Now repeat after W...."there is no such thing as global warming...."
Arctic's Biggest Ice Shelf, a Sentinel of
Climate Change, Cracks Apart
The breakup is apparent evidence of global warming. It also has drained a freshwater lake
containing a rare ecosystem.
By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer
The largest ice shelf in the Arctic — an 80-foot-thick
slab of ice nearly the size of Lake Tahoe — has broken
up, providing more evidence that the Earth's polar
regions are responding to ongoing and accelerating
rates of climatic change, researchers reported Monday.
The Ward Hunt ice shelf, located 500 miles from the
North Pole on the edge of Canada's Ellesmere Island,
has broken into two main parts and a series of ice
islands. A massive freshwater lake long held back by
the ice has drained away.
"Large blocks of ice are moving out. It's really a
breakup," said Warwick Vincent, a professor of
biology at Laval University in Quebec and co-author of
the report, which will be published in an upcoming issue
of the journal Geophysical Review Letters. "We'd been
measuring incremental changes each year. Suddenly in
one year, everything changed."
While far larger shelves of ice have cracked off the
edges of Antarctica, this is the largest ice separation in
the Arctic, occurring in an area of the eastern Arctic
long thought to be more protected against the gradual
warming of the planet.
"This type of catastrophic [event] is quite
unprecedented," said Martin Jeffries, a professor of
geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and
co-author of the report.
Because of their longevity and sensitivity to
temperature, ice shelves are considered "sentinels of
climate change." In recent years, scientists have seen ice
shelves the size of Rhode Island break off of western
Antarctica as it warms and have measured glaciers'
retreat in response to warmer temperatures throughout
the western Arctic.
Weather data recorded at the nearby military station
Alert on Ellesmere Island show that temperatures there
have been warming since 1967 at the same rate as in
western Antarctica: about one degree Fahrenheit per
decade. The average July temperature of recent years
of 34 degrees was above the temperature — 32
degrees — at which ice shelves are known to break up.
The researchers said they considered the weakening of
the ice additional evidence of climate change in the high
Arctic and said the report fit with studies that show
global warming trends are connected to the human
production of greenhouse gases. Those trends have been seen first and amplified
in the Arctic.
But they said other factors, including ocean circulation and atmospheric patterns
that can last for decades, could be contributing to the changes in the ice.
"The picture is a little murky," Jeffries said.
Jeffries, who has worked on the region's ice sheets for two decades, said the ice
appears to have thinned dramatically in that time. The Ward Hunt ice shelf was
measured at 150 feet thick in 1980 and now appears to be less than half that in
some places.
The ice shelf has lost 90% of its area since 1907, when explorer Robert E. Peary
crossed it on his way to the North Pole and complained bitterly about its
undulating terrain.
Researchers were lucky to catch the breakup in such a remote and relatively
unstudied area. Derek Mueller, a graduate student of Vincent's, had reached the
ice shelf by helicopter last summer to study the strange microbes living there when
he saw that the massive cracks extended all the way through the ice.
Using a satellite phone, he called Vincent. Canada's RADARSAT satellite then
captured fresh images of the ice shelf as it was breaking up.
Vincent is very concerned about the ecosystem he and his students were
studying. It has basically been flushed out to sea. The weakening and cracking of
the ice shelf allowed a freshwater lake that had been dammed behind the ice to
drain suddenly.
The ice shelf kept about 140 feet of freshwater pooled atop 1,200 feet of denser
seawater. The layers of fresh and salty water supported an ecosystem of strange
microbes, or extremophiles, that are of particular interest to scientists trying to
understand the limits of life on Earth and in outer space.
"The whole lake just drained. It just disappeared entirely," Vincent said. "We're at
a point where we're starting to lose these unique cryo-ecosystems of the north
before we can understand them."
Other researchers are concerned about the increasing amount of fresh water
pouring into the Arctic Ocean from breaking ice shelves, melting glaciers and
rain-swollen rivers.
Cold, salty water in the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans plays a major role in
driving ocean currents that transport heat around the globe.
One of the most important of these is the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water
up the East Coast of the United States and across the Atlantic to northern
Europe.
In previous geological eras, warmer climates and the release of freshwater lakes
that had been dammed by ice have caused this current to slow and shut down,
drastically cooling parts of Europe.
A study in the journal Science in December reported massive amounts of fresh
water entering the Arctic from Russia's largest rivers, due to increases in
precipitation linked to warmer temperatures.
If temperatures rise globally by several degrees in the next century, as many
scientists predict, increased river runoff, melting of glaciers on Greenland and
melting of ice shelves "would bring us well within the range of what models say
could be a serious disruption to ocean circulation," said Bruce Peterson, a senior
scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
While the amount of fresh water released from the breaking of the Ward Hunt ice
shelf is relatively small, some scientists say it is part of a larger pattern of
freshening of ocean waters that could prove dangerous in the future.
"The question is, at what point do those currents become unhappy?" said Richard
Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University and an expert on ice
sheets and abrupt climate change. "We're just not good enough to tell right now."
AND THE PROOF!
Bush Covers Up Climate Research
Paul Harris
The Observer
Sunday 21 September 2003
White House officials play down its own scientists' evidence of global warming
White House officials have undermined their own government scientists' research into climate
change to play down the impact of global warming, an investigation by The Observer can reveal.
The disclosure will anger environment campaigners who claim that efforts to cut greenhouse gas
emissions are being sabotaged because of President George W. Bush's links to the oil industry.
Emails and internal government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have
sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of
conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack U.S. government scientists if they
produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.
Central to the revelations of double dealing is the discovery of an email sent to Phil Cooney, chief of
staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Myron Ebell, a director of the
Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI is an ultra-conservative lobby group that has received
more than $1 million in donations since 1998 from the oil giant Exxon, which sells Esso petrol in
Britain.
The email, dated 3 June 2002, reveals how White House officials wanted the CEI's help to play
down the impact of a report last summer by the government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
in which the U.S. admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming. 'Thanks for
calling and asking for our help,' Ebell tells Cooney.
The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials,
including its then head, Christine Whitman. 'It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious
fall guys and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible,' Ebell
wrote in the email. 'Perhaps tomorrow we will call for Whitman to be fired,' he added.
The CEI is suing another government climate research body that produced evidence for global
warming. The revelation of the email's contents has prompted demands for an investigation to see if
the White House and CEI are co-ordinating the legal attack.
'This email indicates a secret initiative by the administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit
against itself seeking to discredit an official U.S. government report on global warming dangers,' said
Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut, who has written to the White House asking for
an inquiry.
The allegation was denied by White House officials and the CEI. 'It is absurd. We do not have a
sweetheart relationship with the White House,' said Chris Horner, a lawyer and senior fellow of CEI.
However, environmentalists say the email fits a pattern of collusion between the Bush
administration and conservative groups funded by the oil industry, who lobby against efforts to control
carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of global warming.
When Bush first came to power he withdrew the U.S. - the world's biggest source of greenhouse
gases - from the Kyoto treaty, which requires nations to limit their emissions.
Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are former oil executives; National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice was a director of the oil firm Chevron, and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans once
headed an oil and gas exploration company.
'It all fits together,' said Kert Davies of Greenpeace. 'It shows that there is an effort to undermine
good science. It all just smells like the oil industry. They are doing everything to allow the U.S. to
remain the world's biggest polluter.'
Other confidential documents obtained by The Observer detail White House efforts to suppress
research that shows the world's climate is warming. A four-page internal EPA memo reveals that
Bush's staff insisted on major amendments to the climate change section of an environmental survey
of the U.S., published last June. One alteration indicated 'that no further changes may be made'.
The memo discusses ways of dealing with the White House editing, and warns that the section 'no
longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change'.
Some of the changes include deleting a summary that stated: 'Climate change has global
consequences for human health and the environment.' Sections on the ecological effects of global
warming and its impact on human health were removed. So were several sentences calling for further
research on climate change.
A temperature record covering 1,000 years was also deleted, prompting the EPA memo to note:
'Emphasis is given to a recent, limited analysis [which] supports the administration's favoured
message.'
White House officials added numerous qualifying words such as 'potentially' and 'may', leading the
EPA to complain: 'Uncertainty is inserted where there is essentially none.'
The paper then analyses what the EPA should do about the amendments and whether they should
be published at all. The options range from accepting the alterations to trying to discuss them with the
White House.
When the report was finally published, however, the EPA had removed the entire global warming
section to avoid including information that was not scientifically credible.
Former EPA climate policy adviser Jeremy Symons said morale at the agency had been devastated
by the administration's tactics. He painted a picture of scientists afraid to conduct research for fear of
angering their White House paymasters. 'They do good research,' he said. 'But they feel that they have
a boss who does not want them to do it. And if they do it right, then they will get hit or their work will
be buried.'
Symons left the EPA in April 2001 and now works for the National Wildlife Federation as head of its
climate change programme. The Bush administration's attitude was clear from the beginning, he said,
and a lot of people were working to ensure that the President did nothing to address global warming.
CC |
