Seven Generational Ruminations

Using radar images acquired by European ERS-1 and -2 satellites, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) tracked the flow rate of more than 300 previously unstudied glaciers. They found a 12% increase in glacier speed from 1993 to 2003. These observations, echoing recent findings from coastal Greenland, indicate that the cause is the melting of the lower glaciers, which flow directly into the sea.

Melting glacier uncovers island contains a series of pictures showing one effect of melting glaciers in Greenland. There are beginning to be islands freed from the ice who have been buried by ice for millennia.

I've now flown over Greenland four times (on two trips) and from 35,000 feet in the airplane all I can say is there is a massive amount of ice covering that continent.

The threats posed by climate change to natural and cultural sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List are outlined in a new UNESCO publication, "Case Studies on Climate Change and World Heritage"*. The report features 26 examples - including the Tower of London, Kilimanjaro National Park and the Great Barrier Reef - case studies that are representative of the dangers faced by the 830 sites inscribed on the World Heritage List.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the main UN international group studying climate change -- has released the second installment of the IPCC fourth assessment report enitled "Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability" [more | more2]. Building on February's IPCC report which found human greenhouse gas emissions are very likely to be the main cause of recent warming, thousands of the world's leading climate scientists concurred that heat-trapping emissions from industry and other activities are already influencing weather patterns and ecology.

"And we have far greater regional detail than in [our previous global assessment in] 2001 on things like glacier melting, and what the implications of that melting will be; on sea level rise, which clearly threatens a number of countries in the world including mega-deltas which are particularly vulnerable; and on agriculture, which has implications for food security."

The island, part of a chain called the Sundarbans, was first settled by farmers in colonial times when the authorities decided to expand rice production to feed the multitudes in the city of Calcutta.

But when I visited Ghoramara there was powerful evidence that soil erosion caused in part by farming and the rising surrounding sea level caused by global warming were gradually making the island disappear.

Rising sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets are at upper limits of projections, leaving some human population centres already unable to cope, top world scientists say as they analyse latest satellite data.

...But even in east Antarctica, which is insulated from global warming by extreme cold temperatures and high-altitudes, new information shows the height of the Tottenham Glacier near Australia's Casey Base has fallen by 10 metres over 15-16 years.

Apparently while scientists are applauding the attention Al Gore is bringing to the issue of global warming, they're (some of them) concerned about the little details and wish he would cool the hype. It's not clear whether this article is the typical bashing that's been aimed in the direction of Al Gore and his movie An Inconvenient Truth, bashing that says he's full of bunk or that there is a legitimate debate going on.

Weather records have been kept for a bit over a hundred years, so in terms of global climate this is pretty scant evidence given the age of the planet. Still the last 10 years has seen record warm winters year after year. That sure indicates a trend. This last winter was the warmest yet on record, a thought we shouldn't be surprised over given how warm it was in January. There were several reports throughout the winter where bears were not hibernating, because it wasn't cold enough to trigger that response. In Moscow, Russia, they didn't have a white christmas. etc.

Regardless to the truth of the idea of human-caused climate change, carbon dioxide growth in the oceans is still a problem. This is from a study published in the March 9, 2007, issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters authored by Ken Caldeira from the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University and Long Cao and Atul Jain of the University of Illinois. Increasing absorption of carbon dioxide is acidifying global oceans, because carbon dioxide absorbed into water becomes carbonic acid.