Micronesia is forging new precedent in global environmental law by claiming it is adversely affected by a Czech coal-fired power plant and thus entitled to relief under Czech law.

Micronesia filed a plea with the Czech environment ministry using a measure designed originally to settle disputes between near neighbors, arguing:

The Federated States of Micronesia is seriously endangered by the impacts of climate change, including the flooding of its entire territory and the eventual disappearance of a portion of its state. . . . The commissioning or retrofit of any large coal power plant could play a relevant role in the destruction of the entire environment of our state.

It may be too late for Micronesia. A new study suggests that Antarctica’s Pine Island glacier has passed its tipping point and is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimeters.

Pine Island glacier is but one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Climate change is warming the Amundsen Sea, which is at the southern margin of the Pacific Ocean. As rising sea levels push the warm water beneath the ice shelves, it melts them from below, pushing the grounding line higher up the continental shelf.

By raising sea levels, and therefore the grounding line, in their model, the scientists identified a point of no return beyond which the glacier would be unable to recover.

The Antarctic sea bed has a small lip in it: it rises slowly up the continental shelf, then makes a slight dip before rising again to the shoreline. The researchers found that as long as the grounding line is on the outer rise of the sea bed, before the lip, small changes in climate lead to correspondingly small changes in the glacier’s ice volume. But as soon as the grounding line moves over the lip and starts to move down into the dip in the sea bed, the situation changes critically. Once the grounding line passes the crest, a small change in the climate causes a rapid and irreversible loss of ice.

News isn’t good from the other pole, either. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley,  predict that replacing tundra with trees will melt sea ice and greatly enhance warming over the entire Arctic region.

Because trees are darker than the bare tundra, scientists previously have thought that the northward expansion of trees would result in more absorption of sunlight and a consequent local warming.

During past episodes of warming, broad-leaved deciduous trees expanded their range north even more quickly than needle-leaved trees. While not not as dark as evergreen trees, broad-leaved trees transpire a lot more water. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that becomes well-mixed throughout the Arctic.

Taking account of this in a standard model of global warming, the researchers discovered that, while broad-leaved trees do absorb some additional sunlight, the water vapor they pump into the atmosphere causes a more widespread warming.

The increased water vapor would melt more sea ice, resulting in more absorption of sunlight by the open ocean and dumping more water vapor into the atmosphere. This positive feedback will warm the land even more and encourage faster, more efficient tree growth and perhaps an even faster expansion of trees into the Arctic.

Here’s a brief compendium of news reporting dramatic effects of global warming that are already being felt around the world, from the Arctic to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Troubling bubbles

In the Canadian arctic, pure methane in massive amounts is seeping out of the boggy soil.

“On a calm day, you can see 20 or more ‘seeps’ out across this lake,” said Canadian researcher Rob Bowen, sidling his small rubber boat up beside one of them. A tossed match would have set it ablaze. “It’s essentially pure methane.”

AP correspondent Charles Hanley reports that air temperatures in northwest Canada, in Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic have risen more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970 — much faster than the global average. The summer thaw is reaching deeper into frozen soil, at a rate of 1.5 inches a year, and according to the IPCC a further 13-degree temperature rise is possible this century. And that’s without calculating in the added effect of methane released from thawing Arctic soils.  Permafrost, tundra soil frozen year-round and covering almost one-fifth of Earth’s land surface, runs anywhere from 160 to 2,000 feet deep and is packed with carbon from tens of thousands of years of accumulated plant and animal matter. The top 10 feet of permafrost alone contain more carbon than is now in the atmosphere.

The prognosis is not encouraging.

How likely is a major release?

“I don’t think it’s a case of likelihood,” he [Stockholm University researcher Orjan Gustafssons] said. “I think we are playing with fire.”

Great Barrier Reef Said to Face Catastrophic Damage

Australian officials, commenting on a report issued by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, warn that catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s most extensive bank of coral, may be unavoidable if global warming continues unchecked.

Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh said today that warming is hurting reefs and that urgent action is needed to reduce run-off of nutrients and chemicals from farms that poses a second threat.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the report:

Almost all the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef will be affected by climate change, with coral reef habitats the most vulnerable. Coral bleaching resulting from increasing sea temperature and lower rates of calcification in skeleton-building organisms, such as corals, because of ocean acidification, are the effects of most concern and are already evident.

Change is seen in Atlantic from climate, fishing

The basic makeup of the ocean waters off the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic region has fundamentally changed in the past 40 years because of climate change, commercial fishing pressures and growing coastal populations, according to a new report.

The “new report” referred to is the 2009 Ecosystem Status Report, just released by the Ecosystem Assessment Program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) of NOAA’s Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, Mass. Global warming impacts include:

• Warming of coastal and shelf waters has led to northward shifts in distribution of some fish species and changes to a warmer-water fish community.

• The community structure of zooplankton, a major food source for whales and many other marine species including fish, has changed, due in part to climate and physical processes acting over the North Atlantic Basin, indicating the importance of winds and atmospheric circulation patterns to the function and structure of this ecosystem.

Here’s the introductory paragraph to the section on climate forcing:

Climate patterns over the North Atlantic are important drivers of oceanographic conditions and ecosystem states.  Steadily increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can not only affect climate on global and regional scales but alter critical aspects of ocean chemistry. Here, we describe the atmospheric forcing mechanisms related to climate in this region including large-scale atmospheric pressure systems, natural ocean temperature cycles in the North Atlantic, components of the large-scale circulation of the Atlantic Ocean, and issues related to ocean acidification.

A new study finds climate change is speeding up the release of carbon dioxide from frigid peatlands in the sub-Arctic, stoking a vicious cycle of global warming.

An increase of just 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over current average temperatures would more than double the CO2 escaping from the peatlands. Northern peatlands contain one-third of the planet’s soil-bound organic carbon, the equivalent of half of all the CO2 in the atmosphere.

The team of European researchers led by Ellen Dorrepaal of the University of Amsterdam artificially warmed natural peatlands in Abisko, in northern Sweden, by 1.0 C over a period of eight years. The experimental plots exhaled an extra 60% of CO2 in Spring and 52% in Summer over the entire period. The study is to be published in the British journal Nature July 30.

This conclusion is from the abstract:

Climate warming therefore accelerates respiration of the extensive, subsurface carbon reservoirs in peatlands to a much larger extent than was previously thought. Assuming that our data from a single site are indicative of the direct response to warming of northern peatland soils on a global scale, we estimate that climate warming of about 1 °C over the next few decades could induce a global increase in heterotrophic respiration of 38-100 megatonnes of C per year. Our findings suggest a large, long-lasting, positive feedback of carbon stored in northern peatlands to the global climate system.

Levels of CO₂ at the Zeppelin research station on Svalbard, northern Norway was measured at a record high last week of over 397 parts per million (ppm), an increase of more than 2.5 ppm from 2008 and the highest figures in 50 million years.

CO₂ levels recorded in Svalbard tend to be higher than the global average which is compiled from data from over 60 sites across the world and is now over 386 ppm compared to 280 ppm before the industrial revolution began in the 1800s. The Zeppelin research station on Svalbard is situated on a mountain top approximately 1100 km from the North Pole.

What is very worrying is the speed of change. Levels at Svalbard are now increasing 2-3 ppm a year, much faster than only 10-20 years ago. Never before have CO₂ levels increased so fast.

The global annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14 ppm – the fourth year in the past six to see an annual rise greater than 2 ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5 ppm each year, but since 2000 it has risen to an average 2.1 ppm.

A report just released at a Norwegian government seminar says that extensive climate change is now affecting every form of life in the Arctic.

In the past four years, air temperatures have increased, sea ice has declined sharply, surface waters in the Arctic ocean have warmed and permafrost is in some areas rapidly thawing. In addition, plants and trees are growing more vigorously, snow cover is decreasing 1-2% a year and glaciers are shrinking.

The world’s top polar scientists, collaborating on the 2007-2008 International Polar Year project, report that the situations seen both in 2007 and 2008 were entirely unpredicted by the IPCC models and that Arctic sea ice will most likely disappear during summers in the near future, much sooner than models predicted.

The Arctic sea ice that reforms after the melt season is newer and thinner than in the past, making it more likely to melt the following year, exposing more dark ocean surface to sunlight which then absorbs more heat in a positive feedback loop.

The bold type in the conclusions quoted below is in the original:

Our main conclusions so far indicate that there is a very low probability that Arctic sea ice will ever recover. As predicted by all IPCC models, Arctic sea ice is more likely to disappear in summer in the near future. However it seems like this is going to happen much sooner than models predicted. * * * The entire Arctic system is evolving to a new super interglacial stage seasonally ice free, and this will have profound consequences for all the elements of the Arctic cryosphere, marine and terrestrial ecosystems and human activities. Both the atmosphere and the ocean circulation and stratification (ventilation) will also be affected. This raises a critical set of issues, with many important implications potentially able to speed up melting of the Greenland ice sheet, accelerating the rise in sea levels and slowing down the world ocean conveyor belt (THC). That would also have a lot of consequences on the ocean carbon sink (Bates et al. 2006) and ocean acidification. Permafrost melting could also accelerate during rapid Arctic sea-ice loss due to an amplification of Arctic land warming 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate trends, as pointed out recently by Lawrence et al. (2008). This permafrost evolution would have important consequences and strong impacts on large carbon reservoirs and methane releases, either in the ocean and/or on land.

In an interview at Yale Environment 360, Julienne Stroeve does a great job of clearly and simply explaining Arctic amplification implications.

Stroeve is a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, and has been closely monitoring the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic. She says:

We’re basically about 30 years ahead right now of where the models say we should be, in terms of how quickly the ice is declining.

Stroeve describes the Arctic and its once year-round blanket of sea ice as “the air conditioner of the Northern Hemisphere.” The poles and their snow and ice are what keeps our planet cool, as the white surfaces reflect much more of the sun’s radiation. The melting of that ice has consequences, as the dark surfaces of the ocean and land absorb rather than reflect heat.

If you take that away you just start warming up the planet even more. And, we certainly would expect that to have an effect on atmospheric circulation around the planet, but exactly how that is going to manifest still remains quite unclear. The research on that is still very much in its infancy. But certainly, everything is connected, so when you change one component of the planet, the rest of the system is going to have to respond.

Global weather is driven by the transfer of heat away from the equator and the tropics towards cold regions at the poles. If you change the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator, that impacts circulation.

We’re running an experiment with Earth’s climate, with unknown outcomes that could include an abrupt “flip”:

We don’t really fully understand the implications of this, and I think that’s the biggest fear, is that we really don’t know what we are doing. It’s like we are playing with the dials on our climate and we don’t really know the outcome of it yet.

Scientists are uncovering new evidence that global warming is already having profound impacts on the Arctic.

Teams of scientists working on the Census of Marine Life – a 10-year project involving researchers in more than 80 nations that aims to chart the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the oceans – have found that global warming is changing the distribution, abundance, and diversity of marine life in the polar seas with profound implications for creatures further up the food chain. The loss of sea ice cover means the loss of the sea ice algae, small animals and crustaceans which depend on it. The complete loss of summer ice – which scientists now think could occur within 20 years – will lead to a complete change in the ecosystem – salinity, ice melt, flow, currents.

Finnish scientists report that the Arctic is belching out nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas 310 times more potent than CO2 and 11 times more persistent in the atmosphere than methane. Nitrous oxide releases create a positive feedback loop: increasing temperatures cause increased releases of the gas, which in turn further increases temperatures. Climate Feedback also has a piece on the Finnish research.

Scientists have discovered that another feedback loop is kicking in.  For the first time, research has confirmed that the Southern Ocean can no longer absorb as much atmospheric CO2 as before. Its role as a ‘carbon sink’ has been weakened, and it may now be only one-tenth as efficient as previously estimated. The same trend can be observed at high latitudes in the North Atlantic.

This decrease in the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon is the result of climate change at high latitudes, which has led to an increase in the relative difference of atmospheric pressure at latitudes between 40 and 60° S, and therefore to higher wind speeds, leading in turn to increased ocean mixing, with surface waters mixing with deep waters. Surface waters contain less CO₂ than deep waters, since CO₂ is taken up by the photosynthetic activity of marine phytoplankton. In addition, when these organisms die, they are deposited in deep water where they are broken down by bacteria, thus enriching the deep water in CO₂. Thus when there is increased wind mixing of the ocean, greater amounts of CO₂ are carried from the deep layers to the surface and, as a result, the ocean’s ability to absorb atmospheric CO₂ is diminished.

Both in the northern and southern hemispheres, the weakening of oceanic carbon sinks means an increase in atmospheric CO₂ content and thus in climate warming. These effects are not yet included in coupled climate/carbon models like those used in the IPCC reports.

NSIDC reports air temperatures over the period September 15-October 31 were unusually high over much of the Arctic, especially over the Arctic Ocean.

Counterintuitively, these warm conditions are consistent with a rate of ice growth exceeded only in 2007. NSIDC explains:

“Before sea ice can start to grow, the ocean must lose the heat it gained during the summer. One way the ocean does this is by transferring its heat to the atmosphere. This heat transfer is largely responsible for the anomalously high (but still below freezing) air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean seen in Figure 3. Only after the ocean loses its heat and cools to the freezing point, can ice begin to form.”

NSIDC says that “Arctic amplification” was predicted by climate models:

“In the past five years, the Arctic has shown a pattern of strong low-level atmospheric warming over the Arctic Ocean in autumn because of heat loss from the ocean back to the atmosphere. Climate models project that this atmospheric warming, known as Arctic amplification, will become more prominent in coming decades and extend into the winter season. As larger expanses of open water are left at the end of each melt season, the ocean will continue to hand off heat to the atmosphere.”