Dan's Outside

'Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts'

New York Times article:

The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia.

Arctic Study A Coast Guard work party in August deploying a buoy that helps scientists track the age of sea ice.
Over all, the floating ice dwindled to an extent unparalleled in a century or more, by several estimates.

Now the six-month dark season has returned to the North Pole. In the deepening chill, new ice is already spreading over vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Astonished by the summer’s changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979.

October 2, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | Comments Off on 'Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts'

Bad News About Arctic Ice Pack

From the New York Times (but also reported widely elsewhere):

Scientists Report Severe Retreat of Arctic Ice. The cap of floating sea ice on the Arctic Ocean this year shrank more than one million square miles below the average minimum area reached in recent decades. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. [NYT > Home Page]

September 21, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | Comments Off on Bad News About Arctic Ice Pack

Panel Faults Emphasis of U.S. Climate Program

From a New York Times article:

An effort by the Bush administration to improve federal climate research has answered some questions but lacks a focus on impacts of changing conditions and informing those who would be most affected, a panel of experts has found.

The Climate Change Science Program, created in 2002 by President Bush to improve climate research across 13 government agencies, has also been hampered by governmental policies that have grounded earth-observing satellites and dismantled programs to monitor environmental conditions on earth, concluded the report, issued by the National Academies, the nation’s pre-eminent scientific advisory group.

No surprises here…

September 13, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | Comments Off on Panel Faults Emphasis of U.S. Climate Program

Polar Bears and Climate Change

New York Times:

Warming Is Seen as Wiping Out Most Polar Bears. Shrinking polar ice caps will cause at least two-thirds of the world’s polar bears to disappear by 2050, government scientists reported on Friday. By JOHN M. BRODER and ANDREW C. REVKIN. [NYT > Science]

Not everyone realizes that polar bears live in three environments, almost equally well: land, ice pack, and ocean. Global climate change creates problems for these animals in all three.

From the article:

The scientists concluded that, while the bears were not likely to be driven to extinction, they would be largely relegated to the Arctic archipelago of Canada and spots off the northern Greenland coast, where summer sea ice tends to persist even in warm summers like this one, a shrinking that could be enough to reduce the bear population by two-thirds.

The bears would disappear entirely from Alaska, the study said.

“As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear,” said Steven Amstrup, lead biologist for the survey team.

September 8, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | Comments Off on Polar Bears and Climate Change

Polar ice cap gone by 2030?

This post at Weather Underground caught my attention since I had just seen a National Geographic program on the mechanism and effects of global warming on polar and glacial ice.

You’ll have to scroll down a bit a the links since the portion of the story referring to this year’s astounding decrease in the polar ice cap follows some other information.

Two excerpts:

None of our computer climate models predicted that such a huge loss in Arctic ice would occur so soon. Up until this year, the prevailing view among climate scientists was that an ice-free Arctic ocean would occur in the 2070-2100 time frame. The official word on climate change, the February 2007 report from the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that without drastic changes in greenhouse gas emissions, Arctic sea ice will “almost entirely” disappear by the end of the century. This projection is now being radically revised. Earlier this year, I blogged about a new study that predicted abrupt losses of Arctic sea ice were possible as early as 2015, and that we could see an ice-free Arctic Ocean as early as 2040. Well, the Arctic Ocean has suffered one of the abrupt losses this study warned about–eight years earlier than this most radical study suggested. It is highly probable that a complete loss of summer Arctic sea ice will occur far earlier than any scientist or computer model predicted. In an interview published yesterday in The Guardian Dr. Mark Serreze, and Arctic ice expert with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said: “If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice, then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate. It seems that the Arctic is going to be a very different place within our lifetimes, and certainly within our children’s lifetimes.” While natural fluctuations in wind and ocean circulation are partly to blame for this loss of sea ice, human-caused global warming is primarily to blame. In the words of Dr. Serreze: “The rules are starting to change and what’s changing the rules is the input of greenhouse gases. This year puts the exclamation mark on a series of record lows that tell us something is happening.”

And…

One more point–global warming skeptics often criticize using computer model climate predictions as a basis for policy decisions. These models are too uncertain, they say. Well, the uncertainty goes both way–sometimes the models will underestimate climate change. We should have learned this lesson when the ozone hole opened up–another case where the models failed to predict a major climate change. The atmosphere is not the well-behaved, predictable entity the models try to approximate it as. The atmosphere is wild, chaotic, incredibly complex, and prone to sudden unexpected shifts. By pumping large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air, we have destabilized the climate and pushed the atmosphere into a new state it has never been in before. We can expect many more surprises that the models will not predict. Some of these may be pleasant surprises, but I am expecting mostly nasty surprises.

September 7, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | 4 Comments

Here is Why it is Smoky in the Bay Area

Satellite photograph of Central California showing smoke plume over the San Francisco Bay Area. September 6, 2007.

You can see the plume over the Bay Area, and you can also see that a good part of it is coming from a fire in the Sierra – not just from our local fire. Weather forecasters say that the “finger of fog” coming up the coast from the south may help clear the air of smoke soon.

September 6, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | Comments Off on Here is Why it is Smoky in the Bay Area

Electrical Storms… In the San Francisco Bay Area?

As if on cue to reinforce my previous post’s observation about California’s dry weather year, the Weather Service is now predicting a very-unusual-around-these-parts chance of thunderstorms over the Central California coast today. From an article in SFGate:

Tropical moisture wandering up from Central California is predicted to make its way into the South Bay and East Bay this afternoon, producing a chance of thunderstorms over higher terrain, the weather service said…

In addition to the possible thunderstorm, the Bay Area and Northern California will be awash in red flag warnings, electricity alerts, fire weather watches and heat advisories.

Perhaps the greatest danger from the thunderstorms is the possibility that dry lightning could spark fires, given that inland temperatures are expected to approach 100 degrees again today. A red flag warning was posted for Monterey County.

Such weather is not unheard of in the late summer around here, but it isn’t the typical pattern. The problem – as mentioned in the article – is that frequently the lightning is not accompanied by any significant rain, so instead of relieving some of the dryness these storms more often set off fires. It is fire season between now and late October in California, and it is an exceptionally dry year.

August 30, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | Comments Off on Electrical Storms… In the San Francisco Bay Area?

China's Progress and the Environment

The New York times posts a story well worth reading:

As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes. China’s pollution problem, like the speed and scale of its rise as an economic power, has shattered all precedents. By JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY. [NYT > Home Page]

August 26, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Environment | Comments Off on China's Progress and the Environment