from The Atlantic, titled, “Sea Change”

Introduction:

“November 2008
By Scott Borgerson

"The opening of a new waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is akin in historic significance to the opening of the Suez Canal, in 1869, or is Panamanian cousin, in 1914. With this sea change will come the rise and fall of international seaports, new found access to nearly a quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves, and a recalibration of geo-strategic power."

Clickable map or the rapidly changing Arctic

Nov 16

Deutsche Welle - Almost 20 percent of all the energy produced in the world is used to power lights. Energy-saving bulbs could help -- though so far the ones on the market aren't quite up to par.

The potential is enormous. If all the traditional light bulbs in the world were replaced with energy-saving ones, lighting energy use could be cut by 40 percent. By 2030, 16 billion tons of CO2 would have been prevented from escaping into the atmosphere. That's according to a new study released by the renowned Worldwatch Institute.

The use of energy saving bulbs is on the rise worldwide. Since the beginning of the century, use has tripled to over four billion, and some countries are calling for more. Australia has even gone so far as to say that after October 2009 the sale of traditional light bulbs will be outlawed.

But not everyone is singing the praises of the little bulbs that could. The German ecological product review "Oekotest" put 16 models through a rigorous set of tests and came to a sobering conclusion: Most energy saving light bulbs aren't as bright as they should be.

Tim Johnson | Rujigou, China | Nov 16

McClatchy -

_{The glow of an underground coal fire is visible through surface rocks at Ruqigou, China.}

China has the worst underground coal fires of any country on Earth. The fires destroy as much as 20 million tons of coal annually, nearly the equivalent of Germany's entire annual production. The costs go beyond the waste of a valuable fuel, however. Scientists blame uncontrolled coal fires as a significant source of greenhouse gases, which lead to global warming.

Brad Johnson | Washington | November 13

ThinkProgress - In a landmark action, the Environmental Protection Agency’s final decision-making board has ruled that all new and proposed coal-fired power plants must have their carbon dioxide emissions regulated. The Environmental Appeals Board ruled today that the EPA has no valid reason for refusing to place limits on the global warming emissions from Desert Power’s proposed 110-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Vernal, Utah.

Deseret Power’s Bonanza Generating Station would have emitted 3.37 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. In July 2007, the EPA issued a permit for the plant, ignoring the Clean Air Act’s stipulation that all such permits must include a “best-available control technology” emissions limit for each pollutant “subject to regulation under the Act.” Before the Sierra Club brought suit, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform opened an investigation into the EPA’s decision, saying:

Randy Boswell | November 12

Canwest - A Beaufort seabed survey will enhance Canada's submission to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

The federal scientist heading Canada's bid to claim thousands of square kilometres of Arctic Ocean seabed under a UN convention says a joint United States-Canada mapping mission to the Beaufort Sea this fall yielded "very promising" results that could vastly extend this country's territory in one of the polar region's richest target zones for offshore oil and gas.

"The quality of the data is astonishing," Halifax-based geoscientist Jacob Verhoef says. "We haven't analysed it all, but what we found is that the entire Beaufort Sea -- all the way up to the north -- is covered with significant amounts of sediments, which makes our case look very promising."

Dear Agonistas:

This is a link to our presentation for Water and Electricity.

We'd appreciate questions, feedback and comments. What follows is out written executive summary.

Here's a link to the current draft of our business plan. Here's a link to our working white paper.

Executive Summary

We’re building a privately-owned, for-profit utility company, focused on providing water and electricity to hot, dry areas such as the North American South West, North Africa (for Europe), and the Middle East. We have assembled the nucleus of a team to for this venture.

There are two forms of non-atmospheric carbon that are relevant to our search for solutions to our greenhouse or global warming concerns: (1) fossil fuels; and (2) the carbon mass resident in biosphere’s soils and living biology. We know that we can increase the second quantity substantially which may offer a partial solution to our problem.
Prior to the industrial revolution, natural, renewable products satisfied our requirement for energy for transportation, food, power, materials, construction, clothing and other subsistence items. However, with rapid industrialization, humans sought an increasing standard of living and population growth, which created an enormous increase in energy demand. Fossil fuels have been generated over eons through abundant sunlight energy resources.

Juliette Jowit | Nov 2

The Guardian - Parts of the world may have to be abandoned because severe water shortages will leave them uninhabitable, the United Nations environment chief has warned.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said water shortages caused by over-use of rivers and aquifers were already leading to serious problems, even in rich nations. With climate change expected to reduce rainfall in some places and cause droughts in others, some regions could become 'economic deserts', unviable for people or agriculture, he said.

Steiner argued that only urgent action to combat global warming and poverty could prevent the creation of thousands of 'environmental refugees'. Previous UN agreements to reduce global warming emissions and the Millennium Development Goals on poverty had not been met. His warning echoes those of other environment leaders, who have said that water shortages could be the greatest threat posed by climate change.

'In many ways [water] is the most dramatic expression of mismanagement of natural or nature-based assets,' Steiner said. 'The day a person or a community is bereft of water is the day that your chance of even the most basic life or livelihood is gone and economic activity seeps away.

Mark Kinver | London | October 28

BBC - The thickness of Arctic sea ice "plummeted" last winter, thinning by as much as 49 centimetres (1.6ft) in some regions, satellite data has revealed.

A study by UK researchers showed that the ice thickness had been fairly constant for the previous five winters.

Cornelia dean | Concord, Mass | Oct 28

NYT - Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in “Walden.” Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.

He did not realize it, of course. Thoreau died in 1862, when the industrial revolution was just beginning to pump climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 1851, when he started recording when and where plants flowered in Concord, he was making notes for a book on the seasons.

Now, though, researchers at Boston University and Harvard are using those notes to discern patterns of plant abundance and decline in Concord — and by extension, New England — and to link those patterns to changing climate.

Their conclusions are clear. On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology. Working with Charles C. Davis, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and two of his graduate students, they determined that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long. Those findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(abstract). Full article(PDF)

Rory Carroll | Oct 28

The Guardian -

The Mayan ruins of Palenque and the Temple of the Sun in Chiapas, Mexico. Photograph: Rex features)

Population explosion, ecological disaster and weak leadership ... that's what probably killed off the Maya at the height of their powers. Are the modern-day parallels too close for us to ignore?

The ruins lie silent and abandoned in the heart of the jungle; blocks of stone surrendered to the vines, which twist and writhe over temples, plazas and pyramids. Weeds and forest creatures have colonised the inner sanctums; mahogany and cedar trees swallow what once were roads, blotting out the sun. This is Tikal, the ancient Mayan city of northern Guatemala. There was a time when tens of thousands of people lived here. The architecture and urban planning - there are epic monuments, boastful inscriptions and even courts for playing ball games - embody boundless human confidence.

Today the only voices are of murmuring tourists, interlopers into a domain of spider monkeys and jaguars. "The imagination reels. There are reliefs, pyramids, temples in the extinguished city. The ... sound of flapping wings trickle into the immense sea of silence," wrote Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemala's Nobel laureate.

Shortly after its apogee, around AD800, the Mayan civilisation, the most advanced in the western hemisphere, withered. Kingdoms fell, monuments were smashed and the great stone cities emptied. Tikal now stands as an eerie embodiment of a society gone wrong, of collapse. How it came to pass is a question that has long fascinated scholars. Titles such as Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization fill faculty bookshelves. It has also provided fodder for literature and films, most recently Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. There is a grim, irresistible appeal to this tale of central American oblivion.

Recent events have injected a jarring note into Mayan studies: a sense of anxiety, even foreboding. Serious people are asking a question that at first sounds ridiculous. What if the fate of the Maya is to be our fate? What if climate change and the global financial crisis are harbingers of a system that is destined to warp, buckle and collapse?

Washington | October 16

MSNBC - Autumn temperatures in the Arctic are at record highs, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty as sea ice melts, and reindeer herds appear to be declining, researchers reported Thursday.

"Obviously, the planet is interconnected, so what happens in the Arctic does matter" to the rest of the world, Jackie Richter-Menge of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., said in releasing the third annual Arctic Report Card for the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"There continues to be widespread and, in some cases, dramatic evidence of an overall warming of the Arctic system," the experts stated in their report.

Renee Schoof | Oct 12

McClatchy - For decades, the U.S. has vowed to reduce its dependence on imported oil and to find a reliable source to meet the nation's growing oil needs. Now, Canada offers a solution. While oil supplies are dwindling in some places, or disrupted by hurricanes, threatened by terrorist attacks or controlled by hostile governments, Alberta's oil sands — a patch of forest about the size of Florida with a sea of oil beneath it — produce more crude than all the wells in Texas or Alaska.

Jonathan Amos | Liverpool | Sept 9

BBC - Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois by a US-UK team of researchers.

The group reported one discovery last year, but has since identified a further five examples.

The ancient vegetation - now turned to rock - is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares.

These were among the first forests to evolve on the planet, Dr Howard Falcon-Lang told the British Association Science Festival in Liverpool.

The six forests straddle a period in Earth history 306 million years ago that saw a rapid shift from an icehouse climate with big polar ice caps to a greenhouse climate in which the ice caps would have melted.

"The fascinating thing we've discovered is that the rainforests dramatically collapse approximately coincident with the greenhouse warming," explained Dr Falcon-Lang.

Peter N. Spotts | Sept 7

CSM -

Fractured: The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf along the coast of Ellesmere Island in northern Canada is rapidly disintegrating, endangering unique microbial ecosystems. (Denis Sarrazin/Center for Northern Studies/Reuters)

Global warming may have accelerated the irreversible loss of ice shelves that are thousands of years old, say scientists.

Key portions of Earth’s cryosphere are in deep trouble. So far this summer, Arctic Ocean sea ice has shrunk to its second-lowest extent on record as ice shelves along Canada’s northernmost islands are disintegrating at a rapid pace. A new report from the United Nations Environment Program and the World Glacier Monitoring Service notes that the melt rate for glaciers the service uses as reference sites appears to have doubled since 2000. The resulting increase in open water is expected to have a wide-ranging impact on global warming.

“These are huge areas that are changing,” says Luke Copland, who heads the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa, referring to the ice declines in the Arctic.

People can debate the causes behind what’s happening in the Arctic, he says, “but what we can’t debate is the fact that things are changing, and they’re changing really fast.” Moreover, the changes are irreversible under today’s climate regime, adds Derek Mueller, a polar scientist at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

On Tuesday, Dr. Mueller and his colleagues reported that in early August, the 19-square-mile Markham Ice Shelf broke free of its moorings on the northern coast of Ellesmere Island. It’s now an ice island nearly the size of Manhattan floating freely in the Arctic Ocean.

Juliette Jowit | Sept 7

The Observer - · Climate expert urges radical shift in diet
· Industry unfairly targeted - farmers

People should have one meat-free day a week if they want to make a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change, the world's leading authority on global warming has told The Observer

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which last year earned a joint share of the Nobel Peace Prize, said that people should then go on to reduce their meat consumption even further.

His comments are the most controversial advice yet provided by the panel on how individuals can help tackle global warning.

Pachauri, who was re-elected the panel's chairman for a second six-year term last week, said diet change was important because of the huge greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental problems - including habitat destruction - associated with rearing cattle and other animals. It was relatively easy to change eating habits compared to changing means of transport, he said.

Les Blumenthal | Washington | Aug 31

McClatchy - From 500 miles in space, satellites track brown clouds of dust, soot and other toxic pollutants from China and elsewhere in Asia as they stream across the Pacific and take dead aim at the western U.S.

A fleet of tiny, specially equipped unmanned aerial vehicles, launched from an island in the East China Sea 700 or so miles downwind of Beijing, are flying through the projected paths of the pollution taking chemical samples and recording temperatures, humidity levels and sunlight intensity in the clouds of smog.

On the summit of 9,000-foot Mt. Bachelor in central Oregon and near sea level at Cheeka Peak on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula, monitors track the pollution as it arrives in America.

By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the U.S. annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years.

I wonder how much pollution from the industrial revolution fell on Asia

Kari Lydersen | Chicago | Aug 31

WaPo - The American Petroleum Institute and four other business groups filed suit Thursday against Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, joining Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's administration in trying to reverse the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species.

On Aug. 4, the state of Alaska filed a lawsuit opposing the polar bear's listing, arguing that populations as a whole are stable and that melting sea ice does not pose an imminent threat to their survival. The suit says polar bears have survived warming periods in the past. The federal government has 60 days from the filing date to respond.

One of the plaintiff in Thursday's lawsuit, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), lauded the choice of Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee for reasons including her advocacy of Alaskan oil and gas exploration, which many fear could be affected by the bear's protected status.

** Arctic ice melting and not coming back: scientist
** For the first time in human history, the North Pole can be circumnavigated
** Nine polar bears at risk of drowning in global warming meltdown
** Palin vs Polar Bears ~ Newshoggers

Timothy Gardner & Jim Marshall | New York | August 25

Reuters - New York and 11 other states are suing federal environmental regulators over greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries, the New York attorney general's office said on Monday.

The suit, led by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, charges that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the federal Clean Air Act by refusing to issue standards, known as new source performance standards, for controlling global warming pollution emissions from oil refineries.

My thanks to Think Progress for this story:

The other day, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann told us that we don't need Nancy Pelosi to save the planet. Jesus has it covered. Here's what she said:

"[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to save the planet. ... We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet — we didn’t need Nancy Pelosi to do that."

It gets better.

Yesterday on CNN, Rep. Bachmann gushed about how the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is "the most perfect place on the planet to drill."

Peter Crozier & James Anderson. | Tempe, AZ | August 7

ASU - Arizona State University researchers have made a breakthrough in understanding the effect on climate change of a key component of urban pollution. The discovery could lead to more accurate forecasting of possible global-warming activity, say Peter Crozier and James Anderson.

Crozier is an associate professor in ASU's School of Materials, which is jointly administered by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. Anderson is a senior research scientist in the engineering school's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

As a result of their studies of aerosols in the atmosphere, they assert that some measures used in atmospheric science are oversimplified and overlook important factors that relate to climatic warming and cooling.

The research findings are detailed in the Aug. 8 issue of Science magazine, in the article "Brown Carbon Spheres in East Asian Outflow and Their Optical Properties," co-authored by Crozier, Anderson and Duncan Alexander, a former postdoctoral fellow at ASU in the area of electron microscopy, and the paper's lead author.

So-called brown carbons – a nanoscale atmospheric aerosol species – are largely being ignored in broad-ranging climate computer models, Crozier and Anderson say.

Studies of the greenhouse effect that contribute directly to climate change have focused on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But there are other components in the atmosphere that can contribute to warming – or cooling – including carbonaceous and sulfate particles from combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, salts from oceans and dust from deserts. Brown carbons from combustion processes are the least understood of these aerosol components.

The parameter typically used to measure degrees of warming is radiative forcing, which is the difference in the incoming energy from sunlight and outgoing energy from heat and reflected sunlight. The variety of gasses and aerosols that compose the atmosphere will, under different conditions, lead to warming (positive radiative forcing) or cooling (negative radiative forcing).

The ASU researchers say the effect of brown carbon is complex because it both cools the Earth's surface and warms the atmosphere.

more at the link

August 9

New Scientist - A new approach to measuring glacier behaviour can keep track of the rapidly changing erosion of ice in south-east Greenland.

Earlier studies focused on two large, rapidly thinning glaciers, but these actually contribute relatively little to total ice loss. Satellite measurements of the island's gravitational field imply a much greater loss than the large glaciers alone can account for.

Now a team led by Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado in Boulder has resolved the disparity by looking at a wider range of glaciers. They used laser altimetry to measure the thinning of inland ice, plus satellite images that show changes at the margins of the ice sheet.

Thomas Friedman | August 10 | Guardian

Greenland is one of the best places to observe the effects of climate change. Because the world's biggest island has just 55,000 people and no industry, the condition of its huge ice sheet - as well as its temperature, precipitation and winds - is influenced by the global atmospheric and ocean currents that converge here. Whatever happens in China or Brazil is felt here. And because Greenlanders live close to nature, they are walking barometers of climate change. That's how I learnt a new language: Climate-Speak.

It's easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: 'Just a few years ago...'