Climate - Dec 13

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Ominous Arctic Melt Worries Experts
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press via Common Dreams
An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.1212 09

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”

So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models?
(12 December 2007)

Climate Change Drying Up Mountains in Western US
Amanda Beck, Reuters
By 2040, climate change will have melted the glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana and the spring snowpack in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, scientists said on Tuesday.

"People talk about a tipping point, but we've been there and done that," said Tim Barnett, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and speaker at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

About 15,000 researchers have gathered in San Francisco this week to discuss earthquakes, water resources and planetary science, but climate change was the topic of the day.

Barnett studies snowpack at high altitudes in the Western United States and estimates the region's snow accumulation decreased an average of 20 percent between 1950 and 1999.
(13 December 2007)

Red Cross says global warming caused record disasters in 2007
AFP
Global warming caused a record number of natural disasters across the world in 2007, up nearly 20 percent from a year earlier, the International Federation of the Red Cross said on Thursday.

"As of 10 October 2007, the Federation had already recorded 410 disasters, 56 percent of which were weather-related, which is consistent with the trend of rising numbers of climate change-related disasters," the IFRC said in its "World Disasters Report".
(12 December 2007)

High Clouds Show Effects of Climate Change -- Study
Clare Baldwin, Reuters
Clouds at the edge of space are showing the effects of climate change, scientists said on Monday.

These so-called polar mesospheric clouds are occurring more often and appearing at lower latitudes than they used to, researchers reported at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

'It won't affect people, but we're causing the outer part of the atmosphere to change, which means we are changing the entire atmosphere, which is important to know,' said James Russell III, a scientist from Hampton University in Virginia. The build-up of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the upper atmosphere may be responsible for the cloud changes, scientists said at a news conference." Clare Baldwin reports for Reuters Dec. 12, 2007.
(12 December 2007)