Climate change divides the Alps down the middle
Global warming is already causing flooding in the north and water shortages in south, report says

The dramatic effect of climate change on the Alps comes into focus as never before this week with the publication of a major report which reveals that the mountain range is rapidly dividing into two contrasting climatic zones, each posing new problems.

By Michael Day in Milan
Tuesday, 16 June 2009

Michael McCarthy: Don’t be fooled by this winter’s powder. The Alpine snow line is already in retreat
The Convention on the Protection of the Alps is a statutory EU body set up in 1991 and its magisterial second report, published tomorrow, which has been seen by The Independent, reveals that the northern ranges of the Alps are suffering ever more serious flooding while the parched southern mountains see less and less snow.

According to the report, precipitation in the south-east of the region has fallen nearly 10 per cent in the past 100 years while rain and snowfall in the north-west ranges has increased by the same amount over this time.

“Predictions that the European climate is dividing into two are becoming all too real,” said Marco Onida, secretary general of the Convention, who will present the report at the organisation’s headquarters in Bolzano, Italy, tomorrow, in the presence of EU officials and national representatives. “The result will be havoc for the Alps and the communities and wildlife that rely on area.”

Changing patterns of rain and snowfall, shrinking glaciers and rising temperatures will affect not only the mountains but also the communities which rely on their resources, the report warns. Already some Alpine villages in the north of the range face flooding, while areas further south are seeing tourist and other trades increasingly threatened. Some areas have already suffered water shortages.

The Alps’ most famous high peaks, Mont Blanc, The Matterhorn and Monte Rosa mark part of the dividing line between the increasingly wet north of the region and Italy and Slovenia in the dryer south.

North of the dividing line, flooding and mud slides are becoming a common threat in some Alpine communities. In the south, some of the Europe’s most celebrated Alpine beauty spots, including Italy’s Dolomites are under threat, although some micro-climates mean the dividing line does not following a rigid north-south line.

As a result of these changes, only one Alpine river – Italy’s 178-mile-long Tagliamento in the north-east of the country – has not suffered drastic modifications, the reports says. And even the Tagliamento may not be safe: the wildlife charity WWF has warned that even this, the Alps’ last river system, is threatened by water abstraction in the upper Tagliamento valley, organic pollution, and gravel exploitation.

The situation across the Alps is made worse, the Convention report says, by the increasing demand for artificial snow created during the winter months by snow machines working on the ski slopes. This is needed to sustain the winter sports industry which is an economic mainstay of the slopes, but places a further heavy burden on water and energy supplies which are already under great stress.

“The Alps are the water tower of Europe,” Dr Onida told The Independent, “But increasingly much of the water is not reaching the places downstream where it is needed, for ecosystems, agriculture and energy production.”

Around 16 million people in eight countries, from France in the west to Hungary in the east, live in the arc of Europe’s biggest mountain range. Rain and snow from its mountains provide the Danube, Rhine, Rhone and Po rivers with up to 80 per cent of their water.

Representatives from all eight Alpine countries – France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein, Slovenia and Hungary – together with the European Union – signed up to the Alpine Convention in 1991.

The report warns not only that the destruction of the Alps is accelerating, but that disruption to water supplies will be felt much further afield than originally thought.

Glacier shrinkage earlier this year led the Italian and Swiss governments to propose the first changes in the border line between the two countries in more than a century.

Dr Onida said there was “a battle between agriculture and tourism for control over water supplies” owing to the increasingly intensive exploitation of the slopes.

Climate change is also driving Alpine species further up the mountains while exotic species including palms get a foothold lower down.

 From:
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Research and Transfer Centre Applications of Life Sciences
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 franziska.mannke at haw-hamburg.d

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We learned about an online complete “one-stop” library on much of what matters onclimatechange.

The refernce is:

http://www.klima2009.net/de/ccsl

What Does Climate Change Do to Our Heads?     

by Sanjay Khanna
14 May 2009, CultureChange.org
A small yet growing body of evidence suggests that how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world.

A case in point: When researchers from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health at the University of Newcastle in Australia conducted interviews in drought-affected communities in New South Wales in 2005, the responses suggested some of their subjects may have been suffering from a recently described psychological condition called solastalgia (pronounced so-la-stal-juh).

Solastalgia describes a palpable sense of dislocation and loss that people feel when they perceive changes to their local environment as harmful. It’s a neologism that Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher at the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences, created in 2003.

Albrecht’s work among communities distraught by black-coal strip mining in New South Wales’ Upper Hunter Region convinced him that the English language needed a new term to connect the experience of ecosystem loss to mental health concerns.

“The sense of a home landscape being violated [by strip mining-related environmental damage] seemed to have disturbed the region’s social ecology so much that the psychic or mental health of many people living in the zone of high impact was being affected,” he says.

Albrecht’s stunning insight? That there might be a wide variety of shifts in the health of an ecosystem—from subtle landscape changes related to global warming to desolate wastelands created by large-scale strip mining—that diminish people’s mental health.

In Eastern Australian communities, where the toll of a six-year-long drought has been devastating, interviews with farmers provided additional momentum for the solastalgia concept.

In one such interview, a female farmer poignantly described the loss of her garden oasis. “Our gardens have had to die,” she said, “because our house dam has been dry…. So it’s very depressing for a woman because a garden is an oasis out here with this dust…you know, to come home to a nice green lawn is just… that’s all gone, so you’ve got dust at your back door.”

While persistent drought and open-pit coal mining may be extreme cases, if the environmental degradation of the past hundred years is any indication, our contemporary lifestyles, built on a dwindling resource base, have failed to acknowledge how much the mental health of people and ecosystems is interrelated.

This may imply that the unrelenting media focus on weather-related and economic aspects of climate change does not adequately take into consideration the challenge of mitigating the psychological impact of global warming. How might we feel when the heat is relentless and our surrounding environment changes irrevocably? How might our mental health be affected?

In a recent Wired magazine article on Albrecht and the concept of solastalgia, Global Mourning: How the next victim of climate change will be our minds, writer Clive Thompson sensitively characterized as “global mourning” the potential impact of overwhelming environmental transformation caused by climate change. Thompson cogently summed up Albrecht’s view of what solastalgia might look like were it to become an epidemic of emotional and psychic instability causally linked to changing climates and ecosystems.

Albrecht also emphasizes that feelings of melancholia and homesickness have previously been recorded among Aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australia who were forcibly moved from their home territories by U.S., Canadian and Australian governments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sanjay Khanna: You speak of psychoterratic and somaterratic illnesses. What are they?

Glenn Albrecht: Psychoterratic illness involves the psyche or mind and terra or earth. So a psychoterratic illness would be an earth-related mental illness, where both nostalgia and solastalgia are examples of people being made “mentally ill” by the severing of “healthy” links between themselves and their home or territory.

Somaterratic illness, on the other hand, involves soma or the body and relates to damage done to the human body, its physiology and/or genetics, as a result of the loss of ecosystem health by, for example, toxic pollution in any given area of land.

SK: You note on your blog that there are antecedents to solastalgia.

GA: Yes, David Rapport, a past professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is a pioneer in the study of the health of natural ecosystems and their relationship with humans. In the 1970s, he described “ecosystem distress syndrome,” which was what happened when an ecosystem couldn’t restore its balance after an external disturbance.

Once I fully appreciated this concept, I realized there must be a human equivalent to ecosystem distress syndrome, that is, a home environment so profoundly disturbed that it affected the balance of well being or the mental health of people within their social ecology.

The interviews of affected people I conducted along with Nick Higginbotham and Linda Connor in strip-mined areas of the Upper Hunter Valley showed that people’s sense of place was being violated and that this was profoundly disturbing them. Their home environment was being desolated and it seemed to us that the vital link between ecosystem health and human health, both physical and mental, was being severed.

SK: Can you tell us a little bit more about the origins of solastalgia?

GA: Solastalgia’s Latin roots combine three ideas: The solace that one’s environment provides, the desolation caused by that environment’s degradation and the pain or distress that occurs inside a person as a result.

Solastalgia brings into English a much-needed word that links a mental state to a state of the biophysical environment. The need for new concepts in the face of what is happening under climate change has seen other cultures develop new terms that have affinities with solastalgia.

The Inuit, for example, have a new word, uggianaqtuq (pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took), which relates to climate change and has connotations of the weather as a once reliable and trusted friend that is now acting strangely or unpredictably. And the Portuguese use the word saudade to describe a feeling one has for a loved one who is absent or has disappeared. The upshot is that under the pressure of climate change, your preferred climate and ecosystem might well be thought of as a lover gone missing or turned bad.

SK: How might your research impact on psychiatry and the diagnosis of psychoterratic illnesses such as solastalgia?

GA: Alongside five other researchers, our four-person team co-wrote a summary of our research on the mental health impacts of mining and drought for psychological and psychiatric professionals. The paper, Solastalgia: the distress caused by climate change, was published in Australasian Psychiatry, a publication of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, in November 2007.

Our team has mused that people badly affected by solastalgia would benefit from a set of professionally developed diagnostic tools so that solastalgia could be listed as a condition that required diagnosis and professional attention.

We’re happy for other people to take that challenge up and there are some academic psychiatrists who are interested in exploring these ideas further. However, given that key aspects of solastalgia are existential, the traditions of environmental philosophy and medical psychiatry may not come together so harmoniously. The melancholia of solastalgia is not the same as clinical depression, but it may well be a precursor to serious psychic disturbance.

That said, it’s worth remembering that up until the mid-twentieth century, the medical profession viewed nostalgia as a diagnosable psycho-physiological illness in which, for example, soldiers fighting in foreign lands became so homesick and melancholic it could kill them.

Today psychiatrists would see the condition of rapid and unwelcome severing from home as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an outcome of an acute stressor such as warfare or a Hurricane Katrina.

Solastalgia on the other hand is most often the result of chronic environmental stress; it is the lived experience of gradually losing the solace a once stable home environment provided. It is therefore appropriate to diagnose solastalgia in the face of slow and insidious forces such as climate change or mining.

SK: Would you tell us a little bit about the transdisciplinary team that you participate on?

GA: Nick Higginbotham, a social psychologist colleague who specializes in epidemiology and health matters, is working to gather empirical data for our solastalgia research. He has developed a much-needed environmental distress scale (EDS) that teases out the specific environmental components of distress from all the other things that go on in a person’s life. We will be using this scale in the new AUS$430K grant the team has received from the Australian Research Council to extend our earlier work by addressing “the lived experience (ethnography) of climate change” among people in the Hunter Valley.

Linda Connor, an ethnographer and social and medical anthropologist, handles the ethnography or cultural experience of all this. So collectively we have empirical (Higginbotham), cultural (Connor) and philosophical (me) interpretations of health and climate change. Finally, Sonia Freeman, our research assistant, has co-authored a number of papers.

SK: What implications might the recent apology by Kevin Rudd, the new Prime Minister of Australia, to the “stolen generations” of Australian Aborigines have in relation to solastalgia?

GA: The apology by Kevin Rudd to the stolen generations is about seeking forgiveness for the government-sanctioned taking of Indigenous children from their families and from their home territories (their “country”) from 1909 until 1969. There have been profound mental and physical health impacts from this process and many of the remaining stolen generations are now ageing but with a 17-year shorter life expectancy on average than non-indigenous Australians. Those who are alive today may be experiencing genuine nostalgia for a once-sustainable past and solastalgia within contemporary pathological and depressed home environments.

SK: Do you see a relationship between the conquest of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, the state of environmental degradation and the experience of loss that we are seeing today? If so, what is that relationship from your perspective and research?

GA: The answer is, yes, there is a relationship between the two colonial cultures: the two continents were colonized only by the systematic dispossession of complex and formerly sustainable Indigenous societies.

Traditional Indigenous cultures in the Americas and Australasia displayed a profound appreciation of the relationship between human and ecosystem health, something global culture is trying to rediscover under the label of sustainability.

Remnant aboriginal cultures are still being pushed aside by the dominant global model of economic growth and progress. Even today, their chronic health problems are likely related to social and political issues that are connected to ongoing dispossession.

I’ve had recent firsthand experience of the lives of Indigenous people leading semi-traditional lives in Northern Australia to see the importance of the connections between human health and ecosystem health. In Arnhem Land, Aborigines who live on what are called “outstations” have been able to maintain much stronger and healthier links to their traditional land. Their physical and mental health status is, as a consequence, much better than those whose links to their own land have been severed and who now live in crowded, dysfunctional communities.

SK: Some of the solastalgia symptoms you describe are similar to the loss of cultural identity, including the loss of language and ancestral memory. Loss of place seems an extension of this new global experience of weakened cultural identities and Earth-based ethical moorings.

GA: I have written on this topic in a professional academic journal and expressed the idea of having an Earth-based ethical framework that could contribute to maximizing the creative potential of human cultural and technological complexity and diversity without destroying the foundational complexity and diversity of natural systems in the process.

Our history shows that some people and cultures have a tendency to create pathological ways of thinking, but if we want to support a life-affirming ethic in the twenty-first century, we are in need of reform and change.

SK: In the context of accelerating environmental change, what would you say to young people about the planet they are inheriting? What does sustainability mean in the context of the overwhelming pace of environmental and economic change that we’re seeing today?

GA: This is a tough one because the children of today face the double whammy of the escalating pace and scale of changes under the global forces of development and those of climate chaos. I’ve suggested to my own teenagers that what is happening is unacceptable ethically and practically and they should be in a state of advanced revolt about the whole deal.

From my perspective, supporting and maintaining the status quo is no longer a reasonable response to these big picture issues. At every point, we must challenge and refute this kind of thinking in a society that is clearly on a non-sustainable pathway.

Unfortunately, the lot in life of the youth today is to undo much of what has been done in the name of growth and progress in the last two hundred years. However, this does not mean a return to the past: As Herman Daly (the ecological economist) once said, you can have an economy that develops without growing.

On a personal level, I’m an optimistic, energetic philosopher and I believe that we must get our values more life orientated. I’m not willing to give up on encouraging change towards sustainability even in the face of what look like overwhelming negative forces.

The four-year grant recently awarded to our team will allow us to study the lived experience of climate change at a regional level. We’re happy that we’ll be able to start contributing data on how climate change is shifting culture, values and attitudes.

The next four years are critical. As a member of a research team, I believe that we’re right at the leading edge of change research and we are very committed to supporting the network of ecological and social relationships that promote human health. There’s hope in recognizing solastalgia and defeating it by creating ways to reconnect with our local environment and communities.

###

Sanjay Khanna is a writer and foresight researcher based in Vancouver, Canada. He can be reached at sk AT khannaresearch DOT com. His blog is at www.realisticsanctuary.com. More articles are available at www.huffingtonpost.com

 As we know that many of our readers are interested in the nexus of climate change and desertification, we thought that there might be interest in participatingin the following review studies and decided to post this e-mail.

————–

Dear Scientific Colleagues and Stakeholders of the UNCCD. This is an invitation to review the first drafts of scientific analysis papers contributing to the world’s fight against desertification and land degradation.

To begin the review, please go to the website www.drylandscience.org

(or http://dsd consortium.jrc.ec.europa.eu/php/index.php?action=view&id=160) and click the button on the left entitled ‘Online Consultation’.

You can download and read the papers in PDF format there if you prefer, but all comments must be received via the web feedback system that is accessed through the above path.

—————

Background

The Committee on Science and Technology (CST) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has called for a Scientific Conference on the topic of “Bio-physical and socio-economic monitoring and assessment of desertification and land degradation, to support decision-making in land and water management.”  The Conference, popularly known under the shorter title ‘Understanding Desertification and Land Degradation Trends’, will take place at the UNCCD Conference of Parties in Buenos Aires, Argentina during 22-24 September 2009.

In preparation for that Conference, three Working Groups have drafted ‘white papers’ summarizing leading scientific knowledge relevant to the topic assigned by the Convention that leads towards recommendations that can support decision-making in land and water management by the Convention and its Parties. Each of the three Working Group white papers is about 80-100 pages long consisting of several chapters. In addition, there is a cross-cutting topic that the Working Groups collectively address (denoted ‘S1’).

For one month, from 28 May to 28 June 2009, the first drafts of the white papers will be open for review by scientists and stakeholders worldwide.

We look forward to your valuable contributions. Please visit the web link mentioned above to participate in the review process. Thank you for helping to enrich these papers with your knowledge, comments and suggestions.

Sincerely,
The Dryland Science for Development Consortium (DSD)

————
Dr. Christopher Martius

Head, Program Facilitation Unit (PFU), CGIAR Program for Central Asia and the Caucasus (CAC)

Coordinator, Regional Program of the International Center For Agricultural Research In The Dry Areas (ICARDA) for the CAC Region
Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Mail Address: Program Facilitation Unit, P.O. Box 4564, Tashkent, 100000, Uzbekistan
Street Address: 6, Osiyo Street, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Phones: +99871 2372130, +99871 2372169, +99871 2372104
Fax: +99871 1207125

In our article - David Dollar - Timothy F. Geithner’s new man in Beijing. Do we have a return to the G2? “Chimerica?” Can this David be a savior like the Biblical one? - of June 2, 2009 - we followed the  US-China Pas-de-deux as seen from the Treasury Secretary’s visit to Beijing, but we also said - “US business managed also to turn US journalism away from honest reporting into a rather efficient collection of  news-that-are-important to US-business-interests. Journalism schools started to be proud of training this sort of professionals, and got the product that they wanted. In effect people trained with these objectives in mind are incapable of realizing the trends and mechanisms that propel the foreign governments - so we reap what we sowed - and on this in a different posting that gathers in our mind after having witnessed a New York Asia Society on China event - just last night. They had a great guest speaker but the organizer of the event did not understand what he should aske him so that he does not just put him up for chit-chat” - and now I intend to do good on my promise.

It was about the - Discussion: China’s Role in the Global Climate Game - An Evening with Jeffrey D. Sachs.
Monday, June 1, 2009 at the Asia Society, New York. The announcement said:

“One common feature of the stimulus plans introduced in both China and the U.S. is the surge in funding for “green” efforts, from mass transit and green housing, to clean coal and smart grids. But our two countries remain, far and away, the largest emitters of carbon dioxide that imperils the planet. Can China reduce emissions in time? Can Beijing implement sustainable development goals without undermining China’s high growth rate—already in jeopardy due to the slowing global economy? And how do China’s efforts fit in to the larger, global effort at dealing with the climate crisis?

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of Earth Institute at Columbia, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is uniquely qualified to reflect on China’s role in the global climate game.  Sachs is author of many books including, ‘Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet’ and ‘The End of Poverty,’ and serves as Special Advisor to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
 
Following remarks, Orville Schell, Director of the Center on US-China Relations, will join Dr. Sachs on stage for a conversation about China’s environmental challenges in a global context.”

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs is always great, knowledgeable and to the point. Even if we find something that we do not agree with, we always get thoughtful answers from him. His presentation this Monday was good as always, it did not go along the advertised lines but gave instead a wide background of US failures because of eight years of “Zero - Bush Policies - I mean Zero - NADA!” - he said.  He then gave also a large picture of China’s interests, in the fact that they must use coal because that is what they have, and thus coal is their secure energy source. The US is also a coal economy and the US has done, as said above NADA in order to find cleaner ways to use coal. He did not make promise of pie-in-the-sky in search of entree points in China for American business . In the end of his talk I did even not mind his pro-nuclear arguments and, was not going to touch that subject at all - but had two other comments and wanted to ask for his reaction. This posting comes about because we get touchy when someone just tries to waste his time.

January 30, 2007, thanks to Arthur Ross, an investment manager and philanthropist whose broad contributions to the arts and the environment often reflected his passions, from promoting classicism to establishing a grove of pines in Central Park, he was also very active at the Asia Society (He died in East Hampton, N.Y., September 10, 2007 at age 96). He held US Presidential appointments to the United Nations from five US Presidents.

The inauguration January 30, 2007, of  the Arthur Ross  Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations was indeed a big event with the participation of Ambassador RICHARD HOLBROOKE, at the time Chairman of the Board of The Asia Society, Ambassador HENRY KISSINGER, Dr. VISHAKHA DESAI, President of the Asia Society, and Professor ORVILLE SCHELL, who was the newly appointed Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

Further -  Other American previous Ambassadors to China where asked to speak at videoconferencing at other Asia Society locations. President George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Bush appeared jointly to talk about their experiences in China. The other ambassadors, some of whom were in the room in New York - Ambassador Winston Lord.

At the inauguration - the mandate given to the Center was:

The Center will conduct original research and educate the American and international public on U.S.-China issues, commenting on and distributing timely information on critical topics and current events. It will also engage key Chinese and American leaders in critical dialogue. The Center will be based in New York and work closely with Asia Society Centers and partner with other organizations around the world.

The Center’s new Director will be long-time China observer, author, journalist and professor, Orville Schell - it said.

Preliminary areas of focus for the Center will include:
 - The policies of each government towards the other;
 - The impact of environmental problems in China and collaborative efforts to address them;
 - The role of the media as an arbiter of U.S.-China relations;
 - The role of civil society in China and in mediating U.S.-China relations; and,
 - Collaborative efforts in both countries for education reform.

The Discussion at that Inaugural event, that involved Mr. Kissinger and the three people connected to the Asia Society, with the ailing Mr. Ross present, is reported verbatim at http://www.asiasociety.org/speeches/07ny…

Ambassador Holbrooke chaired the event and said: “Arthur Ross. Arthur, would you please stand for a moment? [APPLAUSE] Arthur had a shocking idea - Sino-American relations were the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Many other people have had that idea but Arthur knows how to convert an idea into a reality. So he and our President, Vishakha Desai, who will talk at the end of this program, and I, met - and Arthur said that he would give us a very substantial gift to start a center on US-China relations inside Asia Society and tonight we inaugurate that center. The center will conduct original research; educate Americans and the international public on China; will issue comments on critical issues and current events, distribute information on a highly upgraded website; engage key Chinese and American leaders in critical dialogue, and we begin this tonight; and although it will be based here in New York we will work with all of the Asia Society centers around the world in Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Shanghai, Mumbai, Manila and Melbourne.”

Then Ambassador Holbrooke proceeded announcing: ” If you’re gonna inaugurate a center on China, you need a fantastic director. And we’ve been incredibly fortunate to lure from the Journalism School of the University of California Berkeley distinguished China scholar, Orville Schell. Orville and his wife Baifeng are moving to New York or in Orville’s case, back to New York to undertake this. You all know his extraordinary background. He’s the author of seventeen books, wide commentator on these issues and we are blessed that he’s here.”

The event then proceeded as a conversation between Mr. Schell and Ambassador Kissinger and turned to nostalgia. The several questions from others, were in the verbatim not dignified by mentioning the questioning person - even when the comment came from a US Senator.

As I am very much interested in China, in its calling to help with the climate change issues even though it is obvious that their initial reaction might be that their society has not yet graduated to the economic club that has caused the environmental problems in the first place, I was intrigued to find out the background of Mr. Schell. Does he have the background to be able to lead independent research that can suggest policy innovations to China and the US?

I was present at the impresive event, and kept thinking of The Hudson Institute in Herman Kahn’s days as a model for what is needed here.

I found that: Orville Hickock Schell III (born  1940) is the Arthus Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He previously served as Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and has authored 14 books including works on the history of China - as per the Asia Society - 10 of them on China.

Schell, a critic of factory farming, joined the company Niman Ranch (then named “Niman-Schell”) with Bill Niman in 1978 with the objective of raising cattle in a humane and environmentally sound manner. Schell left the company in 1999. In 1984 he wrote a book about meat production in the United States.

Schell has a PhD (Abd) from UC Berkeley’s Department of History, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in Far Eastern history. He served as an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s.

Schell has been the recipient of several writing fellowships, from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University. He is also the winner of numerous awards, including the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for Asian Journalism, an Overseas Press Club of America Award, a Mencken Award for the Best Feature, and others.

I found that as Dean at a School of Journalism he faught for the honor of the profession: “The assumption that the press matters is under threat” he said. “As I survey the landscape, what worries me most is that I think one of the oldest assumptions about journalism—namely, if the story can be told, something will happen for the better—is slowly being rendered inoperable. (But, maybe it never was operable, and I am in some mythology myself!)”

“We can no longer blithely assume that if a reporter does his/her shoe-leather investigations and writes or produces a good revelatory story that an editor will welcome it; the publisher will publish it; producers will air it; readers and viewers will become better informed; the collectivity of citizens will demand action; hearings will be held, commissions formed laws passed, court cases will be adjudicated; and reforms will be made. Isn’t that the way things are or were supposed to work? And, if not, how the hell are they supposed to work? Alas, we can no longer assume that journalists have this catalytic ability. We have in too many ways been bull-dozed aside. (I think this is the real message of Judy Miller going to jail.) We still can, to some degree, do our thing, but we are increasingly maligned, marginalized and presumed by many power centers (government, state, church, etc) to be troublesome, negative, unpatriotic and unreliable. Now, we are even threatened with jail.”

Eventually, in 2002 - he entered an unusual collaboration that involved Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University; Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California; and Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

According to the press release from Carnegie, whose president, Vartan Gregorian, is also a key player in the project, the aim of the partners is to “advance the U.S. news business by helping revitalize schools of  journalism.” The Carnegie-Knight Initiative was born and it involves three distinct efforts:

- Curriculum Enrichment that will integrate the schools of journalism more deeply into the life of the university.
News 21 Incubators: annual national investigative reporting projects overseen by campus professors and distributed nationally through both traditional and innovative media.

- The Carnegie-Knight Task Force, focusing on research and creating a platform for educators to speak on policy and journalism education issues.

- At a time when technology’s digital revolution is changing the news industry, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative will focus on preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.

A study based on interviews with 40 of the country’s most prestigious news leaders indicated a need for schools of journalism to help reporters build specialized expertise that will enhance coverage of complex beats ranging from medicine to economics to international conflicts, and to understand the languages and cultures of distant parts of the world.

The report, undertaken for the Corporation by McKinsey & Co., also revealed a desire for journalism schools to help students understand and appreciate the ethical dimensions of their work as well as prepare them for the pressures they will face in a 24/7 competitive news environment. The news leaders voiced a need for the profession to depend on universities to channel the best writers, the most curious-minded reporters and the finest analytic thinkers to the news business. An executive summary is available at www.carnegie.org and www.knightfdn.org.

————

An article in PressThink, a weblog that  concentrates on what’s happening to journalism in the age of the Net, says: “I don’t want to sound picky, but… The press release says the idea is to “advance the U.S. news business.” Is that what a university-based journalism school is all about? I think Schell would say what I would say: as educators we have to know the news business, inside and out, and be engaged with it. What the school is supposed to advance, however, is the craft, conscience and quality of independent journalism.” So, what above nice words seem to mean according to this criticism is less the importance of “doing right” then in having an ongoing news-paper business.

Jay Rosen, the blogger at PressThink, is a press critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University.
He is a strong supporter of citizen journalism, encouraging the press to take a more active interest in citizenship, improving public debate, and enhancing life. His book about the subject, What Are Journalists For? was published in 1999. Rosen is often described in the media as an intellectual leader of the movement of public journalism. Rosen writes frequently about issues in journalism and developments in the media. His works have appeared in the New York Times, Salon.com, Harper’s Magazine, and The Nation. In July 2006, he announced NewAssignment.Net, a project linking professional journalists and internet users.

According to how we feel about journalism at SustainabiliTank.info, obviously we are on the side of the blogger and his interpretation that the future of journalism is with the Internet rather then by trying to improve what turned out to be a losing proposition - the journalism business that is basically doing little else then working in support of all other business interests.

———–

Books by Orville Schell:

Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (2000)
Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders (1995)
Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation of Entrepreneurs, Dissidents, Bohemians, and Technocrats Lays Claim to China’s Future (1994)
Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform (1988)
Modern Meat (1984)
To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the Eighties (1984)
Watch Out for the Foreign Guests!: China Encounters the West (1980)
Brown (1978)
In the People’s Republic: An American’s First-Hand View of Living and Working in China (1978)
In the People’s Republic: An American’s First-Hand View of Living and Working in China (1977)
The Town That Fought to Save Itself (1976)
Modern China; The Making of a New Society, from 1839 to the Present (1972)
Modern China: The Story of a Revolution (1972)

The list is impressive, but where is here the technical knowledge of handling the needed cooperation between China and the US in issues of climate change? Could it be that dealing with the history of China, foreigner’s life in China, and then doing good conventional journalistic reporting of the changes in China since Tianmen Square, is not really enough of a background for filling a think tank leadership position on the future of China as it is imperative today? I would not have written the above, had I not observed the arrogance with which Mr. Schell handled the audience that had perhaps better questions to ask Dr. Sachs, after the not well used time of his own questions to Dr. Sachs. I think this came because he may not have been enough versed in the technical subtleties of the subject of climate change, or perhaps he did not want to venture into creative thinking? At some point, a report that was prepared for the Center, under his supervision, was slightly criticized by Dr. Sachs, as not having reacted to some useless suggestions in the report, that seemingly came from interested US sources, that are not keen in moving ahead with productive thought.

This article is intended as a first in a series of articles, and let me say right here that it will not be the most important article in the series - it will actually be an introductory “puzzlement.”

The series is being born from participation on May 5th, 2009 at a full-day Conference on “THE GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE.”

That conference was organized by  The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) which is the world’s leading authority on political-military conflict.

The IISS, based in London, is both a limited company in UK law and a registered charity. It has offices in the US and in Singapore with charitable status in each jurisdiction.

The IISS was founded in 1958 in the UK by a number of individuals interested in how to maintain civilised international relations in the nuclear age. Much of the Institute’s early work focused on nuclear deterrence and arms control and was hugely influential in setting the intellectual structures for managing the Cold War.

The Institute grew dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, expanding both because of the nature of its work and its geographical scope. Its mandate became to look at the problems of conflict, however caused, that might have an important military content. This gave fresh impetus to the Institute as it began to cover more comprehensively political and military issues in all continents. As this mandate developed, the Institute worked hard both to provide the best information and analysis on strategic trends, and to facilitate contacts between government leaders, business people and analysts that would lead to the development of better public policy in the fields of international relations and international security. 

When I got the information about the May 5th Conference I decided to post it as an upcoming event as I felt from the program that it will be very relevant to readers of our site. Indeed, I even found our article as a posting when I googled now for IISS.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (US) (IISS): Conference on the Global Security Implications of Climate Change, May 5, 2009, Washington DC.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 24th, 2009
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

Having said above, now, for the purpose of this article I move to something very different. It is about a 48 page volume that my neighbor had in his possession. This was the volume on the “Transatlantic Cooperation for Sustainable Energy Security” that originated with the Center For Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) that is the Washington DC Institution connected to Georgetown University, with which I was connected some 25 years ago. The further co-sponsors of that volume where The Atlantic Council of the US, and the British host of a September 15, 2008 Conference in London’s Chatham House. The project director was Simon Serfaty of CSIS and the authors and group leaders were Franklin Kramer and John Lyman of the Atlantic Council and Robin Niblett of Chatham House. I made it my business to walk over to CSIS at the end of the May 5th meeting, and picked up a copy. Reading it I found out that actually the soul of this project was Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his capacity as Chair in Global Security and Geopolitics at CSIS, who back in 2008 launched a Dialogue between the European Union and the United States on issues including “THE RISK OF ENERGY SCARCITY AND STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE ENERGY SECURITY” and as a separate item “THE DILEMMAS OF CLIMATE CHANGE, INCLUDING MITIGATION OF ITS CAUSES AND ADAPTATION TO ITS IMPACTS.”

Other topics mentioned were:

- Issues of Stabilization and Reconstruction, and The Problem of Failing States,

- Challenges in the World Economy and the Modalities of Global Economic Governance,

- The Need For Strategic Convergence and the Formation of a Euro-American Security Strategy.

Above topics were first the base for a meeting in Washington DC on July 8, 2008, and then a second meeting at Chatham House on September 15, 2008, and the final result was release in his booklet of February 2009. 35 people were involved in the preparation of this document and it is mentioned that not all of them agreed to all what was said.

So, for a fast answer to the questions in my title - the security mentioned here is the security of energy supplies to the members of the North-Atlantic Region, with the rest of the world, including topics of climate change, a bothersome group of outsiders who at best should be relegated to the poor house of those in need of stabilization or reconstruction because THEY are Failed States - and that is clearly not what I understand under the term of SUSTAINABILITY.

To be sure, a footnote tells us that while talking of the US and the EU as the Transatlantic Community - Canada, even though never mentioned, is also part of this structure.

I may be extremely prejudiced, but I believe that SUSTAINABLE ENERGY is what will bring Security, and when one looks for narrow Energy Security he will not achieve sustainability and not even security - all this even before we start to try to address the impact from climate change that makes also the mightiest economies unsustainable.

Actually - the first line in the text already guarantees the downfall of this publication. It says: ” The world is energy short and carbon long.” Whatever that means - this clearly has no meaning in sciences - any of them! From that statement one is called to take at face value the second sentence that says: “This report focuses on that juxtaposition and the means to achieve energy security in a world concerned over climate change and maintaining economic growth.”

The goal of the booklet seems to convince the world that “A Transatlantic Forum on Energy Cooperation (TFEC) should be formed that includes the US, the EU, NATO, and the nations of both the EU and NATO.” That forum will then find the way out from the problems as perceived in this booklet. This report promises that a second report will be provided later that “will discuss the need for carbon pricing and other mechanisms to complement efforts in energy efficiency and energy production.” So, there is hope - the meat of this work is yet to show up on the table.

The TFEC will develop programs that would assist other major economies, such as China and India, to develop more efficient and effective transportation systems. This I am sure is going to be viewed as great news by China and India who clearly think that the transportation systems in the US are ideal, or perhapse the intent is here to teach them how to save our transportation systems by selling us better cars. Clearly, one or the other were the reason why this document was readied in such haste so the incoming US Administration will have it on its desk.

The document includes a good section on traditional industry evaluation of the energy markets, and the view of developments in the US and in the EU. It also advocates “the expansion of the IEA into a global organization of petroleum and natural gas consumer nations that includes major economies such as China and India,” even though it mentions here and there the introduction of non-petroleum energy.

The document was supported from funds of the European Commission and I would assume that the funds came from the remnants of Marshall funds.

From: Andrew Holland <Holland@iiss.org>
Date: Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 9:23 AM
Subject: May 5 Invitation: IISS Conference on the Global Security Implications of Climate Change

The IISS’ Transatlantic Dialogue on Climate Change and Security presents:

Defining Global Security in the 21st Century:

A Conference on the Global Security Implications of Climate Change

Tuesday, 5 May 2009

8:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

The Ritz Carlton, Washington DC

1150 22nd St, NW

Participants will include distinguished government, military, business, media and academic leaders from the United States and Europe.

AGENDA:

Panel #1           Can we have both Energy Security and Climate Security?  Are long term security from climate change and short-term energy security compatible?

Panel #2           Managing Climate-Induced State-Threatening Crises:  How should militaries plan for massive humanitarian interventions into states stressed by climate-induced crises?

Panel #3           The Strategic Consequences of the Copenhagen Meeting: How do we define ‘security’ in a world of climate instability? Is a global emissions-reduction treaty necessary for long-term global security?

Participants are required to register by April 30, 2009. There are no fees associated with this conference. A light breakfast and lunch will be provided. In your acceptance, please indicate if you will only attend select portions. Space is limited, and preference will be given to those who can stay through the entire day. You will receive personal correspondence confirming your registration for the event.

E-mail:  events-washington at iiss.org  Tel: 202.659.1490

—————————————————————————-

– The IISS would like to thank the European Commission for its generous support in financing this project –

_____________________________________________

Andrew Holland
Programme Manager and Research Associate
Transatlantic Dialogue on Climate Change and Security

The International Institute for Strategic Studies - US
1850 K Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20006
Phone (direct): 202 659 1494
Phone (switchboard): 202 659 1490
Email:  holland at iiss.org
Website: http://www.iiss.org/programmes/transatla…
Blog: http://climatesecurity.blogspot.com

EU ministers shirk third-world climate finance.
by LEIGH PHILLIPS, EUobserver, Brussels, March 3, 2009.

Poorer countries have been left hanging by EU environment ministers, who at a meeting in Brussels failed to produce any clear funding commitments to help the developing world tackle climate change.

Ministers from the 27 member states were in the European capital on Monday (2 March) to discuss proposals published in January by the European Commission on what stance to take at the upcoming UN conference in Copenhagen in December.

The developing world will be hit much harder by climate change than the wealthy north.

It is too early to reveal what offers will be put on the table, the ministers argued, particularly as the US has yet to make public its negotiating stance.

“We were not quite able to reach consensus on the financing mechanism. This is an issue where the [European] Council will need more discussion time,” said EU environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, also in attendance at the ministers’ meeting.

Recognising that northern industrialised nations are responsible for 75 percent of global warming, these countries have committed to making the bulk of CO2 reductions.

The expected grand bargain in Denmark would be that if the EU and US stump up significant chunks of cash for cutting emissions and climate adaptation, developing countries will commit to considerable CO2 reductions in return.

Specifically, the EU is hoping for a commitment from the global south - with the exception of the least developed countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa - of CO2 reductions of between 15 and 30 percent on 1990 levels.

However, despite the speed with which the EU and US found €2.6 trillion to bail out financial institutions over the course of 2008, coming up with funds for third-world climate measures is now proving much more elusive.

At their Monday meeting, the environment ministers kicked the topic up to the level of EU heads of state, due to meet in Brussels on 19 and 20 March, meaning any decision must be taken unanimously. Prior to that, on 10 March, EU finance ministers are also to discuss the issue.

Environment ministers did however endorse the sum that the commission had suggested in its January proposals would need to be spent by all countries around the world to combat climate change - roughly €175 billion annually by 2020, with half of that having to be invested in the developing world.

–=–=–=–

Paris vs. Warsaw

The two issues of how much of that half would come from the EU and, crucially, how much from each EU member state are at the heart of debate between the ministers.

According to the commission’s proposals, EU financing for the developing world would come either through an annual financial commitment on the basis of an agreed formula, or by a percentage of monies coming from revenues produced by the creation of a carbon market across all wealthy countries similar to Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

If the EU opts for the fixed commitments, the formula to share out the burden would involve a calculation based on a member state’s GDP, its emissions in comparison to GDP, and the size of its population.

Paris wants added to this formula a consideration of the amount of emissions per capita.

France likes this idea because it has the lowest emissions per capita in the EU. Poland, meanwhile, is not such a great fan because of its dependence on coal, an extremely dirty source of energy.

Green groups and development agencies said they were getting impatient with the EU on the question of climate finance.

“While billions of taxpayers’ money is being used to prop up failed banks and carmakers, not one eurocent is being pledged to help the developing world tackle a problem that Europeans helped create,” said Joris den Blanken, a campaigner with Greenpeace, which is calling for annual contributions by the EU of around €35 billion for climate adaptation measures in the developing world.

“The EU needs to put money on the table now. Treating poor people’s lives as a bargaining tool in climate negotiations is both immoral and misguided as a negotiating strategy,” said Katia Maia, with Oxfam in Brazil.

—————

30 percent not enough:

At the same time, many of those reductions committed to by the EU will not really be performed domestically, as a large chunk of the 20 or 30 percent will come from so-called carbon offsets - essentially where wealthy countries pay poorer ones to make their carbon cuts for them.

The Big Question: Officially, this is the first day of spring. So why does it feel like midwinter?
By Steve Connor, Science Editor

The Independent of London, Wednesday, 21 March 2007.

Why are we asking this question now?

As you may have noticed, it’s been cold outside. And the simple answer to the big question at the top of the page is that one swallow does not make a summer. In other words, the weather and the climate are not the same thing, although they are of course related. One is what you get on a day-to-day basis, the other is a long-term trend over many decades, centuries or even millennia.

The current cold spell is due to cold winds streaming down from the frozen Arctic, which is not an unusual event for Britain at this time of year. Global warming does not mean an end to spells of cold weather in winter, but it does make them less likely over time. The computer models of global warming predict that as average worldwide temperatures rise, there will be an increase in the chances of warmer, wetter weather in winter and hotter, drier spells in summer.

Where does ‘weather’ end and ‘climate’ begin?

There is no strict point when one becomes the other - it is purely a question of time. Climate is something that can be defined over hundreds or even thousands of years. As a spokesman for the Met Office said: “It would be fair to say the weather becomes climate when observations of the weather are long enough to glean a trend from those records.”

For the past 100,000 years or so the Earth has experienced fairly regular swings in climate from freezing ice ages to warmer periods of “interglacial” temperatures. We are currently living in a warm, interglacial period, which began at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. It is no coincidence that this was the time when we invented agriculture, which led to the rise of civilisation.

We can expect another ice age in a few thousand years, all other things being equal, although current man-made global warming could affect the timing of that fairly inevitable event. Ice ages appear to be triggered by small changes to the angle of the Earth’s tilt in its orbit around the Sun.

On a shorter timescale, the weather patterns in any geographic region can be described in terms of that region’s local climate. Britain, for instance, has a maritime climate where the seasonal variations are not as extreme as in areas affected by continental air masses, such as central-southern Siberia which is on about the same latitude as Britain yet experiences far colder winters and hotter summers. Nevertheless, the mild maritime climate of north-west Europe can be interrupted occasionally by incursions of cold Arctic air in winter - which is happening now - and hot subtropical air in summer.

How do we know the climate is changing?

This is the key to our understanding of climate change. Being able to discern long-term trends in the apparently random “noise” of day-to-day variations lies at the heart of understanding the scale of global warming.

Essentially, scientists believe that the climate is changing for many reasons but one of the most important is the fact that long-term weather records suggest it is happening. Different countries have gathered records on many different phenomena related to the weather and these individual measurements can be collated and analysed to give a bigger picture of how the weather - and climate - have changed over time.

Good records of course depend on sound instruments and expert monitoring. The longest accurate series of monthly temperatures, for instance, is the Central England Temperature records. These cover a triangular area between Liverpool, Bristol and London with the monthly series of temperatures beginning in 1659 - the oldest continuous temperature record anywhere in the world.

This temperature record shows that the hottest years in the sequence were 1990 and 1999 - with an average annual temperature of 10.63C - and the hottest ever year was 2006, with an average annual temperature of 10.84C. The coldest year was 1740 and the hottest month was July 2006.

But aren’t we seeing more flowers in winter?

One of the most interesting ways of looking at the results of long-term climate is called “phenology”, which is the study of recurring natural phenomena such as the flowering of the first daffodils in a garden, the appearance of the first migratory bird or the times of ripening of autumn fruits.

According to the Woodland Trust, spring in Britain is coming about two weeks earlier than it would have been about 30 or 50 years ago and autumn is arriving about a week later. Many amateur naturalists can now observe the sort of changes that would be expected if the climate were altering as a result of global warming.

What about birds and animals?

There can be real problems for animals and birds that have been lured into breeding earlier than normal. A warmer-than-average winter, such as we have seen this year, may tempt birds and animals into having their young weeks earlier than they generally would. Then, if the cold returns, the nestlings and the young animals are suddenly very vulnerable, and may die. We have seen this happening recently in southern England, with baby squirrels, baby hedgehogs, even baby grass snakes being found in distress and taken to animal refuges like the St Tiggywinkles wildlife hospital near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

Will it get worse?

It may do, if the weather and wildlife breeding patterns increasingly get out of sync. This year and indeed in previous years there have been warm spells followed by cold snaps which have hit wildlife hard locally and temporarily, but this has been a merely passing phenomenon. It is possible that it could become more systematic and more serious. For example, many woodland birds feed their young on caterpillars and time their nesting to coincide with the caterpillars’ appearance. If they appear earlier, resident birds will learn to adapt, but migratory species may arrive in Britain too late for the major food source for their chicks - and their populations may crash as a result.

Has too much been made of particular dramatic events?

Some people claim that, for example, the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was caused by global warming; but others say that such events, although rare, are not unknown in the Gulf of Mexico. Others warn that while no one event can be ascribed to global warming, it is the trend that is to be feared. Although it may well be that there are more frequent weather shocks than previously, we just cannot know which of them is caused by global warming and which would have happened anyway.

Should we be surprised by unexpected cold spells?

Yes…

* People have come to think that because global warming is a fact, it must always be warmer than we remember

* As the winters are becoming warmer, it goes against expectation that the early spring suddenly turn cold

* If the Arctic is warming up, one would not think that winds from this region would be so cold at this time of the year

No…

* Natural variability means that the temperature is always going to oscillate over the short term

* What we are seeing here is day-to-day weather, whereas climate change occurs over longer periods

* The turning point between winter and spring is usually a period of unsettled weather

Mountain Is Reflected In A Bay That Used To Be Covered By The Sheldon Glacier On The Antarctic Peninsula

Date: 20-Jan-09
Country: ANTARCTICA
Author: Alister Doyle

Photo: Staff Photographer

A mountain is reflected in a bay that used to be covered by the Sheldon glacier on the Antarctic peninsula, January 14, 2009.

The glacier has shrunk by about 2 km since 1989, probably because of global warming. Picture taken January 14, 2009.

ENVIRONMENT: Climate Change Forcing Penguins North?
By Adrianne Appel*

Magellan penguins in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, in the South Atlantic.

Credit:Photo Stock

BOSTON, Dec 31 (Tierramérica) - Warm ocean currents may have confused some 2,500 penguins from Argentina’s Patagonia region that washed up — dead and alive — on Brazil’s northern coast.

About half the penguins that were found on Brazilian beaches in October were dead, and the others were starving and in very bad shape, said Valeria Ruoppolo, an emergency veterinarian with the International Federation for Animal Welfare (IFAW), in Sao Paulo, who coordinated the rescue of many of the penguins.

“Of the live ones, about 50 percent survived,” Ruoppolo told Tierramérica.

Magellan penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) live in relatively warmer climates than other penguin species, and breed and nest in burrows in the southern hemisphere spring and summer, from October to February, in southern Chile and Argentina, in a temperate and dry climate.

They travel out to sea during the winter, from March to September, to follow anchovies, their favourite food, in order to fatten up.

Juveniles also migrate north. This year, about 2,500 disoriented juvenile penguins traveled more than 2,500 kilometres beyond the normal point, coming ashore in Salvador, in Bahia state, 1,400 kilometres north of Sao Paulo, to the amazement of beachgoers. The penguins were rescued by IFAW and the Centre for Marine Animal Recovery, with help from other organisations and Brazilian environmental authorities.

After months of care and feeding, the 372 surviving penguins were banded and loaded onto a C-130 Hercules military plane and transported to Cassino Beach, in Pelotas, in southern Brazil.

After an overnight rest, they were released into the South Atlantic ocean, along with a few other rescued adult penguins, with the hope that they would guide the younger ones safely home to Patagonia.

About 200 people cheered them on as they waded into the surf. It was the largest penguin rescue on record, a success for animal welfare experts — but a terrible omen for the penguin population.

“We always have a few strandings here and there. In 1994 and 2000 we had big strandings. But not like this year. More than 2,000 penguins is unheard of,” Ruoppolo said.

Magellans are one of 17 species of penguins, which all live in the southern hemisphere, including the Antarctic. Magellans are among the largest, weighing just over four kilograms, with striking colouring: a white chest and a white band around a black back and black head.

The Magellan penguin population is fragile, as their numbers have plummeted by about 20 percent, with about one million breeding pairs today, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. The penguins are at risk due to the effects of climate change, tourism, oil leaks from tankers and shrimp nets.

“We are going to try and understand what happened,” using the identification bands as a tool, Ruoppolo said.

Once the penguins reach their home colonies, volunteers and researchers there will notify Ruoppolo. She will aggregate data about the climate, ocean currents and food sources, to learn about the strandings.

“One thing that was different is that the surface of the Atlantic ocean was one degree Celsius warmer. The penguins follow the fish, especially their favourite, the anchovies. Probably what happened this year is the anchovies went deeper into the ocean for the cold water. And the penguins couldn’t reach their food and they stranded because they were starving,” she said.

However, Ruoppolo warned, “We don’t know yet if we can link the strandings to climate change. Soon we will be able to say.”

According to Sybille Klenzendorf, a scientist with the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), “It’s probably not going to be unusual for some of these things to happen,” given the rise in temperature of the ocean.

The ocean environment of the southern tip of Patagonia especially is undergoing alterations, Klenzendorf said. Due to glaciers melting, the salinity of the water there is changing.

“The salt content is becoming less. It’s not just the temperature that is changing,” she told Tierramérica.

WWF scientists recently warned that allowing the earth’s surface temperatures to rise an average 2 degrees Celsius further — which is expected within 50 years even with a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions — will severely endanger Emperor (Aptenodytes forsteri) and Adelie (Pygoscelis adeliae) penguins and other Antarctic wildlife.

The current targets for reducing greenhouse emissions “aim at stabilising the climate at 2 degrees higher than it is today. But what we’re saying is we need to be more conservative than 2 degrees,” Klenzendorf said.

Furthermore, stress from the ocean changes would exacerbate an already dwindling source of fish for the penguins, due to aggressive commercial fishing in the region, she said. During nesting season, male penguins are swimming further each day to feed, compared to their normal forays, according to P. Dee Boersma, a penguin expert at the University of Washington.

Boersma, who has a research station in Punta Tombo, home to the largest colony of Magellan penguins, on the coast of the southern Argentine province of Chubut, says the changing climate has included more rain in recent years.

Coastal Patagonia is normally very dry, and the increasing rains mean that wet penguin chicks die of exposure, Boersma says in research published recently in the journal BioScience.

“Penguins are sentinels of the marine environment, and by observing and studying them, researchers can learn about the rate and nature of changes occurring in the southern oceans,” she says.

Punta Tombo is a tiny peninsula near the city of Rawson. Its widest point is less than one kilometre, and it is teaming and crowded with penguins — and tourists — during breeding season. About 105,000 people visited the penguin colony in 2007. Local efforts are underway to protect the penguins from further encroachment.

In 1982, the Punta Tombo colony was saved from Japanese commercial interests, which wanted to slaughter the birds and use their pelts to make golf gloves. The area was turned into a penguin preserve and research centre, led by Boersma.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

From:    emma.barnes at earthscan.co.uk
Subject: Earthscan’s new journal Climate and Development
Date:      November 25, 2008

For more information on the journal “Climate and Development” - please visit http://www.earthscan.co.uk/Journals

Emma Barnes
Dunstan House,
14a St Cross Street
London EC1N 8XA
+44(0)20 7841 1930
www.earthscan.co.uk

The UNU on Arid Aquaculture.
11 November, 2008

The UNU researchers issued a report “Arid Aquaculture Among Alternative Livelihoods Promoted to Relieve Worsening Pressure on World’s Drylands” as a result of the four-year study in cooperation with the International Centre on Agricultural Research in Dryland Areas (ICARDA), and UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program.

“Arid aquaculture” using ponds filled with salty, undrinkable water for fish production is one of several options experts have proven to be an effective potential alternative livelihood for people living in desertified parts of the world’s expanding drylands.

While it may sound far-fetched, researchers say using briny water to establish aquaculture in a dry, degraded part of Pakistan not only introduced a new source of income, it helped improve nutrition through diet diversification. The researchers also showed it possible to cultivate some varieties of vegetables with the same type of brackish water.

The project based on the results of the research will be launched by the project partners in Istanbul, Turkey, at 1:00 pm local time Nov. 12 at meetings of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

A policy brief based on the Sustainable Management of Marginal Drylands (SUMAMAD) project and News Release on “Arid Aquaculture Report” are available on-line.

People in Marginal Drylands. Managing Natural Resources to Improve Human Well-being. A policy brief based on the Sustainable Management of Marginal Drylands (SUMAMAD) project Drylands_policy_brief.pdf

Arid Aquaculture Among Alternative Livelihoods Promoted to Relieve Worsening Pressure on World’s Drylands. Four-year Study Calls for Urgent Reforms to Avert Further Desertification That Threatens Millions of “the Poorest of the Poor” Worldwide.

Dryland policy brie new release.doc

From:     press at unccd.int
Subject: Africa must get on board the Bali Road Map or face greater potential threats in the face of climatic change
Date:      November 19, 2008

Africa must get on board the Bali Road Map or face greater potential
threats in the face of climatic change.

(Algiers, Algeria 19 November 2008) - Less than two weeks before a major
climate change conference in Poland, the Executive Secretary of the United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) raised a warning flag
that African nations faced the greatest threat to global warming.

Addressing high-level policy makers at the African Conference of Ministers
in Charge of Environment on Climate Change For Post 2012 in Algiers,
Algeria, UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja underscored the urgency of
incorporating land and soil into the broad-level dialogue of effectively
combating climate change. That, said Mr. Gnacadja, must start in Africa,
the continent that has been hardest hit by the consequences of climate
change.

The two-day Algiers conference, which concludes on Thursday, 20 November,
is of particular importance for Africa as the world continues deliberations
on the necessary actions against climate changes after the expiration of
the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. African ministers are now striving to build an
African platform on implementing the Bali Road Map, the plan that will lead
the world to climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in late 2009.

“The Bali Plan of Action explicitly provides to take into account the
future needs of African countries affected by desertification, drought and
floods.”,Mr. Gnacadja reminded conference delegates.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the desertification of
arid soils releases almost 300 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere
each year, resulting in almost four percent of total emissions from all
sources combined.

The UNCCD Executive Secretary said that Africa must mobilize to create tool
and platforms to take on the challenge.

One area of great potential is carbon sequestration, which can further
mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The productivity of terrestrial
ecosystems could also be improved. Indeed, carbon sequestration is a
win-win context to simultaneously address other global issues such as
biodiversity conservation, food security and poverty alleviation. So far,
though, no large-scale mechanisms have been implemented nor fully taken
into account in existing mechanisms, said Mr. Gnacadja.

Indeed in tackling climate change soil can make a difference. With the
science and technology now available, agreeing on measurable reportable and
verifiable concepts to sequester carbon into soils is possible, doable, and
should therefore not be delayed.

For further information, please contact Marcos Montoiro +49-228-815-2806 or
press(at)unccd.int. Also see http://www.unccd.int

The Drylands, Deserts, and Desertification - 2008 Conference. December 14-17, 2008, Sede Boqer Campus, The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Israel.

www.desertification.co.il

THE PROGRAM As Available on November 18, 2008. There might be still Changes and Additions, as well -  further Poster Sessions.

Download this schedule: detailed_program_sessions_1611_publish.doc

Please note that the list of presentations is still not final.

 DLDD = Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought.

The high-level policy dialogue (the “Dialogue”) on the theme “Coping with today’s global challenges in the context of the Strategy of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification” (UNCCD), took place on Tuesday, 27 May 2008, in Bonn, Germany. The Dialogue was intended to facilitate a targeted exchange from a number of stakeholders on the ten-year strategic plan (“the Strategy”) and to foster awareness of and buy-in among relevant policy and decision makers. There were over 120 participants, including ambassadors, ministers, country representatives, intergovernmental organizations, UN agencies, NGOs and the private sector. The Dialogue consisted of three segments, each of which comprised presentations and discussion among participants.

Above as reported by IISD from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) -                UNCCD HIGH-LEVEL POLICY DIALOGUE in Linkages:  www.iisd.ca/vol04/enb04208e.html

Now We have a new PRESS RELEASE FROM A UNCCD Conference:
UN Desertification conference, Istanbul: “Without proper action, both in developing and developed countries, some 50 million people could be displaced by desertification and land degradation within the next ten years,” warns the Executive Secretary of the UNCCD.

Istanbul, Turkey, 14 November 2008 - A major United Nations conference ended today with significant steps taken to combat desertification and land degradation as well as to mitigate the effects of drought, known as DLDD. Delegates from the 193 countries who are the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) took significant actions to resolve  difficult scientific problems within the Convention process. By drawing in the scientific and technological community more intensively to create indicators that can be used at national levels and beyond, the Convention will win more confidence of the stakeholders. In addition, the reporting process from the Parties is to be mainstreamed so that both affected countries and development partners can see where the Convention reaps large benefits and retain them, while eliminating less effective ones.

“The delegates here in Istanbul took a big stride to guide the next year’s ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9) [the decision making body of the Convention]. We are all on the same page. But it has to be remembered that without proper action by stakeholders, both in developing and developed countries, some 50 million people could be displaced by desertification and land degradation within the next ten years,” said Mr. Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD.

The Seventh Session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC 7) and the first special session of the Committee on Science and Technology (CST-S1) were held in Istanbul from 3 to 14 November.

At the first special session of the Committee for Science and Technology (CST-S1), the scientific advisory body of the Convention, delegates confirmed that promoting the participation of the national science and technology correspondents (STC) in the activities of the committee would enhance its work. The Committee, in consultation with STCs, is now moving forward to select a minimum set of indicators to measure the impact of the implementation of the Convention.

Mr. Gnacadja said that these indicators would be applicable to all countries so that a common standard can make analysis at the national, sub-regional, regional, and the global level feasible. It will also increase the effectiveness of the implementation of the Convention. The set of indicators will be finalized during regional scientific meetings next year towards the submission to COP9.

The ninth session of the CST (CST9) scientific conference will be held next year to ensure peer scientific review with which a Scientific Policy Dialogue is planned.

***

At the seventh session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC 7), which followed the CST-S1, the delegates agreed on reporting principles which measures the Convention’s implementation progress. Through the reporting process, affected countries and development partners would understand “what works, what doesn’t” in implementing the Convention. Assessment of national capacity to implement the Convention will be conducted in all regions in order to design a comprehensive capacity building approach.

The new reporting format will provide opportunities for affected country Parties to address their success and constraints in implementing the Convention in its 10-year strategic plan. For developed country Parties, future reporting should focus on providing information about how the Convention has been mainstreamed into their development cooperation strategies.

Another significant step was the concrete proposal to strengthen the involvement of integration civil society organizations in the review process.

“Recommendations made at the conference have several significant implications. First, the reporting guidelines will increase credibility of the Convention. Secondly, by Parties agreeing to the establishment of the workprogramme, taking a result-based management approach, the Convention will increase accountability. Further, the cooperation among the Convention institutions will increase efficiency of the implementation process of the Convention.” commented Mr. Gnacadja.  “This is a certain step-forward for making the Convention a systemic and worldwide response to global environmental issues affecting land and its ecosystems.”
The 10-year strategic plan, adopted at the eighth Conference of the Parties (COP8) in Madrid last year, is the response of the member Parties to change in the Convention’s environment. In response to the change, there is a need to restructure the UNCCD institutions for their institutional coherence; to strengthen the Committee on Science and Technology (CST); and to improve the review process of the implementation of the Convention with new and standardized reporting guidelines. Mr. Gnacadja hopes that, by taking these actions, Parties could agree and monitor qualitative and quantitative targets to be achieved towards the goals set out in the 10-year strategic plan. “Setting, achieving and monitoring targets on land improvement with incentive mechanisms could redefine the concept and the content of international development cooperation,” Mr. Gnacadja said, “that could be achieved from strong partnerships of all the stakeholders involved.”

The new recommendations would entail a wider use of the information generated by countries and would achieve a higher level of accountability as desired by the Parties, according to the UNCCD Executive Secretary. These will be addressed at the next Conference of the Parties in autumn 2009.

“The pieces have fallen together here in Istanbul to fight DLDD. Now is the time to act,” concluded Mr. Gnacadja.

Media interested in more information about the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification can call Marcos Montoiro at +49-228-815-2806 or send an e-mail to  press at unccd.int

**********************
Developed as a result of the Rio Summit, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is a unique instrument that has brought attention to land degradation to some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and people in the world. Twelve years after coming into force, the UNCCD benefits from the largest membership of the three Rio Conventions and is increasingly recognized as an instrument that can make an important contribution to the achievement of sustainable development and poverty reduction.

Carbon News and Info, Tuesday, 11 November 2008.
The new President of the Maldives says he will begin buying land in other nations as “an insurance policy” in case his nation needs to be evacuated due to rising sea levels from climate change.

The Maldives is a group of 1200 tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, 80 per cent of which are less than one metre above sea level. Much of the most inhabited parts of the country are just 1.5 metres above the water.

The first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed, and his Vice-President, Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik, wasted little time in declaring their plans to British newspapers saying a national fund would be established with royalties from the country’s tourist industry to fund land purchases.

Nasheed told the Guardian that Sri Lanka and India were obvious targets given their proximity, and the cultural similarities of their people to the 300,000 Maldivians. He also named Australia as a possible destination.

Manik said the “worst-case scenario due to sea level rise would be that some or even all of our islands would become uninhabitable and we would have to look for alternative places for Maldivians to live” in an interview with the Financial Times.

“We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,” Nasheed told the Guardian, comparing the concept to Israelis buying land in Palestine.

There is much contention among scientists over how much sea levels can be expected to rise this century. The IPCC landmark 2007 report published conservative estimates of a rise of 25 to 58cm by 2100, criticised as too low by some researchers.

In 2005, authorities announced plans to move the 1000-strong population of the Carteret Atolls, in Papua New Guinea, to Bougainville in what were said to be the first climate change evacuations. Their current homes are predicted to become completely submerged by 2015.

From:        cmariotte at theclimategroup.org
Subject:     “Breaking the Climate Deadlock” 5th Webinar: The Future of Clean Power Generation, with Vinod Khosla
Date:     November 11, 2008 8:30:41 AM EST

The Climate Group is pleased to invite you to its “Breaking the Climate Deadlock: The future of Clean Power Generation” webinar with  international technology guru, Sun Microsystems co-founder, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla this Thursday, November 13th at 4pm GMT.

This is the 5th in a series of webinars The Climate Group has been holding on key issues influencing the current post-Kyoto negotiations. These webinars support the “Breaking the Climate Deadlock” initiative with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and build on the Briefing Papers produced by internationally-respected experts earlier this year (see www.breakingtheclimatedeadlock.com for more details).

A. Login details:

Topic: Breaking the Climate Deadlock: The Future of Clean Power Generation
Date: Thursday, November 13, 2008
Time: 4:00 pm, GMT Standard Time (GMT -00:00, London)
Meeting Number: 366 050 851
Meeting Password: green33

Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.
——————————————————-
To join the online meeting
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://theclimategroup.webex.com/thecli…
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: green33
4. Click “Join Now”.
——————————————————-
To join the teleconference only
——————————————————-
Call-in toll number (UK/EMEA): (0)20 700 51000
Global call-in numbers: https://theclimategroup.webex.com/thecli…
——————————————————-
For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://theclimategroup.webex.com/thecli…
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.

To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
 https://theclimategroup.webex.com/thecli…

B. Background information:

General information on the “Breaking the Climate Deadlock” initiative:
 http://www.breakingtheclimatedeadlock.or…

We look forward to your participation to the webinar.

Kind regards,
Clément Mariotte and the Breaking the Climate Deadlock team at The Climate Group.

Clément Mariotte
Policy Researcher
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Science Proves Warming of Antarctica.

By Adrianne Appel*

BOSTON, Nov 12 (Tierramérica) - The Antarctic holds the world’s largest amount of fresh water in its icy grip, and it is most certainly warming as a result of greenhouse gases, say new scientific studies.

“We’re able for the first time to directly attribute warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic to human influences,” said Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia, in Britain, who led the study.

Evidence of global warming, caused by the release of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air, has been found on almost every continent on Earth. The exception was the Antarctic, which holds 90 percent of the world’s ice and 70 percent of the world’s fresh water.

Antarctica, about 1.4 times as large as the United States, has just 20 weather stations from which to gather data, and for this and other reasons, less has been known about the icy continent.

Scientists can see that the warmer parts of Antarctica, including the Western Antarctic and Antarctic Peninsula, which juts north toward South America and is home to millions of seals and penguins and other birds, are seeing temperature increases.

But the frigid East Antarctic, with ice 2,226 metres thick, has seen no significant change in air temperature during the past 50 years — in fact it has shown evidence of cooling — and this has made overall conclusions about the greenhouse gas effect inconclusive.

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that Antarctica was the only continent where human-caused temperature changes had not been detected, possibly due to insufficient data and observation.

Gillett’s work “demonstrates convincingly what previous studies have suggested: that humans have indeed contributed to warming in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions,” said Andrew Monaghan, of the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research, a close colleague of the researchers.

The team used all data available from 1900 to 2000 from the 20 research stations, and complex computer predictions to reach its conclusions.

The scientists created four computer models, including one that included the impact of greenhouse gases and one that did not. The model with the greenhouse gases produced predictions that matched actual temperature observations up to this point in time, according to their report, “Attribution of polar warming to human influence”, in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

Taking averages across all of Antarctica produced findings of “overall warming” of a few tenths of a percent, Gillett said.

But the team found temperature increases on the Antarctic Peninsula of up to 3 degrees Celsius since the 1950s, among the largest increases on Earth, Monaghan said. Still, the average monthly temperature is 1 degree to minus -15 degrees C.

Several large glaciers in the West Antarctic are melting and contributing to a rise in global sea levels, due to warmer ocean currents that are hitting the ice sheets. The average monthly temperature there is -12 C to -35 C.

“This melting of ice shelves has implications for sea level rise,” Gillett said. In 2002, a huge ice shelf on the Peninsula, called the Larsen B, broke apart and melted. It was 3,250 square kilometres in size, he pointed out.

In addition, the team noticed data pointing to a warming along the coasts of East Antarctica, and they expect this warming to accelerate.

Gillett hypothesised that the South Pole cooling may be due to a severe loss of ozone in the Pole’s atmosphere, due to pollution.

He believes that because of his research, scientists can draw a more accurate picture of what the future may look like for Antarctica. Calculations about the melting of ice can now include the impact of global warming.

“We won’t see anything catastrophic in the next century if things continue at the current rate. But the melt could accelerate,” Monaghan said.

The IPCC was unable to include complete and accurate predictions of global sea rise because it did not have adequate Antarctic data. It predicted an increase of between 18 and 59 cm, Gillett said.

In January, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri made a personal plea to scientists to step up their research on Antarctica and Greenland.

“My hope is the next [IPCC] report, if there is one, will be able to provide much better information on the possibility of these two large bodies of ice melting, in what seems like a frightening situation,” Pachauri said.

Research about warming in the Antarctic Peninsula has been building.

Earlier this year, Eric Rignot, of the University of California, reviewed satellite images from 1996 to 2000 and found that ice is definitely melting on the Antarctic Peninsula and in the West Antarctic.

West Antarctica lost about 132 billion metric tons of ice in 2006, compared with about 83 billion metric tons in 1996, Rignot said. The Antarctic Peninsula lost 60 billion metric tons in 2006.

The ice melt would have been enough to raise the world’s sea level by 0.5 mm, if not for a simultaneous ice accumulation in frigid East Antarctica, Rignot said.

Research that shows humans are causing global warming may help bolster efforts to slow the emission of greenhouse gases, primarily by the United States and China, said Meg Boyle, a climate change expert with the environmental watchdog group Greenpeace.

“In the United States, we have a small percentage of the world’s population but we produce 25 percent of the world’s global warming pollution. It is time for us to step up,” she said. She expressed hope that United States President-elect Barack Obama will be more willing to participate in global climate agreements.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

Melting ice in the Arctic, but the lure of resources is just too strong. Europe’s Arctic adventure - The new cold rush for resources.
LEIGH PHILLIPS, the EUobserver, November 7, 2008. THIS ARTICLE FROM TROMSO, NORWAY.

EUOBSERVER / TROMSO - PART ONE - There’s this grizzled old guy in the hospital with worsening lung cancer. The doctors can’t tell him whether it’s fatal yet, but each new test shows a rapidly deteriorating condition.

He’s been a heavy smoker all his life, although he’s trying to quit, but one day, while he’s wandering the corridors, he comes across a long-abandoned storeroom and it’s rammed to the gills with cigarettes, cigars, roll-your-own tobacco of every brand and region. There are Cuban cigars, Moroccan apple-flavoured nargileh tobacco, Swedish snus and jars of aromatic pipe shag. It’s an Aladdin’s cave of tobacco left over from the days when hospital cafeterias still sold cigarettes, and the nurses and security staff are nowhere to be seen.

The man briefly thinks that he should just forget he ever opened the storeroom door and get back to the business of quitting, but he’s dazzled by the hoard and instead stuffs as much of it into his pyjamas as he can to take back to his bed and puffs his nicotine-addled brains out.

There’s no tobacco hoard in a cupboard somewhere in the Arctic, but there is however a quarter of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil and gas now within reach as a result of the far north rapidly melting.

Like the old man in the hospital, the European Union and countries on the shores of the Arctic sea have said to themselves: “There may be a chance that we can slow down and reverse global warming, so we really should give up our addiction to fossil fuels. But how can we turn our backs - and our wallets - on such a bonanza, even if it’s full of the very stuff that caused the problem in the first place?”

Or is such an environmentalist caricature unfair to the people of the northern regions, for the most part long shut out from the industrial development and the wealth of the more southerly parts of Europe, Canada, Russia and the United States?

Many of those living in the Arctic are aboriginal people, who have historically borne the double burden of underdevelopment in their regions and racial prejudice. And until recently very little has been available to anyone up north apart from far-from-bountiful farming and the occasional mine that inevitably closes down.

Can we really say “No” to improving the standard of living in the north through development, especially if it can be done sustainably?

With recent months in particular seeing both a cascade of truly alarming news on how fast the Arctic is changing and pronouncements from the European Union and other circumpolar powers on plans for exploitation of newly accessible resources, the EUobserver decided to visit Europe’s patch of the Arctic, the northernmost tip of mainland Norway - still outside the EU, but very much Brussels’ advance guard up in the high north - to find out the reality behind the headlines about the coming “scramble for the Arctic”, and look at all sides in the debate over the Arctic’s future.

***

Methane burps:

The situation at the top of the world has taken a sharp turn for the worse just in the last few weeks.

On 6 September, leading European and American ice specialists at the US National Ice Center reported that for the first time, a ring of navigable waters around the Arctic ice cap opened up the fabled Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic archipelago - the maritime Holy Grail of a faster trade route from Europe to Asia sought for centuries by explorers - and the Northern Sea Route, also known as the Northeast Passage, over Eurasia, at the same time.

Then, in late September, Swedish and Russian scientists found the first evidence that millions of tonnes of methane - a gas that is 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - is bubbling up from beneath the Siberian Arctic seabed.

The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is greater than the world’s remaining global stores of coal and it is now rising up from the bottom of the ocean through “methane chimney” discovered by scientists aboard the research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

Days later, British scientists aboard the James Clark Ross found hundreds of plumes of methane burping up from the Arctic seabed to the west of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, says that the release of methane clathrates from permafrost regions and beneath the seabed will unleash powerful feedback forces that could produce runaway climate change that cannot be controlled - the so-called methane time bomb - a prediction of radical environmental transformation far worse than the worst-case scenarios theorised by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Then on Tuesday (28 October), the European Space Agency reported that Arctic sea ice was thinning at a record rate, with the thickness of sea ice in large parts of the Arctic having declined by as much as 19 percent last winter compared to the previous five winters.

***

Last days of the ‘ice bear:’

“The Arctic is warming at two times the rate of the rest of the world,” says Nalan Koc, a senior scientist with the polar climate programme at the Norwegian Polar Institute, in Tromso, explaining why all of this is happening.

Tromso, in the far north of Norway and home to the world’s northernmost university, at the same time is preparing itself for the economic bonanza that the melting will bring.

Nalan Koc, however, is not as excited as other Tromso inhabitants. In a Power Point presentation of this Arctic apocalypse, she starkly lists the myriad ways in which the environment is fundamentally altering. “Amplified by positive feedback, the Arctic is seeing increased precipitation, declining snow cover, rising river flows, thawing permafrost, melting glaciers, retreating summer sea ice, rising sea levels, and ocean salinity changes making the water less saline.”

The talk, despite its subject, is deceptively banal. Where are the four horsemen? A moon turned blood-red? Instead, the end of days is being announced not by skeletonous biblical heralds but in bullet points and embedded videos that take three minutes to load.

The permafrost is melting under tundra that previously was stable, she explains, buckling roads and highways as the ground beneath them gives way.

In the marine environment, sea temperatures are rising and the ice cover is melting. Ice-dependent species such as the polar bear, which the Norwegians more accurately call “isbjorn” or “ice bear,” as well as the walrus and the ringed seal all face an uncertain future. Some scientists believe the polar bear will be extinct by mid-century.

“When you’ve been around up here for as long as I have, you begin to see it with your own eyes from year to year,” she says. “You can feel it in your bones.”

Last year saw a record low extent of Arctic sea ice cover - 4.3 million square kilometres - more than 40 percent below averages in the 1980s and more than 20 percent below the previous record low in 2005. “But more important than the extent is the volume of the ice. Most of the older thicker ice is not surviving from one summer to the next. As of 2007, most of the ice was three or four-year-old ice. As of 2008, most ice is just one year old.”

The massive ice loss and thinning is forcing scientists to quickly ratchet lower even their worst expectations - the 2007 melting came some 30 years ahead of model predictions.

In 2004, it was predicted that the ice would have melted sufficiently to allow commercial traffic in the Arctic Ocean by 2090. In 2007, it was predicted that commercial traffic would be able to cross by 2040. As of 2008, the predictions are for some time in the next five years, with the first start-up possibly in 2009. Models now predict an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer some time between 2013 and 2040.

The last time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in the summer was over a million years ago.

Her colleague, Kit Kovacs, the Biodiversity Research Programme leader at the institute says: “The changes are happening so rapidly that scientists are having trouble processing it all. From initial tests to publishing papers takes at a minimum months or a couple of years, but change is happening much faster than that.

“The biodiversity loss is just as profound as if there were a loss of the Amazon rainforest within the space of five years.”

***

Oil and gas bonanza:

What looks like the end for the polar bear, however, looks like Christmas for resource companies and European energy security concerns.

Johan Petter Barlindhaug, the chair of North Energy, a northern-Norway-based oil-and-gas start-up currently exploring energy sources on the Norwegian continental shelf, says the melting Arctic could offer northern peoples, who have historically lived in a very much underdeveloped region, a chance to have similar standards of living as those who live in the cities and towns further south.

“Climate change poses lots of threats, but it also opens up a range of possibilities,” he says.

Oil companies like North Energy and Norwegian energy giant Statoil Hydro believe the Arctic holds as much as 25 percent of the worlds undiscovered oil and gas deposits - as much as the combined reserves of Canada and Saudi Arabia.

Russia’s Gazprom already has approximately 34 trillion cubic metres (113 trillion cubic feet) of gas under development in the Barents Sea and Moscow is claiming territory in the Arctic that contains an estimated 586 billion barrels of oil.

Mineral resources may also abound, particularly coal, iron, lead, copper, nickel, zinc and sulphides, as well as precious minerals such as gold and diamonds. Recent diamond discoveries in the Canadian Arctic have made the country, which previously didn’t produce any of the stones, the third biggest exporter of diamonds in the world.

On maps that place the North Pole at the centre of the world, instead of the equator, Mr Barlindhaug shows how a melting Arctic also opens up three different shortcuts for shipping goods between Europe and Asia - routes that will save shipping firms, exporters and importers, and the world’s navies and smugglers - billions of euros.

The shipping industry is hoping for a 20 percent saving, he enthuses, with still greater savings for the megaships that cannot fit through the Suez or Panama canals and have to sail round the tips of Africa or South America.

Although Mr Barlindhaug believes that the third shortcut - straight across the pole - offers the most potential.

“The Northwest and Northeast Passages aren’t as important as building ports on Iceland and in Norway and Russia,” he says. “This is because the Canadians view the Northwest Passage as domestic, and there’s something of the same with the Northeast Passage, which is within Russian borders.

“In any case, international waters closer to the North Pole provide routes that are much shorter. But it’s also a matter of speed and cost. Between the Canadian or Russian islands, you can’t pick up much speed while you’re navigating through them. It’s too narrow.

“But at 20-25 knots across the pole, then you’re really saving some money. It would take just five days to cross from the Bering Sea to the Barent Sea. It doesn’t need to be completely ice free.”

He then moves on to the expanded fishing opportunities and potential for discoveries of new medicines derived from invertebrates living in extreme polar environments that round out the economic bounty becoming available as the climate warms up.

Some 10 percent of global white fish stocks swim through the waters of the Barents Sea, the Bering Sea, and near Iceland, offering catches worth billions of euros.

Nonetheless, “bio-prospecting” for new medicines is by far the greater catch, believes Mr Barlindhaug: “These invertebrates are chemical factories that will produce the next generation of medicines. They’re far more important than the fish that is up there.”

In a visit to brand-spanking new labs at the University of Tromso, Jeanette Andersen, of Mabcent-SFI, a public-private bio-prospecting outfit launched last year with €20.5 million (180m NOK) in funding, explains the potential for new treatments and cures coming from molluscs that poison passing fish or colourless mini-starfish that love the cold.

“The marine environment in the high Arctic is unparalleled with respect to combination of temperature and light regimes,” she says. “This implies evolution of organisms with unique physiological and biochemical adaptations.”

She says that the potential is enormous, from antibiotics, chemotherapy, and painkillers to anti-bacterials, anti-oxidents, anti-inflammatory medicines, but Mabcent also hopes to discover creatures that have cosmetic and industrial applications, and even better food and drink preservation.

“But all high-profit,” she enthuses, describing how her biologist and chemist colleagues dive off into the depths of the Arctic Ocean like a team of submariner Indiana Joneses, before they race back to the university to freeze the hundreds of different specimens. They then grind them into a pulp that is investigated by viking boffins at stupidly expensive machines who identify the wild new molecules produced by the exotic biochemistry of these nigh-on alien creatures.

“Living in environments that range from 1.8 to 8 degrees celsius, these organisms are adapted to cold temperatures. As you warm up the metabolism, you speed up the effectiveness of enzymes, so the thinking is that enzymes existing at these temperatures will work faster in warm humans.”

However, some of the different industries opening up as Arctic waters open up pose a threat to others.

Pooh-poohing the idea that oil and gas exploration threatens the environment, North Energy’s Mr Barlindhaug reckons it’s a massive expansion of unsustainable fishing practices and illegal fishing that pose the greatest threat, particularly to bio-prospecting.

“Bottom trawling is much more damaging than oil and gas exploration, as the you find oil all over the rocks and sand on the sea bed. These creatures are used to it - there’s nothing to worry about from oil and gas exploration.

“Bioprospectors should be more scared about increased fishing activity. That’ll damage these organisms much more,” he insists.

Jeanette back at Mabcent is not so sure: “We need to be worried about oil and gas exploration. What Mr Barlindhaug said is too easy an answer to the question of oil spills. Some organisms will adapt, yes, but others are very vulnerable.”

In the second part of the EUobserver’s look at the politics and business of the melting Arctic, appearing on Monday, we look at Kirkenes, a small harbour town sometimes called ‘Little Murmansk’ for its 10 percent Russian population, and how it is set to be transformed by the oil and gas bonanza opening up as the ice disappears.