USA Today has done it again! America’s national newspaper has published a handy summary on how we go about reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases as a nation. The solution lies with the cities (and with us as individuals as well, of course). The URL is http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-06-21-mayors-environment_N.htm

The next time you find yourself wondering what you can do to stop polar ice cap melting, refer to the above article. Then, once you understand how the progress is made elsewhere, the moment will have arrived for you to ask your local government to make similar moves. Demand reform. There are organizations which will help them find cost-effective solutions. Your city or town may even find that some of the options save them money.

If you would like to reach out to people who have succeeded in helping American cities do their fair share, check out http://www.coolcities.us

The key concept to remember is that the reason we have a polar ice cap melting crisis is our huge dumping of carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We cannot correct the problem overnight but if we all do our part, we will be well on our way to a real solution. Join me in bringing about real change.

The summer of 2007 has not been good in terms of further warning signs that our consumption of fossil fuels is heating the planet to dizzying zeniths. We have seen prolonged triple-digit heat waves covering half the continental United States at the same time and torrential East Coast flooding and rain systems.

How has this affected life in the Arctic Ocean?

William L. Chapman, who monitors the region at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign had the following to say earlier this month, “The melting rate during June and July this year was simply incredible...”

The melting of polar ice caps continues unabated. We must act today.

In this blog, I have advocated for carbon neutrality. There are various methods for achieving it as you will find by reviewing my earlier posts.

The key is to begin immediately and not relent until the carbon you produce through consuming, moving and simply living is at as low a rate as it would have been had you walked the Earth 200 years ago.

In my next two threads, I will lead you through two aspects of the quest for clean air and healthy polar ice caps which bear your attention.

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler
 

As we close out one of the hottest and deadliest summer seasons ever in the northern hemisphere, we find new questions arising about the role which green tags, also called carbon offsets or carbon credits, can play in reversing the global climate crisis.

At the same time, we find that local cineplexes are showing not one but two films about life in our planet’s polar regions and the impact which global warming has on wildlife, “A Polar Tale” and “11th Hour”.

Since I have advocated that offsets can play a crucial role in a blended approach to conservation, this seems an ideal juncture to offer my carbon credit definition. Specifically, do I define such credits are good, good over the short term or bad?

I recently shared with you that the year 2007 has set more weather records. We had not one but two killer hurricanes of category 5 strength strike land within weeks of each other. Worse still, they targeted similar areas, the southwest Caribbean basin. That was a first.

Well, last week, another terrifying record came and went. Arctic ice equal in size to the State of Florida, where I live and which I call Hurricane Alley, melted in six days’ time. We shattered the record for total area melted and pace of melting.

Not only have we never seen melting of such apocalyptic proportions but in some scientific camps the astonishment at this occurrence has yielded calls for new estimates of the year when polar ice will melt completely during the summer.

Even though the 2007 hurricane season will be with us for a few more weeks, the autumnal equinox has passed. It’s fall! From the perspective of another record-breaking summer, it couldn’t come a moment too soon.

After the unspeakable loss of life of Hurricane Katrina, I have developed a habit of fearing the month of August. Before 2005, my fear was derived mostly from what Florida’s oppressive heat index would do to my cooling bill. I intend to install a solar electric array next summer to keep the numbers steady and now, I get butterflies every August when I access the National Hurricane Center website for predictions.

Call it fortunate happenstance. Call it karma. Call it providence. Call it what you will. The year 2007 will go down in history as a turning point in the world’s understanding of and response to global warming. We saw record polar melting. We saw record hurricane acceleration and the first time a pair of category 5 storms struck the same general area in the same year.

NASA’s mission was changed a while back to eliminate atmospheric science as a core priority. Fortunately, the Science Mission Directorate continues its excellent work. It just issued a damning report with hard proof of the climate crisis, including pictures of polar ice caps melting.

The most compelling aspect of the report, though, is the graph of Greenland pictured above. It details “the Greenland melt anomaly, measured as the difference between the number of days on which melting occurred in 2007 compared to the average annual melting days from 1988-2006. The areas with the highest amounts of additional melt days appear in red, and areas with below-average melt days appear in blue.”

For the last 2 posts, I have covered Al Gore’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. Since American politicians win this prestigious gem from time to time but not so often that most of my countrymen would know all of the trivia, I thought this a good moment to pause and answer the question, “Who invented the Nobel Peace Prize?”.

The image above is from an excellent video clip of a January 31 stunt by the good folks at Greenpeace. I am aware that some find the methods and tactics of the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace objectionable. Nevertheless, they are peaceful and effective. Generally, I support them with a smile, as in this case.

A prime example of their methods is the aforementioned video, which is linked below. You see, despite the fact that 2007 was the second-warmest year on record and that the permanent ice pack, which is the foundation of polar bear habitat, withstood unprecedented melting, some people, including government officials, still declare polar bears not in danger from global warming.

Last time, I showed you a brief but important video about the type of peaceful protest needed to prevent the loss of more polar ice and eventual polar bear extinction. Lest my writings seem alarmist, let us take a sober examination of the problem.

If you didn't have a chance to watch it, the video points to a failure on the part of the government of the United States to list the polar bear as an endangered species.

Why is that a problem? The initial answer may seem obvious. Polar bears are endangered. However, there’s another reason of equal importance. Without global cooperation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we cannot fix the problem. By extension, since polar bears live in northern Canada as well as Alaska, the Canadian government has an equal responsibility to act.

Sadly, our friends to the north are correct in one element of their justification for deferring action. Canadians produce much less pollution than their Yankee neighbors so they should not be compelled to act until the government of the United States does.

Since my earliest days as an expert here on Keyboard Culture, I have focused on the need for reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and carbon as much as possible, through any practical means necessary. One of the most important ways is through carbon offsets, also known as renewable energy credits.

I gave you a list of the 3 carbon offset websites which Catrin and I use as well as the reason for our favoring them. Our opinion of those wonderful sites (Krystal Planet, NWF Wind Current and TerraPass) has not changed. However, I have discovered a charitable website which gives you the opportunity of seeing multiple ways to stop global warming all on a single page. The URL is

http://www.changingthepresent.org/global_warming/gifts

Why is this charitable website important?

Last month, I had the distinct privilege of attending the third International Solar Cities Congress in the charming city of Adelaide, along Australia’s south coast. The event was tremendous and several of my upcoming threads here on KBC will be inspired from the many revelations I had during my time Down Under.

Among the most fascinating was related by Gary Doer, Premier of Manitoba, Canada. In his remarks, Mr. Doer illustrated beautifully the contemporary effects of global warming and the consequences of polar ice melting in northern Canada.

Churchill, Manitoba is among the most accessible locations for viewing polar bears. Because these majestic beasts can kill a person with one swat of their front paws, it is necessary to enter their habitat in a tundra buggy as pictured above. It is, in essence, a mobile entertainment venue suitable for the harsh weather conditions and strong enough to protect its occupants from excessive bear inquisitiveness or aggression.

The map which begins this thread is a decade old and the red shaded areas show what will happen to my home if sea levels rise 3 feet. Sadly, it has become a best case scenario because most of the predictions from the scientific community about sea levels have come to fruition since the map was created.

How dire are our straits, then? I could overwhelm you with facts and figures. Fortunately, our allies at National Geographic have done the heavy lifting for us in the form of an excellent series entitled “Six Degrees.” I commend it to your immediate attention but be warned, it may give you nightmares.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/sixdegrees

DATELINE: JUNEAU, Alaska, April 18, 2008 – Montpelier, Vermont is known as one of the most picturesque capital cities in America. Having lived near there for almost 3 years in the 1980’s, I can attest that Montpelier’s reputation for natural splendor is very well earned. However, the tiny capital with the golden dome pales by comparison with Juneau, Alaska, located on the historic Marine highway.

Another key difference between these cities is that millennia ago, Montpelier sat atop a glacier. Juneau sits near one today, the Mendenhall Glacier, just a 20-minute drive from the center of town.

For decades, glacier and icecap science activities have been relatively convenient for researchers and tourists alike. Now, they are downright treacherous because of the record melting underway there. In recent years, Alaska has seen summertime high temperatures at or above 95° Fahrenheit and now Juneau has begun to pay the price.

June was my anniversary month as a Keyboard Culture expert. My tenure has been a wild but highly rewarding ride. It’s also been historic. In a year’s time, I went from having just a handful of readers to more than 20,000 unique visitors per month! For that, the thanks go to you, dear reader, so, thank you!

June also was historic because NASA global warming authority Dr. James Hansen commemorated the twentieth anniversary of his congressional testimony by giving an update on Capitol Hill. Not surprisingly, his performance was exemplary. Since he first raised a billowing red flag over the Capitol building that human behavior was at the core of global warming causes and effects, Dr. James Hansen has done nothing but speak louder, more frequently and to growing audiences. This man knows his subject.

“Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic sea ice is a current example.... the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer [and] more ominous tipping points loom.”

- Dr. James Hansen

briefing before United States Congress

June 23, 2008

As America’s leading authority on global warming (and arguably the top mind on the subject living anywhere in the world today), Dr. James Hansen has a very difficult job. He wears many hats, many of them tilted to the side of a crusader. As the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen is the top mind on the climate crisis on the payroll of the government of the United States.

“Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.”

- Professor Mike Davis

University of California at Irvine

Although science is at the heart of this blog, I am neither a scientist nor a science writer. I am an environmental journalist. However, science is at the heart of everything I write and advocate because without scientific laws, there is no existence.

Science has told us that we have poisoned our atmosphere and oceans but also that human landscape transformation now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude. In other words, the Earth really isn’t the Earth which humanity inherited.

There’s an old saying which some believe originated as a Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. The new millennium certainly qualifies! It often seems that the weather has become our worst enemy. If I were a polar bear, I know that I’d feel that way.

Greenland photo credit: Kim Hansen

So far this month, I’ve been telling you about the significance of proclamations about global warming which have emerged from the scientific community this year. The news is not good. In fact, it’s horrible. All peer-reviewed predictions about the causes and effects of global warming are coming to fruition and it may well happen that next month, summertime melting of polar ice in the Northern Hemisphere will be complete. We could have an ice-free Arctic for the first time in the history of humankind.

That’s a very big deal. In fact, some of the more conservative estimates by very respected academic bodies gave us until 2050 before we’d see a completely ice-free Arctic, even in summer. They were way off. Why? Was there a flaw in their interpretation? Could it be that atmospheric carbon content is not the best measure of the doom we have leveled on ourselves?

Long before traveling to Australia for the third International Solar Cities Congress this past February, I knew that water swirls counterclockwise from a sink south of the equator, versus clockwise in Florida (and everywhere in the United States). I knew that it is caused by the Earth’s rotation and recently learned the name of the cause, the Coriolis Effect. When I finally drained a sink in the lovely seaside city of Sydney, I grinned.

Before I had the chance, though, I sat on the longest airline flight of my life, Honolulu to Sydney. I stared out the window for much of the journey and, oddly, the Pacific Ocean didn’t seem so deep from cruising altitude. The Pacific Ocean is big! My five-hour flight from California to Hawaii, the day before I flew to Sydney, proved that!

Because of this, of course, the Pacific Ocean has immense currents. One of the largest is known as the North Pacific Gyre. It, too, is caused by the Coriolis Effect and originates from the same Latin root which gives us the word gyrate. The North Pacific Gyre spans thousands of miles. Imagine a slow-moving undercurrent from the Aleutian Islands to Hawaii. Yes, it’s that big and it is in constant motion, just as the whole planet is.

Soda Pop and Slushies

The dialog surrounding dead trees and bodies of fresh water in the Northeastern United States and Maritime Canadian Provinces (which I mentioned last time) ultimately yielded an hemispheric alert. Soon thereafter, the Clean Air Act of the United States was amended and updated to address acid rain, as it was known at the time, and thousands of lakes and surrounding forests were given a fair shot at recovery. As important as the landmark legislation was, though, it only postponed the inevitable, acidification of the world’s oceans.

If acid rain was caused by nitrogen and sulfur in smokestack and tailpipe emissions, why does an acidification problem remain if nitrogen and sulfur now are under control?

Back in July, I posited an ice-free arctic during the summer of 2009. We came very close in 2008 but how can I be certain that it will occur next year? The reasons are all around us. At the top of the list is the fact that the ambient temperature within the Arctic Circle right now is 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal!

The great ice shelf of Greenland continues not only to melt but accelerate in velocity of loss. In fact, the trillions of gallons of fresh water which are pouring into the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas from Greenland and other ice shelves are causing enormous shifts in oceanic salinity factors. This is not good!

As a journalist, I will not ask you to envision a future based on a science fiction movie. However, in May of 2004, Fox released a film which was science fiction at the time but has become more of a documentary. It is The Day After Tomorrow and I exhort you to rent it on DVD or Blu-ray immediately. Why? The horrible devastation inflicted on humanity, which makes the special effects of the film so compelling, is spawned in large part by huge shifts in oceanic salinity factors.

Guess what is happening right now, today, as you read this?

My friend, we have been living on the environmental equivalent of borrowed time for about 30 years and the bill is about to come due. We all must take action and the excuses of uncertainty become more ridiculous with each passing moment. To learn what you can do to help abate the climate crisis, visit one of my favorite websites:

FightGlobalWarming.com

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

photo courtesy of NOAA

Mohamed Nasheed is the new president of the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Maldives. He has taken office at the tail end of an opportunity to plan for an inevitable national emergency. Rising seas fueled by global warming are poised to render his tropical paradise uninhabitable and ultimately erase it from our maps.

This is no joke!

Now, here is my message for all of my readers as well as global warming skeptics. President Nasheed is not basing his call for an evacuation plan on the belief that his country is about to submerge for millennia. He is basing it on simple facts: we can measure the number of inches which the world’s seas already have risen in recent years and we know how many trillions of gallons of water are pouring out of our polar ice caps and alpine glaciers. The need to evacuate the Maldives in the next few years is a matter of statistics.

So, to everyone relying on the “La-La-La, I Can’t Hear You!” approach to the global climate crisis, allow me to pose a question: when does it end? How compelling must the evidence be for you to believe? I realize that some people are hopeless. Some people could find themselves riding in Dorothy’s cottage as it flies to the Land of Oz and still deny that spontaneous levitation is possible but we are not talking about some fantasy here. This is real.

So, if you have adopted the methods of carbon-neutral living which I advocate, good for you, now, tell a friend! If not, there’s no time like the present. Through the power of carbon credits, my wife Cat and I have lived carbon-neutral since 2005 and we are within striking distance of carbon-negative status in 2009. We still have a comfortable existence. We still drive. We have a large television set. We still travel by air. Yet, we have a very small net carbon footprint which is about to vanish. If we can do it, so can you.

Get with the program! Your human brethren on the thousands of inhabited islands of the world need our help!

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

Tempest In The Teacup

Why are the Earth’s polar regions the most susceptible areas of the planet to climate change? The answer contains two parts and both portend a frightening future.

Firstly, we have the fact that the atmosphere of the planet regulates temperature primarily by equalizing large forces. For example, hurricanes, tornados and other wind storms are a mechanism to deal in part with the fact that the sun heats the surface of the planet at differing rates as the planet spins on its axis. Additionally, large atmospheric currents help distribute not just the heat from the sun but particulate matter. Three of the most important currents are the North Pacific Gyre, the Intertropical Convergence Zone and the North Atlantic Oscillation.

Since significantly less than 1% of the total greenhouse gas production of the world occurs in the polar regions, the distribution of carbon particles, which occurs as a natural function of the same atmosphere which brings breathable air to regions with no natural oxygen production, brings to the polar regions the pollution which the rest of the world produces.

Secondly, the polar regions are the only large areas of the planet which rely on temperature stability from month to month. Put another way, there is little change in temperature in those areas as the seasons change compared with the temperate areas between the polar circles and the equator. Hence, vast quantities of ice have remained intact there since the end of the last ice age. By shifting heat to the polar regions, the ice melts abnormally because normal melting is minimal on account of the stable temperatures.

For these reasons, the marked uptick in temperature caused by global warming which we can see explained in the graphic above, leads to frightening predictions about what lies ahead. Those predictions are in line with the predictions of global warming experts going back more than a decade: atmospheric chaos which all but the wealthiest nations of the world will be unable to mitigate. Since I live in Florida, I am gravely concerned about rising seas and no fortification or sea wall has been designed to save millions of acres which are located at sea level from flooding when high tides become much higher.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

As I shared with you recently, NASA’s Dr. James Hansen shared with the Obama family and the world a letter on the climate crisis. He used it to close out calendar year 2008 and turn the page into a new year and new administration in the White House. His words were as compelling as always.

Luckily for us, he made himself available for a follow-on interview, granted to Robin McKie of The Observer newspaper. In it, he issued some of his harshest criticism yet for the industrialized world’s reliance on coal for energy and transportation. Naturally, I agree. He went on, however, to call for urgent and sweeping actions to respond to the climate crisis, including the broad abandoning of coal. Wow! Well done, sir!

I will not presume to attempt to improve on Dr. Hansen’s work in any way. However, there are a few key points which are not covered in the interview which bear elucidation:

1) The great tipping point is the proverbial line in the sand beyond which the planet is incapable of self-regulation and we see massive collapses of portions of our biosphere leading to cataclysmic starvation of people and wildlife as well as species extinction on a scale not seen since the last ice age.

We have moved past the tipping point when measured as a function of carbon in our atmosphere. The reason that we hear so little about that point is that no one really knows what to do about it. Nevertheless, we quite literally are living on borrowed time and must be prepared for the true effects of being past the tipping point to engage severely and without warning.

2) A carbon tax is the only long-term solution to the climate crisis. Simply put, what this tax will do is build into every product and service its true environmental cost with an emphasis on global warming. As you know from reading my work here on Keyboard Culture, carbon is the enemy of a healthy climate and until we identify its role in everything we do, we will remain slaves to cheap carbon-based energy and transportation.

You can read the entire interview with Dr. Hansen at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-climate-change

photo credit: Jeremy Harbeck

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

Relentless Continental Heat Wave

I have told you that we have moved past the tipping point of climate cataclysms as measured as a function of carbon in the atmosphere. However, what does this mean to us on a daily basis? Where will the worst effects begin? Will those effects occur in the polar regions first?

The simple answer to all of the above questions is that the scientific community does not know for certain because we are in a unique situation. However, we can extrapolate from the evidence at hand. We already have seen with alarming clarity just how fast the rate of polar ice cap melting has increased this decade. Indeed, 2009 likely will see an ice-free Arctic summer. Well, now we know how pockets of summer heat can extend beyond the polar regions.

At the end of January, during the Australian Open tennis tournament, the Land Down Under experienced yet another ratcheting up of record summer temperatures, so much so that outdoor competitions in the tournament had to be suspended for some time and defending champion Novak Djokovic withdrew from competition. Metal in nearby rail corridors even began to buckle.

Eleven of the last twelve years have been the hottest in Australia’s recorded history and 2009 looks to be even worse! Now, the continent of Australia does not extend into a polar region but it comes close. If Australia can experience decades-long drought and killer heat, what does the trend foreshadow for everyone else?

On that mark, no speculation is necessary. The opposite is true. When climatologists first told us what would happen in the age of global warming and the skeptics scoffed, the scientists who are proven increasingly accurate with each passing month told us that we’d see prolonged extremes of weather patterns, just as Australia is experiencing at this very moment.

Equally frightening, though, is the growing unpredictability of weather patterns in this age of global warming. The proper response for everyone, of course, is to adopt a carbon-neutral lifestyle immediately but beyond that, create a family emergency evacuation plan and rehearse its execution. Now that we know that the effects of global warming have spilled out of the polar regions with alarming ferocity, there is no time to waste in preparing for the worst.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

In July of 2008, I warned of the arrival in just a few years of an ice-free Arctic due to continued acceleration of greenhouse gas production in the United States and around the world. This past winter, we saw many regions of the Northern Hemisphere experience unseasonably cold temperatures which led some global warming skeptics to doubt the phenomenon with greater passion.

Fortunately, science won the argument yet again with NASA’s explanation of the global warming hole. So, where does the science of global warming lie today? Well, NASA’s explanation of the global warming hole was helpful but many skeptics were unswayed by NASA’s scientific conclusions. In fact, the inability of some skeptics to understand how abnormally cold temperatures in a single region can be unrelated to the larger, global move toward a warmer future has stymied some environmentalists. Hence, science must intensify its message yet again.

In recent days, European scientists from INSU-CNRS completed a broad, comprehensive study of Arctic sea ice in an attempt to lay to rest once and for all the debate about the melting of polar ice during years when the Northern hemisphere experiences particularly frigid winters. They conducted literally thousands of examinations of core samples of Arctic sea ice. Sadly, their persuasive conclusions point toward a very bleak future:

• Transpolar drift has accelerated greatly (10% per decade) over the past century, indicating a loss of depth and stability of the permanent ice shelf.

• The mean deformation rate of polar ice has increased by half in recent years, both summer ice and winter ice.

• Summer ice no longer remains solid for 3 years. In other words, all of the ancient sea ice in the Arctic has melted. Everything which we see there is new. This is arguably the most damning statistic of all because it concludes that the abnormally cold winter of 2009 was inadequate to save ice from as recently as 3 years ago.

In conclusion, the number of convincing arguments against the causes and effects of global warming continues to dwindle right along with the thickness and lifespan of Arctic sea ice. We now can witness with our own eyes just how quickly the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer. Perhaps most frightening of all is the possibility that it will occur this year. For all our sakes, not to mention the fate of the polar bear, I hope that it does not happen.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

Back in May, I told you about the

horrifying loss of multiyear ice in the Arctic and how this adds a great
deal of new evidence as to not only the factual basis of global warming but its
accelerating rate.

While I found the scientific methodology and resulting maps to be quite
compelling, I would understand if inexperienced readers might be somewhat
skeptical of what it all means. Enter ASTER Imaging from NASA. ASTER stands for
Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer. As it regards
global warming, ASTER was used in a collaboration between NASA and Japan’s
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to create the world’s largest 3D map.

Covering the surface of our planet between 83 degrees North and 83 degrees South
latitudes, the ASTER map features intriguing discoveries, including with regard
to glaciers in the Bhutan Himalayas, giant sources of potable water for roughly
a billion people. Simply put, the glaciers are not melting at a uniform pace yet
they should be. Global warming is a logical choice when attempting to pinpoint
the blame.

Why?

Well, as I often repeat here on Keyboard Culture, our planet’s atmosphere is in
a constant state of compensation, attempting to fix through temperature
regulation and storm systems the damage which we have inflicted and continue to
inflict.

What is to be done? Well, the answer to that question has not changed. We need
to stop burning fossil fuels and deforesting the planet!

If you are interested in more specifics, examine the image at the end of this
post. Here is NASA’s description of what it means...

“(ASTER) data have revealed significant spatial variability in glacier flow,
such that the glacier velocities in the end zones on the south side exhibit
significantly lower velocities (9 to 18 meters, or 30 to 60 feet per year),
versus much higher flow velocities on the north side (18 to 183 meters, or 60 to
600 feet per year). The higher velocity for the northern glaciers suggests that
the southern glaciers have substantially stagnated ice.”

source: NASA

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

Since 1959, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has tracked the health of South Cascade glacier in Washington and the Wolverine and Gulcana glaciers in Alaska. The American land mass covers a wide variety of climatic zones and the three aforementioned glaciers contain important information because they themselves are found in different climatic zones and at varying elevations.

The 50-year update to the USGS report on the glacier was released a few weeks ago. It told a very grim tale. Glaciers not only are melting fast but far faster than even the worst case scenario which many climatologists predicted just a few years ago. For example, during the 50-year period, the South Cascade glacier in Washington States has lost half its volume, half!

Since glaciers are so vast and change so slowly, it’s easy for skeptics to dismiss statistics such as those just published by the USGS but our posture needs to be the exact opposite. Glaciers play a vital role in providing fresh water to literally hundreds of millions of people and endangered species the world over. In fact, they act as giant, above-ground aquifers. Once they’re gone, people and species which rely on them for water will have no suitable replacement and will be forced to relocate or perish.

The experts at the USGS have attested that global warming is to blame for this horrific loss. However, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can read the entire report online for free. The URL is

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3046

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

photos courtesy of: United States Geological Survey

When most of us ponder the devastation to wildlife from global warming and polar ice cap melting, the polar bear comes to mind right away. That’s understandable because the polar bear is such an iconic species. Moreover, there’s no doubt that polar bears are threatened because it is a commonly known fact that the planet is losing billions of acres of permanent ice pack every year.

However, the impacts from habitat loss to species in the Arctic threaten many species and the walrus is running a close second to the polar bear. You see, whereas polar bears travel in small family groups, walruses gather in large numbers. So, when their habitat melts, they literally pile on one another in a very primitive manner. So, as the loss of habitat worsens, smaller, younger walruses which can’t evade larger animals vying for their space can quite literally be crushed.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, the situation is so dire that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering adding the walrus to the Endangered Species List due to habitat loss from global warming. How horrible!

Now, as the October 24 Day of Climate Action marks the final countdown to COP15 in Copenhagen in December, it is vital that we spread the word as far and wide as we can. Global warming truly is a global threat and unless we take definitive, immediate action, we will lose more and more species, including the unlikely victim of polar ice cap melting, the walrus.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

The old axiom that seeing is believing is seldom more true than with respect to global warming. Recently, a friend of mine, who is plugged in to the cloak and dagger battle which is the battle against fossil fuel companies who seek to destroy climate reform, described the move toward renewal energy as a fight to the death. He was right on.

Disinformation and feel good propaganda are two key tools used by advocates of the status quo and they use them to great effect. Fortunately, there are advocates of reform who know how to wield the truth with equal skill. Noted photographer James Balog and his crack scheme at Extreme Ice Survey have come through with a multimedia presentation which rivals An Inconvenient Truth in its resonance.

The visuals are simply amazing and, most importantly, undeniable. My position on the results of the Extreme Ice Survey is that everyone needs to watch the chilling images of glacial loss, no pun intended.

I exhort you to do so immediately at

EtremeIceSurvey.org

Then, check out Mr. Balog’s presentation at TED 2009 in Oxford:

http://tinyurl.com/n9fhat

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

photos courtesy of Extreme Ice Survey

I’ve been warning for more than 2 years about the dangers of polar ice cap melting. It is an ominous threat and a growing crisis which worsens every time another pound of greenhouse gas emissions is dumped capriciously into our atmosphere. However, other than the fact that most anyone can understand that an ice free Arctic is a bad thing for polar bears, walruses, whales and so on, what can the average person really say about this catastrophe-in-the-making?

When, specifically, will we have an ice free Arctic? Will it be completely free of ice during each of the 12 months of the year? Which Arctic zone will lose all of its ice first? The questions are daunting, which is why no one has given us definitive answers, yet, that is.

Meet noted explorer and Arctic advocate Pen Hadow. He has many great achievements to his name, including the first solo journey without resupply from Canada to the Geographic North Pole. Simply put, Mr. Hadow has more experience on the Arctic sea ice than most and he is gravely concerned with the terrifying changes to the Arctic over the last two decades, including, most especially, shifts in the thickness, location AND COLOR of the ice.

As a true advocate for the changes which we all must make in order to save ourselves from an ice free Arctic, Mr. Hadow has lent his name and vast expertise to the Catlin Arctic Survey, which describes itself as a pioneering scientific expedition to help determine the lifespan of the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover. Through this good work, soon we all will know precisely when humanity will lose its ability to witness the Aurora Borealis from the permanent ice pack of the Arctic.

I commend the intrepid efforts of Pen Hadow and his valiant allies at the Catlin Arctic Survey and invite you to visit the website of the initiative. There, you will find abundant and disturbing details of how these dedicated environmentalists can quantify for all of us just how much devastation we have meted out on the tender Arctic through our reckless consumption of fossil fuels.

The homepage of the Catlin Arctic Survey can be found at

CatlinArcticSurvey.com

credit: Catlin Arctic Survey

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

“Ice is nature’s best thermometer, perhaps its most sensitive and unambiguous indicator of climate change. When ice gets sufficiently warm, it melts. It asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts.”

– Henry N. Pollack, Ph.D.

Ann Arbor, MI

When former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize roughly two years ago, many people lost sight of the fact that Mr. Gore shared with prize with one of the most prestigious scientific bodies in the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is part of the United Nations. Given Mr. Gore’s stature and the success of his book and film, this is an understandable oversight but Mr. Gore has been consistent in sharing his fame with the scientists who make his work possible.

A key member of the IPCC and advisor to the highest levels of government is noted geophysicist Dr. Henry N. Pollack of the University of Michigan. Pollack has a reputation for explaining how the world works and he has written a new book, A World Without Ice.

Last month, I was contacted by Lisa Munley with TLC Book Tours. She extended the kind invitation for me to review Dr. Pollack’s fine opus. It is an honor and privilege to report to you my findings. In short, I recommend that everyone read this book.

In my blog I’ve been warning about how life will change when we have an ice free Arctic. That’s a huge problem and a proverbial canary in our hydrologic coal mine. However, Dr. Pollack’s delightful tome explains the historical and geographic significance of ice, the coda to the story of losing ice in the Arctic, which is a nightmarish world in which we have no natural accumulations of ice anywhere.

Sadly, humanity’s reckless abuse of its own habitat is taking us toward the fateful collision between carbon emissions in the atmosphere and the planetary absence of glaciers and sea ice. The good news is that we can seek redress with the globe before it kills too many of us in response to our abuse of its natural systems. We can embrace bold, swift action and turn the corner on the crisis of our own making which worsens every day.

To help start the process, former Vice President Al Gore has written the forward to A World Without Ice in which he heaps praise on Dr. Pollack. I echo the plaudits. This book is about more than ice. It is about ice and people, about the inexorable link between ice and the abitability of this planet. We must cherish it and vouchsafe it.

Why should you care about ice? Its role in protecting us from the ravages of solar radiation cannot be overstated. Without it, we won’t have the same environment we do today. It is just that simple and the warning signs quite literally are right beneath our feet. Indeed, Shaopeng Huang, a colleague of Dr. Pollack’s and fellow geophysicist, has reported that climate change has resulted in a dramatic heating of subsurface rocks. Given that planetary ice accumulations are a vital shield against precisely that, we should be gravely concerned and take immediate action.

Ice is our friend. I shudder to ruminate on our world without it. If our environmental misdeeds lead to the extinction of it, millions of people will pay for the loss with their lives, as will additional thousands of endangered species. Dr. Pollack’s fine narrative explains why everyone should care and I exhort you not to waste a single moment before exploring this 300-page work from Avery Books.

You can learn more about the author and his work at

WorldWithoutIce.com

As the threat to the existence of The Maldives and other low-lying nations grows by the day, President Mohamed Nasheed’s submerged cabinet meeting has become a mere beginning to a global campaign to stave off an humanitarian disaster. It has become clear even to the most staunch skeptics of global warming that the head of state of The Maldives is determined not to be flooded out of office. Good for him!

Speaking at the Climate Vulnerable Forum last month, Nasheed issued a call for all nations threatened by rising seas to join him in a survival pact through a carbon neutral future. The good people at 350.org are assisting and I cannot think of a better message as we close out one of the most chaotic years of weather on record.

Given the growing risk to many nations from rising seas, I invite you to visit the special page on 350.org to add your name as a demonstration of support for the survival pact. The URL is

350.org/survival-pact

Photo Credit: Chiara Goia for Time Magazine

The imperiled fate of the polar bear, the world’s largest land carnivore, is easy to ignore because this majestic species lives in some of the most remote territory and enjoys natural camouflage, until now. The wintry splendor which used to surround the polar bear during every month of the year is melting at unheard of rates and killing off nearly all but the strongest specimens in the process.

Despite all of this needless, and often dismissed, devastation, no one with the political power to do anything about it seems to be acting. For this and several other reasons, a fine organization which I greatly admire, Environmental Defense, recently published a 6-part blog post which focuses a reader’s attention with laser-like precision on the plight of the polar bear and how this majestic species is suffering right now, today, because of global warming.

I exhort you to read it immediately at

edf.org/polarbearweek

Why should anyone but Eskimos care about this modern tragedy? Beyond the moral rectitude of not knowingly or deliberately causing the extinction of another species, the plight of the polar bear is an omen of the fate of billions of people. Yes, that’s right, billions.

We in the industrialized world have lost sight of the fact that billions of people still derive sustenance from subsistence farming (and/or participate in basic agrarian economies). As the effects of global warming propagate from the Arctic toward the Equator, the natural systems which make farming possible will shift and millions of acres of agrarian lands no longer will be arable.

In short, the suffering of the polar bear as admirably described in the 6-part blog post from Environmental Defense can be proved scientifically as a description of the food poverty and starvation which await billions of people in the coming years and decades. So, if you haven’t checked out that URL quite yet, why not visit it now?

edf.org/polarbearweek

credit: nwf.org

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

I have warned many times about the impending milestone in the progression of global warming from a terrifying result of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels and unsustainable lifestyles to a planetwide crisis which will kill millions and displace hundreds of millions of more. While the scientific basis for predictions of an ice-free Arctic during the summer months strikes me as overwhelmingly conclusive, I can understand where some skeptics remain unconvinced. Now, thanks to the brilliant work of scientific vanguards, we have new evidence from which we can extrapolate the inevitable.

At first glance, one might be struck by the work of Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School and Dr. Leonid Polyak from Ohio State University as pointing to bad news which doesn’t quite rise to the level of global emergency. However, if you fall into this category, I will hasten to emphasize a key detail. Maslowski and Polyak point to an ice-free Arctic in the autumnal months by the end of this decade.

Yes, you read that right. Maslowski and Polyak have offer scientific conclusions that we will see an ice-free Arctic during autumn by the end of this decade. In fact, they inform us that the Arctic ice pack is at its thinnest and smallest coverage area in at least several millennia. Yes, the news is that bad.

By extension, then, we know that we will experience ice-free Arctic summers in our immediate future. I shudder to ponder what that will mean for us and hundreds of endangered species.

We are turning the Arctic Sea into a salty form of slush. Shame on us!

jpg credit: US Geological Survey via flickr

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

It seems that everyone but global warming skeptics is gravely concerned about polar ice cap melting. I certainly am. For more than a decade, scientists have been warning about the cataclysm of melting ice, particularly polar ice cap melting. Indeed, just a few months ago, I reviewed the fabulous book, A World Without Ice, by Dr. Henry N. Pollack. If you haven’t read it, I exhort you to visit your favorite library or book store immediately to read what this subject matter expert informs us about losing our primordial polar ice caps.

Why do I raise this particular point on this particular date? The simple, tragic truth is that predictions of polar ice cap melting already were long past legitimate skepticism about 5 years ago and now are so blatant that the only option which vocal skeptics have is to ignore the truth or, even worse, spew their basely and harmful propaganda. Polar ice cap melting has reached the tipping point in speed and irreversibility!

Every mammal had better grow gills and fast!

Surely, I am just another alarmist, right? The facts, from some of the most respected scientific bodies in the world, such as NASA and NOAA, cry out for themselves. June 2010 saw the fastest pace of polar ice cap melting ever recorded. The skeptics declared it an anomaly because the pace in July slowed. To the world’s collective horror, the final pace for July was even faster than in June, apparently because all of the thinner ice melted in June and the thicker ice needed time to build momentum of melting in July.

If the massive devastation of polar ice cap melting in June and July weren’t bad enough, in early August, the continent-sized ice sheet of Iceland lost a huge island to breakage.

The era of the ice-free Arctic is at hand, just as I warned right here last year and the year before.

The horror of it all is enough to keep everyone up at night. It certainly does so to me!

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler