Climate models project that the global average temperature will rise about 1°C by the middle of the century, if we continue with business as usual and emit greenhouse gases as we have been. The global average, though, does not tell us anything about what will happen to regional climates, for example rainfall in the western United States or in paradisical islands like Hawai'i.
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The failed climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December will not make Russia relax its climate goals, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stressed in a meeting devoted to issue.
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Sovcomflot intends to carry out a trail shipment of oil from the Varandey terminal in Nenets through the north coast of Siberia to Japan this summer.
Lloyd’s List reports that Sovcomflot will send one of its purpose-built 70.000 dwt ice-classed shuttle tankers to Japan with oil loaded at the Varandey terminal on the Pechora Sea coast.
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Ships blowing off steam are helping researchers understand how human-made particles might be useful against global warming. New results from modeling clouds like those seen in shipping lanes reveal the complex interplay between aerosols, the prevailing weather and even the time of day the aerosol particles hit the air, according to research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in San Diego.
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The Catlin Arctic Survey 2010, which is to begin in early March, will take leading research scientists to an Ice Base some 1,200 km from the North Geographic Pole to study the potential impact of rising levels of acidity in the Arctic Ocean.
Based on recent projections, some scientists believe that the world’s oceans might reach acidity levels never seen in 20 million years by 2050. As oceans worldwide absorb about a quarter of the CO2 we produce (no less than 24 million tons a day), ocean acidification is “the other CO2 problem”.
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More frequent tropical cyclones in Earth's ancient past contributed to persistent El Niño-like conditions, according to a team of climate scientists led by Yale University. Their findings, which appear in the Feb. 25 issue of the journal Nature, could have implications for the planet's future as global temperatures continue to rise due to climate change.
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The Barents Sea is a robust and effective ocean cooler. Despite its fairly shallow depth of 230 meters, it releases more energy to the atmosphere than any other sea around the Arctic.
A new study by four oceanographers in Bergen shows how the Barents Sea responds to variation of heat transport by the ocean. Results show that the northwards migration of the sea ice, and the larger open ocean areas in the south, can compensate for much of the increase in ocean heat transport since the mid 1990's.
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Focusing on a controversial hypothesis that ice existed at the equator some 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Period, two University of Oklahoma researchers originated a project in search of clues to Earth's climate system.
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The Norwegian Government last week announced that it will open up huge new areas in the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea for oil and gas exploration.
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Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change, according to new data. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide, experts say.
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We will be celebrating March Polar Week from 15th - 19th March 2010. This week will be an opportunity for researchers, educators, early career scientists, and students from across the globe to celebrate the partnerships, outreach, and scientific outcomes IPY has enabled regionally, nationally and internationally. It will also provide the IPY community with a chance to generate excitement as they prepare for the IPY Oslo Science Conference June 8-12, 2010. We plan activities, lecture series, virtual balloon launches and more during this week so stay tuned!
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Policy makers in Europe and United States are markedly underestimating the changes needed to mitigate CO2 emission required to prevent dangerous climate change because they work in 'silos', according to pioneering research.
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In 2007, the Arctic lost a massive amount of thick, multiyear sea ice, contributing to that year's record-low extent of Arctic sea ice. A new NASA-led study has found that the record loss that year was due in part to the absence of "ice arches," naturally-forming, curved ice structures that span the openings between two land points. These arches block sea ice from being pushed by winds or currents through narrow passages and out of the Arctic basin.
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Two years ago, several research vessels shipped out to the North and the South poles to assemble a census of creatures living under the ice. One of the most surprising results was a discovery that 235 identical species lived on opposite sides of the world but were undocumented anywhere else. It's easy to understand how massive humpbacks can swim from Arctic to Antarctic waters, but most of the miniature worms, snails and crustaceans on the researchers' list are no bigger than grains of rice. How could tiny creatures adapted for the frigid waters travel 9,500 kilometers through warmer climes to reach the opposite pole?
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Residents of the southern United States and the Caribbean have seen it many times during the summer months -- a whitish haze in the sky that seems to hang around for days. The resulting thin film of dust on their homes and cars actually is soil from the deserts of Africa, blown across the Atlantic Ocean.
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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday called to learn a lesson from the failed December UN climate conference in Copenhagen.
“We have talked to government official present here, discussed the results of the Copenhagen conference; it must be admitted that it was a failure, a very sad one for all, especially for the organizers,” Medvedev told a climate meeting. “Although it was a lesson.”
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Global warming is real, and it's happening today, two experts said in Richmond.
The evidence of manmade global warming is "overwhelming," said Walter N. Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "There is really no question as to the fundamentals."
Meier spoke, before an audience and in an interview, this morning at a roundtable discussion on the state of climate-change science.
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LNG from Russia’s Arctic Yamal Peninsula can be routed along the Siberian coast to Asian markets.
It is the Russian gas producer Novatek that now says they are planning to test the Northern Sea route for huge LNG tankers in cooperation with Sovkomflot, Russia’s state owned petroleum shipping company.
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Scientists have made lots of projections over the past few years about how warming temperatures and a changing climate will affect the planet. Real-world measurements have confirmed at least some of them: sea level is clearly rising, for instance, and the ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is shrinking and thinning — in the latter case, faster than anyone had expected just a few years ago.
Other measurements are a lot more difficult, though. It's reasonable to expect, for example, that ecosystems will change as plants and animals respond to a rising thermometer — but how do you measure the change of an ecosystem that may consist of hundreds or even thousands of species?
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Waters from warmer latitudes -- or subtropical waters -- are reaching Greenland's glaciers, driving melting and likely triggering an acceleration of ice loss, reports a team of researchers led by Fiamma Straneo, a physical oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
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Geoengineering -- deliberate manipulation of the Earth's climate to slow or reverse global warming -- has gained a foothold in the climate change discussion. But before effective action can be taken, the Earth's natural biogeochemical cycles must be better understood.
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ESA PR 03-2010. The European Space Agency is about to launch the most sophisticated satellite ever to investigate the Earth’s ice fields and map ice thickness over water and land: lift-off scheduled for 25 February.
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Various large-scale techniques are currently being discussed as possible options for reducing the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere in order to offset global warming. Among such geo-engineering techniques are ideas for long-term sequestration of CO2 in the ocean. The effectiveness of a new method that brings up nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean to the surface using artificial pumps was recently investigated by an international team of scientists under the leadership of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany.
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Researchers at Queen's University suggest that policy makers examine greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions implications for energy infrastructure as fossil fuel sources must be rapidly replaced by windmills, solar panels and other sources of renewable energy.
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A study by University of Michigan researchers offers new insight into what happens to mercury deposited onto Arctic snow from the atmosphere.
The work also provides a new approach to tracking mercury's movement through Arctic ecosystems.
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Land in Svalbard is rising both due to recovery from the last glaciation and melting glacier mass at present. Norwegian Mapping Authority measurements confirm that the land rising rate varies depending on amount of melting ice from the glaciers from one year to another.
Land is still going through an isostatic rise after last glacial period but there is additional rise on top it of caused by shrinking mass of present time glaciers in Svalbard. The latter is en elastic response of land. Land rise that started after the glacial period is stable and does not show any annual variations. In Ny-Ålesund this stable rise is 2 mm per year.
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Just few weeks before Russian President Dmitry Medvedev arrives in Oslo for a state visit, both Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Russia’s Vladimir Putin highlight the positive dynamics in talks over the disputed waters in the Barents Sea.
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Several different pesticides are found in Svalbard. Some of them are in concentrations high enough to estimate that there is a ton of each of them on all of the land ice here.
Insects get here by cargo and sometimes on strong winds from the south but the climate here is the most effective pest killer there is. So how come the pesticides are found in Svalbard? Several researchers from Canaa, USA and Norway have been working together for years looking for an answer. The studies were done on samples of snow and ice (ice cores) from Austfonna, Lomonosovfonna and Holtedahlfonna. The ice core drilled on the top of Holtedahlfonna in 2005 delivered samples which allowed for analysis of 64 different pesticides, 21 of them were not used in Svalbard so they came here from other places.
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Theories about the rates of ice accumulation and melting during the Quaternary Period -- the time interval ranging from 2.6 million years ago to the present -- may need to be revised, thanks to research findings published by a University of Iowa researcher and his colleagues in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science.
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The connection between the native Americans and North American Inuit to the Inuit living in Greenland has long puzzled the minds of researchers. Also, the migration patterns of people over the northern hemisphere have for a long time interested people. Now it has been found out by the research team of Professor Eske Willerslev and his PhD student Morten Rasmussen, from Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, that people preceding the Inuit living in Greenland today crossed into the New World from north-eastern Siberia between 4,400 and 6,400 years ago in a migration wave that was independent of those of Native Americans and Inuit ancestors. The discovery was made by analysing a tuft of hair that belonged to a man from the Saqqaq culture from north-western Greenland 4,000 years ago. This discovery is an achievement both in gene technology as wel as in archaelogy and can be of significant help to scientists as they seek to determine what happened to people from extinct cultures.
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For the projects ITEX (http://www.cevl.msu.edu/ael/projects/tempmanip.html) and Tarantella (http://www.ipy.org/projects/item/410-tarantella-terrestrial-ecosystems-in-and-Arctic-Antarctic), the Open Top Chambers (OTC) were developed to simulate the impact of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems in the short and long term in polar regions (Arctic and Antarctica). OTC are small greenhouses that increase the temperature (average of 2 ° C) and humidity, and decrease the wind strength.
The establishment of a long-term experiment in polar regions request a simple, strong experimental procedure, that does not depend on a energy source because of harsh climatic conditions. For example, at Signy Island (Sub-Antarctic Island), a OTC was blown away by the wind. The choice of the structure and especially its fixation on the rock surface are very important because, during the austral winter, the station is closed and nobody can repair damages.
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Weather forecasts, satellite navigation in cars and the inspection of dikes or natural gas fields: these applications using satellite data would all be even more accurate if we knew more about the distribution of water vapour in our atmosphere, according to Roderik Lindenbergh from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands). He carried out research using the satellite instrument MERIS, which is on board the European environmental satellite Envisat. His research was supported by the Dutch space organisation NSO.
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A new study from the University of California at Davis published in the journal Ecology Letters shows that predicting when climate “tipping points” will occur is more difficult than initially thought.
In light of climate change, most climate scientists are looking for any warning sign that might indicate a sudden shift in natural systems so they can either prevent these changes or improve preparations for them. So far, they have identified three “tipping points”:
* The complete disappearance of Arctic sea ice in summer;
* The acceleration of ice loss from Greenlandic and Antarctic Ice Sheets;
* Ocean acidification resulting from carbon dioxide absorption.
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An international team of climate scientists will take a new approach to modeling the Earth's climate future, according to a paper in 11 February Nature. The next set of models will include, for the first time, tightly linked analyses of greenhouse gas emissions, projections of the Earth's climate, impacts of climate change, and human decision-making.
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A rise in water vapour in the atmosphere fuelled 30 per cent of the global warming that took place during the 1990s. This discovery suggests that the potent greenhouse gas plays a bigger role in climate change that we previously imagined.
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A new University of California, Davis, study by a top ecological forecaster says it is harder than experts thought to predict when sudden shifts in Earth's natural systems will occur -- a worrisome finding for scientists trying to identify the tipping points that could push climate change into an irreparable global disaster.
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The high North is Norway’s most important strategic area of interest and our aim for the region is continued stability and sustainable development. The Norwegian Defense will contribute with sufficient military capacity attend to its missions while keeping the High North as an area of low tensions, says Minister of Defense Grete Faremo.
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The Arctic Marine Institute in Arkhangelsk will strengthen local training on Arctic environment and ocean affairs.
The institute was decided established by the federal Marine Board, a body under the Russian government, after a meeting in Arkhangelsk last year.
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Some animals, it seems, are going on a diet, while others have expanding waistlines.
It's likely these are reactions to rapidly rising temperatures due to global climate change, speculates Prof. Yoram Yom-Tov of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology, who has been measuring the evolving body sizes of birds and animals in areas where climate change is most extreme.
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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."
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Scientists on the British research ship RRS James Cook have been working a mile and a half deep on the seabed of the Southern Ocean to try and understand the extreme environment surrounding hydrothermal vents.
These vents, first discovered in 1977, are places where volcanic gases and fluid from deep within the Earth push through the crust and enter the sea. The scientists, who have already visited two of these sites in the Antarctic Ocean, are now on their way to a third site, where they hope to learn more about what lives in this widely unexplored feature of the ocean floor.
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The main impact of climate change will be on water supplies and the world needs to learn from past cooperation such as over the Indus or Mekong Rivers to help avert future conflicts, experts said on Sunday.
Desertification, flash floods, melting glaciers, heatwaves, cyclones or water-borne diseases such as cholera are among the impacts of global warming inextricably tied to water. And competition for supplies might cause conflicts.
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Russia will invest some 1.5 billion rubles ($49.7 million) in defining the extent of its continental shelf in the Arctic in 2010, in order to prove its right to more of the Arctic floor, the country's Natural Resources Ministry has said.
"These funds will be spent on additional hydrographic and geophysical research in the Arctic Ocean," the ministry said in a statement.
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Scant ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a "double whammy" of powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said on Thursday.
In January, Arctic sea ice grew by about 13,000 square miles (34,000 sq km) a day, which is a bit more than one-third the pace of ice growth during the 1980s, and less than the average for the first decade of the 21st century.
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The increasing acidity of the world's oceans -- and that acidity's growing threat to marine species -- are definitive proof that the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is causing climate change is also negatively affecting the marine environment, says Antarctic marine biologist Jim McClintock, Ph.D., professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Biology.
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Russia will fulfill its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, the presidential advisor on climate issues said on Friday.
"Unlike some other countries, we can say with certainty that Russia will fulfill its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol," Alexander Bedritsky told a news conference.
"We are taking all necessary steps to increase energy efficiency, particularly such measures as are covered by 2020 strategy," he continued.
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Climate change is transforming the Arctic environment faster than expected and accelerating the disappearance of sea ice, scientists said on Friday in giving their early findings from the biggest-ever study of Canada's changing north.
The research project involved more than 370 scientists from 27 countries who collectively spent 15 months, starting in June 2007, aboard a research vessel above the Arctic Circle. It marked the first time a ship has stayed mobile in Canada's high Arctic for an entire winter.
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Life on Earth hit a particularly rough patch about 250 million years ago, when about 90 percent of marine species went extinct along with about 70 percent of land organisms, including the only large-scale extinction of insects.
Apparently, there were few places to hide from disaster at the end of the Permian, a geologic period that lasted for about 50 million years until the widespread extinction of life.
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This Canadian Arctic capital has no stop lights and didn't start naming its streets until a decade ago. Blizzards can last a week or more, and they tend to come very suddenly. So when the financial chiefs of the seven big industrial democracies meet here Friday and Saturday, they'd better have a quick way out.
Iqaluit, population 7,000, may seem an unlikely venue for a G-7 bull session about the global economy, but the host nation chose it in part to underscore a message about sovereignty over its part of the Arctic.
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The United States must move beyond greenhouse gas reductions to develop new strategies to help the public and the economy adapt to the disruptions that will be caused by climate change, a panel of climate experts said at a Capitol Hill briefing co-organized by AAAS.
The panel warned that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases commit the world to rising surface and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, retreating glaciers, disruption of biological systems, and weather extremes that will intensify over the 21st century.
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Content:
1) Oslo Science Conference
2) Teacher's workshop in Oslo
3) Polar Week - 15 to 19 March 2010
4) APECS Update
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Scientists from Australia, New Zealand, and France have embarked on the RV Tangaroa for an expedition to study whales as part of the Southern Ocean Research Partnership. The first truly international and multidisciplinary research collaboration with a focus on improving the conservation of whales was launched on 29 January by Australian Minister for the Environment, Peter Garrett, and New Zealand Minister for Research Science and Technology, Wayne Mapp.
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Nations accounting for most of the world's greenhouse gas emissions have restated their promises to fight climate change, meeting a Sunday deadline in a low-key endorsement of December's "Copenhagen Accord."
Experts say their promised curbs on greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 are too small so far to meet the accord's key goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
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Canada has trimmed its goals for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases and made clear it will follow the U.S. lead on fighting climate change, a move that prompted fresh criticism from green groups.
In a letter sent to the United Nations on Saturday, Canada committed to a 17 percent cut in emissions from 2005 levels by 2020. This is identical to the U.S. target but less than the 20 percent cut from 2006 levels that Ottawa previously promised.
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Norway’s Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre is meeting his Russian colleague Sergey Lavrov in Moscow this week to discuss cooperation in the two countries’ northern regions.
The two ministers will be discussing Norwegian-Russian cooperation, first of all in the northern regions, a press release from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reads. Other issues that will be discussed are cooperation within business and industry, climate and energy.
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The first Glonass station in the southern hemisphere will be installed at Russia’s Bellingshausen research outpost in Antarctica in February, a source at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of the Federal Hydro-Meteorological Service told Itar-Tass on Sunday.
Glonass is a radio-based satellite navigation system, developed by the former Soviet Union and now operated by the Russian Space Forces. It is an alternative and complementary to the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS) and the planned Galileo positioning system of the European Union (EU).
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The intense public debate on how rapidly the Himalayan glaciers are retreating highlights the necessity for the constant monitoring of glaciers worldwide by satellites.
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