Indonesia's green law wilting under benign neglect?

Bruce Gale, Straits Times 5 Mar 10;

IS INDONESIA paying enough attention to environmental issues? In September last year, when Parliament passed a new law strengthening the authority of the environment ministry it seemed as if the country was finally ready for concrete action.

Since the Bali Climate Change Conference in December 2007, observers had certainly been expecting something. At that conference, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono emerged as a key leader in the fight for an international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Changes in domestic policies, it seemed, would almost certainly follow.

But an examination of the Yudhoyono government's approach to the 2009 legislation suggests that whatever else the government had in mind at the Bali Conference, developing a systematic approach to the way the country deals with its environmental problems has not been a high priority.

The new legislation was originally drawn up by Environment Minister Rahmat Witoelar as a revision of law 23 of 1997. Among other things, the legislation was designed to give the environment ministry enforcement powers rather than depending on the police and other law enforcement institutions.

But the draft was never sent to Parliament. No reason was given, but the timing suggests that it could have been related to the controversy over the disastrous volcanic mud flow in East Java in 2006.

The catastrophe certainly put the government in a difficult position. Critics blamed drilling activities by Lapindo Brantas. This company was controlled by the family firm of Mr Aburizal Bakrie, then the Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare and one of the President's most important financial backers. Lapindo Brantas denied any responsibility, claiming that the mudflow was caused by an earthquake.

With millions of dollars in compensation being demanded by various aggrieved parties, strengthening the country's environmental legislation at that time would hardly have seemed like a good idea to those in power.

But the pressure for a revision of the law remained strong, and it was not long before Parliament's Commission 7 on the Environment and Mining began reviewing the legislation on its own initiative, with the help of local environment groups.

Approved by Parliament in September last year, the new legislation enables national park rangers to investigate and arrest those violating environment laws. In the past, rangers could only report perpetrators to the police.

The law also requires companies - most notably mining companies - whose operations have an impact on the environment to obtain an environmental licence and undergo an environmental assessment process before starting operations. And if the terms of these environmental licences are breached, the ministry is empowered to revoke them and issue fines. Yet another clause stipulates sanctions for local and central government officials who issue mining permits without following the proper procedures.

Non-government environmental organisations The Straits Times spoke to in Jakarta last month said they regarded the new law as a major improvement on previous legislation. However, they did point out some weaknesses.

Clause 3 of Article 43, which outlines fines to be imposed on polluters, is a particular concern. Mr Berry Nahdian Furqon of Walhi (Indonesian Friends of the Earth) said he was worried that the way the provision was worded could undermine the possibility of criminal charges provided for in other parts of the legislation. It could also shift the responsibility for clean-up operations from the polluter to the government.

Mr Chalid Muhammad of the Green Institute lamented the lack of a moratorium on the hundreds of mining permits already issued by local kebupaten (regencies) throughout the country.

But the real concern about the new environmental legislation is the low priority it appears to have with government officials. Outlining his key objectives for the first 100 days of President Yudhoyono's second term of office, Environment Minister Gusti Muhammad Hatta said he intended to concentrate on two things - sending a delegation to the Copenhagen climate change talks (last December), and developing a system to prevent forest fires.

Many believe Mr Gusti should have spent more time drawing up the new environment law's implementing regulations instead. In Indonesia, such regulations are often delayed for years. And even after the regulations are issued, there is no guarantee that they will do the job. In an e-mailed response to Straits Times enquiries, Mr Sony Keraf, who chaired the parliamentary commission that drafted the law, warned that the 'content and spirit' of such regulations often have 'nothing to do with the law'.

Citing the inability or unwillingness of the authorities to prosecute cases of illegal logging in 2007 and 2008 uncovered by police in Riau, Mr Chalid says he believes that, without strong support from the President, Mr Gusti will be very unlikely to use his new powers to take on major polluters that have a close relationship with those in power.

It is hard to disagree.

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Legal limbo stalls Thailand industry

Rachel Harvey BBC News 5 Mar 10;

Thailand's economic prospects could be put in jeopardy because of a continuing dispute at a huge industrial complex.

Recent figures on GDP and exports have been encouraging for the Thai government.

But economists and investors are warning that two major factors have the potential to derail Thailand's nascent recovery.

One is political instability. The other is the legal morass at Map Ta Phut.

Map Ta Phut is one of the biggest petro-chemical hubs in the world.

It is the size of a small town built of gleaming steel pipes, storage tanks and chimney stacks, jutting out into the sea; an industrial peninsula clearly visible from the white sand beaches and fishing villages on either side.

Map Ta Phut has been driving Thailand's industrial growth for decades.

But last September the Constitutional Court put the brakes on.

Local environmentalists successfully argued that several new projects were in breach of pollution laws.

The laws were part of the 2007 constitution, but because there have been so many changes of government in Thailand in recent years, the regulations were never properly established.

Companies could not possibly comply.

Thailand's political turbulence left a legal loophole which was successfully exploited by the environmentalists.

The court ruled that more than 70 projects should be suspended.

A handful have since been allowed to continue, but more than 60 projects remain stalled - 25 of those, some $4bn-worth (£2.6bn) of investment, belong to the Petroleum Authority of Thailand, PTT.

"It's not that we tried to evade or tried not to follow the new requirements," said Chainoi Puankosoom, the CEO of PTT Aromatics and Refining.

"It's just that we don't know how to follow it."

Mr Chainoi says his company has gone out of its way to ensure that all environmental and health impact assessments are completed properly.

But according to the law, those assessments should go before an independent panel of experts to be signed off. The panel has never been established.

Local complaints

The legal limbo has made investors, domestic and foreign, increasingly nervous.

Lenders and contractors are seeking reassurance that contracts will be honoured.

Japanese firms are involved in several joint ventures in Map Ta Phut.

Jo Jitsukata, president of the Japanese chamber of commerce in Thailand, warned that although current agreements were probably safe, if the dispute drags on, future investors might be deterred.

"From the investor's view, what's the rule?" he asked.

"Already we are committed to the projects and borrowed the money from the bank. That's a big problem for investors.

"Not only for the Japanese, but also Thai investors and other foreign investors."

The legal dispute may be recent, but the complaints of local villagers are long standing.

Juan, 67, and Noi, 71 have been living in the shadow of Map Ta Phut for 16 years.

Juan expertly wielded a well-worn hoe to remove weeds growing around her fruit trees as she talked.

As the industrial plant has grown, she told me, the air quality has got progressively worse.

"The mangoes are much smaller than they used to be," she said.

"The tree has flowers, but there is not so much fruit. And look at the dark dust on the banana leaves."

Juan's husband Noi sat quietly in the shade. Six of the elderly couple's relatives have died of cancer.

"Whenever I think about it I feel very bitter inside," Noi said, his voice cracking with emotion as tears rolled down his cheeks.

Noi said he doesn't know if pollution is to blame for his loss.

"I'm not a clever man," he said, but he wants his concerns taken seriously.

"I want the government to know that we are suffering mentally as well as physically."

Precedent set

The government is listening. It is now providing peripatetic clinics providing free health checks for local people.

Samples of blood and urine are taken; eyes and skin are checked for any ailments.

There is even a mobile X-ray machine, mounted inside a shiny new bus.

The clinics fulfil two functions - providing basic care and reassurance for the local population while at the same time gathering potentially valuable data.

The government is also trying to sort out the legal limbo over Map Ta Phut.

A special committee, including representatives from all sides of the argument, has been set up to resolve outstanding differences.

Eventually, most, if not all, of the suspended projects will be allowed to continue. Thailand simply cannot afford its industrial heart to stop pumping.

Whatever the outcome, Suthi Achasai, one of the environmentalists who brought the legal case to court, believes the Map Ta Phut dispute has set an important precedent.

"People in other areas will now be more aware and more careful of any kind of development that's similar to this," he told me, as we stood next to the beach, with Map Ta Phut's distinctive skyline dominating the horizon.

"Lessons have been learned here. The private sector can't take things for granted anymore and the government knows it has to enforce the law."

Environmentalists like Suthi are demanding accountability. Investors want legal clarity.

Thailand's economic future depends on them learning to live together.

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Frog thought to have been extinct for 30 years discovered in Australia

A species of frog thought to have been extinct for 30 years has been discovered in rural Australian farmland.
The Telegraph 4 Mar 10;

Frank Sartor, minister for environment and climate change, said the discovery of the yellow-spotted bell frog is a reminder of the need to protect natural habitats so "future generations can enjoy the noise and colour of our native animals."

Luke Pearce, a local fisheries conservation officer, stumbled across one of the frogs in October 2008 while researching an endangered fish species in the southern Tablelands of New South Wales state.

Mr Pearce said he had been walking along a stream trying to catch a southern pygmy perch when he spotted the frog next to the water.

Mr Pearce returned in the same season in 2009 with experts who confirmed it was a colony of around 100 yellow-spotted bell frogs.

Dave Hunter, threatened species officer with the Department of Climate Change and Water, said the find is very important.

"To have found this species that hasn't been seen for 30 years and that professional researchers thought was extinct is great," he said. "It gives us a lot of hope that a lot of other species that we thought were extinct aren't actually extinct – we just haven't found them."

He said the find wasn't made public until now to allow enough time to establish conservation measures to protect the frogs from many dangers, including poaching.

Mr Sartor, the environment minister, said the discovery was "as significant in the amphibian world as it would be to discover the Tasmanian tiger."

The last known tiger, a cousin of the Tasmanian devil, died in a zoo in 1933, although unconfirmed sightings have been reported since then.

Seven of 216 known Australian frog species have disappeared in the last 30 years.

Mike Tyler, a frog expert at the University of Adelaide, said around a dozen species of Australian frogs are regarded as critically endangered.

"Most of them are on the east coast, mainly in Queensland and New South Wales," he said, but added there are probably other species that have never been identified.

Tyler said the cataloguing of fauna in Australia is still far from complete.

"In the last decade, three new species of frog have been discovered in the Kimberley," he said, referring to a northern region of Western Australia state.

"I know of two more in the Northern Territory which haven't even yet been described ... one of the specimens is sitting here on my desk looking at me."

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Japan to ignore bluefin tuna ban

Yahoo News 4 Mar 10;

TOKYO (AFP) – Japan said on Thursday it would ignore any ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, a proposal that has won US support ahead of a crucial vote next month.

The ban, meant to save the species from extinction, has the support of many European nations but is opposed by Japan, which consumes three quarters of the global catch of bluefin tuna, a species much valued in sushi and sashimi.

"The situation is becoming more difficult for Japan," said the vice fisheries minister Masahiko Yamada, ahead of a March 13-25 meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

"Japan will inevitably have to take a reservation" if the body votes for a trade ban at the meeting in the Qatari capital Doha, he said.

Member countries which take a "reservation" would effectively be able to keep trading with other nations that also opt out of the ban.

Tokyo says it prefers other ways to make the catch more sustainable.

In November, Japan said it supported a 40 percent quota cut agreed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).

The body agreed to slash the total catch in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean from 22,000 tons in 2009 to 13,500 tons this year.

Environmentalists say industrial fleets routinely exceed such limits.

Monaco has spearheaded the drive for a ban, which enjoys strong support from Britain and Germany, but is opposed by Spain, Greece and Malta, which all have significant tuna industries.

France, the biggest producer of bluefin tuna for consumption, has spoken in favour of a ban, but for a limited duration and not for another 18 months.

Other countries believed to be opposed to a ban include Canada and China.

A ban on the tuna trade would require support by two-thirds of the roughly 175 nations that make up CITES.

Bluefin stocks in the Western Atlantic have fallen by more than 80 percent from 1970 to 2007.

A 232.6-kilogram (512-pound) bluefin fetched a near-record 16.28 million yen (176,000 dollars) this year at Tokyo's famous Tsukiji fish market.

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Mauritius lashes out at UK over marine park project

Yahoo News 4 Mar 10;

PORT-LOUIS (AFP) – Mauritius' premier said Thursday he was appalled by Britain's plans for a marine reserve around Chagos, an archipelago London forcibly evacuated to build a military base four decades ago.

"Mauritius is appalled by the British government's decision to press on with consultations for the creation of a protected marine park project around the Chagos archipelago," Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Chandra Ramgoolam said.

The Indian Ocean state's premier was speaking at an event inaugurating a building for the Chagos Refugees Group in the capital Port-Louis.

"It is unacceptable that the British claim to protect marine fauna and flora when they insist on denying Chagos-born Mauritians the right to return to their islands all the while," Ramgoolam said.

"How can you say you will protect coral and fish when you continue to violate the rights of Chagos' former inhabitants?" he went on.

The Chagos archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, is a tiny group of islands east of the Seychelles and north of Mauritius' main island.

Some 2,000 people were forcibly moved to Mauritius, which still claims the island and has regularly filed to that purpose with the United Nations. Most of the refugees are still campaigning to go back.

The British government has paid compensation to the Chagossians.

The islanders have won several cases on their right of return in UK courts, but a 2008 split judgment by the House of Lords ruled against it.

Diego Garcia, the main island in the Chagos archipelago, is now populated by an estimated 1,700 US military personnel, 1,500 civilian contractors and a mere 50 British troops. The base played a key role in the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq.

"The British had refused to create a base on Aldabra in the Seychelles not to harm its tortoise population," marvelled Olivier Bancoult, who heads the Chagos Refugees Group.

"Now they are trying to create a protected area to prevent Chagossians from returning to their native islands," he charged.

Britain had initially offered up its then Seychelles colony's Aldabra archipelago for the United States to build its Indian Ocean military base.

Environmentalist groups at home raised a scandal because the Aldabra atoll, now a world heritage site, was home to hundreds of thousands of giant land tortoises.

The next option was Diego Garcia in the Chagos islands further east. Aldabra was uninhabited but the tortoises won the day.

Greenpeace said last month that it supports the creation of the marine reserve, which would be the largest in the world, but also stressed that it wanted to see justice for the Chagossians and was fundamentally opposed to the existence of the military base.

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Economic crisis saves Bulgarian brown bears

Yahoo News 4 Mar 10;

SOFIA (AFP) – Bulgarian brown bears have been thrown a life line by the economic crisis as hunters can no longer afford the high cost of shooting them, a newspaper reported Thursday.

"Hunters, calculate before you shoot!" 24 Hours daily newspaper joked, after a French hunter reportedly missed a huge bear in southern Bulgaria on purpose, saying he could not afford to pay 19,000 euros (25,970 dollars) for the trophy.

The hunter then asked officials in the Rakitovo hunting area in southern Bulgaria to take him to hunt "a smaller and cheaper bear," which they refused, 24 Hours reported.

Hunters pay a sum for each bear they kill calculated on the basis of size.

Another "colossal" bear in the Borovo hunting area in the Rhodope mountains was thus also likely to save its skin as it would cost hunters about 25,000 euros, Standart newspaper added.

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California to ban importing of non-native turtles, frogs for food

LATimes 5 Mar 10;

Animal welfare advocates won a long sought victory Wednesday when the California Fish and Game Commission approved a ban on imports of non-native turtles and frogs for food markets.

“It’s only taken us 16 years,” said Susan Tellem, co-founder of the nonprofit American Tortoise Rescue.

The Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously to order the Department of Fish and Game to stop issuing permits allowing the importation of non-native turtles and frogs for food.

Animal welfare advocates have long argued that food markets, often in Asian communities, kept the live animals in horrible conditions. “The turtles are upside down in the sun, no food, no water,” Tellem said. “They are slaughtered inhumanely.”

Sometimes people cook them live. “They’ll put the turtles in a frying pan, and they die very slowly,” Tellem said.

Tellem said animal-welfare arguments in the past had not convinced the commissioners to ban the importation of what she says are an estimated 2 million bullfrogs and 300,000 red-eared sliders coming into the state each year. This time, the advocates contended there were safety and environmental reasons to stop sales.

“We ended up changing our argument and saying they are non-native animals being released into the wild and they’re killing our native pond turtles,” she said.

People often buy the live animals to save them from death, she said, then release them into ponds and oceans where they are not indigenous and they either die or eat other species. Ravenous bullfrogs, she said, scarf up turtle eggs and baby turtles.

“Our prime motivation was a concern for the impact of such exotic animals on our native wildlife species,” Commissioner Michael Sutton said Wednesday.

The new ban on permits does not apply to imports for the pet trade.

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EU Drafts Reveal Biofuel's "Environmental Damage"

Pete Harrison, PlanetArk 5 Mar 10;

BRUSSELS - Biodiesel and other "green" fuels that Europeans put in their cars can have unintended consequences for tropical forests and wetlands, European Union reports show -- the first evidence of EU misgivings.

The EU aims for its 500 million citizens to get about a tenth of their road fuels from renewable sources such as biofuels by 2020, but some EU officials want the target reduced in a review in four years time.

Modeling exercises are starting to show unwanted impacts spreading across the planet via commodity markets.

"The simulated effects of EU biofuels policies imply a considerable shock to agricultural commodity markets," warns one draft report produced to advise policymakers.

"Current and future support of biofuels...is likely to accelerate the expansion of land under crops, particularly in Latin America and Asia," warns another, one of 116 documents released to Reuters under freedom of information laws. More are still awaited.

"It carries the risk of significant and hardly reversible environmental damages," adds the draft.

The warnings are not new. Environmentalists have been making them for years.

But the impact studies and emails show for the first time that European policymakers are also seriously worried about the impact on tropical forests, wetlands and savannah. However, they are struggling to quantify the likely damage.

"The large amount of documents and their detailed content show the Commission have been considering indirect land use change impacts very seriously," said a spokeswoman for European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger.

"There is no definitive and official answer on the size or character of this issue at this stage," she added.

Lobbyists from bioethanol industry group, ebio, have seized on the confusion, demanding policymakers "reject the concept."

Meanwhile, in the European Commission, which instigates EU policy, officials are split over the wisdom of continuing with a target that was set in 2008 and already prompted billions of dollars of investment globally.

One internal letter from an agriculture official warns that taking account of the full carbon footprint of biofuels could "kill" an EU industry worth about 5 billion euros a year ($6.8 billion).

LAND USE CHANGE

At the center of the debate is an issue drily referred to as "indirect land use change," which has put palm oil producers in Malaysia and Indonesia in the cross-hairs of environmentalists.

Critics say that regardless of where they are grown, biofuels compete for land with food crops, forcing farmers worldwide to expand into areas never farmed before -- sometimes by hacking into tropical rainforest or draining peatlands.

Satisfying the EU's thirst for biofuels would need 5.2 million hectares of land by 2020, reads one report -- a bigger area than the Netherlands. But where to find that land?

Burning forests to clear the land can pump vast quantities of climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere, cancelling out any theoretical climate benefit from the fuel. Iconic species such as Orangutans are also put under renewed pressure.

"Many decades may be needed before the initial induced carbon losses are compensated by the savings due to greater biofuel use," reads one draft study by agriculture experts.

Draining peatlands can have a similar impact as soils rot and release methane gas into the atmosphere.

If just 2.4 percent of European biofuels came from palm oil grown on former peatlands, for example in Indonesia, the entire climate benefits of EU biodiesel would be wiped out, says a report by the Commission's own research center.

"The problems are only going to get worse unless the EU rewrites its law to allow only biofuels that bring benefits to be sold in Europe," said campaigner Nusa Urbancic at environment group T&E. "This information must be brought out into the open so there can be a proper debate."

If the issue wasn't complicated enough, policymakers will have to take account of numerous mitigating factors.

Increased demand for the cereals and oil seeds from which biofuels are made does not always result in farmers expanding agricultural land. Sometimes they can increase yield by using fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation.

Pressure on the land can also be relieved by using the spent grains from biofuels to feed animals -- substituting some of the maize or other feed grains that might have otherwise been grown.

(Editing by Sue Thomas)

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El Nino Dissipating, But May Linger Through 2010

Rene Pastor, PlanetArk 5 Mar 10;

NEW YORK - The deadly El Nino weather anomaly should dissipate by early summer in the northern hemisphere, but there is a chance a weak version will linger for the rest of 2010, according to a U.S. government report issued Thursday.

The federal government's Climate Prediction Center said in a monthly update the warm waters which are a hallmark of the phenomenon are slowly easing, and this indicates "a transition to ... neutral conditions" in June or July.

But the CPC said there are "several models (which) suggest the potential of continued weak El Nino conditions through 2010, while others predict the development of La Nina conditions later in the year."

The CPC is a unit of the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.

El Nino means little boy in Spanish, and results in an abnormal warming of waters in the equatorial Pacific. It also normally disrupts hurricane formation in the Atlantic.

The anomaly wreaks havoc in global weather patterns, especially the Asia-Pacific region, and was first noticed by Latin American anchovy fishermen in the 19th century who named it after the Christ child because it normally appears during Christmastime.

La Nina has the opposite effect of El Nino. It leads to cooler waters in the Pacific Ocean and is said to spur storm formation during the annual hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean.

This year's El Nino was moderate to strong, according to the CPC, as sea surface temperatures stayed warm through February. But it was linked to the severe winter storms which have lashed the eastern United States.

It was also blamed for the weak monsoon which badly damaged the cane crop in India, forcing the world's biggest sugar consumer import larger amounts of the sweetener and sparking a rally which drove prices to a 29-year high.

A severe dry spell has also hit the archipelago countries of Indonesia and the Philippines, forcing the latter to book large orders of rice.

The Philippines is the world's biggest rice importer. Manila booked a record 2.6 million tonnes of the food staple for its 93 million people in 2010.

CPC said the effect of El Nino this spring would include drier-than-average weather over Indonesia.

In the United States, there should be above-average rain in the Southwest, the south-central states, and Florida, and below-average precipitation in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes region, CPC forecast.

If El Nino persists into June, that would bring the weather pattern into the start of the annual hurricane season in the Atlantic, raising the prospect it may again hinder the formation of storms in the area.

The last major El Nino struck in 1997/98, killing scores of people and causing billions of dollars in damages around the world through floods in Latin America and drought in Asia and Australia.

(Editing by John Picinich)

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Arctic Melt To Cost Up To $24 Trillion By 2050: Report

Timothy Gardner, PlanetArk 5 Mar 10;

WASHINGTON - Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

"Everybody around the world is going to bear these costs," said Eban Goodstein, a resource economist at Bard College in New York state who co-authored the report, called "Arctic Treasure, Global Assets Melting Away."

He said the report, reviewed by more than a dozen scientists and economists and funded by the Pew Environment Group, an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides a first attempt to monetize the cost of the loss of one of the world's great weather makers.

"The Arctic is the planet's air conditioner and it's starting to break down," he said.

The loss of Arctic Sea ice and snow cover is already costing the world about $61 billion to $371 billion annually from costs associated with heat waves, flooding and other factors, the report said.

The losses could grow as a warmer Arctic unlocks vast stores of methane in the permafrost. The gas has about 21 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.

Melting of Arctic sea ice is already triggering a feedback of more warming as dark water revealed by the receding ice absorbs more of the sun's energy, he said. That could lead to more melting of glaciers on land and raise global sea levels.

While much of Europe and the United States has suffered heavy snowstorms and unusually low temperatures this winter, evidence has built that the Arctic is at risk from warming.

Greenhouse gases generated by tailpipes and smokestacks have pushed Arctic temperatures in the last decade to the highest levels in at least 2,000 years, reversing a natural cooling trend, an international team of researchers reported in the journal Science in September.

Arctic emissions of methane have jumped 30 percent in recent years, scientists said last month.

Thin ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said this week.

And early findings from a major research project in Canada involving more than 370 scientists from 27 countries showed on Friday that climate change is transforming the Arctic environment faster than expected and accelerating the disappearance of sea ice.

Goodstein's study did not look at worst-case scenarios Arctic melting could have, such as warmer temperatures that trigger massive releases of crystallized methane formations in Arctic soils and ocean beds known as methane hydrates. It also did not look at sea ice erosion troubling people in the Arctic.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

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Glacier Melting A Key Clue To Tracking Climate Change

David Fogarty and Yereth Rosen, PlanetArk 5 Mar 10;

SINGAPORE/ANCHORAGE - The world has become far too hot for the aptly named Exit Glacier in Alaska.

Like many low-altitude glaciers, it's steadily melting, shrinking two miles over the past 200 years as it tries to strike a new balance with rising temperatures.

At the Kenai Fjords National Park south of Anchorage, managers have learned to follow the Exit and other glaciers, moving signs and paths to accommodate the ephemeral rivers of blue and white ice as they retreat up deeply carved valleys.

"Some of the stuff is changing fast enough that we now have signs on moving pedestals," said Fritz Klasner, natural resource specialist at Kenai Fjords.

The vast amounts of water stored in glaciers play crucial roles in river flows, hydropower generation and agricultural production, contributing to steady run-off for Ganges, Yangtze, Mekong and Indus rivers in Asia and elsewhere.

But many are melting rapidly, with the pace picking up over the past decade, giving glaciers a central role in the debate over causes and impacts of climate change.

That role has come even more sharply into focus after recent attacks on the U.N.'s climate panel, which included a wrong estimate for the pace of melting for Himalayan glaciers in a major 2007 report.

The report said Himalayan glaciers could all melt by 2035, an apparent typographical error that stemmed from using literature not published in a scientific journal. Climate skeptics seized on the error and used it to question the panel's findings on climate change.

The evidence for rapid glacial melting, though, is overwhelming.

The problem is no one knows exactly what's occurring in the more remote Himalayas and parts of the Andes. Far better measurements are crucial to really understand the threat to millions of people downstream.

"There is no serious information on the state of the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayan-Tibetan complex," Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Science, told a climate science media briefing in late February.

The high altitude and remoteness of many glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes is the main reason.

DATA IN A DEEP FREEZE

To try to fill the gap, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said last month the government would establish a National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology in Dehra Dun in the north.

In Europe and North America, glaciers are generally more accessible and there are more trained people to study them.

Switzerland's Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps, has been retreating for about 150 years.

But the glacier, which feeds the River Rhone, still stores an estimated 27 billion tonnes of ice, according to www.swissinfo.ch. That's about 12 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

In 2008, a total of 79 Swiss glaciers were in retreat, while 5 were advancing, the Swiss Glacier Monitoring network says.

"There are a very small number of glaciers that are monitored," said veteran glaciologist Ian Allison, pointing to less than 100 globally for which there are regular "mass-balance" measurements that reflect how much a glacier grows or shrinks from one year to the next.

Such measurements are the benchmark and several decades of data is regarded as the best way to build up an accurate picture of what's happening to a glacier.

Glaciers originate on land and represent a sizeable accumulation of snow and ice over the years. They tend to carve their way through valleys as more and more ice accumulates until the point where more is lost through melting than is gained.

THAT SHRINKING FEELING

"We probably know less about the total volume of glaciers than we do about how much ice there is in the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic because a lot of it is in small mass areas and a lot of it is inaccessible," said Allison, leader of the Australian Antarctic Division's ice, ocean, atmosphere and climate program.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland analyses mass balance data for just over 90 glaciers and says their average mass balance continues to decrease.

Since 1980, cumulative thickness loss of the reference glacier group is about 12 meters of water equivalent, it says in its latest 2007/08 report.

Estimates vary but glaciers and mountain caps could contribute about 70 cm (2.3 feet) to global sea levels, a 2009 report authored by Allison and other leading scientists says.

The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" report from the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales says there is widespread evidence of more rapid melting of glaciers and ice-caps since the mid-1990s.

That means run-off from melting glaciers and ice-caps is raising sea levels by 1.2 millimeters a year, translating to up to 55 cm (1.8 feet) by 2100 if global warming accelerates.

In Nepal, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development says "mass-balance" measurements would provide direct and immediate evidence of glacier volume increase or decrease.

"But there are still no systematic measurements of glacial mass balance in the region although there are promising signs that this is changing," the center said in a recent notice.

It said that based on studies, the majority of glaciers in the region are in a general condition of retreat.

"Small glaciers below 5,000 meters (16,500 feet) above sea level will probably disappear by the end of the century, whereas larger glaciers well above this level will still exist but be smaller," it said.

Glaciers have almost vanished from New Guinea island and in Africa and many on Greenland, the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica are also melting quickly, dumping large amounts of ice into the sea.

BAMBOO STICKS

Part of the problem is that glaciers are fickle things to measure, said Allison, and requires legwork and lots of bamboo stakes. These are placed in holes top to bottom, a potentially dangerous job, although satellites and lasers fitted to aircraft are changing this.

After a year or so, stakes placed up high will have had snow build up on them, so you can estimate how much snow fell there.

Those down low will have lost mass due to melt and evaporation, so there would be more of the canes sticking out.

"So you can measure how much height is lowered down below, how much it's gained up top. You'll need to know the density of the snow and ice as well," Allison said.

But he said glaciers in one region can all apparently behave differently in response to the same climate signal. "Because the fluctuations that occur in the front depend on how long it takes to transfer the mass from the top of the glacier to the bottom."

"You might have an area where all the small glaciers are all rapidly retreating but big glaciers still coming forward because they are still integrating changes that happened maybe 50 years ago," he added.

For the millions that live downstream, it is the impacts that are of most concern and among them is the threat of sudden bursting of lakes created as glaciers retreat.

About 14 of the estimated 3,200 glaciers in Nepal are at risk of bursting their dams.

Ang Tshering Sherpa, from Khumjung village in the shadows of Mount Everest, said the Imja glacial lake could burst its dam anytime and wash away villages.

"When I was a child I used to take our yaks and mountain goats for grazing on grassy flat land overlooking Everest," Sherpa said.

"What was a grazing ground for yaks in 1960 has now turned into the Imja due to melting of snow," Sherpa, now a trekking and climbing entrepreneur, said in Kathmandu.

A glacial lake broke its dam 25 years ago destroying trekking trails, bridges and a hydroelectric plant in the region. Neighbouring Bhutan also faces the threat of bursting dams.

Just how much water melting glaciers contribute to major rivers such as the Ganges and Brahmaputra, though, remains unknown.

Richard Armstrong, a senior scientist of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said it was nonsense to think that if glaciers melted there would be no water in the Ganges, a lifeline for millions in northern India.

"Even if the glaciers disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't have a huge impact on the water supply. The rest of the river flow comes from rain and melting seasonal snow."

He said the center has put in a proposal to NASA to use satellite data to build a better picture of the area and altitude of glaciers in the Himalayas.

"What we want to look at is what's the contribution of melting glacier ice to the downstream hydrology," Armstrong said. "It's really what's of primary importance to the socio-economic impacts of retreating glaciers."

Allison and Armstrong and many other scientists have dismissed the row over the U.N. climate panel error as overblown but said it served as a useful reminder of the gaps in global glacier monitoring and the need for a far better picture.

"It certainly brought attention to the problem," said Armstrong.

(Editing by Megan Goldin)

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Huge methane leak in Arctic Ocean: study

Yahoo News 4 Mar 10;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday.

From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean.

"This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land," the study said.

"More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future."

Earlier studies in Siberia had focused on methane escaping from thawing permafrost on land.

Scientists have long thought that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf acted as an impermeable barrier that sealed in methane, a powerful greenhouse gas 30 times more potent that carbon dioxide.

But the research team's observations showed that the permafrost submerged on the shelf is perforated and leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

More than 80 percent of the deep water and more than half of surface water had methane levels around eight times higher than found in normal seawater, according to the study published in the journal Science.

The researchers warned that the release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

"Ocean-bottom permafrost contains vast amounts of carbon, and experts are concerned that its release as methane gas would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, thus creating a positive-feedback loop that would lead to more methane escaping from the permafrost and more global warming," they said.

Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, said Shakhova.

Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher, and scientists are concerned because the undersea permafrost "has been showing signs of destabilization already," she added.

"If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions... would be significantly larger."

Geological records indicate that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods.

Methane Bubbles In Arctic Seas Stir Warming Fears
Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 5 Mar 10;

OSLO - Large amounts of a powerful greenhouse gas are bubbling up from a long-frozen seabed north of Siberia, raising fears of far bigger leaks that could stoke global warming, scientists said.

It was unclear, however, if the Arctic emissions of methane gas were new or had been going on unnoticed for centuries -- since before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century led to wide use of fossil fuels that are blamed for climate change.

The study said about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world's oceans, were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost below the seabed north of Russia.

"Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap," Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, said in a statement. She co-led the study published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The experts measured levels of methane, a gas that can be released by rotting vegetation, in water and air at 5,000 sites on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf from 2003-08. In some places, methane was bubbling up from the seabed.

Previously, the sea floor had been considered an impermeable barrier sealing methane, Shakhova said. Current methane concentrations in the Arctic are the highest in 400,000 years.

GLOBAL WARMING

"No one can answer this question," she said of whether the venting was caused by global warming or by natural factors. But a projected rise in temperatures could quicken the thaw.

"It's good that these emissions are documented. But you cannot say they're increasing," Martin Heimann, an expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany who wrote a separate article on methane in Science, told Reuters.

"These leaks could have been occurring all the time" since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, he said. He wrote that the release of 8 million tonnes of methane a year was "negligible" compared to global emissions of about 440 million tonnes.

Shakhova's study said there was an "urgent need" to monitor the region for possible future changes since permafrost traps vast amounts of methane, the second most common greenhouse gas from human activities after carbon dioxide.

Monitoring could resolve if the venting was "a steadily ongoing phenomenon or signals the start of a more massive release period," according to the scientists, based at U.S., Russian and Swedish research institutions.

The release of just a "small fraction of the methane held in (the) East Siberian Arctic Shelf sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming," they wrote.

The shelf has sometimes been above sea level during the earth's history. When submerged, temperatures rise by 12-17 degrees Celsius (22-31 F) since water is warmer than air. Over thousands of years, that may thaw submerged permafrost.

About 60 percent of methane now comes from human activities such as landfills, cattle rearing or rice paddies. Natural sources such as wetlands make up the rest, along with poorly understood sources such as the oceans, wildfires or termites.

Most studies about methane focus on permafrost on land. But the shelf below the Laptev, East Siberian and Russian part of the Chuckchi sea is three times the size of Siberia's wetlands.

(Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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