Gore pleads for rapid action to halt ice melt

Pierre-henry Deshayes Yahoo News 28 Apr 09;

TROMSOE, Norway (AFP) – Nobel prize-winning climate champion and former US vice president Al Gore called Tuesday for rapid action to prevent the potentially irreversible melting of the planet's ice.

Gore told the first conference devoted to melting ice, held in the Norwegian town of Tromsoe ahead of the UN meeting in Copenhagen in December, that melting was worse than the worst-case scenarios presented by experts a few years ago.

"This conference is a global wake-up call," Gore said. "The scientific evidence for action in Copenhagen in December is continuing to build up week by week."

He explained why the melting ice posed such a threat to the planet.

"Ice is important through the ecological system of the Earth for many reasons, but one of them has to do with its reflexivity," he said.

Ice reflects 90 percent of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere. If the ice were to melt, the dark water would not reflect the heat but instead absorb it, thereby accentuating the effect of global warming.

"As it disappears we have to keep in mind that it can come back only if we act fairly quickly," said Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He explained that "if we keep turning the temperature of the Earth up, then the heat will go to lower depths of the Arctic Ocean and it will be impossible for the ice to come back."

The Arctic ice cap measured 4.13 million square kilometres (1.59 million square miles) in September 2007, its smallest size ever. It is also thinner than ever, making it more susceptible to rapid melting.

Ice melting in the Antarctic and Greenland as well as on the world's glaciers will also have dramatic consequences, Gore said, warning that each one-meter (3.3-foot) rise of water levels will cause 100 million people to become climate refugees.

Melting snow in the Himalayan mountain range, dubbed "the third pole," will meanwhile lead to flooding, then droughts, for 40 percent of the planet's population which depends on that water for survival.

Scientists attending the Tromsoe conference said the future was ominous, with the scope and rapidity of global warming exceeding the UN climate panel's worst scenarios.

"We are in trouble," said Robert Correll, a US scientist and chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a report published in 2004 which shed light on the effects of climate change on the region.

Temperatures in the Arctic are climbing twice as fast as in the rest of the world.

Action envisaged around the world to counter global warming will only reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by a third of what is necessary, Correll said.

And if no other action is taken, the planet's temperature will rise by 4.5 degrees by the end of the century, he said. Experts have warned that a 2.0 percent increase is the most the planet can tolerate.

If his forecast were to come true, sea levels would rise by one metre (yard), he said.

Following the conference, a working group will write a report to raise awareness among decision-makers about the issue of melting ice ahead of the Copenhagen summit.

Meanwhile, the top US climate negotiator said Tuesday he was more optimistic about reaching a new global warming treaty this year after two days of talks in Washington among 18 major economies.

Climate envoy Todd Stern told reporters that the talks were not a "head-butting exercise."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday told delegates from major European countries, China, India, Indonesia and other powers that President Barack Obama "and his entire administration are committed to addressing this issue and we will act."


Al Gore calls on world to burn less wood and fuel to curb 'black carbon'
Soot from engines, forest fires and partly burned fuel is collecting in Arctic and causing north pole to warm at alarming rate
John Vidal, guardian.co.uk 28 Apr 09;

The world must burn less diesel and wood, Nobel peace prize-winner Al Gore said yesterday, as the soot produced is accelerating the melting of ice in polar and mountainous regions.

Gore, backed by government ministers and scientists, said that the soot, also known as "black carbon", from engines, forest fires and partially burned fuel was collecting in the Arctic where it was creating a haze of pollution that absorbs sunlight and warms the air. It was also being deposited on snow, darkening its surface and reducing the snow's ability to reflect sunlight back into space.

"The principle [climate change] problem is carbon dioxide, but a new understanding is emerging of soot," said Gore. "Black carbon is settling in the Himalayas. The air pollution levels in the upper Himalayas are now similar to those in Los Angeles."

The impact of the soot is as significant as it is surprising — it was not mentioned as a warming factor in the UN's major 2007 report on climate change. A study this month indicated that soot from industry, cars, farming and wood fuel burning has been responsible for half the total temperature increases in the Arctic between 1890 to 2007. Temperatures there are rising twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet, making it the region worst affected by climate change.

Gore warned that all the world's icy regions were experiencing rapid and dangerous global warming. "The cryosphere – the frozen water part of the Earth – is disappearing. Global warming is causing the permafrost to thaw. It contains more carbon than anywhere else and the risk is that it releases methane. That has the potential to double the global warming potential in the atmosphere," he said.

Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Store said action on black carbon was even more urgent than that on CO2: "Even if we turn the rising curve of greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years, the reduction will not occur quickly enough to preserve the polar and alpine environments. We must address short lived climate pollutants such as black carbon."

Glaciologists working in Latin America, Nepal, China and Greenland all reported at the meeting in Tromso that glaciers were losing ice more rapidly and becoming less thick as a result of global warming.

Dorthe Jensen, from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, said: "In the last five years we have seen many ice streams double in speed. Their floating snouts have moved back 30km. We never imagined the ice discharge would change so much."

Glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau, from which 40% of the world derives its fresh water, are retreating fast, said Yao Tandong, a researcher with the Chinese academy of sciences. "This is causing severe social problems as lakes get bigger and people are forced to move. Himalayan glaciers are mostly retreating at an accelerating rate."

The meeting also heard, in a new report from the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap), that climate change was now affecting every aspect of life in the Arctic. Norwegian, Canadian, Russian, US and other polar scientists reported that, in the last four years, air temperatures have increased, sea ice has declined sharply, surface waters in the Arctic ocean have warmed and permafrost is in some areas rapidly thawing, releasing methane.

The report's main findings are:

Land

Permafrost is warming fast and at its margins thawing. Plants are growing more vigorously and densely. In northern Alaska, temperatures have been rising since the 1970s. In Russia, the tree line has advanced up hills and mountains at 10 metres a year. Nearly all glaciers are decreasing in mass, resulting in rising sea levels as the water drains to the ocean.

Summer sea ice

The most striking change in the Arctic in recent years has been the reduction in summer sea ice in 2007. This was 23% less than the previous record low of 5.6m sq kilometres in 2005, and 39% below the 1979-2000 average. New satellite data suggests the ice is much thinner than it used to be. For the first time in existing records, both the north-west and north-east passages were ice-free in summer 2008. However, the 2008 winter ice extent was near the year long-term average.

Greenland

The Greenland ice sheet has continued to melt in the past four years with summer temperatures consistently above the long-term average since the mid 1990s. In 2007, the area experiencing melt was 60% greater than in 1998. Melting lasted 20 days longer than usual at sea level and 53 days longer at 2-3,000m heights.

Warmer waters

In 2007, some ice-free areas were as much as 5C warmer than the long-term average. Arctic waters appear to have warmed as a result of the influx of warmer waters from the Pacific and Atlantic. The loss of reflective, white sea ice also means that more solar radiation is absorbed by the dark water, heating surface layers further.