The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past. That’s the message from Eric Post, lead scientist of a new report into the effects of climate change on life in the Arctic. “It seems no matter where you look — on the ground, in the air, or in the water — we’re seeing signs of rapid change,” said Post in a press statement.
With the decline in sea ice and snow, animals usually seen at lower latitudes are being found in more northerly regions, including red foxes that have been displacing native Arctic foxes. Migratory caribou in low Arctic Greenland and elsewhere are declining in number as they have not been able to keep their calving season in synch with changes in plant growth. With the decline in caribou comes a knock-on effect to native Inuit hunters, according to the report’s authors. Hotter summers could result in more insects and parasites that prey on the caribou, which could then also reduce the annual caribou harvest by local indigenous peoples.

This impact on animals and the native human populations is different from ‘Survival of the fittest’ since these are changes made by humans. Unfortunately, these are just an indicator of the impact of global warming, the changes are happening all around us.

U.S. scientists monitoring shrinking glaciers in Washington and Alaska reported this week that a major meltdown is under way. A 50-year government study found that the world’s glaciers are melting at a rapid and alarming rate. The ongoing study is the latest in a series of reports that found glaciers worldwide are melting faster than anyone had predicted they would just a few years ago. It offers a clear indication of an accelerating climate change and warming earth, according to the authors.
Since 1959, the U.S. Geological Survey, which published the study on its Web site, has been tracking the movements of the South Cascade glacier in Washington and the Wolverine and Gulcana glaciers in Alaska. The three glaciers are considered “benchmarks” for the conditions of thousands of other glaciers because they’re in different climate zones and at various elevations.

The melting of the glaciers has both long term and short term problems. Along with the increase in water levels due to melting of polar caps and ice on Greenland, this melting of the glaciers will initially result in river levels going up, eventually contributing to higher sea caps; over a longer period, the glaciers will contribute lower amounts of fresh water and affect huge sections of the world’s population. At the same time, the world’s leaders cannot quit bickering, and take the steps required to reduce global warming.

Experts have warned that the richly diverse coral reefs of the Coral Triangle around southeast Asia will disappear by the end of the century if action is not taken against climate change. As well as the loss of one of the world’s most diverse underwater ecosystems, the knock on effect would be the collapse of coastal economies that supports around 100 million people, according to the WWF- commissioned study outlined at the World Ocean Conference this week.
The Coral Triangle includes 30 percent of the world’s reefs, 76 percent of global reef building coral species and more than 35 percent of coral reef fish. “In this world, people see the biological treasures of the Coral Triangle destroyed over the course of the century by rapid increases in ocean temperature, acidity and sea level, while the resilience of coastal environments also deteriorates under faltering coastal management. Poverty increases, food security plummets, economies suffer, and coastal people migrate increasingly to urban areas.”

The report concludes that unless we take action to rollback some of the effects of global warming, the direct impact on fishing will cause huge problems to the global fishing economy and impact people who are dependent on fishing as both livelihood and for their food needs, and yet, if one evaluates where we are with trying to roll back emission levels, it is still talk and no action. The Obama administration, for all its talk about making changes in the Bush administration policy of action on global warming, has not taken any concrete action.

One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday. They said the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986.
“The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. “This continued and often significant glacier retreat is a wakeup call that change is happening … and we need to be prepared,” USGS glaciologist Jane Ferrigno, who led the Antarctica study, said in a statement.

The US was a laggard in acknowledging climate change, and taking steps to counter it. In addition, climate change has so many politics involved in it that it is difficult to get agreements. Poorer nations argue (with some logic, but still hurting the campaign against climate change) that they have contributed significantly lower to current emissions and hence should bear less of the liability, while developed nations claim that developing nations are also potentially huge contributors and should pony up their part of the effort. And in all this, global warming marches on.

The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned. Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures “will be beyond anything” predicted.
Speaking at the American Science conference in Chicago, Prof Field said fresh data showed greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007 increased far more rapidly than expected. “We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said. Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem.

As has been stated in the past, global warming will have disastrous effects on global weather, such as increased ferocity of storms, skewing of weather patterns (which will make dry regions drier), the sinking of coastal regions, and so on. It will not discriminate between developed and developing countries; developed countries have more people staying near the water (which affects them due to both water fronts during storm and higher sea levels), developing countries will be increasingly affected due to climate changes, and affect of increasing water levels on coastal regions (severely affecting many regions such as Maldives, Fiji, Bangladesh, etc).
However, the focus on global warming that was there just a couple of years ago is gone, with the worries about the global economic recession having wiped out all other worries. No more is there a focus on the increasing ill-effects of global warming (even though a slow down in the economy is not going to lead to a decrease or cut-down in the emission levels and there is no current way that the ongoing increase in global warming can happen). It is pessimistic, but there is almost no current push to reduce or cap emissions in a way that will have beneficial effect.

ONDON, England (CNN) — A team of international scientists led by Dr James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, say that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are already in the danger zone. Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere currently stand at 385 parts per million (ppm) and are rising at a rate of two ppm per year. This is enough, say the scientists, to encourage dangerous changes to the Earth’s climate. As a result we risk expanding desertification, food shortages, increased storm intensities, loss of coral reefs and the disappearance of mountain glaciers that supply water to hundreds of millions of people.

The report, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” appears in the latest edition of the Open Atmosphere Science Journal and brings together the expertise of ten scientists from the United States, the UK and France. It is a departure from the previous climate estimates which predict that perilous CO2 levels will be reached later in the century. As far as current global observations are concerned, Hansen cites both the decline of Arctic sea ice and the worldwide retreat of mountain glaciers as causes for major concern. In light of the new data the authors believe that merely stabilizing CO2 emissions might not be enough to avoid catastrophic changes. “Humanity must aim for an even lower level of greenhouse gases”, the report concludes.

We are heading down a dangerous path of playing with our environment, and yet don’t seem to see this as a problem. There is almost no public involvement in these areas, and leaders of a lot of nations who should be working full steam to avoid such problems are busy either passing the buck or having meetings without reaching the desired goals to avoid future catastrophes.