Climate Climate & Energy

Loss of summer ice in the Arctic will threaten polar bear survival

We've seen the USGS predict that two-thirds of the polar bear population will be wiped out by 2050. But that analysis assumes the Arctic will still have summer ice then. The USGS acknowledges (PDF) their projection is "conservative" since it is based upon an average of existing climate models and "the observed trajectory of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be underestimated by currently available models."

In fact, the Arctic now is poised to lose all its ice by 2030 -- and possibly by 2020, as I discuss below. What will happen to the polar bears?

Colbert does the Borg

Lomborg never stood a chance:

Coal industry insider tapped to kill Cape Wind

Those trying to stop what would be the nation's first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind, have just hired (another!) coal industry insider to lead the charge. Glenn Wattley is the new director of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, and as Wendy Williams details in her blog, he's a longtime coal and coal-gasification proponent. She says that this fits with her past reporting: Big Coal is behind many anti-wind efforts.

In a news report on Wattley's new role (rich reading), a spokesman for Cape Wind said that "Wattley is another example of an Alliance CEO connected to coal and oil interests ... Is this really the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound or the alliance to protect coal and oil?" I wonder.

Biofuels subsidies will only lead to increased food costs and habitat destruction

This, courtesy of the Financial Times, is a welcome development. Hopefully, the Doha Round of the GATT will get restarted, and this can be addressed in addition to the more general discussion of agricultural subsidies.

John Edwards would not require that new coal plants sequester their CO2 emissions

There was some question in this thread about what exactly John Edwards means when he says he would "require that all new coal-fired plants be built with the required technology to capture their carbon dioxide emissions." Would he require that new coal plants sequester their emissions, or merely that they be built in such a […]

Glacial melting is accelerating more quickly than projected

Climate change is occurring much faster than the IPCC models project. The Greenland ice sheet is a prime example. Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat recently:

We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at two metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year.

The glacier's movement is accelerated as water flows down "moulins" (see picture) to the ice-bedrock interface at the bottom and acts as a lubricant for the entire glacier to slide and glide on. This "provides a mechanism for rapid, large-scale, dynamic responses of ice sheets to climate warming," according to research led by NASA and MIT scientists [PDF]. Yet this factor has been given "little or no consideration in estimates of ice-sheet response to climate change."

Greenland glaciers melting at an alarming rate

Depressing climate news, version 17,354: Greenland’s two-mile-thick ice sheet is melting at a rate unforeseen to scientists and climate models. Chunks of ice breaking off are so huge that they’re triggering earthquakes; the glaciers are adding some 58 trillion gallons of water annually to the oceans, more than twice as much as they were 10 […]

Some reviews and criticism of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book Cool It

I was all geared up to recommend this review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book Cool It, written by The Weather Makers author Tim Flannery, but it turns out to be pretty bad. It’s kind of scattered all over the place a makes no coherent, forceful critique. Much better is Eban Goodstein’s review in Salon, which […]

On the myth that polar bear populations are flourishing

Human-caused global warming is poised to wipe out polar bears. The normally staid U.S. Geological Survey -- studying whether the bear should be listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act -- concluded grimly last Friday:

Projected changes in future sea ice conditions, if realized, will result in loss of approximately 2/3 of the world's current polar bear population by the mid 21st century. Because the observed trajectory of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be underestimated by currently available models, this assessment of future polar bear status may be conservative.

That's right -- this grim prediction is optimistic, a best-case scenario. In the next post, I'll examine why polar bears are likely to go extinct by 2030 if not 2020. But first I need to dispense with a myth that polar bears are doing well -- a myth propagated by people like Bjorn Lomborg in his new book, Cool It.

Solar-powered plane breaks world record for longest unmanned flight

Ooh, fancy: A lightweight solar-powered plane has smashed the official world record for the longest-duration unmanned flight. The plane flew for 54 hours, through two sunless nights, and was controlled remotely from the ground and by autopilot. And manned (excuse us, personed) flights are on the horizon: A Swiss man has plans to circumnavigate the […]