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Detailed Picture Of Ice Loss Following The Collapse Of Antarctic Ice Shelves
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An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves.
The work by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Toulouse, France, and the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, Colo., details recent ice losses while promising to sharpen future predictions of further ice loss and sea level rise likely to result from ongoing changes along the Antarctic Peninsula.
Read more…Powers That Be preparing for lockdown as Earth Changes increase? UN security council to consider ‘climate change peacekeeping force’
Special meeting to discuss ‘green helmets’ force to intervene in conflicts caused by rising seas levels and shrinking resourcesA special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.
Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.
There has been talk, meanwhile, of a new environmental peacekeeping force – green helmets – which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, is expected to address the meeting on Wednesday.
But Germany, which called the meeting, has warned it is premature to expect the council to take the plunge into green peacemaking or even adopt climate change as one of its key areas of concern.
“It is too early to seriously think about council action on climate change. This is clearly not Read more…
Rising Oceans – Too Late to Turn the Tide?
(Click to enlarge)
If sea levels rose to where they were during the Last Interglacial Period, large parts of the Gulf of Mexico would be under water (red areas), including half of Florida and several Caribbean islands. (Photo illustration by Jeremy Weiss)
Melting ice sheets contributed much more to rising sea levels than thermal expansion of warming ocean waters during the Last Interglacial Period, a UA-led team of researchers has found. The results further suggest that ocean levels continue to rise long after warming of the atmosphere has leveled off.
Thermal expansion of seawater contributed only slightly to rising sea levels compared to melting ice sheets during the Last Interglacial Period, a University of Arizona-led team of researchers has found.
The study combined paleoclimate records with computer simulations of Read more…
North Carolina Most At-Risk Against Rising Sea Levels
If one man could hold back the sea, North Carolina wouldn’t need to worry about rising ocean levels. Neither would New York, Boston or Miami. (Photo: Reuters Photographer/Reuters)The problem with reports about rising sea levels is that the damn thing—the world’s ocean—seems to creep up very, very slowly. In the past 21 centuries it’s raised an average of .07874 an inch every year, about the thickness of a nickel.
That doesn’t sound like much, right? Nothing to worry about! But what makes rising sea levels a deadly serious problem is that the ocean just keeps creeping up, up, up. And the average in recent decades is more like an inch a year.
In fact a new report from the National Academy of Sciences says the rate of Read more…
World’s Oceans In ‘Shocking’ Decline
The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.In a new report, they warn that ocean life is “at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history”.
They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.
The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.
The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.
Its report will be formally released later this week.
“The findings are shocking,” said Alex Rogers, IPSO’s scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.
“As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.
“We’ve sat in one forum and spoken to Read more…
Australia evaluates sea level threats
Walking on thin ice
AntarcticaIcebergs break away as the melting Antarctica landscape yields to glabal warming. Photo: Angela Wylie
Every now and then the magnificent, mute marble coast of Antarctica will suddenly find a voice and let out a shattering exclamation – like a gunshot. The noise travels far and wide, thundering uninterrupted across crystal space until sheer distance exhausts it.
It is the sound of an ice cliff collapsing into the ocean. Or maybe of a new iceberg cleaving itself away from the continent and setting sail. It is part of the natural soundtrack of planet history, though it is only rarely, and recently – in geological timescales – heard by humans.
In little remote scientific communities like the Australian Antarctic Division’s Casey Station, on the East Antarctic coast, a roar from the ice might briefly interrupt the labour or conversation of the scientists and tradesfolk who are resident there, working on some aspect of deciphering the climate story. For those lucky enough to be among them, to hear it, it sends a shiver of humility through your bones. You are, after all, at the mercy of this grumbling giant. The cryosphere Read more…
Record-High CO2 Levels a Bad Sign for Global Climate Goals
Record levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions last year threaten our chances of keeping the Earth’s temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius, considered by scientists to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change.
CO2 emissions from energy production in 2010 were the highest in history following a recessionary dip the year before, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a stark announcement Monday. Existing and planned power plants mean the bulk of energy-related CO2 emissions projected for 2020 are already “locked in.”
“This significant increase in CO2 emissions and the locking in of future emissions due to infrastructure investments represent a serious setback to our hopes of limiting the global rise in temperature to Read more…
New report confirms Arctic melt accelerating
FILE - In this July 19, 2007 file photo an iceberg is seen off Ammassalik Island in Eastern Greenland. A new assessment of climate change in the Arctic shows the ice in the region is melting faster than previously thought and sharply raises projections of global sea level rise this century. (AP Photo/John McConnico, File)
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Arctic ice is melting faster than expected and could raise the average global sea level by as much as five feet this century, an authoritative new report suggests.
The study by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, or AMAP, is one of the most comprehensive updates on climate change in the Arctic, and builds on a similar assessment in 2005.
The full report will be delivered to foreign ministers of the eight Arctic nations next week, but an executive summary including the key findings was obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
It says that Arctic temperatures in the past six years were the highest since measurements began in 1880, and that feedback mechanisms believed to accelerate warming in the climate system have now started kicking in.
One mechanism involves the ocean absorbing more heat when it’s not covered by ice, which reflects the sun’s energy. That effect has been anticipated by scientists “but clear evidence for it has only been observed in the Arctic in the past five years,” AMAP said.
The report also shatters some of the forecasts made in 2007 by the U.N.’s expert panel on climate change.
The cover of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, for example, is shrinking faster than Read more…
The latest unsmoothed global sea level data from JASON shows a sharp downtick and slight downtrend
One of the great things about WUWT is that it attracts commenters with a wide range of skill sets, who can often contribute far and beyond what we even see from our government sources. I’ve lamented the lack of updates from the University of Colorado sea level website, and when I got no response to emails, I decided to make a rare phone call and ask why. The answer I got from Dr. R. Steven Nerem was:
“This new website design won’t work with our current format, so if you can just be patient and wait a couple of weeks we’ll have it online.”
Not content to wait, and prodded by another commenter in an online tussle, CA and WUWT regular Roman M decided to find out himself. The results speak for themselves, quite a drop in the latest JASON-1 datapoint, with a general slight downturn in the JASON1-2 data since late 2009:
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](https://i0.wp.com/www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](https://i0.wp.com/www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_usoz_2.gif)
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