Loss of Arctic ice leaves experts stunned

The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced. Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030. Mark Serreze, an Arctic specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University in Denver, said: "It's amazing. It's simply fallen off a cliff and we're still losing ice." The Arctic has now lost about a third of its ice since satellite measurements began thirty years ago, and the rate of loss has accelerated sharply since 2002.

Tropical storms doubled due to global warming, study says

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say.

A satellite image of Tropical Storm Dalila off Mexico's Pacific coast.

The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded.

Their findings were being published online Sunday by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

An official at the National Hurricane Center called the research "sloppy science" and said technological improvements in observing storms accounted for the increase.

From 1905 to 1930, the Atlantic-Gulf Coast area averaged six tropical cyclones per year, with four of those storms growing into become hurricanes.

The annual average jumped to 10 tropical storms and five hurricanes from 1931 to 1994. From 1995 to 2005, the average was 15 tropical storms and eight hurricanes annually.

Even in 2006, widely reported as a mild year, there were 10 tropical storms.

"We are currently in an upward swing in frequency of named storms and hurricanes that has not stabilized," said Holland, director of mesoscale and microscale meteorology at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

"I really do not know how much further, if any, that it will go, but my sense is that we shall see a stabilization in frequencies for a while, followed by potentially another upward swing if global warming continues unabated," Holland said.

It is normal for chaotic systems such as weather and climate to move in sharp steps rather than gradual trends, he said.

"What did surprise me when we first found it in 2005 was that the increases had developed for so long without us noticing it," he said in an interview via e-mail.

Holland said about half the U.S. population and "a large slice" of business are "directly vulnerable" to hurricanes.

"Our urban and industrial planning and building codes are based on past history," he said. If the future is different, "then we run the very real risk of these being found inadequate, as was so graphically displayed by (Hurricane) Katrina in New Orleans."

Hurricanes derive their energy from warm ocean water. North Atlantic surface temperature increased about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit during the 100-year period studied. Other researchers have calculated that at least two-thirds of that warming can be attributed to human and industrial activities.

Some experts have sought to blame changes in the sun. But a recent study by British and Swiss experts concluded that "over the past 20 years, all the trends in the sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures."

As the sea surface temperatures warm, they cause changes in atmospheric wind fields and circulations, and these changes are responsible for the changes in storm frequency, Holland said.

Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center, said the study is inconsistent in its use of data.

The work, he said, is "sloppy science that neglects the fact that better monitoring by satellites allows us to observe storms and hurricanes that were simply missed earlier. The doubling in the number of storms and hurricanes in 100 years that they found in their paper is just an artifact of technology, not climate change."

But Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the study was significant. "It refutes recent suggestions that the upward trend in Atlantic hurricane activity is an artifact of changing measurement systems," said Emanuel, who was not part of the research team.

Improvements in observation began with aircraft flights into storms in 1944 and satellite observations in 1970. The transitions in hurricane activity that were noted in the paper occurred around 1930 and 1995.

"We are of the strong and considered opinion that data errors alone cannot explain the sharp, high-amplitude transitions between the climatic regimes, each with an increase of around 50 percent in cyclone and hurricane numbers," wrote Webster, of Georgia Institute of Technology, and Holland.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Peer Reviewed Study: "Earth today stands in imminent peril"

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in "imminent peril".

In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world's leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the "gravest threat" of climate change.

"Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures," the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add.

The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.

The other scientists were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

In their 29-page paper, "Climate Change and trace gases", the scientists frequently stray from the non-emotional language of science to emphasise the scale of the problems and dangers posed by climate change.

In an email to The Independent, Dr Hansen said: "In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control."

The unnatural "forcing" of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a "flip" in the climate that could "spark a cataclysm" in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write.

Study: Southern Ocean saturated with CO2

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The Southern Ocean around Antarctica is so loaded with carbon dioxide that it can barely absorb any more, so more of the gas will stay in the atmosphere to warm up the planet, scientists reported Thursday.

Human activity is the main culprit, said researcher Corinne Le Quere, who called the finding very alarming.

The phenomenon wasn't expected to be apparent for decades, Le Quere said in a telephone interview from the University of East Anglia in Britain.

"We thought we would be able to detect these only the second half of this century, say 2050 or so," she said. But data from 1981 through 2004 show the sink is already full of carbon dioxide. "So I find this really quite alarming."

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Vatican issues new green message for world's Catholics: Protect God's Creation

Pope addresses climate change conference
US church leaders lobby Bush on global warming

John Vidal and Tom Kington in Rome
The Guardian

The Vatican yesterday added its voice to a rising chorus of warnings from churches around the world that climate change and abuse of the environment is against God's will, and that the one billion-strong Catholic church must become far greener.

At a Vatican conference on climate change, Pope Benedict urged bishops, scientists and politicians - including UK environment secretary David Miliband - to "respect creation" while "focusing on the needs of sustainable development".

The Pope's message follows a series of increasingly strong statements about climate change and the environment, including a warning earlier this year that "disregard for the environment always harms human coexistence, and vice versa". Observers said yesterday that the Catholic church is no longer split between those who advocate development and those who say the environment is the priority. Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, head of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, said: "For environment ... read Creation. The mastery of man over Creation must not be despotic or senseless. Man must cultivate and safeguard God's Creation."

According to Vatican sources, the present Pope is far more engaged in the green debate than John Paul. In the past year Benedict has spoken strongly on the need to preserve rainforests. In the next few weeks he visits Brazil.

"There is no longer a schism. The new interest in climate change and the environment is not surprising really. Benedict comes out of 1960s Germany, where environment and disarmament were major issues. It's conceivable that his ministry could even culminate in a papal encyclical on the environment," said one analyst. This would be the most powerful signal to the world's Catholics about the need for environmental awareness at every level.

The Catholic church is just one major faith group now rapidly moving environment to the fore of its social teachings. "Climate change, biotechnology, trade justice and pollution are all now being debated at a far higher level by the world's major religions," said Martin Palmer, secretary general of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (Arc).

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Ex-generals: Global warming threatens U.S. security

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Global warming poses a "serious threat to America's national security" and the U.S. likely will be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report.

The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. "The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts.

"Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations," former U.S. Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan told Associated Press Radio. "Everybody needs to start paying attention to what's going on. I don't think this is a particularly hard sell in the Pentagon. ... We're paying attention to what those security implications are."

Gen. Anthony "Tony" Zinni, President Bush's former Middle East envoy, says in the report: "It's not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability, or climate change and terrorism."

The report was issued by the Alexandria, Virginia-based, national security think-tank The CNA Corporation and was written by six retired admirals and five retired generals. They warn of a future of rampant disease, water shortages and flooding that will make already dicey areas -- such as the Middle East, Asia and Africa -- even worse.

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Intergovernmental Panel: "many natural systems are being affected."

"Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases."

The IPCC is the leading body for the assessment of climate change, established by the United Nations to provide the world with a clear, balanced view of the present state of understanding of climate change.

The IPCC does not conduct research on its own. Its core activity is to review and assess the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to the understanding of climate change.

The IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4) consists of four volumes that will be released in the course of 2007. Compared to the 2001 report, the AR4 pays greater attention to the integration of climate change with sustainable development and the inter-relationships between mitigation and adaptation. Specific attention is given to regional issues, uncertainty & risk, technology, climate change & water.

Here are the release dates:

February 2 (Paris) - "The Physical Science Basis"
April 6 (Brussels) - "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability"
May 4 (Bangkok) - "Mitigation of Climate Change"
November 16 (Valencia) "The Synthesis Report"

In this second release, Working Group II Report addresses "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability": It provides a detailed analysis of observed changes in natural and human systems and the relationship between those observed changes and climate change, as well as a detailed assessment of projected future vulnerability, impacts, and response measures to adapt to climatic changes for main sectors and regions.

Get the full report here.