What we’re doing to the arctic, we’re doing to ourselves – Scientist

 

RT America | April 20, 2016

Seven people have died from heavy rains and flooding in the Houston, Texas region. The area saw 17 inches of rain in less than 24 hours, causing more than $5 billion in damage and destroying thousands of homes. But severe weather isn’t unique to the US, with massive floodings currently underway in Chile, drought in India, and an El Nino affecting countries around the globe. So is climate change to blame for extreme weather? To help answer that question, Conservation Biologist Dr. Reese Halter joins ‘News With Ed.’

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From Rising Seas to Walruses, the Arctic’s Endangerment Affects Us All

A ringed seal pup finds shelter on ice. Ringed seals, like many Arctic mammals, depend on sea ice to survive – ice that is swiftly disappearing. (Photo: Ringed Seal via Shutterstock)

 

Dahr Jamail | Truthout | November 30, 2015

As world leaders meet at the COP21 climate conference in Paris, we would do well to turn our eyes northward. The impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) are nowhere as evident as they are in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at least twice as fast as the average global temperature increase.

The most obvious ramification of this has taken the form of dramatically milder winters in the far north, coupled with temperature increases in the waters of the Arctic Ocean – both of which are dramatically increasing the melting of the sea ice, which is leaving more of the water’s surface exposed, thus allowing more heat to reach the ocean during the summer. This process is likely the most well-known and most important feedback loop in ACD today – and because of it, land ice and permafrost in the Arctic are melting at a record pace.

Despite the remoteness of the Arctic, the region is deeply linked to the rest of the planet: Everything from our weather, to coastal flooding, to what we eat is tied to the Arc tic and the events that are rapidly changing it.

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Environmentalists Blast Obama’s Decision to Let Shell Drill in Arctic

Kulluk aground on the southeast side of Sitkalidak Island on January 1, 2013. (image: U.S. Coast Guard)

 

Reynard Loki | AlterNet | August 23, 2015

Last Monday, just weeks after he gave Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) final approval to go ahead with its controversial plan to resume oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, President Obama greenlighted a request by the company to drill even deeper for oil than it ever has before. Granted through the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the approval lets Shell start drilling in the Arctic for the first time in since 2012, when it was forced to halt drilling operations amidst a series of accidents, culminating in the washing ashore of its drilling rig Kulluk on Sitkalidak, a pristine uninhabited island off the Alaskan coast.

Mixed messages

“It sends a terrible signal to the rest of the world for the United States to be using public resources to promote [Arctic] development,” said Niel Lawrence of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “We have to make clear to the rest of the world that we are all in on a clean energy future. And we’ve got to stop giving the rest of the world license to go exploring by permitting Shell to do it.”

Could Obama’s decision help fuel an international Arctic oil rush? Under international law, four other countries besides the U.S. — Canada, Norway, Russia and Denmark (via Greenland) — have Arctic exploration and resource rights to areas within 200 nautical miles of their coasts. In Norway, the fear of oil spills in the Arctic have made lawmakers push back on the plans to let oil companies press further northward into the Arctic Circle. But Russia is going full bore, with plans to deploy a floating nuclear reactor to power its Arctic drilling operations by October 2016. Canada has a similar plan to power its remote mining projects.

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Report: Polar Bears Unlikely to Survive Unless Global Emissions Reduced

Polar bear. (photo: Brian Battaile/U.S. Geological Survey/AP)

 

Al Jazeera America | Reader Supported News | July 3, 2015

US Fish and Wildlife Service says species may not survive unless emission of greenhouse gases is curbed

 

olar bears are at risk of dying off if humans don’t reverse the trend of global warming, a blunt U.S. government report filed Thursday said.

“The single most important step for polar bear conservation is decisive action to address Arctic warming,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a draft recovery plan, part of the process after the agency listed the species as threatened in 2008.

“Short of action that effectively addresses the primary cause of diminishing sea ice, it is unlikely that polar bears will be recovered.”

Halting Arctic warming will require global action, the report said. Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming, which is reducing the Arctic’s amount of summer sea ice.

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Climate Change Demands Marshall Plan Levels of Response

Polar bear in the Arctic. (photo: Ralph Lee Hopkins/Corbis)

Naomi Klein | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | March 7, 2015

voice came over the intercom: would the passengers of Flight 3935, scheduled to depart Washington DC, for Charleston, South Carolina, kindly collect their carry-on luggage and get off the plane. They went down the stairs and gathered on the hot tarmac. There they saw something unusual: the wheels of the US Airways jet had sunk into the black pavement as if it were wet cement. The wheels were lodged so deep, in fact, that the truck that came to tow the plane away couldn’t pry it loose. The airline had hoped that without the added weight of the flight’s 35 passengers, the aircraft would be light enough to pull. It wasn’t. Someone posted a picture: “Why is my flight cancelled? Because DC is so damn hot that our plane sank four inches into the pavement.”

Eventually, a larger, more powerful vehicle was brought in to tow the plane and this time it worked; the plane finally took off, three hours behind schedule. A spokesperson for the airline blamed the incident on “very unusual temperatures”.

The temperatures in the summer of 2012 were indeed unusually hot. (As they were the year before and the year after.) And it’s no mystery why this has been happening: the profligate burning of fossil fuels, the very thing that US Airways was bound and determined to do despite the inconvenience presented by a melting tarmac. This irony – the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels – did not stop the passengers of Flight 3935 from re-embarking and continuing their journeys. Nor was climate change mentioned in any of the major news coverage of the incident.

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Climate Change Poses Growing Threat of Conflict in the Arctic, Report Finds

Suzanne Goldenberg | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | May 14,2014

Report by former military officers says prospect of ice-free Arctic has set off scramble for shipping lanes and for access to oil

 

limate change poses a growing security threat and could cause conflict in the Arctic, a group of retired American generals and admirals said on Tuesday.

In a new report, the former military officers said the Pentagon had been caught out by the rapid changes under way in the Arctic because of the melting of the sea ice.

“Things are accelerating in the Arctic faster than we had looked at,” said General Paul Kern, the chairman of the Centre for Naval Analysis Corporation’s military advisory board, which produced the report. “The changes there appear to be much more radical than we envisaged.”

The prospect of an ice-free Arctic by mid-century had set off a scramble for shipping lanes by Russia and China especially, and for access to oil and other resources. “As the Arctic becomes less of an ice-contaminated area it represents a lot of opportunites for Russia,” he said. Oil companies were also moving into the Arctic.

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Arctic Sea Ice Falls to Fifth Lowest Level on Record

Suzanne Goldenberg | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | April 3, 2014

National Snow and Ice Data Center says findings reinforce trend that Arctic sea ice disappearing much faster than expected

 

rctic sea ice remained on its death spiral on Wednesday, with the amount of winter ice cover falling to its fifth lowest on the satellite record, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

The scientists said Arctic sea ice extent for March averaged 14.80m sq km. That’s 730,000 sq km below the 1981-2010 satellite average.

The latest findings reinforce a trend that could see the Arctic losing all of its ice cover in the summer months within decades.

The world’s leading scientists this week admitted that Arctic sea ice was disappearing much faster than expected.

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