Take glaciers, for instance.

Some of the most graphic examples of global warming are found in pictures of receding glaciers. Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is one of the most dramatic. Compare these photos from 1993 and 2000 to these from 2003 and 2004.

Researchers at Ohio State University report that Kilimanjaro’s glaciers could melt away within two decades.

When inland glaciers in tropical regions melt, they have an enormous effect on the environment. Species that rely on the habitat glaciers provide are threatened.  Communities down the mountain, whose agriculture depends on a steady, predictable water flow from glaciers are likely to lose their livelihoods and food supply.  Once the glaciers are gone, there  no more water will flow into these communities.  Glacial recession will lead to a shortage of fresh water.

Earlier this month, the The Met Office, UK’s National Weather Service, predicted that glacial retreat could lead to a 20 per cent decline in global agricultural productivity.

When it comes to orders of magnitude, though, Mt. Kilimanjaro is relatively small. Consider Greenland, with its 2.5 million gigaton ice sheet. The consequences of this vast amount of ice melting into the sea are mind boggling.

I can’t waste too much time being boggled, though. The enormity of glacial melt needs to start grokking – not just with me, but with everyone. Greenland, the largest island in the world, harbors about 10 percent of the world’s fresh water in its ice sheet. The Antarctic ice sheet, by way of comparison, holds 70 percent of Earth’s fresh water.

And now, it seems, the Greenland ice sheet is melting even more rapidly than it was ten years ago.

Using satellite data and sophisticated techniques that measure the smallest changes in the Earth’s gravity over the massive ice sheet, scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Bristol University in the UK, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, found that the Greenland ice sheet was losing mass three times faster now than it was during the early 1990s. During the 1990s, Greenland lost about 97 gigatons of ice mass per year. In 2007, it shed about 267 gigatons. Between 2000 and 2008, Greenland lost about 1500 gigatons of ice.

What is even more alarming, is the ice sheet losses could have been even higher. “Without increased snowfall and refreezing since 1996, the ice sheet mass losses would have been 100% higher,” said Dr. Jonathan Bamber, a professor at the University of Bristol, and one of the study’s authors.

I find numbers like this hard to picture. In cases like these, comparisons can be useful. I need a human scale or I can’t relate. For instance, I can relate to the size of a football field. I can walk the approximate circumference of an acre without having to be told where the boundaries are.

So, for the purpose of illustration, consider a single gigaton:

One gigaton is equal to one billion tons (or 10^15 g). It is equal in mass to about 2750 Empire State Buildings, or about 142 million African elephants

One gigaton could provide enough water for 17 million people.

What is unnerving about these numbers they account for a substantial rise in global sea levels.

During the 1990s, Greenland’s ice sheet thaw accounted for about .46 millimeters per year of global sea level rise. Since 2006, ice loss at the rate of 273 gigatons per year caused a sea level rise of about .75 millimeters per year.

Over the nine years between 2000 and 2008, 1500 gigatons of melted Greenland ice produced a world-wide sea level rise of about 5 millimeters. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted into the sea – which, at the present rate, could reasonably occur with in the next fifty years – the sea level would rise seven meters world wide.

About 1.2 billion people live in coastal areas around the world. Their homes, food supply, and infrastructure would be devastated. Think of New Orleans the day after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but on a global scale.

To get a picture of what this will look like – and compare a seven meter sea level rise with, say, a ten or twenty sea level rise – have a look at this interactive Web site. You can play with the values yourself, and see what the world will look like if Greenland melts. Then imagine what the world would look like with no Antarctica – which has seven times more ice than Greenland.

Next time: a linguist studies how people talk about climate.  And I try to figure out what it means.

Even more importantly, though, we have to have facts - proven facts - to back up any claims we make about climate.  Dr. Marty Mlynczak, a senior research scientist based at NASA’s Langley, Virginia research centre is all about finding out the facts.  Technology he developed gives us even greater access to data about the atmosphere.

When we think of climate change we tend to think only of near-earth phenomenon: changes in average temperature, diminishing polar ice, changes in weather patterns, variations in El Niño effects, and measurements of atmospheric C02.  Most of these data are collected either at the Earth’s surface or else they are viewed from afar, by satellites.

After I spoke with Dr. Marty Mlynczak, I realized that often there were limitations to what technology on hand could measure.  And some of what isn’t – or wasn’t – being measured is very important indeed for our understanding of climate change.

Radiative emissions of water vapour at the far infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, for instance – that is, wavelengths between 15 and 100 micrometers – could not be measured directly until very recently.  The lack of accurate measurement of radiation at this wave length, it turns out, really matters:  based on the results yielded by climate models, scientists studying the atmosphere hypothesized that half of all of the cooling emissions into the outer parts of the atmosphere were in the far infra-red part of the spectrum.

The far infrared relative to other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum

Dr. Mlynczak is very interested in the far-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.  “All infrared energy relevant to the Earth’s climate occurs at the shorter wavelenths,” he wrote in a 2006 paper.*  He believes being able to measure radiative emissions in the upper troposphere at far-infrared wavelengths is crucial to our understanding of how the Earth’s atmosphere cools.  The trouble was, said Dr. Mlynczak, “There wasn’t an instrument available that could measure this part of the spectrum.”

So he and his colleagues built one.

Dr. Mlynczak’s team launched a prototype of the the Far-Infrared Spectroscopy of the Troposphere (FIRST) instrument during a high-altitude balloon flight from Fort Sumner, New Mexico in June of 2005.  It was a success.

“FIRST opens a new window on the spectrum that can be used for studying atmospheric radiation and climate, cirrus clouds, and water vapor in the upper troposphere,” wrote Dr. Mlynczak.*

In October of this year, Dr. Mlynczak and his colleagues traveled to a location high up in the Andes mountains of Chile, the Atacama desert, an altitude of 17,600.  Because it’s one of the driest regions on Earth, the Atacama desert offers an ideal environment for measuring water vapor.

At this altitude, said Dr. Mlynczak, there’s nothing getting in the way of accurate measurement.  “We’re above everything.  We’re above the pollution.  It’s the ideal location for atmospheric observation.”

Next time: precise measurement tells us a great deal about how glacial melting is affecting both agriculture and sea level rise.

*Source: Martin Mlynczak et al, “First light from the Far-Infrared Spectroscopy of the Troposphere (FIRST) instrument,” GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, 4 April, 2006.

Al Gore, Nobel Prize winner and former Vice President, has a new book out today: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.  Published by Rodale, Our Choice strides leagues beyond the fact-based message of his 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth“. It boldly asserts that saving the world is a moral imperative, one which religious leaders throughout the world should sign on to before it’s too late.

In an pre-publication interview in Newsweek magazine, Gore cited a poll of CEOs’ and CFOs’ attitudes towards the impending climate cataclysm. Even now, he said, 80 percent of them indicated they would not spend money to make their factories more efficient and save money in the long run if it hurt their next-quarter bottom line.

And where business goes, at least in America, politicians obediently follow. Just forty days away from the Copenhagen climate conference, policy makers dodge and weave when the “E” word slides into the climate discussion.

But the “E” word is probably our last resort. Fact-based argument is not working.

Tempting though it is to think we can barter our way out of it, climate will continue to plague us.  And unfortunately, in the US we’re still suffering from the diplomatic and greenhouse gas emission sequelae (a term I’m borrowing deliberately from medicine, meaning an after-effect of disease, condition, or injury) of our previous administration.

We tend, as human beings, to be very forgetful.  To refresh my own memory, I revisited the Kyoto Protocol, ratified in 1997.

Under the 1997 Kyoto pact, companies or governments expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can essentially outsource their cuts by funding clean energy projects in developing countries. By purchasing offsets known as Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) from projects like the ones now under way in China, regulated entities can make up the difference between what they must cut and what they can do domestically.

But all is not well on the road to Denmark.

The Kyoto Protocol places the onus for the developing world’s success or failure in reducing greenhouse gas emissions squarely on the shoulders of industrialized nations. There is also proviso for developed nations to address climate changes that are already causing havoc in many developing nations and will only get worse and more widespread – drought and famine plaguing some nations, flooding in others.

UN climate talks held in October in Bangkok broke down when specific carbon emission reduction commitments from the developed world were mentioned, alongside the suggestion that major developing nations might have to ante up at some point.  Sudan, chairing the G-77-China negotiating group set the tone by accusing the United States and European Union and leading developed countries of attempting to sabotage the terms agreed to in the Kyoto treaty.

They point out that although the emissions-cutting commitments by developed countries are far from burdensome, most are firmly on track to miss them.

But why the disconnect?  If climate change is going to be a catastrophe for all of us, every single living creature on the planet, then what is stopping us from joining together to do something about it?

Two recent studies, and a recent book, address these questions.  I call the phenom The Seven Deadly Sins Factor: I have seen the enemy and he is us.

The first is a study conducted by two researchers at the University of Toronto.  They discovered that people who purchased “green” products behaved less altruistically than those who didn’t.  These findings, reported in Nature revealed through a computer game, that students who had chosen purchase green products rather than conventional ones were the most likely to lie and steal to earn extra money.  Buying green products may act as a ‘moral offset’, prompting people to be more lax with other ethical norms.

Perhaps carbon offsets work the same way:  a country that has more of them feels they have the moral high ground, and other rules about governance simply don’t apply to them.

Another study carried out by Manfred Milinski, director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, revealed how participants behaved when they were told that unless they contributed to a fund to cut emissions, the world would suffer catastrophic climate change.  In this theoretical climate, each six-student team needed 120 euros in total to do the job.  But each participant had a budget of just 40 euros.

The results were not too heartening.  Even faced with the possibility of near-certain doom, only half of the 30 teams mustered enough funds to prevent the end of the world.

Next time: Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

EOS satellites monitor climate from space

The  Earth Observing System (EOS), launched in 1999, uses a series of polar-orbiting satellites to study clouds, the oceans, atmospheric chemistry, as well as water and ecosystem processes and land masses.  Dr. Steve Running, of the University of Montana wrote about why NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) mission was so important at its inception on December 16, 1999.  He wrote:  “Dec 16, 1999, maybe fittingly at the end of this millennium, we will launch the first satellite designed to fulfill this vision. The one line summary of the purpose of EOS is to find out “Is the current human occupancy and activity of planet Earth sustainable?.

In the ten years since the first EOS satellite was launched, things have changed a great deal.  In a recent essay, Dr. Running wrote:  “In the decade of EOS observations, fossil fuel emissions have risen from 6.7 to 8.7 petagrams per year. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has gone from 363 to 386 parts per million, actually exceeding the”worst-case” (most fossil-fuel intensive) emission scenario used for climate simulations for the most recent IPCC report. As illogical as it sounds, humanity has actually accelerated its approach to the impending climate cliff in this last decade.”

What started off as a scientific endeavor, Dr. Running writes, is now a geopolitical one: global carbon monitoring now has economic and legal dimensions.

Next time: the United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, starts in six weeks. In the run-up to the conference, The Hot Zone will get up close and personal on the geopolitics of climate change.

I asked Dr. Anastasia Romanou, Associate Research Scientist at NASA GISS, to address these questions.  In her own research and climate modeling, Dr. Romanou does what I’d describe as fitting in with “think global, act local.”

She cited, as an example, a study she and her colleagues undertook recently to ascertain the amount of radiative energy that reaches the Earth’s surface.

According to measurements made in two very far-flung locales, Dr. Romanou and her colleagues found the level of radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface varies greatly from location to location.

Dr. Romanou and her colleagues studied two areas that could not be more different from each other in terms of both physical climate and geopolitical climate: Thessaloniki, Greece and Beijing China. Dr. Romanou used local in situ and satellite measurements of radiation levels in Thessaloniki. She and her colleagues relied on satellite data from Beijing for measurements of radiation levels in China.

Dr. Romanou’s measurements revealed that in Thessaloniki, where local government initiated a strict emissions control program almost two decades ago, the level of sunlight reaching the surface was much greater than it was before the control program was put in place. In contrast, in Beijing, where such controls were not put in place until 1996, the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface was found to be far less.   China’s recent economic boom lead to huge increases in energy consumption and a corresponding increase in air pollution. These factors served to degrade Beijing’s already poor air quality.

Curious about why Dr. Romanou’s team used satellite data for their analysis of China’s air, while they used data collected locally in situ in Greece, to carry out their analysis, I asked Dr. Romanou to explain.

“While satellite data tells us about large areas and is in some ways too general – the highest resolution we get from satellite data is a footprint of aboutt a hundred square kilometers – local in situ measurements can also be biased by small scale phenomena. Topography, microclimates, urban or rural environments affect local measurements. So we try to use both sets of data.

“Many governmental agencies in Europe and Asia are reluctant to release scientific data from their meteorological institutes to third parties. We had to use what is published in the literature, and data we gathered via satellite.”

It turns out that some countries have very tight controls over data which can stand in the way of research and international collaboration. Data having to do with air quality and the efficacy of measures taken to improve it are the most often withheld. Governments that withhold data are concerned that releasing it may incriminate them in in the wake of stringent air quality regulations instituted over the last several years by international bodies.

It seems as though sometimes gathering data about climate presents difficulties that are more about politics than they are about science.

Next time, conversations with scientists involved in The Earth Observing System (EOS).

The Hot Zone spoke with Rasmus Benestad, Senior Scientist, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and a regular contributor to the climate blog, RealClimate. We asked him to identify issues he thinks are most important in confronting climate change. Among other things, Dr. Benestad believes that there is a need for local scale climate observation to complement and augment the global picture offered by mathematical models.

THZ: What are the most important issues we should be thinking about in terms of climate change?

Dr. Benestad: We need more precise modelling at the local level. This entails a limited area model – a model of a physical location with very high resolution.

THZ: Why is this important?

Dr. Benestad: For instance, if the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean disappears in the summer, seasonal temperature fluctuation in Norway and in Europe will be affected. In turn, storm patterns will change, and seasonal forecasting will be affected. Fisheries will also be affected, which has economic implications.

THZ: How will you obtain accurate observations in local areas, areas we’d consider remote, like Madagascar or parts of Indonesia - places that simply would not have access to the same scientific data gathering infrastructure we have in the US or in the EU?

Dr. Benestad: Countries which have the scientific infrastructure will have to collaborate with those that don’t. The organizations would have to hire local people to do local observations. This requires an economic commitment as well as a commitment to maintaining the infrastructure locally.

THZ: What are the other issues that might be standing in the way of accurately assessing and communicating the impact of climate change?

Dr. Benestad: We need to bring together the disciplines. The people who study the stratosphere generally don’t talk enough with other flavours of experts. There is too little interaction between different related disciplines: physicsists and statisticians or between meteorologists and oceanographers. We need to bring these people together. The issues are very inter-related.

THZ: A bit self-referential, in other words? What I’d call “chimneying?”

Dr. Benestad: Yes.

THZ: Are there other aspects of the discussion you’d consider important?

Dr. Benestad: There are too few people with physics degrees involved in this kind of work. There are too few people involved in this kind of work at all. Compare the number of people who work in finance in Oslo with the number of people who work in scientific disciplines.

THZ: Oslo and everywhere else.

Next time, conversations with Dr. Anastasia Romanou, Associate Research Scientist at NASA GISS and Dr. Watson Gregg, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Global Modeling & Assimilation Office about ocean modeling and the Ocean Biogeochemical EOS Assimilation Model.

I stopped eating sushi a few years ago when I began learning about ocean acidification and the decline of the world’s fisheries. The NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology reports that the United States is the third largest seafood consumer in the world. Americans ate a record of nearly 17 pounds of seafood per person in 2004, while total consumer spending for fish and shellfish topped $62 billion. In that year alone, coastal and marine commercial fishing generated $32 billion for the economy and employed over 67,000 people.

Regardless of whether you eat fish or not, the image of an octopus trying to climb a fishing line in an attempt to escape anoxic water, reported by The Times (UK) has a way of making an impression.

Anoxic water occurs in parts of the ocean where the concentration of oxygen has been so diminished that marine life cannot breathe. Low-oxygen areas occur naturally near the west coasts of all continents, where near the surface there is sufficient sunlight to support photosynthesis. In these environments, photosynthetic plankton flourish; and at the surface, oxygen is plentiful enough. But when insufficient oxygen at the surface causes a die-off in plankton, their nutrient-rich remains drift to lower depths, causing a secondary bloom in microscopic animal life – the kind that does not contain chlorophyll and does not photosynthesize. Instead of contributing to deep-sea oxygen stores, these microorganisms are oxygen consumers.

The water becomes oxygen-starved. The sea life that relies on it suffocates.

A long time ago, I saw a television program about a marine biology lab. It housed among other things, tanks of tropical fish, as well as a tank containing an octopus. Over the course of several days, scientists began to notice that the population of fish were diminishing. They were not dying – there were no bodies floating on the water’s surface in the morning. Fish were simply vanishing, one by one. Other than a mysterious wet spot on the floor, nothing in the lab seemed, well, fishy.

Determined to solve the mystery, the research staff resorted to espionage. They mounted a video camera in the lab before they left for the evening.

In the morning, the tape revealed all. As soon as the door closed behind the last scientist, the octopus hefted itself out of its tank, slid noiselessly onto the lab floor (hence the wet spot), climbed up the shelf to the fish tank, helped itself to a tropical fish or two, then slid calmly back to its own quarters, where it was, as always, found in the morning.

Whenever I think about the preternatural intelligence of the octopus, sliding out of its tank to purloin a snack, I can’t help but smile.

I myself suffer from asthma. Once paramedics had to be summoned in the middle of the night because I couldn’t breathe. Not being able to breathe is most frightening sensation in the world. Imagine trying to pull piece of inner tube through a narrow pipe. That’s what asthma is like. I think of the octopus, trying to breathe, its audacious will to survive forcing it to climb a tightrope that will only lead it to an even more inhospitable world. No paramedics will force an oxygen tube down its throat and save its life. We’re the ones responsible for its breathing, and for its suffocation.

Next, a conversation with Rasmus Benestad, Senior Scientist, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and regular contributor to the climate blog, RealClimate.

For instance, salmon yearlings prey mainly on pteropods, which may be among the first organisms to be affected by ocean acidification. Hence, ocean acidification may influence the structure and productivity of primary and secondary benthic and planktonic production, which in turn may affect the productivity of fish communities and higher trophic levels. In addition, the interaction of ocean acidification with thermal tolerance may change the temperature-dependent biogeography for many fish species.*

*Source: “The Impacts of Ocean Acidification,” in European Science Foundation, Science Policy Briefing 37, pp 1–12, 2009

for the full paper, see the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Lab Website.

Ocean acidification affects different parts of the ocean very differently, depending upon the kind of organisms that inhabit each niche, and the ecosystems they’re part of. Over the next few weeks, the Hot Zone will be speaking to scientists whose research explores the inner workings of niche ecosystems.

If you have specific questions, please post them in the comments section, and we’ll get answers from the scientists themselves.

*Source: The Dangers of Ocean Acidification. Scott Doney, in Scientific American, pp 58-65, March, 2006.