UNEP: How much hotter does it have to get before we act on emissions reductions by Bloomberg 3:07am 5th Jun, 2007   June 4, 2007    Melting Snow, Ice to cause Water Shortages, Floods, by Bunny Nooryani. (Bloomberg)    Melting snow and ice caused by global warming threatens to cut water supplies, flood coastal areas and raise greenhouse gas emissions, affecting hundreds of millions of people from Bangladesh to Alaska, a United Nations report said.    Rising temperatures are shrinking snow cover, sea ice, glaciers, permafrost and lake ice in areas from Greenland to Antarctica and the Himalayas, according to the report, published today in connection with World Environment Day. These changes are likely to accelerate if greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming aren"t reduced, the study showed.    "Today"s report should empower the public to take their leaders to task, should encourage them to ask how much hotter it has to get before we act on a fair and forward-looking emissions reduction deal in Bali this December," Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environmental Program, said in a Webcast speech in Tromsoe, Norway, which is hosting World Environment Day.    Delegates meeting in Bali will seek to extend the Kyoto Protocol, the main global treaty for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, which expires in 2012. U.S. President George W. Bush, who has rejected Kyoto, last week urged 15 of the world"s biggest polluting nations to agree on a global emissions reduction goal by the end of next year, but refused to set mandatory targets or limits.    The melting of the ice and snow is not only a consequence of global warming, it is also an accelerating factor, researchers presenting the report in the Norwegian Arctic town of Tromsoe says.    "Snow and ice reflect 70 to 80 percent of the sun''s energy, whereas water absorbs it. If snow and ice continue to melt, this will amplify global warming," report author Paal Prestrud told journalists.    "This means that the adaptation process of coping with climate change is potentially so far-reaching in terms of economic costs and consequences that we have to act now," UNEP executive director Achim Steiner adds.    The extent of sea ice in both polar regions is expected to decline by a quarter by 2100, when the Arctic is set to be largely ice-free in the summer, the UN report said. Ice in Arctic waters has retreated by as much as 7 percent in the winter and 12 percent in the summer over the past 30 years.    For the almost 4 million people in the region, including Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the heat is already on.    "The ice is freezing much later in the fall and breaking up much earlier in the spring, leaving less time for us to hunt because winters are our longest season," Watt-Cloutier, a spokeswoman for the 150,000 Arctic Inuit people, said in a May 11 interview.    Diminishing sea ice is forcing some coastal Arctic towns, such as Shishmaref, Alaska, to relocate, said Watt-Cloutier, who lives on Canada"s Baffin Island. Without ice as a buffer, waves cause coastal erosion.    Warmer temperatures have increased winter rainfall, causing snow to melt and refreeze into ice that is too hard for animals to dig through for food. The survival of caribou, reindeer and polar bears is at risk, the study said.    Some reindeer are becoming thinner, said Ole Henrik Magga, a part-time herder and professor at the Sami University College in Kautokeino, Norway.    "After a while, a layer of ice may cover the Arctic, and this would have catastrophic effects on all animals who have to dig through snow for food," Magga said in a May 25 interview. "The other worst-case scenario is that the snow may have melted away over the next 50 to 100 years over large parts of the Arctic".    Every 1-degree rise in temperature will move the snow line in mountains in Chile up by 120 meters (394 feet) and by 150 meters in the Alps, the report predicted.    Glaciers in mountain ranges including Himalayas-Hindu Kush, Kunlun Shan, Pamir and Tien Shanan may shrink by between 40 percent and 80 percent by 2100, the UN study showed. This could affect water supplies for as many as 2.4 billion people in Asia, or 40 percent of the world"s population, it said.    "The threat to the climate is so important that if it isn"t solved, it could lead to huge conflicts as people fight over access to water and land, said Norwegian member of parliament Heidi Soerensen, who nominated Watt-Cloutier and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for this year"s Nobel peace prize for raising awareness about climate change.    A 1-meter sea level increase would expose about 145 million people to flooding and may cost almost $950 billion in damage to communities and industries, the report said. Small islands and populations in large river deltas, such as the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh, are at risk.    A total meltdown of Greenland"s ice sheets would raise sea levels by an estimated 7 meters, the study showed.    "We can state with confidence that sea level rise is increasing, but we lack the ability to predict how much the ice sheets will in the end contribute to this over the next 10 years, let alone the next 50 years," said Paal Prestud of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.    Lakes formed by the melting of frozen land in places such as Siberia are emitting bubbles of methane that may be up to 43,000 years old, adding to the effect of global warming caused by other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, the UN said.    "Because we are on the land and the ice and the snow every day, we"re witnessing all of these changes very fast," said Watt-Cloutier, who traveled by dog sled in her childhood. "We are telling the world that this is an early warning for you."    June 2, 2007    Greenland Ice melt speeds up, by David Perlman. (San Francisco Chronicle)    NASA scientists reading signals from a satellite in orbit, and flying aboard a low-flying plane over Greenland, are finding fresh evidence of melting snows and thinning glaciers in vast areas of the massive island.Their observations confirm the climate’s warming trend in the far northern reaches of the world, they say, where changes in the circulation of waters feeding into the Arctic Ocean are altering crucial patterns of ocean currents there with effects that are increasingly uncertain.    The pace of glaciers sliding into the sea along Greenland’s southwestern coast “is speeding like gangbusters this year,” said William Krabill, leader of a NASA team that has just ended a three-week airborne mission probing glacier dynamics with lasers and radar..    * Visit link below to access the UNEP report. Visit the related web page
	Next (more recent) news item
	Next (older) news item