communication to billions, but every coal-fired power plant is a ticking slow bomb.
The Eiffel Tower Goes Dark in order to draw“I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.” Ellen Goodman.The Problem
The problem, as the left sees it, is that too many Republicans have denied the reality of global warming for too long. They believe that the moral obligation to act now is so absolute and imperative that the skeptics must be absolutely discredited and now. Ms. Goodman writes:
One reason is that while poles are melting and polar bears are swimming between ice floes, American politics has remained polarized. There are astonishing gaps between Republican science and Democratic science. Try these numbers: Only 23 percent of college-educated Republicans believe the warming is due to humans, while 75 percent of college-educated Democrats believe it.Notice how those "opposed to the environment are tied to corruption of science?" Funny, I would say that many on the left are guilty of that very act. Also, see how the deniers are labeled as either dysfunctional or willfully irresponsible? Skeptics are labeled as "zealots" or "flat-earthers" or even as "creationists."This great divide comes from the science-be-damned-and-debunked attitude of the Bush administration and its favorite media outlets. The day of the report, Big Oil Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma actually described it as "a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain." Speaking of corruption of science, the American Enterprise Institute, which has gotten $1.6 million over the years from Exxon Mobil, offered $10,000 last summer to scientists who would counter the IPCC report.
But there are psychological as well as political reasons why global warming remains in the cool basement of priorities. It may be, paradoxically, that framing this issue in catastrophic terms ends up paralyzing instead of motivating us. Remember the Time magazine cover story: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried." The essential environmental narrative is a hair-raising consciousness-raising: This is your Earth. This is your Earth on carbon emissions.
This works for some. But a lot of social science research tells us something else. As Ross Gelbspan, author of "The Heat is On," says, "when people are confronted with an overwhelming threat and don't see a solution, it makes them feel impotent. So they shrug it off or go into deliberate denial."
Advancing The Agenda
The left seems to have grasped that America is still somewhat more conservative and religious than say, Europe. Pragmatically, they have determined to reframe their arguments into an issue of morality. Also, appealing to the market capitalists, the environmental movement is being sold as a "money-maker." One with unlimited potential for those who get in on the ground floor of the emerging green technology.
Michael Shellenberger, co author of "The Death of Environmentalism," adds, "The dominant narrative of global warming has been that we're responsible and have to make changes or we're all going to die. It's tailor-made to ensure inaction."
So how many scientists does it take to change a light bulb?
American University's Matthew Nisbet is among those who see the importance of expanding the story beyond scientists. He is charting the reframing of climate change into a moral and religious issue -- see the greening of the evangelicals -- and into a corruption-of-science issue -- see big oil -- and an economic issue -- see the newer, greener technologies .
In addition, maybe we can turn denial into planning. "If the weatherman says there's a 75 percent chance of rain, you take your umbrella," Shellenberger tells groups. Even people who clutched denial as their last, best hope can prepare, he says, for the next Katrina. Global warming preparation is both his antidote for helplessness and goad to collective action.
The report is grim stuff. Whatever we do today, we face long-range global problems with a short-term local attention span. We're no happier looking at this global thermostat than we are looking at the nuclear doomsday clock.
Can we change from debating global warming to preparing? Can we define the issue in ways that turn denial into action? In America what matters now isn't environmental science, but political science.
We are still waiting for the time when an election hinges on a candidate's plans for a changing climate. That's when the light bulb goes on.
...The mainstream media, in their effort to be balanced and their relative ignorance of science, have largely fallen down on the job by giving the handful of naysayers too much space and air time.So what next? Deny the "flat earthers" access to the media? Ostracize and shun the deniers? Broach no further dissent from the climate heretics? Never mind that the debate really isn’t about whether we have entered a warming phase or not. Thermometers don’t lie and most people now admit that it seems warmer nowadays. The debate really is about the causes of that warming and what can be done about it. Unfortunately, one side seeks to end the debate, declare itself the winner and begin implementing an agenda which could be about much more than simply lowering the temperature by one degree over the next 100 years. We're in trouble here, but it's not from a gradual warming which mankind can certainly adapt to and in fact, benefit from. The real danger to the West is from this clash of worldviews we're witnessing in the post-modern era.In its quest to be fair, my industry has made this whole global warming thing out as just a tug of war among scientists who interpret highly technical data very differently. In fact, I'm now convinced, the nonbelievers are just a relative few, especially if you don't count the cyber prostitutes who are paid to misinform.
Don't be fooled: Those who say global warming is a hoax are modern-day flat earthers. But they're far more dangerous, because they're in positions to influence public opinion, policy and, ultimately, the future of the planet.
