by Roger Harrabin

http://news.bbc.co.uk

This year will be one of the top five warmest years globally since records began 150 years ago, according to figures compiled by the Met Office.

The UK’s weather service projects that, unless there is an exceptionally cold spell before the end of the year, temperatures will be up on last year.

Climate sceptics had pointed out that the temperature rise appeared to have stalled in the last decade or so.

That was caused in part by the Pacific La Nina current, which cools the Earth.

But the influence of La Nina declined in the spring and the Met Office project that, barring a very cold December, this year will be the fifth warmest on record.

Other sources say it could even be the third warmest.

The last ten years have been in the top 15 warmest on record. And this summer the UK enjoyed temperatures higher than the long-term average.

Although the Met Office was pilloried after forecasting a “barbecue summer”, it was their rainfall forecast, not the projected temperatures, that was wrong.

Next year we will see the influence of the warming El Nino current, and the Met Office says there is a 50% chance that global temperatures will hit an all-time high.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8377128.stm

by Richard Black

http://news.bbc.co.uk

Average temperatures across the world are on course to rise by up to 6C without urgent action to curb CO2 emissions, according a new analysis.

Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project.

All of that growth came in developing countries, but a quarter of it came through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations.

The study comes against a backdrop of mixed messages on the chances of a new deal at next month’s UN climate summit.

According to lead scientist Corinne Le Quere, the new findings should add urgency to the political discussions.

“Based on our knowledge of recent trends and the time it takes to change energy infrastructure, I think that the Copenhagen conference next month is our last chance to stabilise at 2C in a smooth and organised way,” she told BBC News.

“If the agreement is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, it’s not two and a half or three degrees that we will get, it’s five or six – that’s the path that we are on right now.”

Professor Le Quere, who holds posts at the UK’s University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, is lead author on the study that is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Rising sinks

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) is a network of scientists in academic institutions around the world.

It uses just about every source of data available, from atmospheric observations to business inventories, to build up a detailed picture of carbon dioxide emissions, carbon sinks, and trends.

Before about 2002, global emissions grew by about 1% per year.

Then the rate increased to about 3% per year, the change coming mainly from a ramping up in China’s economic output, before falling slightly in 2008 as the global economy dipped towards recession.

Endorsing similar projections from the International Energy Agency, the GCP suggests emissions will fall by about 3% during 2009 before resuming their rise as the recession ends.

Concentrations in the atmosphere also show an upward trend – as monitored at stations such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii – but at a lower rate.

The team believes that carbon sinks – the oceans and plants – are probably absorbing a slightly lower proportion of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions than they were 50 years ago, although researchers admit that uncertainty about the behaviour of sinks remains high.

Industrial emissions have climbed, but those from land use change have remains constant.

As a consequence, the proportion of global emissions coming from deforestation has fallen – about 12% now compared with 20% in the 1990s.

“One implication of this low fraction is that there is only limited scope for rich nations to offset emissions by supporting avoidance of deforestation in tropical countries like Indonesia and Brazil,” observed Michael Rapauch from the Australian government research agency CSIRO and co-chair of the GCP.

A mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) is due to be concluded at next month’s summit.

Future plans

Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the UK Met Office and an author on the chapter of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report dealing with the effects of a changing atmosphere, suggested the report ought to be of interest to policymakers in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit.

“It’s an important step towards understanding what we’re doing to the world’s carbon budget,” he said.

However, he questioned the conclusion that society is necessarily on a trajectory leading towards 6C.

The IPCC plots out a number of “scenarios” – visions of how society might develop in terms of the size of the human population, economic growth and energy use – each of which comes with projected ranges of temperature rise.

Although the GCP study suggests society is on one of the high emission (and therefore high temperature rise) pathways, Dr Betts cautioned that it was too soon to discern a long-term trend.

“Year-to-year changes in the global economy have quite an effect, and it’s too early to discern longer term, robust changes,” he said.

“However, if we continue to let emissions rise without mitigation, there’s a strong chance we’ll hit 4C and beyond.

“If we want to be staying below 2C then it’s true to say we’ve only got a few years to curb emissions.”

These temperature rises – measured against a 19th Century baseline – would be expected to occur around the end of this century or the middle of next century, said Professor Le Quere.

Border controls

One of the most intriguing findings from the study is the difference between the emissions produced directly by a given nation and the emissions generated through production of the goods and services consumed by its citizens.

Emissions from within the UK’s borders, for example, fell by 5% between 1992 and 2004, says the GCP analysis.

However, emissions from goods and services consumed in the UK rose by 12% over the same period.

“The developed world has exported to the developing world the emissions it would have produced had it met its growing appetite for consumer goods itself for the last two decades,” said CSIRO’s John Finnegan.

“In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing world’s emissions.”

Another of the analyses shows that per-capita emissions across the globe are rising.

On average, each human now consumes goods and services “worth” 1.3 tonnes of carbon – up from 1.1 tonnes in 2000.

The GCP analysis suggests that constraining the global temperature rise to 2C would entail reducing per-capita emissions to 0.3 tonnes by 2050.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8364926.stm

by Suzanne Goldenberg

http://www.guardian.co.uk

Twenty-five million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century as climate change leads to food shortages and soaring prices for staples such as rice, wheat, maize and soya beans, a report says today.

If global warming goes unchecked, all regions of the world will be affected, but the most vulnerable – south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – will be hit hardest by failing crop yields, according to the report, prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

The children of 2050 will have fewer calories to eat than those in 2000, the report says, and the effect would be to wipe out decades of progress in reducing child malnutrition.

The grim scenario is the first to gauge the effects of climate change on the world’s food supply by combining climate and agricultural models.

Spikes in grain prices last year led to rioting and unrest across the developing world, from Haiti to Thailand. Leaders at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last week committed $2bn (£1.25bn) to food security, and the United Nations is set to hold a summit on food security in November, its second since last year’s riots.

But the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is pressing the World Bank and other institutions to do more. He said the industrialised world needs to step up investment in seed research and to offer more affordable crop insurance to the small farmers in developing countries. Though prices have stabilised, the world’s food system is still in crisis, he said at the weekend.

“Ever more people are denied food because prices are stubbornly high, because purchasing power has fallen due to the economic crisis, or because rains have failed and reserve stocks of grain have been eaten,” he said.

Even without global warming, rising populations meant the world was headed for food shortages and food price rises.

“The food price crisis of last year really was a wake-up call to a lot of people that we are going to have 50% more people on the surface of the Earth by 2050,” said Gerald Nelson, the lead author of the report. “Meeting those demands for food coming out of population growth is going to be a huge challenge – even without climate change.”

After several years in which development aid has been diverted away from rural areas, the report called for $7bn a year for crop research, and investment in irrigation and rural infrastructure to help farmers adjust to a warming climate. “Continuing the business-as-usual approach will almost certainly guarantee disastrous consequences,” said Nelson.

The G20 industrialised nations last week began discussing how to invest some $20bn pledged for food security earlier this year.

Some regions of the world outlined in the report are already showing signs of vulnerability because of changing rainfall patterns and drought linked to climate change. Oxfam yesterday launched a $152m appeal on behalf of 23 million people hit by a severe drought and spiralling food prices in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Uganda. The charity called it the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa for a decade, and said many people in the region were suffering from malnutrition.

But southern Asia, which made great advances in agricultural production during the 20th century, was also singled out in the IFPRI report for being particularly at risk of food shortages. Some countries, such as Canada and Russia, will experience longer growing seasons because of climate change, but other factors – such as poor soil – mean that will not necessarily be translated into higher food production.

The report was prepared for negotiators currently trying to reach a global deal to fight climate change at the latest round of UN talks in Bangkok. It used climate models prepared by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia to arrive at estimates of how changes in growing seasons and rainfall patterns would affect farming in the developing world and elsewhere.

Without an ambitious injection of funds and new technology, wheat yields could fall by more than 30% in developing countries, setting off a catastrophic rise in prices. Wheat prices, with unmitigated climate change, could rise by 170%-194% by the middle of this century, the report said. Rice prices are projected to rise by 121% – and almost all of the increase will have to be passed on to the consumer, Nelson said.

The report did not take into account all the expected impacts of climate change – such as the loss of farmland due to rising sea levels, a rise in the number of insects and in plant disease, or changes in glacial melt. All these factors could increase the damage of climate change to agriculture.

Others who have examined the effects of climate change on agriculture have warned of the potential for conflict. In a new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilising to Save Civilisation, published today, Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, warns that sharp declines in world harvests due to climate change could threaten the world order.

“I am convinced that food is indeed the weak link,” he said.

Brown saw Asia as the epicentre of the crisis, with the latest science warning of a sea level rise of up to six feet by 2100. With even a 3ft rise, Bangladesh could lose half of its rice land to rising seas; Vietnam, the world’s second largest producer of rice, could also see much of the Mekong Delta under water.

Wheat and rice production would also fall because of acute water shortages, caused by past over-pumping and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, which currently store water that supplies the region’s main rivers: the Indus, Ganges, and Yangtse.

Brown said: “The potential loss of these mountain glaciers in the Himalayas is the most massive projected threat to food security ever seen” .
Global shortfall

People in both the developing and developed worlds will have less to eat by 2050 if climate change is not seriously addressed, though the shortfall will be relatively slight in richer countries. Prices rises and shortages of food will drive down the average calories available:

• The calories available for each person in industrialised nations will fall from 3,450 in 2000 to about 3,200.

• In developing countries overall, the average will fall from 2,696 to 2,410 calories.

• In sub-Saharan Africa, people will on average have only 1,924 calories a day, compared with 2,316 in 2000.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/30/food-crisis-malnurtrition-climate-change

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Koalas live in the rolling hills and flat plains where eucalyptus trees grow, because they need the leaves for both food and water. But as people move in, koalas are finding themselves with fewer trees, researchers have said. The stress is bringing out a latent disease that infects 50 to 90 per cent of the animals.

“Koalas are in diabolical trouble,” says researcher Frank Carrick, who heads the Koala Study Program at the University of Queensland.

“Numbers show that even in their stronghold, koala numbers are declining alarmingly.”

The problem came to national attention in August, when the well-known Sam the Koala died during surgery to treat the disease, called chlamydia. Sam captured the world’s attention during major wildfires in February, when she was photographed drinking from the water bottle of a firefighter in a smouldering forest.

Sam was in such obvious pain from chlamydia that veterinarian John Butler decided to operate. But her organs were too scarred to complete the surgery, and Sam was euthanised.

Chlamydiosis is a virus that breaks out in koalas in times of stress like cold sores in humans and leads to infections in the eyes and urinary, reproductive and respiratory tracts. It can cause blindness, infertility and death.

Deborah Tabart, chief executive of the Australian Koala Foundation, urged the government to follow up on Sam’s case by classifying koalas as a threatened species and implementing policies to preserve their habitat. Her organization named September “Save the Koala” month, with the theme “No Tree, No Me.”

The United States already considers the koala a threatened species.

And the Australian Koala Foundation estimates there are fewer than 100,000 koalas left in Australia, down from the millions at the time European settlement started in the late 1700s.

Mr Carrick and other scientists think the numbers are slightly higher, but in any case, regional counts by scientists and state governments show a huge drop. There’s clear evidence that some local populations have gone extinct because of chlamydial disease, Carrick said.

The majority of koalas live on a stretch of eastern coastline in the states of Queensland and New South Wales. They are most abundant on the so-called Koala Coast, a 155 square-mile swath of semi-rural coast in southeastern Queensland.

A 2008 survey of the Koala Coast by the Queensland government shows the population dropped 64 per cent, from more than 6,200 in 1999 to about 2,800. While car accidents and dog attacks killed many koalas, the report blamed about 60 per cent of the deaths on disease.

“We need to learn to live with our native species but instead we keep encroaching on them,” said Tracy Goodman, an Adelaide resident who recently visited Gorge Wildlife Park with her husband and 4-year-old son, Matthew. Ten koalas live at the park. “Protection of koalas absolutely should be legislated.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6245190/Australias-koalas-are-dying-of-stress.html

by Jody Bourton

http://news.bbc.co.uk

One of the world’s largest freshwater fish is on the verge of going extinct. A three-year quest to find the giant Chinese paddlefish in the Yangtze river failed to sight or catch a single individual. That means that the fish, which can grow up to 7m long, has not been seen alive for at least six years.

There remains a chance that some escaped the survey and survive, say experts, but without action, the future of the species is bleak.

The concern for the Chinese paddlefish is that its fate will parallel that of the Yangtze river dolphin, a large mammal species that was once abundant in the Yangtze river system, but has recently been declared extinct.

A number of fish species vie for the position of the world’s largest freshwater fish, including the arapaima (Arapaima gigas) of the Amazon river and the Mekong giant catfish (Pangasianodon gigas).

At up to 7m, the Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) is much longer than either, though it may not exclusively live in freshwater.

The fish is suspected to be anadromous, meaning it spends some of its life in marine waters before returning to the river to spawn. But it is so rare that little is known about its behaviour, life history, migration habits and population structure.

It is endemic to the Yangtze river system in China.

“It has special characteristics such as its sword-like rostrum. Some people call it the ‘elephant fish’ and we found out it swims on the surface of the water like a whale,” says Professor Wei Qiwei, one of the leaders of the research team from the Chinese Academy of Fisheries Science in Jingzhou, China.

The last confirmed sighting of a Chinese paddlefish was made in the river on 24 January 2003.

Now scientists have published in the Journal of Applied Ichthyology the results of a three-year survey to find and locate the fish.

Professor Wei and colleagues surveyed the upper Yangtze river between Xinshi, Sichuan Province and Chongqing, covering a distance of 488.5km.

Most of this stretch of water lies within the Upper Yangtze National Nature Reserve, a protected area.

Elusive target

Between 2006 and 2008, the team used a number of boats to deploy 4762 setlines, 111 anchored setlines and 950 drift nets in a bid to catch the fish.

They failed to catch a single individual.

The team also used hydroacoustic equipment that beams sound through the water to create a picture of the river and anything in it.

This identified nine possible targets, of which two could be paddlefish, say the researchers. But they could not confirm these finds.

The fish now appears on the brink of extinction, say the scientists.

They speculate that some paddlefish may have eluded the research team, avoiding its nets and capture methods.

Professor Wei also thinks that some younger, smaller paddlefish may also still exist.

“The individuals born in the late 1980s and early 1990s should survive in the wild, since the Yangtze river system is large and it has some complicated habitats where the paddlefish could hide,” he says.

But without intervention, the future for the species is bleak.

“It is not a good future for the species. Maybe we have only ten years to save the species according to the estimated life span of 30 to 40 years,” Professor Wei says.

“The offspring born in 1990 will be 30 years old by 2020. It is impossible for the species to be a viable population by natural reproduction. With the current situation of ecology and environment in the Yangtze river, man assistant measures have to be taken.”

With so few fish left the team proposes that modern reproduction methods need to be considered, such as using surrogates to rear the fish in captivity.

Other techniques may include preserving genetic material, cloning, or gynogenesis, where fish eggs are coerced into developing via parthenogenesis.

However the team need to find live paddlefish in order to be able to start this process.

From the middle of last century the population of Chinese paddlefish has declined rapidly due to overfishing, habitat degradation and pollution.

The construction of the Gezhouba dam in 1981 on the Yangtze river also created a barrier to the migrating fish which further affected fish stocks.

The species has been listed as critically endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species since 1996.

Last chance to find

The team believe the upper Yangtze is probably one of the last places that the fish may be present and propose to focus their efforts there.

They also hope to be in a position to act if any fish materialise on the river.

“In the last three years, we have been trying to set a quick-response network along the upper-stem of the Yangtze river to save accidental catches of the paddlefish,” Professor Wei says.

“However, the network not only costs money and time, but is also a great challenge.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8269000/8269414.stm

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

The population explosion in poor countries will contribute little to climate change and is a dangerous distraction from the main problem of over-consumption in rich nations, a study has found.

It challenges claims by leading environmentalists, including Sir David Attenborough and Jonathon Porritt, that strict birth control is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The study concludes that spending billions of pounds of aid on contraception in the developing world will not benefit the climate because poor countries have such low emissions. It says that Britain and other Western countries should instead focus on reducing consumption of goods, services and energy among their own populations.

David Satterthwaite, of the International Institute for Environment and Development , a think-tank based in London, analysed changes in population and greenhouse gas emissions for all countries between 1980 and 2005.

He found that sub-Saharan Africa had 18.5 per cent of the world’s population growth and only 2.4 per cent of the growth in carbon dioxide emissions. The United States had 3.4 per cent of the world’s population growth but 12.6 per cent of the growth in carbon dioxide emissions.

China’s one-child rule had resulted in a sharp decline in population growth but its CO2 emissions had risen very rapidly — 44.5 per cent of the growth in global emissions — largely because of the increasing number of Chinese enjoying Western levels of consumption.

Dr Satterthwaite, whose study is published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment and Urbanization, said: “A child born into a very poor African household who during their life never escapes from poverty contributes very little to climate change, especially if they die young, as many do. A child born into a wealthy household in North America or Europe and who enjoys a full life and a high-consumption lifestyle contributes far more — thousands or even tens of thousands of times more.”

The world’s population has risen from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.8 billion. It is growing by 75 million a year and is almost certain to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Nine of the ten countries with the highest predicted growth rates up to 2050 are in Africa. Uganda’s population is expected to treble from 33 million to 91 million.

The populations of developed countries, including Japan and Russia, are expected to decline over the same period.

A separate study by the Princeton Environmental Institute found that the world’s richest half billion people accounted for 7 per cent of the world’s population but 50 per cent of emissions. The difference in emissions levels between a rich Westerner and a poor African was illustrated in a study this month by the New Economics Foundation.

It found that by 7pm on January 4, a typical person in Britain would have generated the same amount of carbon emissions that someone in Tanzania would be responsible for in the whole year. A US citizen would reach the same point by 4am on January 2.

Last month the Optimum Population Trust called for population restraint policies to be adopted by every world state to combat climate change. The call was endorsed by Sir David Attenborough, James Lovelock and Jonathon Porritt.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6852853.ece

by David Adam

http://www.guardian.co.uk

• Study says 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060

• Increase could threaten water supply of half world population

Unchecked global warming could bring a severe temperature rise of 4C within many people’s lifetimes, according to a new report for the British government that significantly raises the stakes over climate change.

The study, prepared for the Department of Energy and Climate Change by scientists at the Met Office, challenges the assumption that severe warming will be a threat only for future generations, and warns that a catastrophic 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060 without strong action on emissions.

Officials from 190 countries gather today in Bangkok to continue negotiations on a new deal to tackle global warming, which they aim to secure at United Nations talks in December in Copenhagen.

“We’ve always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise,” said Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who will announce the findings today at a conference at Oxford University. “People will say it’s an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario, but it’s also a plausible scenario.”

According to scientists, a 4C rise over pre-industrial levels could threaten the water supply of half the world’s population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts.

A 4C average would mask more severe local impacts: the Arctic and western and southern Africa could experience warming up to 10C, the Met Office report warns.

The study updates the findings of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said the world would probably warm by 4C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The IPCC also listed a more severe scenario, with emissions and temperatures rising further because of more intensive fossil fuel burning, but this was not considered realistic. “That scenario was downplayed because we were more conservative a few years ago. But the way we are going, the most severe scenario is looking more plausible,” Betts said.

A report last week from the UN Environment Programme said emissions since 2000 have risen faster than even this IPCC worst-case scenario. “In the 1990s, these scenarios all assumed political will or other phenomena would have brought about the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by this point. In fact, CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating.”

The Met Office scientists used new versions of the computer models used to set the IPCC predictions, updated to include so-called carbon feedbacks or tipping points, which occur when warmer temperatures release more carbon, such as from soils.

When they ran the models for the most extreme IPCC scenario, they found that a 4C rise could come by 2060 or 2070, depending on the feedbacks. Betts said: “It’s important to stress it’s not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.” Soaring emissions must peak and start to fall sharply within the next decade to head off a 2C rise, he said. To avoid the 4C scenario, that peak must come by the 2030s.

A poll of 200 climate experts for the Guardian earlier this year found that most of them expected a temperature rise of 3C-4C by the end of the century.

The implications of a 4C rise on agriculture, water supplies and wildlife will be discussed at the Oxford conference, which organisers have billed as the first to properly consider such a dramatic scenario.

Mark New, a climate expert at Oxford who has organised the conference, said: “If we get a weak agreement at Copenhagen then there is not just a slight chance of a 4C rise, there is a really big chance. It’s only in the last five years that scientists have started to realise that 4C is becoming increasingly likely and something we need to look at seriously.” Limiting global warming to 2C could only be achieved with new technology to suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. “I think the policy makers know that. I think there is an implicit understanding that they are negotiating not about 2C but 3C or 5C.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/28/met-office-study-global-warming

by Michael McCarthy

http://www.independent.co.uk

Satellite laser measurements show change in environment for the first time.

Melting ice is pouring off Greenland and Antarctica into the sea far faster than was previously realised because of global warming, new scientific research reveals today.

The accelerating loss from the world’s two great land-based ice sheets means a rise in sea levels is likely to happen even more quickly than UN scientists suggested only two years ago, the findings by British scientists suggest.

Although floating ice, such as that in the Arctic Ocean, does not add to sea-level rise when it melts as it is already displacing its own mass in the water, melting ice from the land raises the global sea level directly. At present it is thought that land-based ice melt accounts for about 1.8mm of the current annual sea level rise of 3.2mm – the rest is coming from the fact that water expands in volume as it warms. But the new findings, published online today in the journal Nature, imply that this rate is likely to increase.

High-resolution satellite laser measurements have shown that along both the Greenland and Antarctic coastlines, the glaciers and ice streams which for thousands of years have slowly carried ice into the sea are now rapidly thinning, meaning they are speeding up in their flow. In both cases, the increased flow rate is extending back far into the ice sheets’ interior.

This is happening all the way around Greenland, even at the high northern latitudes, and around much of Antarctica, especially in West Antarctica and around the Antarctic Peninsula.

Areas around the Greenland coast are hotspots of glacier thinning – in some cases the glacier surface level is dropping at a rate of half a metre per year, while in others it is a remarkable rate of a metre and a half.

It is the first time that a comprehensive view of the rate of thinning – and thus ice loss – all the way around the coast has been made possible. It has been put together by Hamish Pritchard and his colleagues from the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol, by analysing millions of measurements from Nasa’s high-resolution ICESat (Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite).

Launched in January 2003, ICESat examines changes in the world’s ice and land masses. The satellite’s lasers have measured the surface elevation of the Earth’s ice sheets with unprecedented accuracy – and thus picked up how they are changing.

“The fact that the changes are so large is alarming, and you wonder how far they will go,” Dr Pritchard said. “The thinning effect must be relatively recent, as it is so strong that it could not have been sustained previously without the glaciers melting away.”

The scientists compared the rates of change in elevation of both fast-flowing and slow-flowing ice. In Greenland, they studied 111 fast-moving glaciers and found 81 thinning at rates twice that of slow-flowing ice at the same altitude. They found that ice loss from many glaciers in both Antarctica and Greenland is greater than the rate of snowfall further inland.

In Antarctica, some of the fastest thinning glaciers are in the west, where the Pine Island, Smith and Thwaites Glaciers are thinning by up to nine metres per year.

“We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across such large areas of coastline – it’s widespread and in some cases thinning extends hundreds of kilometres inland,” Dr Pritchard said. “This kind of ice loss is so poorly understood that it remains the most unpredictable part of future sea level rise.”

* Humanity must stay within the defined boundaries of several of the Earth’s natural processes or face catastrophe, a group of leading environmental scientists warns today. The scientists, who include James Hansen of Nasa, the world’s leading climatologist, suggest in the journal Nature that nine Earth-system processes are among the planetary boundaries: climate change, ocean acidification, interference with the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, freshwater use, changes in land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, chemical pollution and rate of biodiversity loss.

For three of these – the nitrogen cycle, the rate at which species are being lost and anthropogenic climate change – they argue that the acceptable boundary level has already been passed. In addition, they say that humanity is fast approaching the boundaries for freshwater use, for converting forests and other natural ecosystems to cropland, for acidification of the oceans and for the phosphorous cycle.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/ancient-glaciers-are-disappearing-faster-than-ever-1792274.html

Adapted from materials provided by University of California – Santa Barbara

http://www.sciencedaily.com

New approaches are needed to help humanity deal with climate change and other global environmental threats that lie ahead in the 21st century, according to a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists.

The scientists propose that global biophysical boundaries, identified on the basis of the scientific understanding of the earth system, can define a “safe planetary operating space” that will allow humanity to continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. This new approach to sustainable development is conveyed in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature. The authors have made a first attempt to identify and quantify a set of nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, freshwater use, biological diversity, and aerosol loading.

The research was performed by a working group at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), in cooperation with the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

One important strand of the research behind this article is based in the global project known as IHOPE. The goal of the Integrated History and future Of People on Earth (IHOPE) project is to understand the interactions of the environmental and human process over the ten to hundred millennia to determine how human and biophysical changes have contributed to Earth system dynamics. The IHOPE working group is assembled at NCEAS today.

The scientists emphasize that the rapid expansion of human activities since the industrial revolution has now generated a global geophysical force equivalent to some of the great forces of nature.

“We are entering the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which our activities are threatening the earth’s capacity to regulate itself,” said co-author Will Steffen, professor at the Australian National University (ANU) and director of the ANU Climate Change Institute. “We are beginning to push the planet out of its current stable Holocene state, the warm period that began about 10,000 years ago and during which agriculture and complex societies, including our own, have developed and flourished. The expanding human enterprise could undermine the resilience of the Holocene state, which would otherwise continue for thousands of years into the future.”

Robert Costanza, director of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont and one of the IHOPE project leaders at NCEAS, said: “Human history has traditionally been cast in terms of the rise and fall of great civilizations, wars, and specific human achievements. This history leaves out the important ecological and climate contexts that shaped and mediated these events. Human history and earth system history have traditionally been developed independently, with little interaction among the academic communities. The Nature article provides evidence of the necessities to establish a thorough, long-term historical understanding of the exchange between human societies and the earth system, in order to set standards for safe navigation within planetary boundaries and avoid crossing dangerous thresholds.”

Planetary boundaries is a way of thinking that will not replace politics, economics, or ethics, explained environmental historian Sverker Sörlin of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. “But it will help tell all of us where the dangerous limits are and therefore when it is ethically unfair to allow more emissions of dangerous substances, further reduction of biodiversity, or to continue the erosion of the resource base. It provides the ultimate guardrails that can help societies to take action politically, economically. Planetary boundaries should be seen both as signals of the need for caution and as an encouragement to innovation and new thinking of how to operate safely within these boundaries while at same time securing human well being for all.”

Lead author Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, said: “The human pressure on the Earth System has reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. To continue to live and operate safely, humanity has to stay away from critical ‘hard-wired’ thresholds in Earth’s environment, and respect the nature of the planet’s climatic, geophysical, atmospheric and ecological processes. Transgressing planetary boundaries may be devastating for humanity, but if we respect them we have a bright future for centuries ahead.”

In addition to the authors named above, the group of IHOPE-related scientists who contributed to the Nature article includes systems ecologist Carl Folke, of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and archaeologist Sander van der Leeuw at Arizona State University. Among other authors are Katherine Richardson, an oceanographic biologist with the University of Copenhagen, and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist with the Max Planck Institute, Mainz, Germany.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090923143339.htm

by Alan Gadian

http://news.bbc.co.uk

As the UK’s Royal Society prepares to publish its conclusions on whether geo-engineering can help combat climate change, physicist Alan Gadian argues that geo-engineering techniques, in particular cloud whitening, must be properly tested – and soon.

Planet Earth has become a huge science experiment, and the consequences will affect all of us.

“Global warming poses a greater threat than world terrorism and agreement must be reached within two years to mitigate global warming and minimise environmental catastrophe,” Sir David King, the UK’s chief scientist, wrote in 2007.

On 8 July this year, the G8 proposed a 50% reduction of global emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050. It remains to be seen whether this will be fast enough.

And carbon dioxide is not the only problem.

Methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent, and the wastelands of Siberia are now releasing fountains of methane as the permafrost melts, adding to the greenhouse warming effect.
So how can geo-engineering help?

I define geo-engineering as man-made environmental change; and I would include in its definition the unprecedented burning of fossil fuels that has pumped large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the massive increase in the number of farm animals with consequential methane production.

Changes in agriculture, in Africa for example, have resulted in the felling of large areas of forest and have removed the water storage capacity of the land. This has led to the rapid advance of the desert in the Sahel region.

The planet has been and is warming further. This will also lead to significant changes in precipitation, and flooding will remove prime agriculturally productive land.

In a 1990 paper in the journal Nature, John Latham, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, US, suggested that increasing the number of droplets in maritime layer clouds (stratocumulus) could significantly increase their reflectance.

These clouds cover a third of the ocean.
The water droplets in clouds reflect solar radiation back to space. And the numbers of droplets they contain are largely controlled by the number of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), such as specks of dust.

Many of these nuclei are produced over the land. Land-locked clouds therefore contain many hundreds of cloud droplets per cubic centimetre, whilst clouds that form over the sea contain substantially fewer.

Generally, the more droplets that are present in a cloud, the smaller they are.

For a given mass of water in a cloud, clouds with smaller droplets tend to be whiter. This was illustrated by the Edinburgh University scientist Stephen Salter’s example of glass beads in a jar – the smaller the beads, the whiter they appear.

So the proposal is to inject a fine spray of sea salt from the ocean surface into the clouds; to artificially increase the number of drops, reduce their size and increase the reflectance of the clouds, making them whiter.

This one-off increase in reflectance – and the resulting cooling – could buy us precious time; maybe as much as 25 years.

ut we need numerical models and field experiments to determine the ideal size of the sea-salt nuclei.

Results from climate models show that a modest increase of nuclei in marine stratocumulus clouds could produce the desired cooling.

Further research is required, but preliminary results suggest this could compensate for up to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels.

Initial results suggest that the biggest cooling would occur in the polar regions, which is consistent with theory, and is exactly the place where cooling is most needed.

The big advantages of this scheme are that it uses sea water spray, a naturally occurring substance, and that it can be turned off immediately if there are any undesirable consequences.

Professor Salter has even suggested a design for a fleet of about 2000 of wind-powered yachts, which incorporate a sophisticated spray mechanism that is now being developed.

My colleagues and I propose to carry out detailed research of the scheme and provide an answer on its viability within five years.
There are four elements to this research:

• cloud physics modelling; there are many questions about the optimal size of sea-salt CCN and how the clouds will respond to their increased numbers
•
• further climate modelling

• developing and building Stephen Salter’s test yachts

• a field experiment; a limited-area field experiment is needed in a region of stratocumulus clouds, and we already have advanced-stage plans with potential collaborators in the US

Initial estimates suggest that we could complete the research for approximately £6m ($10m), and produce a result that will determine if the proposed scheme is viable or not.

he research needs to be carried out, otherwise we will not know, five to 10 years from now, if we could have done anything to slow down the warming and the irreversible change in the Earth system.

It is an insignificant sum compared to the cost of doing nothing.
As James Lovelock states: “There have been seven disasters since humans came on the Earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen.”

He argues that billions of people are likely to die in the ensuing famine. “Enjoy life while you can.
“Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan”.
We can do something to provide a breathing space. That something should start now.

Dr Alan Gadian is a senior research lecturer in the School of Earth and the Environment at the University of Leeds, UK
Dr Gadian would like to extend his thanks to collaborators Alan Blyth, John Latham and Stephen Salter

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8214045.stm