Gore's Nobel lecture, calling for a new time table

For those present in Oslo today to hear Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture it may have seemed the Nobel Laureate was in fact preaching to the choir but the fact is, the assembled audience was no ordinary choir; heads of state, scientists and activists like Uma Thurman one would expect should not be surprised by Gore's rhetoric, he's been warning the world about global warming for almost 20 years now and that is the message he reiterated today with one difference.

Gore called for a revival of the moral determination that allowed the "Greatest Generation" to defeat Fascism last century, Gore challenged world leaders to overcome their squeamishness, take up the role of leadership and come away from the Environmental Congress in Bali next month with a new resolve to wage war on global warming.

Saying, "We must step up our efforts to counter global warming just as the cumulative effects of the warming process have accelerated," Gore suggested the schedule for full compliance with the Kyoto Accords be put forward to 2010 rather than the current goal of 2012. Gore went on to insist that the leaders at the Bali Conference should step up and individually take responsibility for the accords even suggesting that as a body they ought to meet every 3 months until the agreement is ratified.

Of course, Gore is a politician first and foremost but that doesn't automatically disqualify him from leading the discourse on global warming as some of his critics suggest; political leadership should in fact be the staging point for any mass movement not just war and revolution, civil reform and humanitarian resolve too can have their roots in political soil.

Gore said most correctly that the world must face the fact that the global environmental crisis is not just science and statistical measurement but rather a real process seen in the changing fortunes of the world's economy and the harsh reality of an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Gore's particular talent and the one he will be remembered for rather than his political leadership will be his ability to have connected poverty, disease and rising global tension to the state of a diseased, threatened environment and having the moral courage to say that you can not fix one without addressing the other.

Greener Magazine

NOAA, hurricane hunters

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Air Operations Center at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa serves as home to The Hurricane Hunters. The air group provides life saving, real time information on the formation and progress of earth's deadliest storms. However, the AOC's year round mission as NOAA's air platform for gathering vital data on weather, ocean resources and the atmosphere may be our best tool yet in the quest to understand the environment.

At 9 AM, it is already a steamy 93 degrees as we approach the main gate to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The sky is bright and clear betraying no hint of severe thunderstorms approaching from the west – but you know they’re there all the same. This is hurricane season and storms rising daily over the Gulf are a constant reminder that hurricanes are our perennial companions.

We are met by Lori Bast from Public Affairs, NOAA – the Hurricane Hunters. She quickly guides us through security and leads our small caravan into the city within a city that the base has become since taking on the role of U.S. Central Command. Our destination is a hanger marked Aircraft Operations Center (satellite image). The hanger building is parked inconspicuously among a half dozen other hangers along the concrete apron bordering the base’s interlace of runways. We are here to meet Dr. James McFadden Chief of Programs & Projects Staff for NOAA and a few of his charges: Kermit, Miss Piggy and Gonzo.

Originally designated as the Research Flight Facility (RFF), the group began operations in 1961 in Miami conducting weather studies and gathering information about atmospheric conditions for the U.S. Weather Bureau's National Hurricane Research Project. One project, early on, was called Operation Stormfury, an attempt to determine if a hurricane’s destructive energy could be somehow modified by controlled cloud seeding.

In 1970, President Nixon proposed unifying several branches of earth science studies under one umbrella and assigned it the designation National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration under the Department of Commerce and NOAA was born. Data gathered by NOAA’s five line offices each responsible for a different research venue is shared with other government agencies, research communities, private industry and the public. NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center moved to MacDill AFB in 1993. The AOC provides the aircraft platform from which NOAA conducts its various studies.

To the public much of what NOAA does on a day-to-day basis is lost in the glare of the “Hurricane Hunter” missions. Part of the reason the public focuses so intensely on the hurricane flights themselves Dr. McFadden observed, is that, “people notice weather, they don’t notice climate”. These dramatic flights above and into the eye of the storm provide dynamic data streams of information from which weather forecasters can predict a storm’s strength, growth potential and probable track to landfall. This vital service saves lives and property and has become, over the years, the most visible aspect of NOAA operations. I asked Dr. McFadden if he would describe some of the other missions the Aircraft Operations Center enables throughout the year.

NOAA, he told us, flies a variety of environmental missions designed to support science studies such as marine resources surveys for the National Marine Fisheries Service, monitoring coastal erosion, annual changes in snow pack levels, which aid in predicting spring flooding from melt runoff and winter storm research in the Pacific. The AOC may partner with other agencies as they did recently when they joined with NESDIS, the National Satellite, Data and Information Service, flying low-level flight instrumentation checks to help calibrate GPS mapping coordination of their satellite imagery. NESDIS satellite imaging provides global environmental data to scientists and government agencies, which in turn is used in a variety of studies designed to enhance our understanding of weather, natural resources and the environment.

The men and women who comprise the AOC come from many different backgrounds. Some are scientists, or engineers; some are flight officers, mathematicians or aircraft mechanics; civilian or NOAA Corp, which, Dr. McFadden explained, is the seventh uniformed service of the United States. The Corp can trace its origins back to the establishment of the Survey of the Coast by Thomas Jefferson in 1807. Like the Coast Guard, the Uniformed Corp of NOAA maintains an organizational identity similar to the military and works in close association with their civilian counterparts. For more information about the NOAA Corp, visit their web site at NOAA Marine and Aviation Operations (NMAO.)

Standing inside the Hurricane Hunter’s cavernous hanger, one can not resist the impression that regardless their training or service specialty the one thing that motivates this team of specialists as much as their dedication to the science of weather is the presence of their teammates and partners, the most visible element of their organization, the aircraft themselves. Earlier we mentioned Kermit, Miss Piggy and Gonzo, names certainly familiar to generations of America children and the respective designated names of 2 giant Lockheed WP-3D Orion aircraft and a sleek, high flying Gulfstream G-IV SP. Next week we’ll take you aboard Kermit and explain how the Hurricane Hunters reveal the nature of these violent storms.

NASA satellites watch as China constructs giant dam

Last June we described the progress of Three Gorges Dam in Dragon and sword, now the dragon has begun to stir and with some unexpected results.


The Yangtze River is the third largest river in the world, stretching more than 3,900 miles across China before reaching its mouth near Shanghai. Historically, the river has been prone to massive flooding, overflowing its banks about once every ten years. The dam is designed to greatly improve flood control on the river and protect the 15 million people and 3.7 million acres of farmland in the lower Yangtze flood plains.

Observations from the NASA-built Landsat satellites provide an overview of the dam's construction. The first images show the region prior to start of the project. By 2000, construction along each riverbank was underway, but sediment-filled water still flowed through a narrow channel near the river’s south bank. The 2004 images below show limited development of the main wall and the partial filling of the reservoir, including numerous side canyons. By mid-2006, construction of the main wall was completed and a reservoir more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) across had filled just upstream of the dam.

Engineered to store more than 5 trillion gallons of water, the Three Gorges Dam is designed to produce more than 18,000 megawatts of electricity when all 26 turbines become operational in 2009­twenty times the power of Hoover Dam. The reservoir will also allow 10,000-ton freighters to enter the nation's interior, opening a region burgeoning with agricultural and manufactured products, increasing commercial shipping access to China's cities.

While Landsat is a premier research tool for observing changes on the Earth's surface, other NASA satellites are also helpful in determining how changing land cover and use may influence climate and the environment. Just as transforming forested lands into cities can change the local climate, scientists have found evidence that Three Gorges Dam and its enormous reservoir might have a similar effect.

In a recent study, researchers used computer models and data from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite to estimate how the dam's construction impacted area rainfall. Information from NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites also revealed the dam's effect on land surface temperatures.

"The satellite data and computer modeling clearly indicate that the land use change associated with the dam's construction has increased precipitation in the region between the Daba and Qinling mountains," said lead author Liguang Wu of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland - Baltimore County. The land changes also reduced rainfall in the region immediately surrounding Three Gorges Dam after the dam's water level abruptly rose in June 2003.

The researchers were surprised to see that the dam affected rainfall over such a large area - a 62-square-mile region - rather than just 6 miles projected in previous studies.

Land surface temperature changes were also found to occur in the area where more rain fell. In the daytime, temperatures between the Daba and the Qinling mountains decreased by an average of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.67 degrees Celsius). Where there was more rainfall, there were more clouds, which reduced the amount of sunlight and heat that reached the land surface, creating cooler daytime temperatures.

The study suggests that the cause of these temperature changes was the expansion of the width of the Yangtze River and the formation of the dam's reservoir. After construction, a 401-square-mile reservoir formed in the mountainous area. Before the dam, the Yangtze River was only one-third of a mile in width. The larger mass of water created a "lake effect," causing cooler temperatures and increased rainfall between the Daba and Qinling mountains, but less rainfall in the immediate vicinity of the reservoir.

When the dam becomes fully operational in 2009 and the reservoir reaches its peak size, scientists predict these regional temperature and precipitation changes may increase even more. The 2006 study was published in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters.

Greener Magazine

Arctic ice retreating more quickly than projected

Arctic sea ice is melting at a significantly faster rate than projected by even the most advanced computer models, concludes a new study, released today. The research, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), shows that the Arctic's ice cover is retreating more rapidly than estimated by any of the 18 computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in preparing its 2007 assessments.

The study, "Arctic Sea Ice Decline: Faster Than Forecast?" appears today in the online edition of Geophysical Research Letters. It was led by Julienne Stroeve of the NSIDC and funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR's principal sponsor, and by NASA.

"While the ice is disappearing faster than the computer models indicate, both observations and the models point in the same direction: the Arctic is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace and the impact of greenhouse gases is growing," says NCAR scientist Marika Holland, one of the study’s co-authors.

The authors compared model simulations of past climate with observations by satellites and other instruments. They found that, on average, the models simulated a loss in September ice cover of 2.5 percent per decade from 1953 to 2006. The fastest rate of September retreat in any individual model was 5.4 percent per decade. (September marks the yearly minimum of sea ice in the Arctic.) But newly available data sets, blending early aircraft and ship reports with more recent satellite measurements that are considered more reliable than the earlier records, show that the September ice actually declined at a rate of about 7.8 percent per decade during the 1953-2006 period.

"This suggests that current model projections may in fact provide a conservative estimate of future Arctic change, and that the summer Arctic sea ice may disappear considerably earlier than IPCC projections," says Stroeve.

THIRTY YEARS AHEAD OF SCHEDULE::

The study indicates that, because of the disparity between the computer models and actual observations, the shrinking of summertime ice is about 30 years ahead of the climate model projections. As a result, the Arctic could be seasonally free of sea ice earlier than the IPCC- projected timeframe of any time from 2050 to well beyond 2100.

The authors speculate that the computer models may fail to capture the full impact of increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Whereas the models indicate that about half of the ice loss from 1979 to 2006 was due to increased greenhouse gases, and the other half due to natural variations in the climate system, the new study indicates that greenhouse gases may be playing a significantly greater role.

There are a number of factors that may lead to the low rates of simulated sea ice loss. Several models overestimate the thickness of the present-day sea ice and the models may also fail to fully capture changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation that transport heat to polar regions.

MARCH ICE::

Although the loss of ice for March is far less dramatic than the September loss, the models underestimate it by a wide margin as well. The study concludes that the actual rate of sea ice loss in March, which averaged about 1.8 percent per decade in the 1953-2006 period, was three times larger than the mean from the computer models. March is typically the month when Arctic sea ice is at its most extensive.

The Arctic is especially sensitive to climate change partly because regions of sea ice, which reflect sunlight back into space and provide a cooling impact, are disappearing. In contrast, darker areas of open water, which are expanding, absorb sunlight and increase temperatures. This feedback loop has played a role in the increasingly rapid loss of ice in recent years, which accelerated to 9.1 percent per decade from 1979 to 2006 according to satellite observations.

Walt Meier, Ted Scambos, and Mark Serreze, all at NSIDC, also co-authored the study.

Greener News Room

Title: Arctic Sea Ice Decline: Faster Than Forecast?
Authors: Juliene Stroeve, Marika Holland, Walt Meier, Ted Scambos, Mark
Serreze
Publication: Geophysical Research Letters

Like Columbus, climate researchers explore beyond known world

A new global warming study predicts that many current climate zones will vanish entirely by the year 2100, replaced by climates unknown in today's world.


Global climate models for the next century forecast the complete disappearance of several existing climates currently found in tropical highlands and regions near the poles, while large swaths of the tropics and subtropics may develop new climates unlike anything seen today. Driven by worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, the climate modeling study uses average summer and winter temperatures and precipitation levels to map the differences between climate zones today and in the year 2100 and anticipates large climate changes worldwide.

The work, by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wyoming, appears online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of March 26.

As world leaders and scientists push to develop sound strategies to understand and cope with global changes, predictive studies like this one reveal both the importance and difficulty of such a task. Primary author and UW-Madison geographer Jack Williams likens today's environmental analysts to 15th-century European mapmakers confronted with the New World, struggling to chart unknown territory. "We want to identify the regions of the world where climate change will result in climates unlike any today," Williams says. "These are the areas beyond our map."

The most severely affected parts of the world span both heavily populated regions, including the southeastern United States, southeastern Asia and parts of Africa, and known hotspots of biodiversity, such as the Amazonian rainforest and African and South American mountain ranges. The changes predicted by the new study anticipate dramatic ecological shifts, with unknown but probably extensive effects on large segments of the Earth's population.

"All policy and management strategies are based on current conditions," Williams says, adding that regions with the largest changes are where these strategies and models are most likely to fail. "How do you make predictions for these areas of the unknown?"

Using models that translate carbon dioxide emission levels into climate change, Williams and his colleagues foresee the appearance of novel climate zones on up to 39 percent of the world's land surface area by 2100, if current rates of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions continue. Under the same conditions, the models predict the global disappearance of up to 48 percent of current land climates. Even if emission rates slow due to mitigation strategies, the models predict both climate loss and formation, each on up to 20 percent of world land area.
The underlying effect is clear, Williams says, noting, "More carbon dioxide in the air means more risk of entirely new climates or climates disappearing."

In general, the models show that existing climate zones will shift toward higher latitudes and higher elevations, squeezing out the climates at the extremes - tropical mountaintops and the poles - and leaving room for unfamiliar climes around the equator.

"This work helps highlight the significance of changes in the tropics," complementing the extensive attention already focused on the Arctic, says co-author John Kutzbach, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW-Madison. "There has been so much emphasis on high latitudes because the absolute temperature changes are larger."

However, Kutzbach explains, normal seasonal fluctuations in temperature and rainfall are smaller in the tropics, and even "small absolute changes may be large relative to normal variability."

The patterns of change foreshadow significant impacts on ecosystems and conservation. "There is a close correspondence between disappearing climates and areas of biodiversity," says Williams, which could increase risk of extinction in the affected areas.

Physical restrictions on species may also amplify the effects of local climate changes. The more relevant question, Williams says, becomes not just whether a given climate still exists, but "will a species be able to keep up with its climatic zone? Most species can't migrate around the world."

For the researchers, one of the most poignant aspects of the work is in what it doesn't tell them - the uncertainty. At this point, Williams says, "we don't know which bad things will happen or which good things will happen - we just don't know. We are in for some ecological surprises."

The work was conducted in collaboration with Stephen Jackson at the University of Wyoming and was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Greener News Room

Keywords:: GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE ZONES, CLIMATE MODELS, GREENHOUSE GASES

Chance for Global Warming Activism

Photo courtesy of peacecorpsonline.org

Here's your chance to meet other global-warming activists in your own community.

The website Step It Up! 2007 is promoting a "national day of climate action" on April 14, 2007. Great idea, and a desperately needed action. Already 920 events are planned in 50 states. The Step It Up 2007 website has an interactive map that allows you to locate the event closest to your home.

Step It Up! is pushing Congress for an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by the year 2050, which is just a 2% reduction per year.

Here is Step It Up's explanation of why they've chosen this particular goal. From their website:

"The latest science tells us that temperatures are increasing faster than expected, and the results are showing up in melting ice caps, intensifying storms, and rising sea levels. America's foremost climatologist, NASA scientist James Hansen, has said that we have just a few years to start reducing carbon emissions, and he's endorsed our goal of 80% by 2050. That won't prevent global warming - it's already too late for that - but it may be enough to stave off the most catastrophic effects.

"While few experts have said explicitly 'we need to reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2050,' we're sticking to this message. Here's why: Scientists have resisted in nearly every case prescribing policy because they don't want to enter the political realm. That's why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others won't suggest policy, but rather leave it up to legislators to do the dirty work. That said, Jim Hansen, the Stern Report, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a number of European countries, the State of California and others (including the new USCAP business-environmental partnership) have either suggested or explicitly referred to 80% carbon cuts by 2050 as a solution commensurate to the scale of the problem.

"And it's possible. The cost of renewable energy is falling fast. New conservation technologies, like hybrid cars, are becoming more available. Many Americans are starting to switch already, but only leadership from Washington can allow this transformation to happen fast enough. And if we begin to get our house in order, then we can play some role in helping China and India steer away from cataclysm as well.

"There are no guarantees we'll succeed. But if we act ambitiously, we have reason to hope."

Step It Up's website (link above) also has suggetions for how to plan an action near you, if there isn't one already planned, and other steps you can take to reduce our contribution to climate change. Americans are right now the world's biggest producers of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. But we're not helpless to stop it.

by Sally Kneidel

Keywords:: global warming day of action step it up Congress 80% reduction greenhouse gases carbon emissions climate change

Peruvian glacier may vanish in five years

When glaciologist Lonnie Thompson returns to Peru’s Qori Kalis glacier early this summer, he expects to find that half of the ice he saw during his visit there last year has vanished.

What troubles him the most is his recent observations that suggest that the entire glacier may likely be gone within the next five years, providing possibly the clearest evidence so far of global climate change.

The fact that the Qori Kalis glacier, high in the Andes Mountains, is only one of many ice tongues retreating on the Quelccaya Ice Cap, the largest body of ice in the tropics, provides strong evidence of the warming that appears to be underway worldwide. Thompson, Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University and a world-acclaimed paleoclimatologist, outlined his fears at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco this week.

Since 1974, Thompson has made the trek to the Quelccaya ice cap at least 27 times, drilling cores through to bedrock, taking samples and periodically monitoring its slow but accelerating retreat. Ancient plant beds have been newly uncovered as the ice retreats. The first were discovered in 2002, more are uncovered each year, and carbon dating indicates that most have been buried for at least 5,000 years. They indicate that the current retreat of the ice exceeds any other retreat in at least the last 50 centuries.

Evidence from the analysis of those ice cores – as well as records from more than a dozen other remote ice fields across the globe over the past three decades –point to an increase in temperatures throughout the tropics.

Thompson notes that today’s globally averaged temperature is thought to be only a few degrees cooler than the temperature at the height of the Eemian interglacial period, roughly 125,000 years ago when melting ice raised sea level nearly 6 meters (20 feet). Recent model projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the globally averaged temperature at the end of the current century could be 3 degrees warmer than it is today, he says.

“It raises the question of whether there are delays in the climate system that haven’t shown up as a change in sea level yet, but that will eventually come.”

He also points towards Greenland with another warning. The Jakobshavn glacier is the island’s largest outflow glacier, draining more than 6.5 percent of the ice cap. In the last decade, Thompson said, the glacier has doubled the speed it is sending ice out to the ocean.

“We’re talking about huge amounts of ice and water going into the ocean in this one single case,” Thompson said.


In 2001, he predicted that the famed “snows of Kilimanjaro” in Tanzania would disappear in 15 years as the glaciers atop that ancient volcano succumb to a warmer climate. If anything, he now wonders if his predictions were too conservative.

“Kilimanjaro is behaving just like Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori, both also in Africa, as well as the glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas,” he said. “This widespread retreat of mountain glaciers may be our clearest evidence of global warming as they integrate many climate variables. Most importantly, they have no political agenda,” he said.

Aside from the sheer geophysical changes this represents, he worries most about what it means to the millions of people relying on these ice caps as major water supplies. He’s quick to emphasize that 50 percent of the planet’s surface area lies between 30 degrees north and south of the equator and that 70 percent of the people live there. This is also where climate phenomenon that impact the entire planet originate, such as monsoons and El Ninos.

“This is basically the weather engine for the world.”

“These glaciers are going to be gone,” he says. “If you a living at the base of one of these mountains, it doesn’t matter why they’re disappearing – only that they are. Millions of people are going to have to adapt to these changes, many of which will occur in some of the poorest regions of the globe.”

He says that Peru’s Quelccaya offered another glimpse of a dangerous future for people living in that region. Over the years, as Qori Kalis retreated, a massively deep lake formed at its margin, high up a valley it has been contained by a natural dam. Last March, a massive chunk of the glacier broke off, tumbled downhill and splashed into that lake, sending a wall of water over the dam and cascading down into the valley.

“I’ve crossed this meadow that lies about 18 miles (30 kilometers) below Quelccaya perhaps 27 times and this is the first time I’ve ever seen this much sediment there, evidence of that recent flood.”

He said that such events wouldn’t have happened before 1991 since there was no lake there before that. “You see this unfolding also in the Himalayas where you have the retreat of glaciers and the formation of high-altitude lakes. Now the people in the valleys below face a new geological hazard.”

Through aerial mapping and satellite images, historic photographs and current surveys, researchers now can paint a picture of just how much ice has vanished in recent decades. New measurements at Quelccaya, Kilimanjaro and other sites all show that these ice masses are shrinking at an alarming rate. Thompson plans new expeditions to both mountain sites later this year to add to the evidence.

Thompson recently returned from drilling ice cores with his Chinese collaborators at a new site, Naimona’nyi, a 20,000-foot (6,100-meter) ice field in Tibet near the western border of Nepal. They retrieved three cores to bedrock, each offering a record of the local climate, trapped in the ice. While the ice core has not been dated yet, preliminary analysis shows an increase in temperature over time that nearly mirrors the record from various other sites worldwide.

“This may be very old ice,” he says.

Finding the plants that had been preserved under the Quelccaya ice was a real wake-up call, he believes. He and his colleagues have found more than 50 additional sites with remarkable plant remains, most dating back to that 5,000-year-old mark.

“About 5,000 years ago, we had perhaps 300 million people living on the planet,” he says. “Now there are more than 6.5 billion covering the globe. If you change the climate for many of these people, where will they go? There are fewer options today than there were back then.”

Greener News Room

Keywords:: QORI KALIS GLACIER GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE WARMING

Contact: Lonnie Thompson (614 292-6652; Thompson.3@osu.edu.