Marlowe Hood Mon Yahoo News 14 Dec 09;
COPENHAGEN (AFP) – Climate guru Al Gore warned UN climate talks Monday that the record melting of glaciers worldwide could deprive more than a billion people of access to fresh water.
"There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water -- many of them all of their drinking water -- from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice," Gore said at the release of a report he co-sponsored.
A triple threat from crumbling ice sheets, disappearing glaciers and the shrinking Arctic ice cap are feeding global warming and will fuel rising sea levels, the report found.
Adding to an avalanche of bad scientific news over the last two years, the former US vice president also cited new research showing that the Arctic ice cap may have shrunk to record-low levels last year.
"2008 had a smaller minimum, probably, than 2007," Gore said, alluding to work led by California-based researcher Wieslaw Maslowski.
"Some of the models suggest to Dr. Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years," Gore said.
Scientists reported in September that the Arctic ice cover -- which helps beat back the Sun's heat-delivering rays back into space -- had reversed course compared to 2007, when it had shrunk to its smallest size since the start of accurate measurements some four decades ago.
But when measured by volume, it turns out that the 4.5 million sq km (1.7 million sq miles) area in 2008 was actually smaller than the year before.
The Arctic ice cover does not affect sea levels, but is a critically important barrier to global warming.
Intact, its white surface acts as a mirror, but when the ice disappears it becomes a sponge.
"Instead of 85 percent of the solar energy being reflected, 85 is absorbed in the Arctic Ocean," said Gore who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on warning of the threat posed by climate change.
One of the report's authors Robert Corell of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington pointed to another threat: the massive, accelerating loss of mass -- measured in hundreds of billions of tonnes per year -- from icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
Combined with the expansion of ocean water due to global warming, the continent-sized icesheets are now set to contribute to a global sea level rise of about a metre by the end of the century, double the mid-point prediction of the UN's benchmark science report in 2007.
"A one meter rise equals 100 million people who will have to move, one hundred million environmental refugees," said Corell.
"We have woken giants," said Arctic ice specialist Dorothe Dahl-Jensen at Copenhagen University of the ice sheets.
"This is really scary. This really shakes us scientists. These icesheets are enormous," she said in presenting a second report on Greenland from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme.
Greenland's ice block holds enough frozen water to lift seas seven metres, while West Antarctica could add another five metres to the global water mark.
Dahl-Jensen said the pace at which some glaciers on the west coast of Greenland were "calving", or falling into the sea, has sped up dramatically over the last decade.
"This is by far the fastest flowing ice we have ever dreamed of. This is a rate of loss that we have never seen before," she said.
Both scientists pointed out that all of these impacts had been unleashed by a less than 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase of global temperatures since pre-industrial times.
"Current proposals from individual countries for their own actions would lead to a temperature increase of approximately 3.8 C (6.8 F)", by the end of the century, Corell said.
Gore at climate talks: Polar ice may go in 5 years
Charles J. Hanley (AP) Google News 15 Dec 09;
COPENHAGEN — New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore said Monday at the U.N. climate conference.
Northern polar sea ice has been retreating dramatically. These new projections suggest an almost-vanished summer ice cap much earlier than foreseen by a U.S. government agency just eight months ago.
"It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this," former U.S. Vice President Gore told reporters and other conference participants at a joint briefing with Scandinavian officials and scientists, his first appearance at the two-week session.
The group presented two new reports updating fast-moving developments in Antarctica, the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, and the rest of the Arctic.
"The time for collective and immediate action on climate change is now," said Denmark's foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller.
But delegates from 192 nations were bogged down in disputes over key issues. This further dimmed hopes for immediate action to cut more deeply into global emissions of greenhouse gases.
Gore and Danish ice scientist Dorthe Dahl Jensen clicked through two slide shows for a standing-room-only crowd of hundreds in a side event at the Bella Center conference site.
One report, on the Greenland ice sheet, was issued by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an expert group formed by eight Arctic governments, including the United States. The other, commissioned by Gore and Norway's government, was compiled by the Norwegian Polar Institute on the status of ice melt worldwide.
Average global temperatures have increased 0.74 degrees C (1.3 degrees F) in the past century, but the mercury has risen at least twice as quickly in the Arctic. Scientists say the makeup of the frozen north polar sea has shifted significantly in recent years as much of the thick multiyear ice has given way to thin seasonal ice.
In the summer of 2007, the Arctic ice cap dwindled to a record-low minimum extent of 4.3 million square kilometers (1.7 million square miles) in September. The melting in 2008 and 2009 was not as extensive, but still ranked as the second- and third-greatest decreases on record.
Last April, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that Arctic summers could be almost ice-free within 30 years, not at the 21st century's end as earlier predicted.
Gore cited new scientific work at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, whose Arctic ice research is important for planning polar voyages by Navy submarines. The computer modeling there stresses the "volumetric," looking not just at the surface extent of ice but its thickness as well.
"Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years," Gore said.
His office later said he meant nearly ice-free, because ice would be expected to survive in island channels and other locations.
Other U.S. government scientists dismissed projections of such rapid melting as excessive.
"It's possible but not likely," said Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. "We're sticking with 2030."
Meanwhile, what's happening to Greenland's titanic ice sheet "has really surprised us," said Jensen of the University of Copenhagen.
She cited one huge glacier in west Greenland, at Jakobshavn, that in recent years has doubled its rate of dumping ice into the sea. Between melted land ice and heat expansion of ocean waters, the sea-level rise has increased from 1.8 millimeters a year to 3.4 millimeters (.07 inch a year to .13 inch) in the past 10 years.
Jensen said the biggest ice sheets — Greenland and West Antarctica — were already contributing 1 millimeter (.04 inch) a year to those rising sea levels. She said this could double within the next decade.
"With global warming, we have woken giants," she said.
