Stephen Leahy / Inter Press Service & BBC News – 2011-09-18 00:34:54
http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/7443-record-arctic-ice-melt-threatens-global-security
Record Arctic Ice Melt Threatens Global Security
Stephen Leahy / Inter Press Service
(September 15, 2011) — All the analysis and commentary about safety and security on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 ignored by far the biggest ongoing threat to global security: climate change.
Just days before Sunday’s commemoration of the attacks, German scientists pointed to yet another smoking gun of climate change: the Arctic sea ice reached a new historic minimum ice extent.
The rapidity with which the planet is losing its northern ice cap continues to astonish experts. The defrosting northern pole is one of the prime drivers of Earth’s climate system and is changing global weather patterns in unpredictable ways.
The Arctic ice melt is also accelerating the rate of climate change beyond what humanity is doing with every barrel of oil, ton of coal or cubic meter of gas burned.
On Sept. 8, researchers at the University of Bremen in Germany reported that the Arctic ice melt bettered the previous minimum of 2007. Other research centers using different satellite and analysis tools say the extraordinary decline of ice in 2007 has not yet been exceeded this year and 2011 remains a close second.
“We think it will end up a little bit short of the record — not that it really matters,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the US city of Boulder, Colorado.
“What is extraordinary this year is that there was no weird weather pattern that created the perfect conditions for the record melt in 2007,” Serreze told IPS.
This year, the summer weather was normal and yet it the ice vanished in similar amounts to 2007. “That tells us the sea ice is too thin now to hold up under normal weather conditions,” he said.
Both the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route across the Arctic are wide open again, as has happened almost every year since 2007. An oil tanker recently crossed the Arctic Ocean in the record time of eight days traveling from Houston, Texas to Map Ta Phut, Thailand.
This summer’s ice loss is double the summer ice melt of 30 to 40 years ago. A child born at the advent of the satellite era, when humanity had its first complete look at the frozen vastness, would be 32 years old today. Now they would see that more than three million square kilometers of ice — about the size of India — has vanished this summer compared to the summer they were born.
It is now virtually certain a child born in 1979 will not reach 50 years of age before the Arctic is ice-free in the summer. That is a rapid change on a planetary scale, with far-reaching consequences that scientists are just beginning to understand.
One consequence is the acceleration of global warming as the Arctic flips from all white to dark blue, with the ocean absorbing tremendous amounts of heat from the 24-hour summer sun. That shift in albedo — from white to dark — is expected to add an additional amount of heat energy of about 0.3 watts per square meter over the entire land and water surface of the planet, calculates Stephen Hudson of the Norwegian Polar Institute.
Hudson based his calculation on the Arctic having no ice for one month and decreased ice at all other times of the year.
That’s enough additional energy to power an LED night light for each square meter of the 510 million square meters that comprise the Earth’s surface. That will raise global temperatures about 0.25 C, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota told IPS.
Of course, most of that tremendous amount of heat will reside first in the Arctic, where temperatures are already an average of three to five degrees C higher than 30 to 40 years ago. This winter parts of the Arctic were 21 C above normal for a month.
All that additional heat threatens to light the fuse of the world’s biggest “carbon bomb,” the vast permafrost region spanning 13 million square kilometers across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of northern Europe.
Permafrost contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere. Even if a small percentage of this is released, catastrophic climate change is likely, experts believe. Permafrost has been slowly thawing for the last two decades and the rate of thaw is accelerating with rising temperatures, world expert on permafrost Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks told IPS previously.
This will have profound impacts on human populations around the globe. According to figures from the Global Governance Project, by the year 2050, the world will have 200 million climate-displaced refugees on its hands, the majority of them from low-lying coastal areas, as a result of rising water levels.
While this climate change calamity gains momentum, the US and most of the industrialized world have been distracted by the relatively trivial threat of terrorism and have spent trillions of dollars on defense and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US could generate 100 percent of its electricity from wind, solar, tidal and geothermal for much less than it has spent on defense and wars in the last decade, said Richard Heinberg, energy expert and senior fellow at the California-based Post Carbon Institute.
However, the US economy is in such poor shape, Heinberg, author of the new book The End of Growth, told IPS, that the country is no longer financially capable of doing this. Nor can it afford to continue to burn fossil fuels.
“We’re going to be forced to use a lot less energy sooner or later,” he said.
Comment
Jeff C 2011-09-15 16:55
Given the obvious role that deficit spending associated with the American WWII effort played in terms of ending The Great Depression, I’m beginning to think that — sadly — the United States is missing an incredible opportunity here. We certainly have the moral equivalent the Allied WWII effort in the global climate crisis. And that could well be an understatement, because global warming threatens the very ecosystem on which our species depends for life.
I’d love to have someone try and explain to me why that’s not an imperative for action. So why haven’t our fearless leaders in Washington proposed a genuinely bold jobs plan for American workers focused on the development of non fossil fuel — base energy alternatives as well as development and construction of the associated infrastructure?
It seems that there could be enormous collateral benefit in terms of jobs creation, technological advancement as well as elimination of dependence on foreign oil and peak oil concerns. Imagine what kind of future we could build. And imagine how a leader like FDR might have responded to these challenges … and these opportunities.
Arctic Ice Hits Second-lowest Level, US Scientists Say
BBC News
LONDON (September 16, 2011) — Sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2011 has passed its annual minimum, reaching the second-lowest level since satellite records began, US scientists say. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says the minimum, reached on 9 September, was 4.33 million sq km. That value is 36% lower than the average minimum for 1979-2000.
NSIDC said the figure was preliminary, and that “changing winds could still push the ice extent lower” before final numbers are published in early October. The preliminary value is 160,000 sq km — or 4% — above the record minimum seen in 2007.
“While the record low year of 2007 was marked by a combination of weather conditions that favored ice loss — including clearer skies, favorable wind patterns and warm temperatures — this year has shown more typical weather patterns but continued warmth over the Arctic,” they wrote. “This supports the idea that the Arctic sea ice cover is continuing to thin.”
NSIDC director Mark Serreze said: “Every summer that we see a very low ice extent in September sets us up for a similar situation the following year. The Arctic sea ice cover is so thin now compared to 30 years ago that it just can’t take a hit any more. This overall pattern of thinning ice in the Arctic in recent decades is really starting to catch up with us.”
In fact, an analysis released last week by researchers at the University of Bremen in Germany, who use a different satellite to assess ice cover, indicated that 2011’s minimum was the lowest on record. However, there is some controversy surrounding the result; the Bremen team’s higher-resolution data can detect small patches of water where the NSIDC team would not, but the Bremen record goes back only to 2003.
These analyses are for the extent, or area, of Arctic ice, but recent estimates released by the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center give an indication of the total amount of sea ice. Their data indicate that the ice volume is at an all-time low for the second year in a row.
Analyses of Arctic ice in recent years consistently indicate a change in the nature of the ice itself — from one solid mass that melts and freezes at its edges towards more dispersed, piecemeal ice cover, and from robust “multi-year” ice toward seasonal floes that melt more easily.
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