Arctic sea ice reaches record low

Arctic sea ice reaches record low

Arctic sea ice reached record low levels this year, according to satellite measurements.

Researchers at the University of Colorado claim that the melt season saw levels lower than any since 1979 when records began.

During September the average sea ice extent was 1.65 million square miles, nearly 25 per cent less than the previous low record reached in 2005.

At the end of the melt season, sea ice was 39 per cent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000.

Professor Mark Serreze said that a number of factors have contributed to the decline of sea ice but "the effects of greenhouse warming are coming through loud and clear".

Scientists believe that part of the reason for the drastic decline was due to ice being at an already-weakened state before the melt season.

Other contributing factors include an unusual atmospheric pattern, with persistent high atmospheric pressures over the central Arctic Ocean and lower pressures over Siberia.

At the same time winds pumped warm air into the region, encouraging further melt.

The loss of sea ice was so great this year that the fabled Northwest Passage completely opened for the first time in human memory.

Melting sea ice is likely to have an impact on hunting and travelling in the region.

"We may well see an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer within our lifetimes," said Professor Serreze. "The implications for global climate, as well as Arctic animals and people, are disturbing."

Africa: Developing Countries Need Help to Fight Climate Change, Officials Tell UN

 Africa: Developing Countries Need Help to Fight Climate Change, Officials Tell UN 

Senior officials from a number of developing countries today called for greater international cooperation to help the world's poor and vulnerable States respond to climate change - the central focus of this year's annual high-level debate of the General Assembly.

Marco Hausiku, the Foreign Minister of Namibia, said climate change is a global issue with serious implications for economic growth, sustainable development and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of global anti-poverty targets toward the year 2015.

"The international community has to live up to its commitment to provide resources to developing countries to adapt to the effect of climate change," he told the Assembly. "By the same token, compulsory targets must be set for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions."

He called for a greater sense of urgency and international action. "Namibia is not happy with the rate at which investments are made in the development of renewable and clean energy sources," he said. "I would like to call upon the private sector to join hands with governments to develop and apply technologies that can mitigate climate change."

Seyoum Mesfin, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia, said Africa is "exceptionally" vulnerable to the effects of climate change. "So many of us live on the margins that the smallest difference in climate can mean the difference between sufficiency and famine, survival and death," he said.

While acknowledging that this global challenge requires a global response, he cautioned that "the need for speedy economic development in countries such as Ethiopia, and in Africa, as a whole should not be compromised in the interest of reversing a dangerous climatic situation for the creation of which we have no responsibility."

Through effective international cooperation, it should be possible to ensure that the development process in countries such as Ethiopia will be environmentally friendly. Toward that end, he welcomed a proposal put forward by Brazil to convene in 2012 a new UN conference on environment and development.

Also urging a global partnership against climate change, the Foreign Minister of Suriname, Lygia Kraag-Keteldijk, pointed out that the countries least able to respond will be the hardest-hit. "The effects of climate change will be felt in all parts of the world," she said, "however the impact will be worse in small and vulnerable States."

For Suriname, a low-lying coastal country, sea-level rise could be "catastrophic," she said. In response, the Government has designated a large part of its land mass as a World Heritage Site monitored by the UN Educational Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), she added.

She said all countries must work for a common solution. "We call on the international community and development partners to increase their efforts and to continue their technical and financial support to developing countries to safeguard the world environment for current and future generations."

Philip Sealy, Permanent Representative of Trinidad and Tobago, said it was important that any decisions or timetable for emission reductions be implemented as soon as practicable.

"The world is already committed to an increase 1.14 degrees Celsius by the end of the next two decades" as a result of emissions from fossil fuel use and deforestation, Mr. Sealy said, adding that a strategy is needed to ensure that the long-term temperature increase is no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Concerns about climate change were also taken up by representatives of industrialized countries during the high-level debate today, with New Zealand's Permanent Representative Rosemary Banks calling for a "road map" to emerge during the global summit on the issue in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

"The road map will need to include all relevant pieces of the climate change puzzle," Ms. Banks said, calling for all economies to be placed on "low-carbon pathways over time. Market mechanisms will have a significant role to play. Individual countries will face different challenges. Different national circumstances must be taken into account."

Too late to avoid warming

Too late to avoid warming

Sydney could face an annual temperature rise of up to 4.3 degrees by 2070, and a tripling of the number of days a year when the thermometer soars above 35 degrees, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut steeply, a new report has found.

It is too late for the city to avoid a warming of about 1 degree by 2030 as well as a 3 per cent reduction in annual rainfall because of polluting gases already in the atmosphere.

More droughts, fires, and severe weather events, and less rain and snow across the country are also on the horizon, according to the report, Climate Change in Australia, which contains the most detailed and up-to-date climate projections produced by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.

Its findings, released at the Greenhouse 2007 conference in Sydney this morning, include projections of up to 20 per cent more drought months over most of Australia by 2030.

By 2070 this could rise to 40 per cent more drought months in eastern Australia and 80 per cent more in south western Australia.

The report also spells out the impact that human activity has already had on Australia's climate.

A warming of 0.9 degrees since 1950 and an increase in hot nights have been mostly due to greenhouse gas emissions, it concludes.

These higher temperatures have "exacerbated" the effects of drought and led to a decline in snow cover, including a 40 per cent reduction in snow depth in Spring in the Snowy Mountains in the past 45 years.

Weather patterns and ocean currents have changed, reducing rainfall to south-west Australia and leading to a warming of waters off the east coast of Tasmania that is occurring at triple the global rate of ocean warming.

"The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past," the report says.

It is based on conclusions of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released earlier this year, and climate research conducted on the Australian region since the last CSIRO projections were released in 2001.

Co-ordinator of the CSIRO's climate change science program, Paul Holper, said improvements in computer modelling of climate meant the new projections were more accurate than the last ones, which warned national temperatures could rise as much as 6 degrees by 2070.

"Over the past five or six years we have learnt so much more about the atmosphere and the oceans, and our ability to use super computers to simulate climate has improved immensely," he told ABC Radio.

Nationally, temperatures will rise by about 1 degree by 2030, and rainfall will decline by up to 5 per cent, according to the report.

The impact of human activity beyond that will depend on how quickly greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, with worst-case scenarios including a 5-degree warming and a 30 per cent reduction in annual rainfall by 2070.

If carbon dioxide levels can be stabilised at 550 parts per million by 2100, however, the temperature rise in Australia could be kept to about 1.8 degrees by 2070, and rainfall decline to about 7.5 per cent.

Climate will alter travel patterns in decades

Climate will alter travel patterns in decades

DAVOS, Switzerland, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Global warming will produce stay-at-home tourists over the next few decades, radically altering travel patterns and threatening jobs and businesses in tourism-dependent countries, according to a stark assessment by U.N experts.

The U.N. Environment Programme, the World Meteorological Organisation and the World Tourism Organisation said concerns about weather extremes and calls to reduce emissions-heavy air travel would make long-haul flights less attractive.

Holiday-makers from Europe, Canada, the United States and Japan were likely to spend more vacations in or near their home countries to take advantage of longer summers, they said.

In a report prepared for a U.N. conference on climate change and tourism, they projected that global warming would reduce demand for travel between northern Europe and the Mediterranean, between North America and the Caribbean, and between northeast Asia and southeast Asia.

"The geographic and seasonal redistribution of tourist demand may be very large for individual destinations and countries by mid- to late-century," the agencies said.

"This shift in travel patterns may have important implications, including proportionally more tourism spending in temperate nations and proportionally less spending in warmer nations now frequented by tourists from temperate regions."

However, overall travel demand was expected to grow by between 4 and 5 percent a year, with international arrivals doubling to 1.6 billion by 2020.

In some developing and island states, tourism accounts for as much as 40 percent of national economic output.

Officials from tourism-dependent countries such as the Maldives, Fiji, the Seychelles and Egypt told the conference that shifts in travel choices, and ecological damage from global warming, posed serious threats to their businesses and jobs.

"Tourism is a catalyst to the economy. If you are hitting the tourism sector, automatically this rocks the whole economic machinery," Michael Nalletamby of the Seychelles Tourism Board told the Davos conference.

Christopher Rodrigues, chairman of the British government agency VisitBritain, said the sector needed to find ways to reduce the effects of ever-increasing travel demand on the environment, which in turn affects the industry's health.

"The biggest risk is that the success of the tourist industry becomes its own undoing," he told the conference.

Expert studied sea fossils

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World-renowned University of Hawaii researcher Johanna Martha Resig, called a role model for women in science, died Sept. 19 at Hospice Hawaii. She was 75.

"She was a very humble person," said Janice C. Marsters, principal at Masa Fujioka & Associates, who took many cruises with Resig. "She was extremely well known worldwide and loved by everyone she met. It's a huge loss to us."

Born in Los Angeles, Resig was an expert in a specialized field of micropaleontology, studying microfossils in ocean bottom sediments, said Brian Taylor, dean of the UH School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

"For those interested in tectonics, if submarine land was subsiding or rising, Johanna, from bugs in the sediments, could tell you what was going on."

Resig earned a master's degree in science in 1956 at the University of Southern California under a leading micropaleontologist. She then worked for the Allen Hancock Foundation, studying living foraminifera (microfossils) of the Southern California coast.

Her research papers are cited among pioneering applications of the field now known as environmental micropaleontology, said Marsters, who met Resig on a marine geology research cruise off Peru in 1986.

Marsters said she moved to Hawaii about 1 1/2 years later to work on a doctoral degree at UH and Resig was on her dissertation committee. The two became close friends, she said.

Resig went to Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, on a Fulbright grant for research in 1962. Her fellowship was extended, enabling her to earn a doctorate in natural science there in 1965, when she was recruited by the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics.

She was the first woman on the HIG faculty and the only one for many years, starting as an assistant micropaleontologist, Marsters said. She became an associate micropaleontologist in 1970 and had a joint appointment in 1990 as an HIG researcher and professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

She studied microfossils around Hawaii and the Pacific Basin, participating in scientific cruises of the Deep Sea Drilling Project.

Chuck Helsley, Sea Grant emeritus researcher and former HIG director, said Resig "will be sorely missed. ... She was one of the old-style micropaleontologists that looked at bugs themselves. ... She was a tremendous walking encyclopedia... of the morphology of foraminifera."

Her expertise was in knowing how to extract microfossils from layers of the sea floor and "how to identify them through a narrow piece of time," he said.

"This is very essential expertise for making use of data coming from a research drill ship where we sample cores and want to know how old they are and what they tell is about chemistry in the past."

Such information was "one of the key steppingstones to making sense of the history of the ocean basins," he said.

Resig discovered and described five new species of foraminifera, including a group that "in the mammalian world would be akin to the discovery of a group such as primates," Marsters said.

Resig also was a dedicated teacher and mentor and an author of more than 50 articles in scientific books, journals and academic papers. She supported the arts and volunteered as a tutor reading to elementary school children.

She was a former editor of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research Group, member of the board of directors of the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research and member of the Society for Sedimentary Geology for more than 50 years.

She retired in 2001 as an emeritus professor, continuing her research in a small office in SOEST until early this year.

Marsters said they traveled to Scotland and Ireland in October. Her health began to fail upon her return and she learned in April she had inoperable cancer.

Survivors include sisters Mary Alley of Folsom, Calif., and Peggy Van Sickle of Austin, Texas, and many nieces and nephews.

Colleagues plan a private memorial service.

Sea Shepherd - Campaign Begins in Tokyo for the Dolphins and Children of Japan

Campaign Begins in Tokyo for the Dolphins and Children of Japan

In an effort to protect both dolphins and children, three Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) activists began a campaign today in the heart of Tokyo to bring attention to a Japanese national crime and scandal. The activists travelled to Japan to mark Dolphin Day by launching a personal protest against the killing of tens of thousands of defenseless dolphins that are in turn being fed to innocent Japanese school children despite the dangerously high levels of mercury in the dolphin meat.

"Dolphins are dying to provide cheap toxic lunches for children," said Allison Lance, SSCS field agent and campaign leader. "This is a crime that must be exposed and shut down." 

Despite the evidence of dangerously high levels of mercury, the mayor of Taiji, Japan, is presently constructing a dolphin slaughterhouse with plans to increase the numbers of dolphins killed. Japanese politicians are refusing to address the scandal and the Japanese media has ignored the issue. The average Japanese citizen is completely unaware of the massive dolphin slaughter and the fact that the mercury tainted meat is being distributed to school lunch programs. Mercury poisoning is a deadly affliction which can lead to Minamata disease named after the Japanese city of Minamata where thousands of Japanese citizens have died or continue to suffer from degenerative brain cell damage and genetic birth defects.

"I cannot sit at home and do nothing," said Lance. "I believe that if the people of Japan become aware of the horror that takes place on Japanese beaches and in Japanese schoolrooms they will demand that the government take action to end the slaughter and the deliberate poisoning of their children."

Lance is being supported by two other activists, Michelle Sass and Danielle Thompson. Sea Shepherd Director, actress Persia White, who appears on the hit television program Girlfriends, will be going to Tokyo in early October to lend support to the efforts.

"Perhaps as a woman who loves both dolphins and children, I may be able to appeal to the women of Japan to call for the government to put an end to the poisoning of their children with mercury. I cannot believe that anyone can condone such evil once they become aware of this horror," said Lance.

Some 22,000 dolphins are killed each year in Japan by dolphin drives that see the animals driven onto beaches and into shallow bays where they are brutally speared, clubbed, and knifed. A few dolphins are selected for sale to dolphinariums around the world, but the majority are slaughtered for meat to feed livestock and children. Pigs fed with dolphin meat produce mercury tainted pork.

SSCS first brought the images of the dolphin slaughter to international attention in October 2003. In November 2003, Lance was arrested in Taiji along with Alex Cornelissen, from the Netherlands, when they dove into the bay to release 15 dolphins before they could be slaughtered. They were held in jail for three weeks and ordered to pay a fine of US $8,300.

"Three weeks incarceration was a small price to pay for freeing those dolphins," said Lance. "I am undertaking this campaign because the alternative is to accept the cruel slaughter of dolphins and the continued poisoning of children, and that is something I cannot and will not do."