tagged w/ Arctic Meltdown
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YOKOSUKA, Japan (AP) — To the world's military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.
By Arctic standards, the region is already buzzing with military activity, and experts believe that will increase significantly in the years ahead.
Last month, Norway wrapped up one of the largest Arctic maneuvers ever — Exercise Cold Response — with 16,300 troops from 14 countries training on the ice for everything from high intensity warfare to terror threats. Attesting to the harsh conditions, five Norwegian troops were killed when their C-130 Hercules aircraft crashed near the summit of Kebnekaise, Sweden's highest mountain.
The U.S., Canada and Denmark held major exercises two months ago, and in an unprecedented move, the military chiefs of the eight main Arctic powers — Canada, the U.S., Russia, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland — gathered at a Canadian military base last week to specifically discuss regional security issues.
None of this means a shooting war is likely at the North Pole any time soon. But as the number of workers and ships increases in the High North to exploit oil and gas reserves, so will the need for policing, border patrols and — if push comes to shove — military muscle to enforce rival claims.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its untapped natural gas is in the Arctic. Shipping lanes could be regularly open across the Arctic by 2030 as rising temperatures continue to melt the sea ice, according to a National Research Council analysis commissioned by the U.S. Navy last year.
What countries should do about climate change remains a heated political debate. But that has not stopped north-looking militaries from moving ahead with strategies that assume current trends will continue.
Russia, Canada and the United States have the biggest stakes in the Arctic. With its military budget stretched thin by Iraq, Afghanistan and more pressing issues elsewhere, the United States has been something of a reluctant northern power, though its nuclear-powered submarine fleet, which can navigate for months underwater and below the ice cap, remains second to none.
Russia — one-third of which lies within the Arctic Circle — has been the most aggressive in establishing itself as the emerging region's superpower.
Rob Huebert, an associate political science professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, said Russia has recovered enough from its economic troubles of the 1990s to significantly rebuild its Arctic military capabilities, which were a key to the overall Cold War strategy of the Soviet Union, and has increased its bomber patrols and submarine activity.
He said that has in turn led other Arctic countries — Norway, Denmark and Canada — to resume regional military exercises that they had abandoned or cut back on after the Soviet collapse. Even non-Arctic nations such as France have expressed interest in deploying their militaries to the Arctic.
"We have an entire ocean region that had previously been closed to the world now opening up," Huebert said. "There are numerous factors now coming together that are mutually reinforcing themselves, causing a buildup of military capabilities in the region. This is only going to increase as time goes on."
Noting that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, the U.S. Navy in 2009 announced a beefed-up Arctic Roadmap by its own task force on climate change that called for a three-stage strategy to increase readiness, build cooperative relations with Arctic nations and identify areas of potential conflict.
"We want to maintain our edge up there," said Cmdr. Ian Johnson, the captain of the USS Connecticut, which is one of the U.S. Navy's most Arctic-capable nuclear submarines and was deployed to the North Pole last year. "Our interest in the Arctic has never really waned. It remains very important."
But the U.S. remains ill-equipped for large-scale Arctic missions, according to a simulation conducted by the U.S. Naval War College. A summary released last month found the Navy is "inadequately prepared to conduct sustained maritime operations in the Arctic" because it lacks ships able to operate in or near Arctic ice, support facilities and adequate communications.
"The findings indicate the Navy is entering a new realm in the Arctic," said Walter Berbrick, a War College professor who participated in the simulation. "Instead of other nations relying on the U.S. Navy for capabilities and resources, sustained operations in the Arctic region will require the Navy to rely on other nations for capabilities and resources."
He added that although the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet is a major asset, the Navy has severe gaps elsewhere — it doesn't have any icebreakers, for example. The only one in operation belongs to the Coast Guard. The U.S. is currently mulling whether to add more icebreakers.
Acknowledging the need to keep apace in the Arctic, the United States is pouring funds into figuring out what climate change will bring, and has been working closely with the scientific community to calibrate its response.
"The Navy seems to be very on board regarding the reality of climate change and the especially large changes we are seeing in the Arctic," said Mark C. Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences University of Colorado. "There is already considerable collaboration between the Navy and civilian scientists and I see this collaboration growing in the future."
The most immediate challenge may not be war — both military and commercial assets are sparse enough to give all countries elbow room for a while — but whether militaries can respond to a disaster.
Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the London-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said militaries probably will have to rescue their own citizens in the Arctic before any confrontations arise there.
"Catastrophic events, like a cruise ship suddenly sinking or an environmental accident related to the region's oil and gas exploration, would have a profound impact in the Arctic," she said. "The risk is not militarization; it is the lack of capabilities while economic development and human activity dramatically increases that is the real risk."YOKOSUKA, Japan (AP) — To the world's military leaders, the debate over... more
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Scientists have tied the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, caused by global warming pollution, to the recent extreme winters that hit the United States last year and Europe this year. In “Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall,” a new report published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers find that the loss of polar ice has changed atmospheric circulation and increased atmospheric water vapor, driving the popularly-dubbed “snowpocalypse” conditions:
“We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.”
Sea ice decline is contributing to catastrophic, deadly winters in two ways, the researchers find. The loss of ice changes wind patterns over the northern oceans, which in turn disrupts the jet stream, allowing cold polar air to plunge across the northern hemisphere. “If there is a dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice, the westerly winds that blow across the North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans are weakened,” lead author Jiping Liu, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Climatewire. “This means we will have a wavier jet stream.”
The loss of ice and warmer temperatures mean that there is much more evaporation from the Arctic Ocean, leading to a higher moisture content in the polar air that is pulled south. That means that intense snowfall is more likely, especially as the polar air collides with warm, moist air from the south.
In 1999, Kevin Trenberth explained how global warming would lead to more intense precipitation events, including snow storms.
The decline in Arctic sea ice is one of the primary indicators of man-made global warming. Arctic sea ice cover began shrinking decades ago, with a rapid acceleration in the last decade. Sea ice decline has been much more rapid than projected by climate models. Some scientists now expect the Arctic to be effectively ice-free during the summer in less than 30 years. The United States and other nations have responded to this troubling collapse of the planetary thermostat by making plans to drill for fossil fuels in the Arctic oceans. That decision hastens our march into a “no-analogue world,” in the words of NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco.
By Brad Johnson on Feb 28, 2012 at 11:17 am
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Virginia GOP Mocks Epic Snow Storm As '12 Inches Of Global Warming'Scientists have tied the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, caused by global warming... more
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CO2 is termed the Earth's biggest control knob. It hadn't been until now, because a knob implies something that someone can turn to control things. In a normal, natural world and on relatively short timescales, say tens of thousands of years, carbon dioxide is interlocked with global mean temperature and other variables. Temperatures can drive carbon dioxide levels up or down, which in turn drive temperatures further up or down.
Carbon dioxide acts as a feedback that enhances temperature changes.
This is most obvious during the transitions between glacial and interglacial periods, when temperatures rise or drop and CO2 seems to follow along like a happy puppy. What is not obvious when looking at the readings is that while orbital forcings cause the initial change in temperatures, and CO2 levels rise or fall in accordance with that initial change, the subsequent temperatures themselves also rise and fall in accordance with the changing CO2 levels.
The basic formula behind a glacial termination is that something (orbital forcings) starts the increase in temperature. Actually, what really starts it is a change in the length and severity of northern hemisphere summers, without changing the overall amount of radiation reaching the planet at all. That stays fairly constant.
These seasonal changes in turn cause the ice sheets covering the northern hemisphere land masses to begin to melt. This reflects less sunlight back into space, and that really does change the amount of energy that the planet receives from the sun, which leads to warming. It also results in the release of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, which warms the planet even further.
Then CO2 kicks in. The oceans warm. Warmer water cannot hold as much dissolved carbon dioxide and so the oceans release some CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming. The increased warming causes the ice sheets to retreat further, and the oceans to warm further, and more CO2 to be released.
This continues, but with limits. There is (or had been) only so much CO2 that could make its way into the atmosphere. The system only pushes this cycle so far. The many previous glacial terminations in the past 2.5 million years (a period known as the Pleistocene Epoch) have seen lows of about 180 ppm of CO2, and highs between 250 ppm and 300 ppm.
The main point is that temperatures and CO2 are interlocked, or at least had been until now. Temperature changes had to get the ball rolling, so on a graph they will lead the way, but the two work in concert. One is not pulling a leash to drag the other along. They each push and pull the other, working their way from low to high, or high to low, as an integrated system.
CO2 does not "lag" temperature. That's a simplistic, inaccurate and indiscriminate view of a complex interaction.
Turning the Knob
Unfortunately, contrary to recent natural history, man has learned how to remove the regulator and to dial up a far higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 has become the climate's biggest control knob in the last two centuries or so, in the sense that it is in fact a control that mankind can twist, turn, tweak and, sadly, overdo.
A glacial termination happens on very, very long timescales relative to man. What we have done in the past two centuries, however, applies a change to CO2 levels — implying an equivalent change in climate — that would otherwise take nature 10 to 12 thousand years.
CO2 was once interlocked with temperature. In the past 200 years we have instead taken 337 gigatonnes of carbon out of the ground and injected it into the atmosphere and the oceans. Nature spent the better part of several hundred million years converting that carbon into new forms (coal, oil, gas) and sequestering it deep under the surface of the earth.
Man will be able to undo in 200 years what took nature hundreds of millions of years to accomplish, and in so doing, in that same time frame, we are duplicating a feat that normally takes nature 10,000 years to accomplish (i.e. increasing atmospheric CO2 levels by two thirds).
And, as an important point, we have no idea if we are capable of duplicating nature's feat of again sequestering that carbon underground. We have far too easily turned the knob in one direction, but with no capacity whatsoever to turn it in the other.
More at the linkCO2 is termed the Earth's biggest control knob. It hadn't been until now,... more
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PHOTO: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10 in this file image released September 16, 2008. Arctic nations are promising to avoid new “Cold War” scrambles linked to climate change, but a thaw may allow new shipping routes. REUTERS/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Two German ships set off on Friday on the first commercial journey from Asia to western Europe via the Arctic through the fabled Northeast Passage – a trip made possible by climate change...PHOTO: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive... more
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The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square miles (square kilometers) of ice on Sunday in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching through satellite eyes for a possible record low polar ice cap.
From the barren Arctic shore of this village in Canada's far northwest, 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) north of Seattle, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice retreating more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend the ice edge lay some 80 miles (128 kilometers) at sea.
"Forty years ago, it was 40 miles (64 kilometers) out," said Gruben, 89, patriarch of a local contracting business.
Global average temperatures rose 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius) in the past century, but Arctic temperatures rose twice as much or even faster, almost certainly in good part because of manmade greenhouse gases, researchers say.
In late July the mercury soared to almost 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in this settlement of 900 Inuvialuit, the name for western Arctic Eskimos.
"The water was really warm," Gruben said. "The kids were swimming in the ocean."
As of Thursday, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported, the polar ice cap extended over 2.61 million square miles (6.75 million square kilometers) after having shrunk an average 41,000 square miles (106,000 square kilometers) a day in July -- equivalent to one Indiana or three Belgiums daily.The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square miles (square kilometers)... more
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Mercury Levels in Seals Rising - Reverse the Trend
Target: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
Sponsored by: Care2
Global warming is changing the ecology of the Arctic Ocean - and the effects on the inhabitants of the Arctic are just starting to come to light. A just-released research report links vanishing sea ice to a shocking rise in mercury levels in ringed seals.
Cod are a very mercury-contaminated species - and a favorite of ringed seals during the ice-free season. Because the ice-free season is becoming longer and longer due to global warming, researchers say, the feeding season for ringed seals is also becoming longer - and as a consequence, the seals are taking in too much mercury.
The mercury contamination will only get worse for the Arctic ringed seal unless we start to seriously address global warming! More research is needed to see just how the transfer of mercury in the food web is being affected by global warming. Urge Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to ensure his department puts resources behind investigating the impact of global warming on seals and other marine life.Mercury Levels in Seals Rising - Reverse the Trend
Target: Interior Secretary Ken... more
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Photo: "Losing their home"
Today, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan have a piece on the alarming decline of Arctic sea ice. In and of itself the story isn’t that surprising: scientists have known for a while that the ice is declining; new data just confirms that it’s happening faster than originally estimated. That’s consistent with all sorts of new observational data on the effects of climate change, which across the board seem to be exceeding scientists’ most pessimistic predictions.
What jumped out at me is this bit, toward the bottom of the piece:
The new evidence—including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s—contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979. [my emphasis]
Hard to read it as anything but a rebuke from the news team to Post editor Fred Hiatt and his editorial page’s “multi-layer editing process,” which allowed Will to lie and mislead on climate change three times just in the last few months, even after being corrected, publicly, by multiple sources.
Along the same lines, see this new piece on the Post’s weather blog, by Andrew Freeman: “Will Misleads Readers on Climate Science - Again.”
In response to the Will controversy, numerous people have made the point that people who work for the Post—the ones who aren’t full of shit—have a responsibility to speak out about their employer’s willingness to mislead readers.
It appears some of them are trying.Photo: "Losing their home"
Today, Washington Post reporters Juliet... more
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Boyd Warner TREASURES the memory of killing his 1st polar bear. It was 2003. For days he had stalked his prey on the frozen wastelands north of Pond Inlet, one of Canada's most isolated Inuit communities deep inside the Arctic Circle. His dog team picked up the scent of an 8ft adult male & they hurtled over the ice: the hunt was on.
"It was one of those beautiful Arctic days," recalled Mr Warner. "We'd had about 14 hrs of sunlight and were completely surrounded by nature. "The moment of death comes QUICKLY for the bear"... USUALLY with a shot to the heart just behind the bear's fore leg. "You might track one for days through the ice but a single shot to the heart kills IT instantly."
For WEALTHY modern-day TROPHY hunters, 'bagging' a polar bear is the ultimate kill.
14 days in harsh conditions, requiring dog-sleds, Inuit guides & a heated tent camp, does not come cheap: the minimum bill comes to $35,000 (£24,000).
Mr Warner is the man who helps them do it. Earlier this week, the 45-year-old Canadian, whose company Adventure Northwest is based in Yellowknife, sent this season's 1st group of hunters north to Pond Inlet, where they will track & kill up to 6 bears. "This is probably the toughest hunt you can ever do," he said. "The weather conditions are appalling & it takes a huge amount of patience. You're living in the Arctic where it can drop to -50C at night & everything is done with sled dogs. It's incredibly gruelling."
"This year we have a lot of Mexicans & Americans but you get hunters from Europe, mainly Norwegians & Poles. They are just GENUINE, ORDINARY folk with a LOT of cash. THEY RESPECT the ANIMALS ENORMOUSLY."
There are few animals more symbolic of the perils of climate change than the polar bear, which faces destruction as the Arctic sea ice melts away – the bears starve or drown because the distances they have to swim to find prey become too vast. Yet, every year scores of wealthy hunters from around the world pay tens of thousands of dollars to travel into the frozen Arctic and bag themselves a coveted polar bear hide.
Canada, home to about 60% of the world's 22,000 polar bears, is the only one of the 5 polar bear "range states" which allows outsiders to hunt them as a TROPHY SPORT. America, Greenland & Russia only allow their native Arctic populations to kill a quota each year whilst Norway has outlawed stalking altogether.
"I don't ENJOY killing animals but I enjoy the hunt," said Mr Warner. "People find that difficult to understand but for me there is no paradox."
The kill quotas – known as "tags" – are also allotted for Canada's Inuit communities, many of whom choose to legally sell them onto outsiders willing to part with enough cash.
"Those 20 bears are going to get killed one way or another because the Inuits depend on them for food during the winter," Mr Warner insisted. "So it shouldn't really matter whether it is the indigenous population that is shooting them or outsiders."
Most hunters are then allowed to take their polar bear hides back to their own country. Last year the US banned the importation of polar bear hides but most countries, including Britain, place no restrictions on the skins. Mr Warner reports that his business has been hit by the US restrictions. "The American ban on importing polar bear skins has definitely hit the Inuit communities hard. You're not going to part with 1000'S of dollars if you can't bring your trophy back."
The latest US-led scientific surveys suggest that up to 2/3 of ALL POLAR BEARS could be LOST by 2050 – bringing the sustainability of hunting into question.
PHOTOS: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/bag-a-polar-bear-for-35000-the-new-threat-to-the-species-1649547.Boyd Warner TREASURES the memory of killing his 1st polar bear. It was 2003. For days... more
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| Environment | guardian.co.uk
PHOTO: A breaking ice shelf in Antarctica ... many scientists fear the world is close to a tipping point. Jim Elliott/British Antarctic Survey/AP
Sea level rise due to global warming will "substantially exceed" official UN projections and could top 150cm by the end of the century, according to a report from the US Geological Survey on the risks of abrupt climate change. Such a rise would be catastrophic, seeing hundreds of millions of people affected by flooding.
Many scientists now fear the warming world is on the verge of "tipping points", in which climate change and its effects accelerate rapidly. The science is evolving quickly and the new report updates the most recent findings of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released in 2007.
Some observers have called for an update of the science before the UN talks on a global deal on greenhouse gases emissions reach their finale in December 2009. The US report considers four scenarios for abrupt change, and delivers bad news on two.
On sea level, the report found models used by the IPCC in 2007 do not take into account recent information on how fast glaciers slide into the oceans, particularly from Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets. The report says the south western states of the US will enter a "permanent drought state".
But the risk of the ocean circulation in the Altantic shutting down – freezing the coasts of America and Europe, as in the film The Day After Tomorrow – is rated as low by the report. It predicts a slowdown of around 25% to 30%. The chance of a catastrophic release of methane from frozen sub-sea stores at high latitudes is also rated low. The report is part of a series by the US Climate Change Science Program, which collates all US federal research on the subject. It was presented tonight at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
The IPCC predicted that sea level would rise by 28cm to 42cm by the end of the century. ,The authors cite a 2007 study by Prof Stephan Rahmstof at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research which predicted a sea level rise of between 40cm-150cm by 2100. But even this much higher estimate will "likely need to be revised upwards" because it does not fully capture the ice flow processes.| Environment | guardian.co.uk
PHOTO: A breaking ice shelf in Antarctica ... many... more
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PLEASE TAKE ACTION!
GreenpeaceOffshore Oil = Increased Risk for Polar Bears
Polar bears are hanging on for dear life. They are faced with a rapidly shrinking arctic environment due to global warming. And now the Senate is poised to drive another nail in polar bears' coffins by voting for more drilling off of America's shores.
More oil drilling will do nothing to lower gas prices. It will, however, increase global warming pollution and put the polar bear on an even faster track towards extinction. To solve our dead-end dependence on fossil fuels we need legislation that immediately ends the massive tax breaks for Big Oil; doubles the average fuel efficiency of existing cars to at least 50 miles per gallon; substantially invests in public transportation so people have more and better choices; and provides robust incentives for renewable energy investments to transition us to a clean energy future.
Tell your Senator today! A vote to protect our coastal waters from more drilling is a vote the polar bears desperately need right now.
Please follow the link below to sign a pre-written letter or you can personlize & edit the letter.
http://members.greenpeace.org/action/start.php?action_id=211
PLEASE TAKE ACTION!
GreenpeaceOffshore Oil = Increased Risk for Polar Bears... more
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Sarah Palin may have seen the light - sort of - on climate change but that did not spare her from being singled out yesterday as America's environmental enemy of the year.
The Centre for Biological Diversity awarded Palin its Rubber Dodo award for her insistence - despite evidence to the contrary - that the polar bear population was rising across the Arctic. The Arizona thinktank condemned the Alaska governor as a "global warming denier".
"Governor Palin has waged a deceptive, dangerous, and costly battle against the polar bear," Kieran Suckling, the centre's director, said. "Her position on global warming is so extreme, she makes Dick Cheney look like an Al Gore devotee."
The slap comes less than a week after Palin belatedly admitted the possibility of a human factor in climate change, in her first television interview since she was chosen as John McCain's running mate.
The conversion was followed by further revelations of Palin's tenuous relationship with scientific fact. News reports yesterday said that Palin bought a tanning bed and moved it into the governor's mansion soon after her election. A few months later, in May 2007, she issued a proclamation during skin cancer awareness month urging Alaskans to take preventive measures. "Skin cancer is caused, overwhelmingly, by overexposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun and from tanning beds," she said in a press release.
McCain had skin cancers removed in 1993 and 2000, and is religious about using sun screen and wearing a hat outdoors.
Sarah Palin may have seen the light - sort of - on climate change but that did not... more
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Don’t miss the hilarious point/counterpoint debate between Palin and a suprisingly articulate and snarky polar bear.
Read the rest of this entry »Don’t miss the hilarious point/counterpoint debate between Palin and a... more
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Polar bears and other rare species are in danger of dying out, scientists fear, as latest figures show the Artic sea ice is at record lows.
Scientists from the World Wildlife Fund, who are recording the ice cover over the North Pole, said less ice is predicted in the Arctic this year than in any other.
Experts say this not only means a loss of habitat to species like polar bears and loss of livelihood for indigenous peoples but could speed up global warming as water absorbs heat rather than reflecting the sun's rays back into space.
Dr Martin Sommerkorn, senior climate change advisor at WWF International's Arctic Programme, said: "We are expecting confirmation of 2008 being either the lowest or the second-lowest year in terms of summer ice coverage.
READ FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/14/eapolar114.xml
Polar bears and other rare species are in danger of dying out, scientists fear, as... more
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We’re getting the word out to voters about Governor Sarah Palin’s barbaric record on killing America’s wildlife, especially her active promotion of the brutal aerial hunting of wolves and bears.
As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has proposed paying a $150 bounty for the foreleg of each dead wolf. The aerial hunting program she champions has already killed nearly 800 wolves. She’s opposed efforts to save America’s polar bears from extinction. She’s fought against efforts to save some of the world’s most endangered beluga whales.
At nearly every opportunity, Governor Palin has sided with Big Oil, mining companies, wealthy trophy hunters and other entrenched special interests in support of policies that would greatly harm the wild animals we treasure.
Warning: This television ad -- like the governor’s support for this brutal practice -- is disturbing.We’re getting the word out to voters about Governor Sarah Palin’s barbaric... more
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It wasn't much noticed at the time, but three weeks before she was chosen as John McCain's vice presidential running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin played a key supporting role in the latest episode of the Bush Administration's eight-year war on the Endangered Species Act, one of the cornerstones of American environmental law. On August 4 Alaska sued the government for listing the polar bear as a "threatened" species, an action, the lawsuit asserted, that would harm "oil and gas...development" in the state. In an accompanying statement, Palin complained that the listing "was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available" and should be rescinded.
The Bush Administration had not wanted to designate the polar bear as threatened in the first place; now Palin's lawsuit provided cover to backtrack on the decision. The Interior Department had issued the listing only after environmental groups filed two lawsuits, and the courts ordered compliance. While the polar bear population was currently stable, the plaintiffs argued, greenhouse gas emissions were melting the Arctic ice that polar bears rely on to hunt seals, their main food source. A study by the US Geological Survey supported this argument, concluding that two-thirds of all polar bears could be gone by 2050 if Arctic ice continues to melt as scientists project. The listing was the first time global warming had been cited as the sole premise in an Endangered Species Act case, and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne clearly wanted it to be the last. When Kempthorne announced the polar bear listing on May 14, he emphasized that it would not affect federal policy on global warming or block development of "our natural resources in the Arctic."
A week after Palin's lawsuit, Kempthorne delivered on that pledge. On August 11 he proposed new rules that could allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether their actions will imperil a threatened or endangered species. The rule reverses precedent: since passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service have made such determinations independent of the agency involved. Under the new rule, if the Army Corps of Engineers is building a dam, the corps can decide whether it is putting species at risk. To make sure no one missed the point, Kempthorne told reporters that the new rule, which he termed "a narrow regulatory change," would keep the Endangered Species Act from becoming "a back door" to making climate change policy.
Kempthorne's proposal nevertheless seems likely to go forward. An obligatory thirty-day period for public comment expires September 15, after which Interior can begin to implement the rule. Congress could block funding, but few expect that to happen. Lawsuits are certain to follow, but critics say the quickest solution would be for the next administration to withdraw the rule. Barack Obama seems likely to do that; he immediately condemned Kempthorne's proposal. John McCain was silent. But his choice of Palin--who does not believe global warming is caused by humans but does think it's acceptable for humans to gun down wolves from airplanes--suggests that Arctic creatures have much to fear from a McCain administration.
FOR THE REST OF THIS REPORT, PLEASE VISIT: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080929/hertsgaardIt wasn't much noticed at the time, but three weeks before she was chosen as John... more
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For the first time in recorded human history, the Arctic has become an island to itself, completely separate from the landmasses that the Arctic ice normally stretches out onto. This distressingly historic event has been captured by NASA satellites, depicting both the Northwest and Northeast passages as ice free.
For the past few years we have seen the Arctic ice sheet melt, dropping to lower and lower levels. And though we haven’t seen the 2008 melt season drop below 07’s record numbers, the ice has melted in such a way that now the Arctic has become an island.
The Telegraph quoted Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in the US, as saying that the Arctic may have entered a “death spiral” caused by global warming.
Already shipping companies are making plans to cut thousands of miles of their sea-bound journeys. And Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced that ships intending on passing through the Northwest Passage must first report to the Canadian government.
The images have been gathered by NASA, who continually monitors the space around Earth, but Earth itself. The images show that the Northwest Passage opened last weekend, and the last impediment on the east side melted a few days later.
This is having a direct influence on the wildlife as well. Late August saw reports of nine polar bears swimming in open ocean off Alaska’s northwest coast, in the Chuckchi Sea. Many of the polar bears, as well as some walruses, were swimming north and ranged from 15 to 65 miles offshore.
Intriguing side-note; the Chuckchi Sea is where people like Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin are hoping to drill for oil. That wouldn’t hurt the polar bears chances of survival, would it?
For the first time in recorded human history, the Arctic has become an island to... more
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Sign the Petition: Sarah Palin Doesn't Speak For Me!
To Whom It May Concern:
During her speech in St. Paul on Wednesday night, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin purported to speak for women, small town residents, and everyone who is a member of the Washington elite.
Sarah Palin is an intelligent, well spoken woman, but it must be made clear:
We don't want a country in which women who are raped are refused the right to choose abortion.
We don't want a country in which religious dogma is taught in public school science class.
We don't want a country where gay and lesbian citizens are discriminated against.
We don't want a country where books are banned from public libraries.
America is strongest when we are united, not divided. When our Constitutional liberties are respected. When our politicians rely on ideas and opinions instead of distortions and attacks. The challenges we face are too big to be reduced to name-calling.
Sarah Palin doesn't speak for us.
Sincerely,
YOUR NAME
https://secure.pfaw.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=action_palin
Sign the Petition: Sarah Palin Doesn't Speak For Me!
To Whom It May Concern:... more
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