4th International Polar Year (IPY) & Damocles Integrated Project, Arctic sea will not likely recover

Arctic sea ice will probably not recover

Environmental Research Web, February 19, 2009

As predicted by all IPCC models, Arctic sea ice will most likely disappear during summers in the near future. However, it seems like this is going to happen much sooner than models predicted, as pointed out by recent observations and data reanalysis undertaken during IPY and the Damocles Integrated Project.

On February 25, 2009, there will be a celebration in Geneva, Switzerland to officially close the 4th IPY that started on March 1, 2007 in Paris, France. It is not a surprise that one of the main topics of this 4th IPY was climate change, since the polar regions play a very important role in Earth’s climate. This role is magnified by the combined effect of two main processes: one is due to the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trapping longwave solar radiation, which keeps our atmosphere warm, and the other, called albedo, is due to the capacity of the Earth’s surface to either reflect (in particular over ice and snow) or absorb (in particular over the ocean) incoming shortwave solar radiation.

Unprecedented events have been reported during the past 20 years in the Arctic Ocean, mostly related to the Arctic sea ice summer minimum extent that retreated in September 2007, far beyond previous extreme minimum records. This is the first clear evidence of a phenomenon of importance on a planetary scale, forced by global warming, mainly caused initially by an Earth energy imbalance due to greenhouse gas concentrations increasing in the atmosphere.

The Earth now absorbs 0.85 watts per square meter more energy from the sun than it emits into space, raising the likelihood of an acceleration of sea ice melting, ice sheet disintegration and a rise in sea levels (Hansen et al. 2005).

The European integrated project Damocles is one of the major programs of the International Polar Year (2007-2009). It is dedicated to the Development of Arctic Modelling and Observing Capabilities for Long-term Environmental Studies (DAMOCLES). Damocles started in December 2005 and will end up in June 2010. Damocles was proposed and selected by the European Union in response for a call addressing the development of observing systems for predicting extreme climate events.

Damocles was based on the fact that Arctic sea ice was retreating and thinning at an alarming pace. Projecting a disappearance of Arctic sea ice during summer in the near future could be considered as an extreme climate event. During the two international polar years 2007 and 2008, Damocles experienced two extreme climate events. Arctic sea ice retreated during both IPY years by more than 1 million km2 compare to a previous extreme case occurring in September 2005 before Damocles and IPY started.

It is quite instructive to compare the last three years (2005, 2007 and 2008) and also to compare the past 20 to 30 years, when satellites for observing planet Earth have been in existence.

Over the past 30 years we have observed a gradual long-term warming, mostly characterized by milder winter freezing seasons and longer summer melting seasons, evidencing strong albedo positive feedback effects. Less ice means more sea water being exposed to short-wave solar radiation that would be absorbed and transformed into heat by the ocean melting more ice and so on. Strong positive feedback accelerates the melting of Arctic sea-ice, especially due to the sharp contrast of the high albedo for sea-ice areas covered with snow (>0.8) that reflects 80% of the incoming solar radiation back into space, in contrast with the very low albedo (0.2) of the ocean, absorbing 80% of the incoming solar radiation.

Although long-wave and short-wave downwards solar radiation agreed rather well between models and observations, one of the biggest uncertainties in Arctic climate simulations still remains how albedo effects are affected by cloud cover and aerosols (Arctic haze). Warming amplification in the Arctic resulting in sea-ice thinning and retreat might also be attributed partly to atmospheric circulation (Graversen et al. 2008) and oceanic circulation (Zhang et al. 1998, Polyakov et al. 2005 and Dmitrenko et al. 2008) but this is still controversial. A drastic retreat of the sea-ice minimum extent in summer has inevitably profound consequences during the following fall season. Then all the heat taken up by the ocean has to be evacuated by the atmosphere, delaying the onset of freezing and consequently the amount of sea ice formed during the following winter. Observations taken during the past 20 years indicate that sea ice is becoming thinner, younger, moves faster and retreats more and more in summer. The sea-ice extent, ice thickness, ice drift and ice age are all interrelated parameters best characterizing Arctic sea-ice evolution and it is remarkable to realize that all these parameters have changed radically.

Surprisingly, the 2007 Arctic sea-ice event was largely unpredicted, even if extreme sea-ice conditions were observed almost every September month each year over the past 10 years (Perovich et al. 1999, 2003, Serreze et al. 2003 and Stroeve et al. 2005). Premises for an Arctic sea-ice thinning and of an Arctic ocean warming were reported nearly 20 years ago by Wadhams (1990) and Quadfasel (1991). So why the 2007 Arctic summer sea-ice minimum extent occur as a complete surprise if it was not an exceptional and an extraordinary event?

During the summer of 2005 we did not observe any replenishment of the MYI (Multi Year Ice) lost during the previous months by FYI (First Year Ice) either because FYI melted entirely or because FYI escaped the Arctic Ocean through Fram Strait or both. So at the end of the summer of 2005, there was almost no FYI left and consequently second year ice could not grow. Only MYI remained in the Arctic Ocean in 2005 and that explained why an extreme Arctic sea-ice extent minimum was reached during that particular year.

During the summer of 2007 we observed a similar situation but even more extreme simply due to a cumulative effect characterized by no replenishment of MYI by FYI during previous years. That explained why MYI was so depleted, leading to an extreme situation in September 2007 with an all-time absolute sea-ice extent record minimum. It is quite important to understand precisely why in 2005 and 2007 all FYI disappeared and could not replenish any of the MYI like it usually did in normal years. There are several potential reasons such as a polar amplification of global warming in particular in summer during the melting season due to strong albedo positive feedback.

During the summer of 2008 we observed a drastic decrease of the Arctic MYI and an exceptional replenishment of MYI by FYI. Because FYI resisted the summer melt in 2008, the sea-ice extent minimum record of 2007 was not reached in 2008. It would be quite important to understand precisely why FYI in summer 2008 resisted both the summer melt and the transpolar drift through Fram Strait.

Based on the 2005, 2007 and 2008 extreme events occurring in the Arctic and on observations occurring very intensively thanks to the IPY stimulus and the Damocles project, it is remarkable that scientists collected lots of basic information badly needed for improving modelling and predictive capabilities. At the same time however, it should be recognized that the situations met both in 2007 and 2008 were entirely unpredicted by the IPCC models. The original design proposed by the Damocles consortium to the European Commission had to be completely revised and adapted to the new situation.

The first polar year of Damocles (2007) was mainly characterized and highlighted by the transpolar drift of the French vessel Tara (September 2006-January 2008), 115 years after the Norwegian Fram expedition with Fridtjof Nansen at the helm. Tara drifted along the transpolar drift in an amazing 15 months (500 days) compared to 3 years for the Fram 115 years ago.

During the exceptional summer of 2007, the Russian icebreaker Akademik Fedorov from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) based in Saint Petersburg (Russia) and the German icebreaker Polarstern (the SPACE project) from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) based in Bremerhaven (Germany), circumnavigated an Arctic Ocean drastically depleted with sea ice, collecting an abundant dataset to document the prevailing conditions met during this peculiar summer of 2007. Akademik Fedorov deployed the NP35 Russian drifting station in September 2007 during the very last day of the campaign, near the Svernaya Zemlya Russian islands. NP 35 was recovered near Svalbard 10 months later, confirming the acceleration of the transpolar drift as also observed by Tara.

The second polar year of Damocles (2008) was highlighted by an impressive number of field work campaigns involving seven icebreakers from Russia (Akademik Fedorov and Kapitan Dranitsyn), from China (Xuelong), from Sweden (Oden), from Germany (Polarstern), from Norway (KV Svalbard and Lance) and from Canada (Louis Saint Laurent). The Swedish icebreaker Oden was stationary in the vicinity of the North Pole during the whole summer of 2008 (the ASCOS experiment).

New important processes were discovered during winter and summer of 2007 and 2008, such as frazil ice formation (deep ice) during the transpolar drift of Tara in winter, as well as ponds melting throughout the entire layer of ice, which drastically accelerated lateral sea-ice melting, as observed from the Chinese icebreaker Xuelong during summer of 2008.

Very innovative high technology was operated during Damocles, such as ITP, POPS, MOPS, AITP and sea glider, and an impressive array for acoustic tomography in Fram Strait was deployed. All kinds of new systems for performing sea-ice thickness measurements such as EM bird, ULS on floats and submarines, tiltmeters and seismometers and IMBs were operated.

An important September Sea-Ice Outlook was initiated by the Search for Damocles group in April 2008 after an S4D workshop organized in the US (Palisades, New Jersey) in March 2008. This Outlook will continue in 2009. A new workshop will be organized in Boulder, Colorado, in March 2009. The S4D activities were pretty successful in 2008, as illustrated by the five workshops organised during that year.

Damocles stimulated a very intensive international cooperation with the US, thanks to an EU initiative (Search for Damocles); with the Russian Federation, thanks to the EU initiative Damocles TTC (Third Targeted Countries) extension; with China thanks to a Memorandum of Understanding signed with the PRIC (Polar Research Institute of China) in Shanghai to participate in the Arctic Chinese expedition Chinare 2008 on board the Chinese icebreaker Xuelong; and with Canada thanks to a convention signed with the PCSP (Polar Continental Shelf Project) to access the Canadian Polar stations of Resolute Bay and Eureka (Environment Canada).

Our main conclusions so far indicates 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, as pointed out by recent observations and data reanalysis undertaken during IPY and the Damocles Integrated Project. 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.

There will be a large symposium organised in Brussels on November 17-19, 2009 by the Damocles consortium to present the complete and final results.

Recommendations

1. Establishment of an Arctic Treaty covering scientific needs, rights and access for exploring the Arctic in exchange of a fully transparent process for all scientific activities occurring under the Treaty, including unlimited and full transparent data sharing between all the parties.

2. Large European involvement for Arctic exploration: promotion of the Aurora Borealis European icebreaker and European full partnership in the Arctic Council.

3. Establishment of an international pan-Arctic coordinated scientific network of polar stations including Tiksi (Siberia), Resolute Bay & Eureka (Nunavut), Longyearbyen & Ny Alesund (Svalbard), Nuuk (Greenland) and Point Barrow (Alaska) and logistical platforms (ice breakers).

4. Establishment of an international pan-Arctic coordinated scientific network of Arctic researchers gathering ALL scientists working in ALL countries contributing to Arctic research with NO exclusion. This network (Open Forum) should elaborate and keep updated a coordinated science plan for future Arctic research covering all disciplines. Scientists should elect network coordinators for any given stretch of time. This network should also elaborate an implementation plan to be discussed with national and international polar agencies. The European Union and the Arctic Council could provide the funding necessary for the foundation and functioning of this international network of scientists. That would be a great legacy of both IPY and Damocles.

5. The fourth IPY is ending soon but due to the rapid evolution of climate change, specially in the Arctic domain, we need to maintain a high level of scientific activity in the Arctic. It would make no sense to wait for another 50 years for the fifth International Polar Year to continue our investigations regarding climate change.

6. The human dimension of climate changes is global and this is why we called the new era the anthropocene.

Source: ipy

Link: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/yournews/37877

Dan McDougall, Observer: Doug Tompkins' Patagonia

Welcome to my world

Doug Tompkins made a fortune "selling people countless things they didn't need." Now he's spending it saving the planet. Dan McDougall enters his private Patagonian wilderness to hear how the tycoon turned environmentalist has declared war on industrialists, whalers -- and Greenpeace

• Dan McDougall
• The Observer, Sunday 15 February 2009
• Article history

A dark intertwine of deep green fjords stretches beneath us towards the horizon where the confluence of the glacial current merges with the black stillness of the open sea. Far to the south, where epic waves torment Cape Horn's cold granite cliffs, three great oceans -- the Pacific, the South Atlantic and the Antarctic -- meet in a cacophony of turbulent waves and deadly squalls. It is the stormy heart of the most unpredictable weather system on earth. "My Patagonia," in the words of the poet Mario Miranda Soussi, "is a landscape of infinite water, torn apart by a torrent of love, navigating a single river swollen by miracles."

The verdant terrain we are crossing at 500ft above the Patagonian rainforest canopy is no less violent: fern-covered Jurassic mountains crashing into each other, snarling vegetation suffocating the trees, roaring rivers tossing huge boulders and rocks kilometres downstream. Fleetingly, we fly over a few small corrugated tin houses, their red roofs glinting in the evening sun; remote dwellings only there, it seems, to show how vast the terrain is. Even the mighty Andean Condor, with its 3-meter wingspan, appears no bigger than a seagull in this landscape.

The shadow of the plane that carries us is lost on the side of an enormous massif as we begin to lose altitude. The single prop dips and weaves in the thermals as we approach the tree line, cutting the uppermost branches off a 200-year-old pine tree, and then hurtles towards the dusty runway. Our pilot is Doug Tompkins, 66, a multimillionaire philanthropist conservationist and the most controversial American in South America. He is an individual at the vanguard of a new aggressive environmentalism who has spent hundreds of millions of his own dollars buying up a slice of Patagonia the size of Northern Ireland, and has practically split a sovereign country in two -- all in the name of saving the world. Fifteen minutes earlier, Tompkins had flown us over the gaping crater of his own volcano, and taken an impossible 360-degree turn so close to the lip that we almost passed out from the sulphurous emissions.

We are among the first guests this year to stay at his remote farmhouse. Tompkins spent Christmas and New Year on the Antarctic high seas, the acting quartermaster on the controversial Sea Shepherd, a vessel he has supported through thick and thin through his friendship with the ship's captain, Paul Watson. Tompkins later tells me that he spent much of his time bombarding the Japanese whaling fleet with putric acid bombs. He was the oldest man on the ship, but he pulled his weight by doing night watch, and even scrubbed the deck.

The experience of ramming Japanese ships on the world's most treacherous oceans has clearly taken its toll on him, and he looks gaunt. But he is also agitated. It's been a difficult weekend. Over coffee, toast and his own homemade blueberry jam he spent our first breakfast together telling me it was time to "Take it up a notch" in his bid to save the planet. "Greenpeace," he told me, "were wimps. They've turned into a corporation. They hoover up donations from around the world and do nothing. As activists, they are dead in the water. It's time for a new activism to get the message across. We need to take the destruction of this earth and its animals to those responsible -- and face them down. We are out in the snow and the wind taking it to the Japanese. Greenpeace are in their warm London offices lobbying politicians. Direct action is the key now, and the public are behind us."

The story of how Doug and his wife, Kris McDivitt Tompkins, arrived in Patagonia started out simply enough, but it has quickly become one of the most enduring controversies in modern South American history. Once fashion moguls behind three of the high street's most famous brands -- Esprit, The North Face and Patagonia -- the couple are now mounting the world's largest private conservation effort, buying vast stretches of wilderness in Chile and Argentina to protect it from development.

Tompkins founded The North Face, his outdoor gear company, in the 1960s and, with his first wife, the clothing company Esprit. Kris, who is a decade younger than Doug, was CEO of Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company that was the first US corporation to give 1% of its sales to an environmental fund.

Tompkins first dabbled in land conservation as far back as 1979, creating the redwood-studded Esprit Park on a San Francisco city block. In 1990, he helped Britain's Cat Survival Trust buy 10,000 acres of rainforest in Misiones, Argentina, now El Piñalito Provincial Park. In 1994, he married Kris and the couple moved to Chile. They sold their shares and said a not-so-fond goodbye to corporate America, deciding to focus full-time on conservation in Patagonia. Since then they have bought up an astonishing 2.2m acres of wilderness for parks and reserves.

As Bill Gates and Warren Buffet launched audacious philanthropic campaigns to wipe out HIV and malaria, the Tompkins have quietly poured almost $300m into reserves and ecological causes through their private San Francisco-registered charitable foundations.

Parque Pumalin, where we are now standing, is owned by one of these foundations -- almost 800,000 acres of temperate rainforest stretching from the Chilean coast to the Andes. It holds 25% of the world's remaining Alerce trees, related to the giant Sequoias of California, as well as pristine waterfalls, lakes, campgrounds, cabins and trails. It doesn't stop there. To the southeast of Pumalin, in Valle Chacabuco, a former sheep ranch is being restored to grasslands and 300 miles of fences have been removed. The locals have become guides, restoration specialists and wildlife managers, just as small farmers around Pumalin have become park employees and organic farmers.

In the Argentine province of Santa Cruz, McDivitt Tompkins used $1.7 million from her Patagonian Land Trust to buy the 155,000-acre Estancia Monte Leon. Endangered deer, sea lions and elephant seals take refuge here, along with Magellanic penguins. Her foundation gave the land, as well as a management plan, to Argentina as the Monte Leon National Park in 2004. The newest project is to rescue an area in subtropical Argentina where giant anteaters, tapirs and jaguar will be reintroduced.

Today, the couple are the ecological equivalent of rock stars, such is their standing in environmental circles that they both get top billing wherever they go to talk in the world. Prince Charles recently received them at Clarence House to discuss organic farming. Yet they are far from self-publicists. Securing an interview with the intensely private couple took eight months of perseverance.

But not everyone is a fan. Accused by right-wing Chilean politicians of effectively splitting the country in two in a conspiratorial land grab, the Tompkins have faced a barrage of criticism over the past few years. The Catholic church and Chile's former president, Eduardo Frei Montalva, have both attacked the Parque Pumalin project repeatedly, claiming the couple have evicted peasants and blocked traffic along the region's only road-and-ferry lifeline, the Carretera Austral.

The campaign against them has, at times, attracted popular appeal in a region where US involvement has often meant CIA-backed coups and support for right-wing dictators, such as Augusto Pinochet. In newspaper headlines and on websites, the Tompkins have been accused of dark motives and sinister schemes, some of them ridiculous, some downright entertaining -- they are here to replace local cattle with American buffalo, to corner the world granite market, to establish a new Zionist state, to steal Chile's water and sell it to Africa.

"The country is divided into two and the guilty party is a North American who doesn't even live in this country," warned the conservative weekly Que Pasa recently. "His objective is, to say the least, dark, covering a vast territory from mountains to sea."

The superintendent of Region 10 (one of 13 provinces in Chile), of which Tompkins owns 20%, keeps a thick file on the American on his desk. The Chileans have even placed a bizarre police station in the centre of Parque Pumalin to keep an eye on him. It's a dream posting for the officers who sunbathe and play football all day with only sheep for company. The army keeps an active base near him, too: since his land shares a 44-mile border with Argentina, the army sees him as a potential threat to national security. So much for saving the planet.

"Imagine if a super-rich millionaire bought a quarter of Northern Scotland," one Chilean friend and Santiago-based journalist told me, "and then informed the local populace that he was keeping it for their own good because their government couldn't be trusted to look after it. Even if true, it's a hard truth to swallow for us all. We are a country with growing energy needs, and water and wind energy in Patagonia could be the key to keeping our economy afloat when fossil fuels go the way of the dodo."

"We knew from the start that the biggest challenge for us would be overcoming not just political opposition but mistrust over our motives as outsiders. We have thrown the obstacles in our own path, this is what we do," Tompkins tells me at his Pumalin farmhouse. We are perched, awkwardly, on one huge sofa surrounded by an expensive mixture of crafted blond woods and organic white paint. Outside is a beautiful Japanese garden and a series of organic greenhouses -- not to mention the couple's private runway and hangar for their four planes. Every detail of the 100-year-old farmhouse's renovation was designed by Tompkins himself.

"I've never ever tried to make life easy for myself," Tompkins continues. "Land use is highly political here, more than most places: if we wanted to retire in peace we wouldn't be here. These parks are our life's work, not the clothing chains we created, selling people clothes they don't need. We are the ones who keep putting obstacles in our own way by buying more land. I'm a troublemaker and I'm proud of it. We know what to expect - more confrontation, more outrage, more mistrust. When we began working on Parque Pumalin, rumours flew that we were establishing a nuclear waste site for the United States or, oddly for Episcopalians which we both are, setting up a Jewish state. It would be funny if these theories weren't being taken very seriously. If we weren't getting the hate mail or the graffiti outside our mainland offices."

Tompkins claims that things are finally improving, with the government at least. Last August, Pumalin was designated a nature sanctuary, a special status conferred by the Chilean government in order to provide additional environmental protection. As a result of the announcement, the Chilean Pumalin Foundation will supervise the park's administration and development as a national park for the Chilean people with full public access, yet one that remains privately owned. With its new designation, Parque Pumalin has become the world's largest private reserve.

At the heart of the reserve is a mist-shrouded, old-growth rainforest, which receives an astonishing 6 meters of rain a year and is home to the towering Alerce trees, some more than a 1,000 years old. Once common, the Alerce has been logged to the brink of extinction. To Tompkins, the struggle to preserve biodiversity is his primary concern, it is "the point upon which everything turns," he says. In the early 1990s, he started the non-profit Foundation for Deep Ecology to promote the ideas of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who died last month, aged 96.

Naess's philosophy opposes all "mega-technology" -- from nuclear power plants to television sets and even wind turbines, and calls for a dismantling of the "techno-industrial society." Although Tompkins uses computers and pilots small planes to and from his projects in Chile and Argentina, he is unapologetic in his support for Naess. "I use satellite phones and a Mac. I use a camera like everyone else, but for me this is a strategic embrace to try and communicate the messages I believe in. Mega technologies present the biggest threat to the world today, more so than fossil fuels. We have distanced ourselves from nature," he says.

As we speak, Tompkins's wife, who calls him Lolo (young man in Spanish), calls us to the table for lunch. "We have a saying here," says Kris, "that if we wait long enough, the whole world will turn up on our doorstep. We host environmentalists from the four corners. People who come here to see the work we are doing." Close friends of the couple understand that she is, in fact, the dynamo behind the pair's success. We are joined by an American environmental campaigner and his son who are visiting Tompkins to raise funds for a project in their home state of Oregon. Within moments the youngster finds himself chastised by Tompkins for tacitly admitting it would be hard to give up his laptop. "You are weak," shouts Tompkins at the startled young man. "This is a fight to the end. You need to step away from technology's hold on you." The young environmentalist, who rides a skateboard to work for fear of polluting the planet, looks crestfallen.

Doug Tompkins grew up in Greenwich Village and the resort town of Millbrook, upstate New York; his father owned a Manhattan antiques store. He was kicked out of the prestigious Pomfret School in Connecticut and then, like many Americans in the 1960s, he drifted west, moving to California to climb and ski. While he was working as a tree surgeon near Lake Tahoe in 1963, he met Susie Russell. He'd been hitchhiking, she picked him up. They were both 20. Married a year later, they moved to San Francisco, where he borrowed $5,000 to start The North Face, selling it a few years later for $50,000. Esprit started out, literally, on Susie's kitchen table in 1968. By 1986, its worldwide sales topped $1 billion.

Known as Little Utopia and Camp Esprit, the San Francisco-based company was a leader in developing neo-hippie perks, offering employees free foreign language lessons, and sending them rafting in the foothills of the Himalayas. Happy employees at Esprit ultimately made for serious profits: along the way Tompkins acquired a $1 million collection of art, including work by Bacon, Picasso, Balthus and Hopper.

In the 1980s, with Esprit flying high, Tompkins read George Sessions's and Bill Devall's primer, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered, and decided to make a change. As he states on his Deep Ecology website: "Within the few hours that it took to read the book, I experienced a powerful epiphany. Everything suddenly made sense." As the company grew, Tompkins perfected what was later dubbed "MBA" (Management by Being Absent), going off for months on climbing and kayaking adventures. His mind was seemingly elsewhere. In 1990, after several years of wrangling and a divorce from his first wife Susie, she and three partners bought him out. The deal gave him $125 million plus 25% of Esprit Far East.

In Pumalin, Tompkins keeps a tight grip on the park, micro-managing his conservation effort in the same way he did with Esprit. No decision is made without his express permission, be it the style of stone used on a pathway to the lettering on a signpost in one of the parks. "Doug Tompkins is such a control freak that he has to pick the toilet-paper holders for all these places," jokes his close friend Yvon Chouinard, chairman of clothing manufacturer Patagonia, Inc.

What is undeniable is that Tompkins's methods, good or bad, have put him on the frontline between development and conservation. The idyll of the Patagonia he lives in is deceptive. Timber companies and cattle breeders are busily harvesting the forests, and the lakes of the region are steadily becoming polluted by salmon farmers exporting to Japan and Europe. South America's last non-tropical rainforests are being chopped down, the wood ground into chips for the cellulose industry, and Chile's environmental laws are not strong enough to protect the trees.

Tompkins is blunt, because he has his work cut out. "Sure, I offend people," he says. "I do it all the time, but we only have one shot at this. I can't buy every wilderness in the world. There are wealthy men out there who if they stood up and did the same we would have a fighting chance of saving our ecosystems. Why would a retired billionaire want to keep his money anyway? What good is it to him when he is dead?"

To this end, Tompkins considers other charitable efforts, such as the fight against poverty, illiteracy, or disease, secondary to preserving biodiversity, a fact that many charities find impossible to digest. "Look, you can plough money into Africa, you can be like Bill Gates and take on malaria, these are all admirable pursuits, but it's really quite simple. There's not going to be any social justice on a dead planet. We need to pay our dues to live on this earth; we need to pay the rent and I'm doing that with the work we are carrying out here in Patagonia."

"There are too many of us," he adds. "Say what you like about the Chinese, but they got it right with their one-child policy. We must accept our place in nature. The earth's population must shrink if we want to survive."

Subtlety, Tompkins is the first to admit, is not his strong point. Getting results is. Everything here, in majestic Pumalin at least, depends on his success and much of the water that runs through the land he owns is scheduled for damming by energy companies. He vows to stand in their way. Energy is a hot topic in Chile, where natural resources are few. Ten Patagonian rivers are targeted for dams planned by Spanish-Italian multinational Endesa and Chile-based conglomerate HidroAysén, with the backing of the government. At stake are pristine ecosystems and rural farms, but an even greater issue involves building the world's longest transmission lines. Thousands of high-voltage towers would run 1,500 miles to bring power to Santiago and the country's energy-hungry mining operations in the north. "Water," says Tompkins, "is absolutely everything."

And currently it is salmon farming that is his particular bête noir. As we arrive in Pumalin, 500,000 Atlantic salmon have escaped from farms into the Pacific fjord, causing devastation. To show the extent of the catastrophe, we take to the skies. A few miles north of his farmhouse, he banks steeply so we can look at the tethered cages of the salmon farms that line one of the fjords which dissect his estate. The seafloor beneath salmon cages quickly becomes a dead zone, carpeted in a deep slime of faeces and unconsumed protein from feed pellets, resulting in toxic algae blooms and red tides.

The profligate use of antibiotics to ward off disease in the overcrowded pens has, in the past six months, led to an increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria -- many of the salmon are sick. "Look at this shit," says Tompkins. "This whole enterprise is fed by the depletion of the marine food chain. It takes 3-5 lbs. of fishmeal to produce 1 lb. of salmon. Madness. It's damned madness, I tell you."

Yet salmon farming is one of the crown jewels of Chile's economic boom, worth around £2 billion, and its competitive advantage on the world market is based largely on the claim that the fish are raised in "the world's purest cold waters." Chile has a 35% share of the world market: half the salmon consumed in the US began life in a cage in a Chilean fjord.

"It's just another battle I have to take on," says Tompkins, banking left and heading back to the fjord.

As I prepare to leave his home I wonder if guilt is driving Tompkins. He knows I investigated his former company Esprit while I was working as a foreign correspondent based in India, where I found eight-year-old children making garments for the US chain without its knowledge, now owned by a Hong Kong-based consortium. Tompkins denies that exploitation, in particular of children, contributed to his enormous profits.

"Look, I'm not proud of how I made my money; the carbon footprint aside, fashion is one of the most intellectually vacuous industries. We had to manufacture desires to get people to buy our products. We were selling people countless things that they didn't need. It set the agenda for the other multinationals that shift disposable items in unfathomable bulk. The retail industry is a monster hoovering up the planet's vital resources."

Tenacious and obsessive, passionate and compulsive, arrogant and caustic are the words most often used to describe him. No one suggests Tompkins is modest. "I want to raise the consciousness of the world," he recently told a Chilean news magazine. In the mid-1980s, at the height of Esprit's success, he told another interviewer that he was obsessed with two things: "Moving in places where the ordinary human doesn't go" and achieving "world-class status."

Soaring above Doug Tompkins's forest canopy are Pumalin's prized Alerce trees. Cashing in on its light weight, its straight grain and its resistance to rot, loggers have decimated the tree population. The Alerces growing in Pumalin are some of the species' last survivors, and the near destruction of the tree is a sort of Chilean morality tale, for this is a country whose economy is based, to an extreme degree, on the extraction of raw materials and the exploitation of natural resources.

Tompkins feels an affinity with the trees: "I'm a survivor like them. They keep threatening to throw me out, but I'm still here, fighting the good fight. I hope I've got 20 years' fight left in me yet."

As we pack our bags, a helicopter hovers above the farmhouse and drops on to the airfield. At the helm is Sebástian Piñera, Chile's former ambassador to the UN and now a billionaire businessman. Piñera, a charismatic Harvard graduate, is the majority owner of Chile's largest airline, Lan, and also a major television station. He is here, he claims, for fuel on his way to the mainland, but a camera crew is in tow. They film me speaking to Piñera.

Although nowhere near as vociferous as Tompkins on the issue, I know Piñera is dabbling in conservation himself. He recently bought 120,000 hectares of Chiloé Island, one of the country's most remote wildernesses. Will he buy more, I ask him -- as much as Tompkins?

"More land? No. I don't think so -- 120,000 hectares is a lot of land. More than any man needs. Nobody should have too much land, it belongs to the people. This is an issue I feel very strongly about."

Link to article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/12/doug-tompkins-patagonia-conservation-environment-fashion-dan-mcdougall

Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, "The Tempest" (article on Bill Gray)

NEWS |

The Tempest

by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, Sunday, May 28, 2006; W08

As evidence mounts that humans are causing dangerous changes in Earth's climate, a handful of skeptics are providing some serious blowback

IT SHOULD BE GLORIOUS TO BE BILL GRAY, professor emeritus. He is often called the World's Most Famous Hurricane Expert. He's the guy who, every year, predicts the number of hurricanes that will form during the coming tropical storm season. He works on a country road leading into the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in the atmospheric science department of Colorado State University. He's mentored dozens of scientists. By rights, Bill Gray should be in deep clover, enjoying retirement, pausing only to collect the occasional lifetime achievement award.

He's a towering figure in his profession and in person. He's 6 feet 5 inches tall, handsome, with blue eyes and white hair combed straight back. He's still lanky, like the baseball player he used to be back at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington in the 1940s. When he wears a suit, a dark shirt and tinted sunglasses, you can imagine him as a casino owner or a Hollywood mogul. In a room jammed with scientists, you'd probably notice him first.

He's loud. His laugh is gale force. His personality threatens to spill into the hallway and onto the chaparral. He can be very charming.

But he's also angry. He's outraged.

He recently had a public shouting match with one of his former students. It went on for 45 minutes.

He was supposed to debate another scientist at a weather conference, but the organizer found him to be too obstreperous, and disinvited him.

Much of his government funding has dried up. He has had to put his own money, more than $100,000, into keeping his research going. He feels intellectually abandoned. If none of his colleagues comes to his funeral, he says, that'll be evidence that he had the courage to say what they were afraid to admit.

Which is this: Global warming is a hoax.

"I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people," he says when I visit him in his office on a sunny spring afternoon.

He has testified about this to the United States Senate. He has written magazine articles, given speeches, done everything he could to get the message out. His scientific position relies heavily on what is known as the Argument From Authority. He's the authority.

"I've been in meteorology over 50 years. I've worked damn hard, and I've been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who've been around have not been asked about this. It's sort of a baby boomer, yuppie thing."

Gray believes in the obs. The observations. Direct measurements. Numerical models can't be trusted. Equation pushers with fancy computers aren't the equals of scientists who fly into hurricanes.

"Few people know what I know. I've been in the tropics, I've flown in airplanes into storms. I've done studies of convection, cloud clusters and how the moist process works. I don't think anybody in the world understands how the atmosphere functions better than me."

In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin to cool again.

We sit in his office for 2 1/2 hours, until the sun drops behind the mountains, and when we're done he offers to keep talking until midnight. He is almost desperate to be heard. His time is short. He is 76 years old. He is howling in a maelstrom.

Parallel Earths

HUMAN BEINGS ARE PUMPING GREENHOUSE GASES INTO THE ATMOSPHERE, warming the planet in the process.

Since the dawn of the industrial era, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen steadily from about 280 to about 380 parts per million. In the past century, the average surface temperature of Earth has warmed about 1 °F. Much of that warming has been in the past three decades. Regional effects can be more dramatic: The Arctic is melting at an alarming rate. Arctic sea ice is 40% thinner than it was in the 1970s. Glaciers in Greenland are speeding up as they slide toward the sea. A recent report shows Antarctica losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year.

The permafrost is melting across broad swaths of Alaska, Canada and Siberia. Tree-devouring beetles, common in the American Southwest, are suddenly ravaging the evergreen forests of British Columbia. Coral reefs are bleaching, scalded by overheated tropical waters. There appear to have been more strong hurricanes and cyclones in recent decades, Category 3 and higher -- such as Katrina.

The 1990s were the warmest decade on record. The year 1998 set the all-time mark. This decade is on its way to setting a new standard, with a succession of scorchers. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global effort involving hundreds of climate scientists and the governments of 100 nations, projected in 2001 that, depending on the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and general climate sensitivities, the global average temperature would rise 2.5-10.4 °F between 1990 and 2100. Sea levels could rise just a few inches, or nearly three feet.

All of the above is part of the emerging, solidifying scientific consensus on global warming -- a consensus that raises the urgent political and economic issue of climate change. This isn't a theory anymore. This is happening now. Business as usual, many scientists say, could lead to a wildly destabilized climate for the first time since the dawn of human civilization.

But when you step into the realm of the skeptics, you find yourself on a parallel Earth.

It is a planet where global warming isn't happening -- or, if it is happening, isn't happening because of human beings. Or, if it is happening because of human beings, isn't going to be a big problem. And, even if it is a big problem, we can't realistically do anything about it other than adapt.

Certainly there's no consensus on global warming, they say. There is only abundant uncertainty. The IPCC process is a sham, a mechanism for turning vague scientific statements into headline-grabbing alarmism. Drastic actions such as mandated cuts in carbon emissions would be imprudent. Alternative sources of energy are fine, they say, but let's not be naive. We are an energy-intensive civilization. To obtain the kind of energy we need, we must burn fossil fuels. We must emit carbon. That's the real world.

Since the late 1980s, when oil, gas, coal, auto and chemical companies formed the Global Climate Coalition, industries have poured millions of dollars into a campaign to discredit the emerging global warming consensus. The coalition disbanded a few years ago (some members recast themselves as "green"), but the skeptic community remains rambunctious. Many skeptics work in think tanks, such as the George C. Marshall Institute or the National Center for Policy Analysis. They have the ear of powerful leaders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The skeptics helped scuttle any possibility that the United States would ratify the Kyoto treaty that would have committed the nation to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions (conservatives object to the treaty for, among other things, not requiring reductions by developing nations such as China and India).

In the world of the skeptics you'll come across Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist who has steadfastly maintained for years that clouds and water vapor will counteract the greenhouse emissions of human beings. You'll find S. Fred Singer, author of Hot Talk, Cold Science, who points to the positive side of the melting Arctic: "We spent 500 years looking for a Northwest Passage, and now we've got one." You'll quickly run across Pat Michaels, the University of Virginia climatologist and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media. You might dip into TCSDaily.com, the online clearinghouse for anti-global-warming punditry. You'll meet the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Greening Earth Society.

The skeptics point to the global temperature graph for the past century. Notice how, after rising steadily in the early 20th century, in 1940 the temperature suddenly levels off. No -- it goes down! For the next 35 years! If the planet is getting steadily warmer due to Industrial Age greenhouse gases, why did it get cooler when industries began belching out carbon dioxide at full tilt at the start of World War II?

Now look at the ice in Antarctica: Getting thicker in places!

Sea level rise? It's actually dropping around certain islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

There are all these . . . anomalies.

The skeptics scoff at climate models. They're just computer programs. They have to interpret innumerable feedback loops, all the convective forces, the evaporation, the winds, the ocean currents, the changing albedo (reflectivity) of Earth's surface, on and on and on.

Bill Gray has a favorite diagram, taken from a 1985 climate model, showing little nodules in the center with such labels as "thermal inertia" and "net energy balance" and "latent heat flux" and "subsurface heat storage" and "absorbed heat radiation" and so on, and they are emitting arrows that curve and loop in all directions, bumping into yet more jargon, like "soil moisture" and "surface roughness" and "vertical wind" and "meltwater" and "volcanoes."

"It's a big can of worms!" Gray says. It's his favorite line.

The models can't even predict the weather in two weeks, much less 100 years, he says.

"They sit in this ivory tower, playing around, and they don't tell us if this is going to be a hot summer coming up. Why not? Because the models are no damn good!"

Gray says the recent rash of strong hurricanes is just part of a cycle. This is part of the broader skeptical message: Climate change is normal and natural. There was a Medieval Warm Period, for example, long before Exxon Mobil existed.

Sterling Burnett, a skeptic who is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, says that even if he's wrong about global warming, mandating cuts in carbon emissions would mean economic disaster for poor countries, and cost jobs in America: "I don't know any politician anywhere who is going to run on a platform of saying, 'I'm going to put you out of work.' "

The skeptics don't have to win the argument, they just have to stay in the game, keep things stirred up and make sure the politicians don't pass any laws that have dangerous climate change as a premise. They're winning that battle. The Senate had hearings on climate change this spring but has put off action for now. The Bush administration is hoping for some kind of technological solution and won't commit itself to cuts in emissions.

The skeptics have a final trump in the argument: Climate change is actually good. Growing seasons will be longer. Plants like carbon dioxide. Trees devour it. This demonized molecule, CO2, isn't some kind of toxin or contaminant or pollutant -- it's fertilizer.

The Free Market Solution: Zoos

AL GORE IS ABOUT TO COME ON THE BIG SCREEN. Fred Smith is eagerly awaiting the moment. We're at a media preview of "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on Gore and global warming (it debuts this week in Washington). Smith is not exactly a Gore groupie. He is the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a factory for global warming skepticism.

CEI has 28 people on staff, "half a platoon," Smith likes to say. They're in the persuasion business, fighting for the free market. They lobby against government regulations of all kinds. Smith writes articles with titles such as "Eco-Socialism: Threat to Liberty Around the World." These promoters of capitalism don't really operate a commercial enterprise; like any think tank, CEI relies on donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. The most generous sponsors of last year's annual dinner at the Capital Hilton were the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Exxon Mobil, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and Pfizer. Other contributors included General Motors, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Plastics Council, the Chlorine Chemistry Council and Arch Coal.

Smith is short, stocky, bearded. He talks extremely fast and sprinkles his remarks with free market jargon, climate change lingo, historical references and various mysterious words that seem to come from a secret conservatives-only code book.

As we wait for the movie to start, I ask him how he would define his political beliefs. "Classical liberal," he says. He explains that civilization is a means for allowing individuals to liberate their energies and their genius -- an emergence from primitive, tribal, collectivist social arrangements. When humans switch from collectivism to private property, he says, "you have greater freedom of ideas." This prompts the thought that the federal government owns way too much land in the West. Much of it should be privatized, he says.

Including national parks? I ask.

"Probably wouldn't touch it for political reasons," he says.

The movie begins: Images of a river. Lush foliage. Gore's voice, almost sultry, rhapsodizes about nature. Then we see him take a stage in an auditorium. He is in a suit and tie and looks very much like a candidate for political office.

"Maybe he is running," Smith says.

When Gore shows a big graph of rising CO2, Smith says, "That's a phony scale."

The film shows footage from Hurricane Katrina.

"It was a Category 3 hurricane," Smith says. Not the Cat 5, at landfall, you keep hearing about.

Gore reveals that insurance losses because of hurricanes have steadily climbed.

"That's just dishonest," Smith says. There are more beach houses and so on -- it's just an infrastructure issue.

Subsequent visits to the Competitive Enterprise Institute show Smith in his element. The think tank is a warren of offices lined with framed magazine advertisements from the 1950s and earlier. These are images of the Golden Age of American Commerce, when cars were like luxury liners and chemical companies bragged about their mosquito-annihilating concoctions.

"New Guinea is an island gripped in the vise of high, jagged mountain ranges . . . Choking entangling jungle is everywhere . . . In this appalling setting, aviation made an epic conquest." That's ad copy for the Socony-Vacuum oil company, later known as Mobil.

Smith loves this stuff. Those were the days! The message: Free enterprise brings people together and improves their lives. It was the Better Living Through Chemistry era. Smith points out an ad for Weyerhaeuser Timber showing clear-cut forests on a mountainside and two raccoons tussling with one another on the stump of a Douglas fir. Another photo, lower, shows a frame house. You can clearly see that cutting forests benefits people. Nowadays, environmentalists want the benefits without any of the pain. "It's all gain, no pain," Smith says.

We pass an asbestos ad.

"When I was a kid, this was called the miracle mineral," he says.

Although Smith can be rambling and digressive, he has a team of analysts who know the global warming topic inside and out and can quickly produce the latest nugget of potentially contradictory evidence (Greenland melted faster in the 1920s!). What rankles them most of all is the suggestion that global warming is a problem that must be fixed by the government, top down, through regulations. Let the free market work its genius, they say. Countries with thriving economies will, in the long run, be more adaptive to climate change and will find more technological solutions than countries that hamstring themselves by clamping down on greenhouse emissions.

Smith's office has a grand view of Farragut Square and the Washington Monument in the distance. A man named Chris Horner, general counsel of the Cooler Heads Coalition, joins us, as does, popping in and out, Marlo Lewis, a CEI policy analyst who works on climate change. They lapse several times into the Secret Code.

"Terrible toos," Horner says. I'm confused. He explains that it's shorthand for environmental doom and gloom.

"Terrible toos. Too many people, using too many resources."

Smith has a different equation: "Less people, less affluence, less technology: We call that death, poverty and ignorance."

They believe the rise of carbon dioxide may be a symptom of global warming, not the cause. Look at the chart Gore used:

Didn't it look like the warming comes before the CO2 increase?

Lewis says the snows of Kilimanjaro have been in retreat since the 1880s. The climate there is not getting warmer, it's getting drier. Just won't snow.

They see economic growth as an all-purpose cure for environmental problems. Rich societies are environmentally resilient; poor societies have dirty power plants and sooty huts. Government regulations aren't necessary. I ask Lewis if he thinks the Clean Air Act is a good idea. "It depends," he answers. There follows a complicated riff from Smith about common law property rights and English fishermen suing upstream polluters in the 19th century.

Smith takes an abrupt detour into the issue of endangered species. The solution is to let the private sector handle it. They should be privatized, like pets or livestock. Dogs, cats, chickens, pigs: These creatures won't ever go extinct.

I want to make sure I understand what he is saying, so I begin to ask a question: "For endangered species, people should --"

"-- own them," Smith says.

But isn't there a difference between animals that live in zoos and animals that live in the wild?

"Yes and no," Smith says. " 'Zoo' is a pejorative term that PETA has turned into an animal slavery community. A zoo is nothing more than an elaborate ark."

What's unnatural, Smith says, is wilderness. The so-called wilderness of early America used to be inhabited by Indians, and they changed their environment. "They burned down trees, they burned forests, they ran buffaloes over cliffs. They were not dancing with wolves," he says. "Wilderness is the least natural part of this planet."

Human beings, in his view, are not apart from nature but very much of it, and thus whatever human beings do is natural. Environmentalists view human activity as a blemish, and animal activity as noble and good. If Manhattan had been built by termites, environmentalists would make it a World Heritage Site, Smith says. If the Grand Canyon had been the result of coal mining, he says, "Al Gore would say, 'This is horrible.' "

Horner talks about baselines used in climate trends. Why start in 1860? That was the end of the Little Ice Age. Of course the world has warmed since then. That's cheating with the baseline. At one point Horner refers to the "cooling" since 1998 -- a record-breaking year with a major El Niño event in the Pacific. He admits he is being disingenuous.

"We're playing the baseline game," Horner says.

And then -- I'm not even sure how it comes up -- Smith says we can solve the problem of gorillas being killed in Africa. They're caught in the middle of a civil war among African tribes. The solution: Evacuate them. Airlift them out, like soldiers caught behind enemy lines.

"We've got lots of land."

For the gorillas, he means.

"Build a Jurassic Park in Central America."

Horner says that perhaps we are getting off track.

And Then There's Hitler

LET US BE HONEST about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything.

Everything is a war now. This is the age of lethal verbal combat, where even scientific issues involving measurements and molecules are somehow supernaturally polarizing. The controversy about global warming resides all too perfectly at the collision point of environmentalism and free market capitalism. It's bound to be not only politicized but twisted, mangled and beaten senseless in the process. The divisive nature of global warming isn't helped by the fact that the most powerful global-warming skeptic (at least by reputation) is President Bush, and the loudest warnings come from Al Gore.

Human beings may be large of brain, but they are social animals, too, like wolves, and are prone to behave in packs. So when something like climate change comes up, the first thing people want to know is, whose side are you on? All those climatic variables and uncertainties and probabilities and "forcings" and "feedback loops," those cans of worms that Bill Gray talks about, get boiled down to their essence. Are you with us or against us?

Somehow Hitler keeps popping into the discussion. Gore draws a parallel between fighting global warming and fighting the Nazis. Novelist Michael Crichton, in State of Fear , ends with an appendix comparing the theory of global warming to the theory of eugenics -- the belief, prominently promoted by Nazis, that the gene pool of the human species was degenerating due to higher reproductive rates of "inferior" people. Both, he contends, are examples of junk science, supported by intellectual elites who will later conveniently forget they signed on to such craziness.

And Gray has no governor on his rhetoric. At one point during our meeting in Colorado he blurts out, "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews."

When I opine that he is incendiary, he answers: "Yes, I am incendiary. But the other side is just as incendiary. The etiquette of science has long ago been thrown out the window."

In a media-saturated world, it's hard to get anyone's attention without cranking the volume. Time magazine recently declared that Earth looks like a planet that is sick (cover headline: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried"). Vanity Fair published a "worst-case scenario" photo illustration of Manhattan drowned by an 80-foot sea-level rise, the skyscrapers poking up from what has become part of the Atlantic Ocean. That's not inconceivable over the course of many centuries, but the scientific consensus (IPCC, 2001) is that by 2100 sea level will have risen somewhere between three and 34 inches from its 1990 level.

The news media -- always infatuated with doom (were it not for the obvious ramifications for ratings and circulation, the media would love to cover the End of the World) -- struggle to resist the most calamitous-sounding climate scenarios. Consider the January 2005 survey of thousands of climate change models that showed a very wide range of possibilities. One model at the very extreme had a worst-case-scenario warming of 11 °C -- which is nearly 20 °F.

"The world is likely to heat up by an average of 11 ºC by the end of the century, the biggest-ever study of global warming showed yesterday," the London Evening Standard reported online. This would cause "a surge in sea levels threatening the lives of billions of people."

Wrong, but whatever.

The skeptics feed on alarmism. They love any sign that global warming is a case of mass hysteria. Someone like Myron Ebell, an analyst at CEI, freely admits that, as an advocate in a politicized battle, he tries to make "the best case against alarmism." Everyone, on both sides, is arguing like a lawyer these days, he says. "What is going on right now is a desperate last-ditch Battle of the Bulge type effort by the forces of darkness, which is relying heavily on the lockstep/groupthink scientific community."

The president's science adviser, John Marburger, thinks the politicized debate has made it almost impossible to talk sensibly about the issue. "There seems to be the general feeling that somehow the administration doesn't feel that climate change is happening," he says. "That's completely wrong." The administration just doesn't think the problem can be solved with the "magic wand" of regulation.

Marburger recently declined to go on "60 Minutes" to address allegations that federal scientists were being muzzled and government reports rewritten by the White House to minimize concerns about global warming. "In general the public discourse on this has gotten completely off the track, and we're never going to straighten it out on '60 Minutes,' " Marburger says.

This issue forces Americans to sort through a great deal of science, technology and economics, all of it saturated in divisive politics. Many Americans haven't really tuned in. A Gallup poll in March showed that global warming is far down the list of concerns among Americans -- even when asked to rank their environmental worries. More Americans were worried about damage to the ozone layer. No doubt some people have the two issues confused. Both involve air, and emissions of some kind, and some worrisome global effect. But the ozone issue, while hardly solved, has at least been seriously addressed with a global ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Climate change takes place on time scales of decades and centuries. In a 24-hour information society, it is hard to keep the year 2100 in mind. But these changes are happening at a geologically rapid pace. For roughly the past 10,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, human beings have enjoyed a relatively stable, comfortable "interglacial" period, during which they've invented everything from agriculture to moon rockets. Nomadic bands of hunters and gatherers have given way to more than 6 billion people, largely urbanized and energy-hungry. Pressure on ecosystems is immense. Biologists warn of a "sixth extinction" -- the sixth mass extinction of species since the rise of multicellular organisms about 600 million years ago. The most recent mass extinction, 65 million years ago, was apparently caused by a mountain-size object striking Earth. Human civilization, in this view, is like an asteroid hitting the planet.

The expansion of human civilization is an experiment on a global scale: What happens when a species obtains not only intelligence but technology? Do intelligent, technological species tend to survive for a long time -- or bring their environment crashing down around them?

The Hurricane Conference

BILL GRAY HAS THE HONOR of delivering the closing remarks at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando. It's mid-April, and we're at a fancy hotel on International Drive, a main street for the tourist industry that has sprouted from the orange groves and cow pastures of central Florida. Gray seems to be everywhere, constantly talking, popping out to the terrace by the pool to give TV interviews, holding forth without any hint of fatigue. He has three media assistants following him around. They are working under contract for TCSDaily, a Web site that is a nexus of anti-global-warming arguments.

They set up two news conferences. At both events, Gray gives his standard arguments about global warming, bracketing a dispassionate discussion of the upcoming tropical storm season by his young protege, Phil Klotzbach. The two are a sight to behold: Gray, the white-haired titan, thunderous, outraged, and Klotzbach, red-haired, freckled, very calm, very mild, looking so much younger than his 25 years.

"I think there's a lot of foolishness going on," Gray says as he stands before a bank of 10 TV cameras and a couple of dozen journalists.

Hurricanes aren't getting worse -- we're just in an uptick of a regular cycle. But the alarmists won't let anyone believe that.

"The world is boiling! It's getting worse and worse!" Gray shouts. "Hell is approaching."

He was a paperboy in Washington in the 1940s, he says. There were stories back then about global warming. But then it got cooler, for decades, and by the mid-1970s the story had changed, and scientists were warning of -- yes -- an Ice Age! Gray shows a slide of magazine covers in the mid-1970s (Science Digest, 1973; Newsweek, 1975) fretting about the Cooling World.

The core of Gray's argument is that the warming of the past decades is a natural cycle, driven by a global ocean circulation that manifests itself in the North Atlantic as the Gulf Stream. Warm water and cool water essentially rise and fall in a rhythm lasting decades. "I don't think this warming period of the last 30 years can keep on going," he says. "It may warm another three, five, eight years, and then it will start to cool."

Gray's crusade against global warming "hysteria" began in the early 1990s, when he saw enormous sums of federal research money going toward computer modeling rather than his kind of science, the old-fashioned stuff based on direct observation. Gray often cites the ascendancy of Gore to the vice presidency as the start of his own problems with federal funding. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stopped giving him research grants. So did NASA. All the money was going to computer models. The field was going off on this wild tangent.

Numerical models can't predict the future, he says. They don't even pretend to predict the weather in the coming season -- "but they make predictions of 50 or 100 years from now and ask you to believe the Earth will get warmer."

The modelers are equation pushers.

"They haven't been down in the trenches, making forecasts and understanding stuff!"

The news media are self-interested.

"Media people are all out for Pulitzer Prizes!"

The IPCC is elitist.

"They don't talk to us! I've never been approached by the IPCC."

He spots a famous meteorologist in the back of the room. It's Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center.

"Neil, have they ever approached you?"

"No," Frank answers.

A TV reporter asks Gray a key question: "What if you're wrong?"

"We can't do anything about it if I'm wrong. China and India are going to burn fossil fuels."

After Gray finishes, he gives more interviews. Frank, waiting in the wings, tells me he agrees with Gray.

"It's a hoax," he says. He says cutting carbon emissions would wind up hurting poor people. I ask if he thinks more CO2 in the air would be a good thing.

"Exactly! Maybe we're living in a carbon dioxide-starved world. We don't know."

Skeptics and Conspiracies

THE SKEPTICS DON'T AGREE with one another. They will privately distance themselves from other skeptics ("I think he's full of beans") while maintaining a certain public solidarity against the Forces of Fear. Pat Michaels, the U-Va. climatologist, doesn't even want to be called a skeptic.

"I believe in climate change caused by human beings," Michaels says. "What I'm skeptical about is the glib notion that it means the end of the world as we know it."

John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says: "We're skeptical that the observations we see now are indicating catastrophic change. And we're skeptical of our capability to truly understand the climate system, how it works, and so on, and therefore predict its evolution."

Of all the skeptics, MIT's Richard Lindzen probably has the most credibility among mainstream scientists, who acknowledge that he's doing serious research on the subject. Lindzen contends that water vapor and clouds, which will increase in a warmer world because of higher rates of evaporation, create "negative feedbacks" that counter the warming trend. "The only reason the models get such a big response is that, in models, the most important greenhouse substances, which are water vapor and clouds, act to take anything man does and make it worse," he says. Observations show otherwise, he says.

Lindzen argues that the climate models can't be right, because we've already raised CO2 and methane dramatically, and the planet simply hasn't warmed that much. But Isaac Held, a NOAA modeler, says Lindzen is jumping the gun, because the greenhouse gases take time -- decades, centuries -- to have their full impact. Indeed, we've already made a "commitment" to warming. We couldn't stop global warming at this point if we closed every factory and curbed every car. The mainstream argument is that we could minimize the increase, and reduce the risk of a dangerous, unstable, white-knuckle climate change.

Held studied under Lindzen years ago and considers him a friend and a smart scientist -- but highly contrarian.

"There're people like [Lindzen] in every field of science. There are always people in the fringes. They're attracted to the fringe . . . It may be as simple as, how do you prove you're smarter than everyone else? You don't do that by being part of the consensus," Held says.

The most vocal partisans in the climate change debate often describe their opponents as part of a conspiracy, of sorts. Both sides think the other side has a monetary or political incentive to skew the data. But there are people in this battle who fervently believe in what they say. Bill Gray says he takes no fossil-fuel money. He's simply sick and tired of squishy-minded hand-wringing equation-pushing computer jocks who've never flown into a hurricane!

Gray has his own conspiracy theory. He has made a list of 15 reasons for the global warming hysteria. The list includes the need to come up with an enemy after the end of the Cold War, and the desire among scientists, government leaders and environmentalists to find a political cause that would enable them to "organize, propagandize, force conformity and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!"

Gray admits that he has a dark take on human nature: "I have a demonic view on this."

The most notorious example of climate change conspiracy-mongering is in Crichton's State of Fear. The villain is the director of an environmental organization. He's in league with radical environmentalists who kill people at the drop of a hat as part of a plot to trigger natural disasters that will somehow advance the theory of global warming. The novel's fans include the president of the United States, who met with Crichton in the White House.

There's a certain kind of skeptic who has no patience for the official consensus, especially if it has the imprimatur of a government, or worse, the United Nations. They focus on ambiguities and mysteries and things that just don't add up. They say the Official Story can't possibly be true, because it doesn't explain the [insert inexplicable data point here]. They set a high standard for reality -- it must never be fuzzy around the edges.

"They argue not as scientists but as lawyers," says Pieter Tans, who runs a lab at NOAA in Boulder, Colo., where he examines bottles of air taken from monitoring stations all over the planet. "When they argue, they pick one piece of the fabric of evidence and blow it up all out of proportion . . . Their purpose is to confuse, so that the public gets the idea that there is a raging scientific debate. There is no raging scientific debate."

Some of the anomalies cited by the skeptics go away over time. Remember that graph showing the world's temperature leveling off and actually cooling from 1940 to 1975, even as the industrial economies of the planet were going full blast? The mainstream climate scientists think one factor may have been air pollution -- aerosols pumped out by smokestacks, dimming sunlight before it reached the surface. In the early 1970s, governments passed air pollution controls, such as the Clean Air Act, that required scrubbers on smokestacks. The skies cleared. And the temperature has been racing upward ever since.

What about the Medieval Warm Period? If human industry causes warming, why were the Vikings sailing around the North Atlantic to godforsaken places like Greenland and setting up farming communities 1,000 years ago? Many scientists answer that the Medieval Warm Period wasn't a global phenomenon. You can't draw global conclusions from the experience of the North Atlantic.

"There is this misperception that global change is a spatially uniform and smooth in time process," says Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT. "In fact that's not true. There's all kind of variability. You can find places in the world where the temperature has gone down for the past 50 years. When you're looking for a signal in a very noisy record you do as much averaging as possible."

So what about all those fears, back in the 1970s, of a coming Ice Age? It was a minor issue among serious climate scientists. One paper commonly cited by skeptics as an example of Ice Age doomsaying merely stated that, absent any human-driven global warming, an Ice Age might return in 20,000 years.

The most famous anomaly, long cited by skeptics, was the satellite data. It didn't show the warming of the lower atmosphere.

It flatly contradicted the surface measurements. Earlier this month, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program announced that a re-analysis of the data resolved most of the discrepancy. Anomaly gone. Arch-skeptic Fred Singer says there's still some inconsistency, but the advocates of the consensus view of global warming feel vindicated. ("Game over," one environmentalist told The Washington Post.)

Scientists are argumentative by nature. They're supposed to be. They're supposed to attempt to disprove the hypotheses and claims of their fellow scientists. Theories are hazed unmercifully. And when they emerge from that trial-by-skepticism, they are all the more respected.

Certain skeptics -- really, they're optimists -- have scored debate points by noting that prophesies of doom have often slammed into a wall of human resourcefulness. But you can't solve a problem if you spend decades failing to perceive it. Humans adapt best when worried.

Or at least not in denial.

Back in Orlando

Climate change is generating headlines almost daily -- (e.g., "Peril to Walrus Young Seen As Result of Melting Ice Shelf") -- but it is also abstruse in its specifics, so journalists rely on "experts" to tell them where the truth lies. Someone like Bill Gray seems to be a fully credentialed authority figure. But when you press him on his theory of how thermohaline circulation has caused recent warming of the planet and will soon cause cooling, he concedes that he hasn't published the idea in any peer-reviewed journal. He's working on it, he says.

The Web site Real Climate, run by a loose group of climate scientists, recently published a detailed refutation of Gray's theory, saying his claims about the ocean circulation lack evidence. The Web site criticized Gray for not adapting to the modern era of meteorology, "which demands hypotheses soundly grounded in quantitative and consistent physical formulations, not seat-of-the-pants flying."

The field has fully embraced numerical modeling, and Gray is increasingly on the fringe. His cranky skepticism has become a tired act among younger scientists. "It's sad," says Emanuel, who has vowed never again to debate Gray in public.

When I ask Gray who his intellectual soul mates are regarding global warming, he responds, "I have nobody really to talk to about this stuff."

That's not entirely true. He has many friends and colleagues, and the meteorologists tend to share his skeptical streak.

I ask if he has ever collaborated on a paper with Richard Lindzen. Gray says he hasn't. He looks a little pained.

"Lindzen, he's a hard guy to deal with," Gray says. "He doesn't think he can learn anything from me."

Which is correct. Lindzen says of Gray: "His knowledge of theory is frustratingly poor, but he knows more about hurricanes than anyone in the world. I regard him in his own peculiar way as a national resource."

In Orlando, the national resource has the honor of closing the hurricane conference with a speech. He and Klotzbach go through their usual routine. Gray talks of global warming foolishness, untrusty numerical models, underappreciated ocean circulation, overly dramatized CO2 increases, the crazy complexity of the weather.

"It becomes an absolute can of worms!"

He seems to be running out of steam just a little bit. He's given so many interviews, he might have lost a little velocity on his fastball. But everyone claps at the end. He throws in a final few words:

"Don't believe everything you read in the paper! This whole business about global warming --"

But he steps from the mike, and his final words are inaudible.

In 20 years, he likes to say, the world will have cooled, and everyone will know he was right all along. When that happens, he says, he hopes someone will put flowers on his grave.

Adapting to Uncertainty

Let us say a word in praise of uncertainty. It is a concession to an interesting and complicated planet that is full of surprises. The fog of uncertainty surrounding climate change is routinely cited as a reason to wait before making cuts in greenhouse emissions. But if we wait for that fog to break, we'll wait forever.

Isaac Held, the NOAA climate modeler, is the first to admit that the models aren't perfect. "Clouds are hard," he says. The models on his computer screen are incomprehensible to the untrained eye. But Held argues that the models are conservative. For global warming to be less of a problem than is currently anticipated, all the uncertainties would have to break, preferentially, toward the benign side of things.

Moreover, we don't even know all the things that we don't know. James Hansen, the prominent NASA scientist, points out that the models don't realistically include ice sheets and the biosphere -- all the plants and animals on Earth. The global climate surely has more surprises for us.

"Our models were not predicting the ozone hole in 1980 when it was discovered," Held says. Scientists are haunted by the realization that if CFCs had been made with a slightly different type of chemistry, they'd have destroyed much of the ozone layer over the entire planet.

Hansen thinks we have less than 10 years to make drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions, lest we reach a "tipping point" at which the climate will be out of our control. Hansen may be a step ahead of the consensus -- but that doesn't mean he's wrong. In the brutally hot summer of 1988, Hansen testified before Congress that the signal of global warming could already be detected amid the noise of natural climate variation. Many of his colleagues scoffed. They thought he'd gotten ahead of the hard data. Judy Curry, a Georgia Tech climate scientist, says: "I thought he was playing politics. But, damn it, he was right."

Curry, who believes the skeptics have mounted a "brilliant disinformation campaign," thinks climate change is being held to a different standard than other societal threats. The skeptics want every uncertainty nailed down before any action is taken.

"Why is that standard being applied to greenhouse warming and not to other risks, like terrorism or military risks or avian flu?" she asks.

Mainstream climate scientists readily accept that there is natural variation in the system. For example, greenhouse gases alone can't melt the Arctic at the alarming rate that has been observed recently. Americans sorting through this issue may feel constrained by all the unknowns. Perhaps they need to adapt to uncertainty, to see uncertainty as the norm, and not as a sign of scientific failure.

Or as an excuse to do nothing.

Our Friend CO2

Ten years ago, Fred Smith says, the Competitive Enterprise Institute had contributions from companies across the board in the petroleum industry. It still gets money from Exxon Mobil, the biggest and most hard-line oil company on the climate change issue, but many of its donors have stopped sending checks.

"They've joined the club."

The club of believers in global warming.

The executives don't understand "resource economics." They lack faith in the free market to solve these issues. And they go to cocktail parties and find out that everyone thinks they're criminals.

"Or their kids come home from school and say, 'Daddy, why are you killing the planet?'"

Smith never sounds morose, though. He's peppy. He thinks his side is still winning the debate. Look at the polls: Americans don't care about global warming.

He'd like to get people believing once again in good old-fashioned industrial activity. CEI has created a new public-service TV spot. Smith and several colleagues gather round as we watch it on a computer monitor. The ad begins with images of people picnicking in Central Park on a beautiful day. A child is shown blowing the seeds of a dandelion. A woman's voice, confident, reassuring, says that all these people are creating something that's all around us:

"It's called carbon dioxide," she says, "CO2."

There's an image of an impoverished woman hacking the ground with a hand tool.

"The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a life of backbreaking labor."

We see kids jumping out of a minivan. There are politicians out there who want to label CO2 as a pollutant, the narrator says. We return to the child blowing the dandelion seeds.

"Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."

End of ad.

"It should always bring a tear to your eye," Fred Smith says, delighted.

Joel Achenbach is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 11 a.m. Tuesday at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

Link to article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305_pf.html

2008 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union -- Greenland abstracts

2008 Fall Meeting Search Results

Cite abstracts as Author(s) (2008), Title, Eos Trans. AGU, 89(53), Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract xxxxx-xx

Your query was: greenland You've chosen 25 documents: HR: 0800h AN: C31B-0499 TI: Does Warming of the North Atlantic over the Last Decade Explain the Acceleration of Outlet Glaciers in Southeast Greenland? AU: * Straneo, F EM: fstraneo@whoi.edu AF: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MS 21, Woods Hole, MA 02543, AU: Sutherland, D A EM: dsutherland@whoi.edu AF: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MS 21, Woods Hole, MA 02543, AU: Hamilton, G S EM: gordon.hamilton@maine.edu AF: Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, 4 Sawyer Lab Annex, Orono, ME 04469, AU: Stearns, L A EM: leigh.stearns@maine.edu AF: Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, 4 Sawyer Lab Annex, Orono, ME 04469, AB: The Greenland Ice Sheet's contribution to sea level rise more than doubled in the last five years, mostly because of increased mass flux rates from outlet glaciers in southeast Greenland. These outlet glaciers terminate at tidewater in deep fjords, which provides an intimate connection between the ice sheet and the ocean and raises the possibility that ocean warming was the trigger for recent changes in ice dynamics. Until recently, however, the oceanic role was unknown since there was no evidence that the warm waters of tropical origin, found offshore along the continental margins of southeastern and western Greenland, could cross the cold, fresh Arctic waters found on the shelf, and penetrate deep into fjords. We provide evidence that warm offshore waters both penetrate and circulate deep inside Sermilik Fjord, the 100 km long fjord in East Greenland where Helheim Glacier terminates, based on a series oceanographic surveys conducted in the summer of 2008. Furthermore, the depth at which these waters are found, as well as the observed spatial and temporal variability all indicate that the warm waters play an active role in the fjord-glacier estuarine system and suggest that they come into contact with the glacier's terminus. Then, using historical oceanographic and glaciological data we argue that the timing of Helheim Glacier's acceleration is consistent with the variability in warm water properties found offshore. Finally, because Sermilik Fjord and Helheim Glacier are typical of many fjord-glacier systems in southeast Greenland, we propose that glacier-ocean interactions can explain a significant fraction of the increased mass flux from the Greenland Ice Sheet. DE: 0720 Glaciers DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 4215 Climate and interannual variability (1616, 1635, 3305, 3309, 4513) DE: 4217 Coastal processes SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 08:00h AN: C41D-01 TI: Acceleration of Jakobshavn Isbrae Triggered by Warm, Subsurface Irminger Waters AU: * Holland, D M EM: holland@cims.nyu.edu AF: New York University, 251 Mercer St, New York, NY 10012, United States AU: Thomas, R H EM: robert_thomas@hotmail.com AF: EG&G, Wallops, NASA, Building N-159, Wallops Island, VA 23337, United States AU: deYoung, B EM: bdeyoung@physics.mun.ca AF: Memorial University, Chemistry-Physics Building, St John's, NL A1B 3X7, Canada AU: Ribergaard, M H EM: mhri@dmi.dk AF: Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, Copenhagen, DK-2100, Denmark AU: Lyberth, B EM: bjarne@natur.gl AF: Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Postboks 570, Nuuk, 3900, Greenland AB: Observations over the past decade show a rapid acceleration of several outlet glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Among the largest changes seen, Jakobshavn Isbrae(JI), an outlet glacier feeding a deep ocean fjord on the west coast of Greenland, recently, and suddenly, switched its behavior from slow thickening prior to 1997 to subsequent rapid thinning and a doubling in glacier velocity. Suggested reasons for the JI speedup range from increased lubrication of the ice-bedrock interface as more meltwater drains to the bed during recently warmer summers, to weakening and breakup of the floating ice tongue. Here, we present evidence that the changes of the JI were in fact triggered by an increase in subsurface ocean temperature, based on hydrographic data showing a sudden jump during 1997 along the entire west coast of Greenland. This arrival of upstream, Irminger Sea warm water, originating near Iceland, was driven by changes in atmospheric circulation in the North Atlantic. UR: http://efdl.cims.nyu.edu/project_oisi/realistic/jakobshavn/ DE: 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540) DE: 0728 Ice shelves DE: 4200 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 11:20h AN: C32B-05 TI: Controls on Greenland Outlet Glacier Sensitivity to Climate Forcing: A Comparative Approach AU: * McFadden, E M EM: mcfadden.109@osu.edu AF: OSU Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Howat, I M EM: ihowat@gmail.com AF: OSU Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Ahn, Y EM: ahnysleo@gmail.com AF: OSU Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Joughin, I EM: ian@apl.washington.edu AF: University of Washington, 1013 NE 40th Street, Seattle, WA 98105, United States AB: Significant changes in the dynamics of Greenland's marine-terminating outlet glaciers within the past few years indicate a rapid and complex response of these systems to recent climatic forcing. Widespread and substantial accelerations in glacier flow-speed along Greenland's southeast coast have been linked to destabilization and retreat of glacier fronts triggered by thinning to flotation. There is concern that ongoing coastal thinning in northern Greenland will trigger a similar response, further threatening the stability of the ice sheet. Despite regional ice thinning and retreat, the glaciers of Greenland's northwest coast have not yet undergone substantial acceleration. This suggests a lessened dynamic sensitivity of these glaciers to changes at the ice front than southeastern glaciers, likely due to differences in glacier geometry. To investigate the potential factors behind this contrasting behavior, we derive time series" of front position, ice thinning, and flow speed for approximately 70 outlet glaciers along Greenland's southeast and northwest coasts. Using these data, we look for patterns in the relationships between retreat, thinning, acceleration and geometric variables, such as surface slope, to determine the first-order controls on sensitivity to changes at the ice front. Based on these controls, we assess the future stability of these glaciers under continued climate warming. UR: http://www.bprc.osu.edu/GDG/ DE: 0720 Glaciers DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 0774 Dynamics DE: 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 17:45h AN: C44A-08 TI: A Reconstructed 1784-2007 Time Series of Greenland Melt Extent AU: Knappenberger, P C EM: chip@nhes.com AF: New Hope Environmental Services, Inc., 536 Pantops Center, #402, Charlottesville, VA 22911, United States AU: * Frauenfeld, O W EM: oliverf@colorado.edu AF: CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado 449 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States AU: Michaels, P J EM: pmichaels@cato.org AF: Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20001-5403, United States AB: Total melt on the Greenland ice sheet has been rising over the past several decades. The melt extent observed in 2007 was the greatest on record according to several satellite-derived indices of Greenland melt. Observed melt extent across the Greenland ice sheet has been shown to be strongly related to summer station temperatures from locations along Greenland's coastal periphery, as well as to variations in the circulation of the atmosphere across the North Atlantic. We exploit these relationships with historical temperature and circulation observations to develop a 224-yr reconstructed history of annual Greenland melt extent from the late 18th century to 2007. This reconstruction allows us to put recent melt, particularly 2007, into a historical perspective and compare current melt to the well-known warm period in the early half of the 20th century. Our reconstruction indicates that the melt observed since the late 1990s is likely among the highest extents to have occurred since the late 18th century, although recent values are not statistically different from those common during the period 1923-1961, a time when summer temperatures along the southern coast of Greenland were similarly high as those experienced in recent years. The reconstruction indicates that if the current trend toward increasing melt extent continues, total melt across the Greenland ice sheet will exceed historic values of the past two and a quarter centuries. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0794 Instruments and techniques DE: 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513) DE: 1621 Cryospheric change (0776) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C11B-0501 TI: Simulation of Long-Term Response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to Global Warming With an Ice Sheet Model Coupled to a Regional Energy-Moisture Balance Climate Model AU: * Robinson, A EM: robinson@pik-potsdam.de AF: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, Potsdam, 14412, Germany AU: Calov, R EM: calov@pik-potsdam.de AF: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, Potsdam, 14412, Germany AU: Ganopolski, A EM: ganopolski@pik-potsdam.de AF: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, Potsdam, 14412, Germany AB: Using the 3D, thermo-mechanical ice sheet model SICOPOLIS coupled to a simple, regional energy-moisture balance climate model, we simulated the response of the Greenland ice sheet under various global warming scenarios. Until now, the usual approach to specify surface boundary conditions for ice sheet models has been to use present day temperature and precipitation distributions in combination with anomalies to scale the values to the past or future. This method is only justified, however, when the ice sheet area and elevation remain similar to present day, because it assumes that the patterns of temperature and precipitation remain similar to present ones. However, it is likely that the distributions of temperature and, especially, precipitation would be much different for a partially or completely ice-free Greenland. In our approach, the climatology used to force the ice sheet model explicitly accounts for albedo feedback and elevation changes. This is important for long-term (multi-centennial to multi-millennial) climate change scenarios, in which the Greenland ice sheet could melt completely, since the albedo feedback would produce higher temperatures in the interior of Greenland, altering the temperature pattern from the current distribution, and the precipitation pattern, particularly in Southern Greenland, would be strongly affected by elevation changes. We present results of simulations for several long-term global warming scenarios and compare them with those found using the traditional (anomalous) approach. We also performed a stability analysis of the Greenland Ice sheet in CO2 phase space by performing a set of equilibrium experiments for different CO2 concentrations and initial conditions. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0764 Energy balance DE: 1621 Cryospheric change (0776) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C41A-0476 TI: Hydrologic response of the Greenland Ice sheet: the role of oceanographic warming AU: * Hanna, E EM: ehanna@sheffield.ac.uk AF: Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield, S10 2TN, United Kingdom AU: Cappelen, J AF: Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, Copenhagen, DK2100, Denmark AU: Fettweis, X AF: Département de Géographie, Université de Liège, allée du 6 Août, 2, Liège, 4000, Belgium AU: Huybrechts, P AF: Departement Geografie, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Brussel, B-1050, Belgium AU: Luckman, A AF: School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, United Kingdom AU: Ribergaard, M AF: Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, Copenhagen, DK2100, Denmark AB: The response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to ongoing climate change remains an area of great uncertainty, with most previous studies having concentrated on the contribution of the atmosphere to the ice mass- balance signature. Here we systematically assess for the first time the influence of oceanographic changes on the Ice Sheet. The first part of this assessment involves a statistical analysis and interpretation of the relative changes and variations in sea-surface and air temperatures around Greenland for the period 1870- 2007. This analysis is based on HadISST1 and Reynolds OI.v2 sea-surface temperature analyses, in situ SST and deeper-ocean temperature series, surface-air-temperature records for key points located around the Greenland coast, and examination of atmospheric pressure and geopotential height from NCEP/NCAR reanalysis. Second, we carried out a novel sensitivity experiment in which SSTs were perturbed as input to a regional climate model, and document the resulting effects on simulated Greenland climate and surface mass balance. We conclude that sea-surface/ocean temperature forcing is not sufficient to strongly influence precipitation/snow accumulation and melt/runoff of the ice sheet. Additional evidence from meteorological reanalysis suggests that high Greenland melt anomalies of summer 2007 are likely to have been primarily forced by anomalous advection of warm air masses over the Ice Sheet and to have therefore had a more remote atmospheric origin. We also take a preliminary look at summer 2008 climate and melt anomalies over Greenland and their attribution. However, there is a striking correspondence between ocean warming and dramatic accelerations and retreats of key Greenland outlet glaciers in both Southeast and Southwest Greenland during the late 1990s and early 2000s. DE: 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513) DE: 1621 Cryospheric change (0776) DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225) DE: 1637 Regional climate change SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31E-0570 TI: MODIS-derived Greenland ice sheet equilibrium line altitude 2000-2008: comparison with surface melt and accumulation variability AU: Benson, R EM: russtron@gmail.com AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: * Box, J EM: jbox.greenland@gmail.com AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AB: Equilibrium Line Altitude (ELA), where accumulation and ablation balance on an annual basis conveniently integrates the combined effect of surface melting and net snow accumulation. ELA can be monitored in optical satellite imagery for cloud-free scenes just prior to the first winter snow. We use NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to first manually, then using reflectance thresholds, we automatically classify in many images whole-Greenland ice sheet ELA. Inter-annual ELA variations spanning years 2000-2008 are compared with precipitation and melt anomalies simulated by Polar MM5 to better understand ELA sensitivity to climate and likely future changes in ice sheet accumulation area ratio. DE: 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540) DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863) DE: 3309 Climatology (1616, 1620, 3305, 4215, 8408) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31E-0563 TI: High-Resolution Bathymetry of Disko Bay and Ilulissat Icefjord, West- Greenland AU: * Weinrebe, W EM: wweinrebe@ifm-geomar.de AF: Cluster of Excellence "The Future Ocean", University of Kiel, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany AU: * Weinrebe, W EM: wweinrebe@ifm-geomar.de AF: Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany AU: Kuijpers, A EM: aku@geus.dk AF: Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland - GEUS, O. Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark AU: Klaucke, I EM: iklaucke@ifm-geomar.de AF: Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany AU: Fink, M EM: mfink@ifm-geomar.de AF: Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany AU: Jensen, J B EM: jbj@geus.dk AF: Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland - GEUS, O. Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark AU: Mikkelsen, N EM: nm@geus.info AF: Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland - GEUS, O. Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark AB: About 10% of the annual production of Greenland calf ice passes Disko Bay in the northern part of West- Greenland. The amount of over 35 km3 of ice annually which is more than any other glacier outside Antarctica produces, floats with a speed of more than 1 m per hour into Disko Bay through Ilulissat Icefjord, a 60 km long and 3-6 km wide tide-water ice-stream. This highly dynamic system with the large calving production and the high velocity implies a rapid response to climate changes and is thus a key area for the understanding of West Greenland Holocene climate history. The seafloor in the icefjord and off its mouth is extensively shaped by the movement of the icebergs and characterized by abundant plow marks. Large icebergs accumulate over a sill off the fjord mouth where they reside several months until they are finally released through the combined effect of tides and streams, melting, and melt-water lubrication. All these processes shape the morphology of the seafloor and create characteristic submarine landforms. Revealing the morphology helps to understand these processes. High-resolution bathymetric maps display the relief and morphology of the seafloor, however multibeam bathymetry surveys are difficult to perform in front of moving icebergs. As recently as 2007 a first high-resolution multibeam survey was carried out with RV Maria S. Merian to map a large area of Disko Bay off the mouth of Ilulissat Icefjord. In summer 2008 the survey was extended into the fjord using a small local vessel equipped with a temporarily installed portable Seabeam 1180 multibeam system. Both datasets merged together well display the morphology of the area mostly affected by the activity of the floating ice and the movements of icebergs. DE: 0730 Ice streams DE: 0732 Icebergs DE: 1625 Geomorphology and weathering (0790, 1824, 1825, 1826, 1886) DE: 1824 Geomorphology: general (1625) DE: 3045 Seafloor morphology, geology, and geophysics SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31E-0546 TI: Marine geophysical evidence for former expansion and flow of the Greenland Ice Sheet across the northeast Greenland continental shelf AU: * Evans, J EM: J.Evans2@lboro.ac.uk AF: Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3SJ, United Kingdom AU: O Cofaigh, C EM: colm.o'cofaigh@durham.ac.uk AF: Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom AU: Dowdeswell, J EM: jd16@cam.ac.uk AF: Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom AU: Wadhams, P EM: pw11@damtp.cam.ac.uk AF: Sea Ice Group, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, United Kingdom AB: Fast-flowing glaciers in NE Greenland drain approximately 300,000 km2 or 20% of the Greenland Ice Sheet to the margin. Swath bathymetry and sub-bottom profiler acoustic data from the continental margin of northeast Greenland (78° N to 80° N) provide a record of the long-term behaviour of the Greenland Ice Sheet in this region. Geophysical data record the presence of subglacial landforms on the continental shelf that are formed in the surface of a soft sediment layer. Mega-scale glacial lineations are found in Westwind Trough that connects the outlet glaciers Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Gletscher and Zachariae Isstrom to the continental shelf edge. The geomorphological and stratigraphical records show that the Greenland Ice Sheet covered the inner-middle shelf during the most recent ice advance of the Late Weichselian glaciation, and that ice flow through Westwind Trough was in the form of a grounded, fast-flowing ice stream. Glacimarine sediment gravity flow deposits on the continental slope imply that the ice sheet extended beyond the middle continental shelf, and supplied subglacial sediment direct to the shelf edge with subsequent remobilisation downslope. Collectively the geophysical data record for the first time that ice streams were an important glacio-dynamic feature that drained interior basins of the Late Weichselian Greenland Ice Sheet across the NE Greenland continental margin, and that the ice sheet was far more extensive in this region during the last glacial maximum than the previous terrestrial-glacial reconstructions showed. DE: 0720 Glaciers DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0730 Ice streams DE: 1707 Cryosphere DE: 3000 MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 12:05h AN: C12A-08 TI: Terrestrial photogrammetry of Greenland glacier discharge variability: comparison with surface climate anomalies AU: * Box, J E EM: jbox.greenland@gmail.com AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Yushin, A EM: ahnysleo@gmail.com AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Balog, J EM: jamesbalog@mac.com AF: Extreme Ice Survey, 262 Bristlecone Way, Boulder, CO 80304, United States AU: Lewinter, A EM: adam.lewinter@gmail.com AF: Extreme Ice Survey, 262 Bristlecone Way, Boulder, CO 80304, United States AU: Orlowski, J EM: orlowski@gmail.com AF: Extreme Ice Survey, 262 Bristlecone Way, Boulder, CO 80304, United States AB: Repeat photography provides a powerful tool to quantify glacier speed variability without the need to set foot on the hazardous glacier front. Surface displacements are derived from daily digital images from several west Greenland ice sheet outlet glaciers. Displacements are compared with surface melt intensity data to test the hypothesis that a significant inter-daily correlation exists between outlet glacier discharge and melt intensity. Neighboring and regional glacier speed co-variability on inter-daily time scales is evaluated. The effect of winter sea ice and its breakup is evaluated. Numerous time lapse sequences are presented. UR: http://extremeicesurvey.org/ DE: 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863) DE: 1621 Cryospheric change (0776) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31A-0485 TI: Greenland Surface Melt Trends From SSM/I And QuikSCAT Data AU: * Bhattacharya, I EM: bhattacharya.21@osu.edu AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Scott Hall Room 108,1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Jezek, K C EM: jezek@frosty.rsl.ohio-state.edu AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Scott Hall Room 108,1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Wang, L EM: leiwang@lsu.edu AF: Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 227 Howe- Russell, Geoscience Complex, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, United States AU: Liu, H EM: liu@geog.tamu.edu AF: Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, Room 810, Eller O&M Building, College Station, TX 77843, United States AB: We estimated surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet using Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) data during 1989-2007 and Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) data during 2000-2007. We applied a multi-scale wavelet transform based edge detection technique to the SSM/I data for melt detection. For QuikSCAT data, we used a threshold based method to compute surface melt. The correlation coefficient between the surface melt areas calculated from these two different sensors and two different algorithms reaches 0.98. Our analysis shows that the temporal variation in the surface melt in Greenland can divided into three sub- periods: 1979-1989, 1990-2000, and 2000-2007. Each sub-period has a distinctive change rate in melt extent, which implies a decadal scale variability in surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet. DE: 0740 Snowmelt DE: 0758 Remote sensing SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31B-0496 TI: GRACE Observes Small-Scale Mass Loss in Greenland AU: Wouters, B EM: bert.wouters@tudelft.nl AF: TU Delft, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Kluyverweg 4, Delft, 2629HS, Netherlands AU: Chambers, D EM: chambers@csr.utexas.edu AF: Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin, 3925 West Braker Lane, Suite 200, Austin, TX 78759-5321, United States AU: * Schrama, E EM: e.j.o.schrama@tudelft.nl AF: TU Delft, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Kluyverweg 4, Delft, 2629HS, Netherlands AB: Using gravity data from the GRACE satellites between February 2003 and January 2008, we examine changes in Greenland's mass distribution on a regional scale. During this period, Greenland lost mass at a mean rate of 179±25 Gt/yr, equivalent to a global mean sea level change of 0.5±0.1 mm/yr. Rates increase over time and are driven by mass loss during the summers, which vary substantially over the years. The largest mass losses occurred along the southeastern and northwestern coast in the summers of 2005 and 2007, when the ice sheet lost 279 Gt and 328 Gt of ice respectively within 2 months. In 2007, a substantial mass loss is observed during summer at elevations above 2000 m, for the first time since the start of the GRACE observations. DE: 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223) DE: 1217 Time variable gravity (7223, 7230) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31B-0494 TI: Mass-balance measurements from a network of automatic weather stations in the ablation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet AU: * van As, D EM: dva@geus.dk AF: GEUS, Oster Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark AU: Ahlstrom, A P EM: apa@geus.dk AF: GEUS, Oster Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark AB: The most accurate way to record continuous mass balance variations for a specific location is by placing an automatic weather station (AWS). In spite of this, the ablation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet had a poor spatial coverage of these measurement systems, as changing ice surfaces, strong winds, etc. may call for frequent visits, and therewith high logistical expenses. However, we are in the process of building a comprehensive network of AWSs in the ablation zone (part of the PROMICE programme for monitoring the Greenland Ice Sheet), increasing the number of permanent transects around the ice sheet from two to nine. We will present preliminary mass-balance data of the stations placed during the previous two summers, focusing on the summer of 2008. After completion of the network in 2009, the measurements will serve as input for a melt model run over the entire ice sheet. Another ambition is to use the data to validate regional climate models. We will discuss the uncertainties of such modeling in the ablation zone, and possibly compare model results for 2008 to our observations. DE: 0740 Snowmelt DE: 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223) DE: 0764 Energy balance DE: 0772 Distribution DE: 0794 Instruments and techniques SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31C-0508 TI: Greenland Ice Sheet Seasonal Speedup Coupled With Surface Hydrology AU: * Palmer, S J EM: s.j.palmer@sms.ed.ac.uk AF: School of GeoSciences, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, United Kingdom AU: Shepherd, A EM: Andrew.Shepherd@ed.ac.uk AF: School of GeoSciences, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, United Kingdom AU: Nienow, P EM: Peter.Nienow@ed.ac.uk AF: School of GeoSciences, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, United Kingdom AB: We use interferometric synthetic aperture radar data from western Greenland to quantify temporal variations in ice sheet flow and to characterise the ice sheet surface hydrology. In contrast to a recent study, our data reveal a non-uniform pattern of summertime velocity increase that, in places, extends over 100 km inland. Ice speedup is intimately linked to the routing of supraglacial water, and the magnitude of seasonal flow variations is positively correlated with the area of surface hydrological catchments. During late summer, ice beneath the largest catchments flows on average ~50 % faster than in winter, but beneath small catchments there is little or no change. Our results suggest that mass losses from the Greenland Ice Sheet under a warming climate will be governed by the extent to which coupling between hydrology and flow evolves, and that ground-based experiments to study velocity fluctuations should be sited with care. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0746 Lakes (9345) DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 0774 Dynamics SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 1340h AN: C23A-0586 TI: Structural Glaciology and Recent Changes of Helheimgletscher and Fenrisgletscher, East Greenland AU: * Mayer, H EM: mayerh@tryfan.colorado.edu AF: Terra Mobilis Research, P.O. Box, Lafayette, CO 80026, United States AU: Herzfeld, U C EM: ute.herzfeld@colorado.edu AF: CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States AU: Sucht, S EM: steven.sucht@hotmail.com AF: CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States AB: Drastic changes have been affecting the Greenland Ice Sheet and its outlet glaciers in recent years. While a general trend to increased melting and accelerated ice discharge is apparent, individual glaciers behave quite differently. We present a structural analysis of Helheimgletscher and Fenrisgletscher based on aerial surveys and remote-sensing data to assess their kinematics and dynamics. Our approach combines principles and techniques from structural geology with continuum mechanics and remote sensing to characterize and classify structural units within glaciers. Time series of structural classification and segmentation of a glacier derived from repeat observations provide a detailed record of its kinematic and dynamic development. Helheimgletscher is the only glacier in the Sermilik area of East Greenland that showed significant and prolonged periods of advance during the twentieth century. Our field observations of 2001 revealed that Helheimgletscher was still advancing then. Neighboring Fenrisgletscher, in contrast, was moving and retreating slowly. Since then, Helheimgletscher has changed into a phase of rapid retreat and acceleration of flow. We analyze the most recent changes based on high-resolution remote-sensing imagery. DE: 0720 Glaciers DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 0774 Dynamics DE: 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 08:45h AN: C21D-04 INVITED TI: Greenland ice sheet surface air temperature and accumulation rate reconstruction (1840- 2007) from in-situ data records AU: * Box, J E EM: jbox.greenland@gmail.com AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall, Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Yang, L EM: lei.miren.yang@gmail.com AF: South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, 164 West XinGang Road, Guangzhou, 510301, China AU: Bromwich, D EM: bromwich@polarmet1.mps.ohio-state.edu AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall, Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AU: Bai, L EM: bai@polarmet1.mps.ohio-state.edu AF: Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall, Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States AB: Meteorological station and ice core records are combined with regional climate model output to develop a continuous 168-year (1840-2007) spatial reconstruction of seasonal mean Greenland ice sheet near-surface air temperatures and ice sheet snow accumulation rates. Independent observations are used to assess and compensate systematic errors. Uncertainty is quantified using residual non-systematic error. Spatial and temporal temperature variability is investigated on seasonal and annual time scales. We find that volcanic cooling episodes are concentrated in winter and around western Greenland. Warming trends coincide with an absence of major volcanic eruptions. Year 2003 was the only year 1840-2007 with a warm anomaly that exceeds three standard deviations from the 1951-1980 base period. The annual whole ice sheet 1919-1932 warming trend is 33% greater in magnitude than the 1994-2007 warming. The recent warming was, however, stronger along western Greenland in autumn and southern Greenland in winter. Spring trends marked the 1920s warming onset while autumn lead the 1994-2007 warming. In contrast to the 1920s warming, the 1994- 2007 warming has not surpassed the northern hemisphere anomaly. An additional 1.0-1.5°C of annual mean warming would be needed for Greenland to be in phase with the Northern Hemispheric pattern. We thus predict that the ice sheet melt rates and recent mass deficit will continue to grow in the early 21st century as Greenland climate catches up with the Northern Hemispheric warming trend and Arctic climate warms according with climate forecasts. Reconstructed accumulation rates exhibit significant inter-decadal trends. Spatial and temporal surface mass balance is reconstructed from melt intensity derived from the air temperature and accumulation reconstructions. The effect of recent and past century warming on surface mass balance is presented. DE: 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540) DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 3309 Climatology (1616, 1620, 3305, 4215, 8408) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 13:40h AN: C43A-01 INVITED TI: Recent Surface Changes in Southern Greenland Outlet Glaciers from NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper Experiments AU: Krabill, W B EM: william.b.krabill@nasa.gov AF: NASA/GSFC/Wallops Flight Facility, Building N159, Room E201, Wallops Island, VA 23337, United States AU: * Sonntag, J G EM: sonntag@osb.wff.nasa.gov AF: EG&G Services, Inc., NASA Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, VA 23337, United States AB: In summer 2008, NASA deployed its Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM), along with other airborne science instruments, to several locations around the southern periphery of the Greenland ice sheet, with the aim of quantifying recent changes in a number of outlet glaciers. The ATM also joined with a Swansea University (United Kingdom) team in order to provide geodetic reference ties on the bare bedrock surrounding a dozen outlet glaciers, most of them in southeastern Greenland. The goal of this phase of the effort was to make possible the computation of volumetric change of these glaciers using a decades-long series of oblique aerial photographs, combined with the geodetic reference provided by the ATM's rock overflights. Finally, we supported a National Science Foundation and University of Kansas effort to fly a large, dense grid over the greater Jakobshavn basin to obtain bedrock topography using their 150 MHz depth-sounding radar. In the process of this, we obtained our own extensive surface-topography measurements over the same grid. Here we present initial results from these efforts, including changes in the surface topography of the Jakobshavn and Helheim glacier basins, and along the flowlines of Kangerdlugssuaq and other outlet glaciers in the southeast of Greenland. Finally we summarize initial, or baseline, measurements along the flowlines of a number of glaciers never mapped before by the ATM, which we flew as part of our other efforts and which will pay dividends when the ATM returns to refly the lines in future campaigns. UR: http://atm.wff.nasa.gov/ DE: 0720 Glaciers DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31B-0498 TI: Spatial and Temporal Trends in Snow Accumulation From Radio Echo Eounding, Summit, Greenland AU: * Overly, T B EM: toverly@ku.edu AF: CReSIS - Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, University of Kansas 316 Nichols Hall 2335 Irving Hill Road, Lawrence, KS 66045-7612, United States AB: Current estimates of snow accumulation over Greenland have large errors (20-25%) because they are derived from a relatively sparse network of point measurements (Ohmura and Reeh, 1991; Bales et al., 2001). To determine whether the Greenland ice sheet mass is increasing or decreasing and how this will affect the global sea level, the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas has developed several ice penetrating radar systems. Ground based ultra-wideband radar (500-2000 MHz) operated near Summit, Greenland, in July 2005, is used to map near-surface internal layers with 10 cm free- space resolution. This high resolution allows for visual inspection of accumulation layers to a depth of over 200 meters. Radar transects connecting the GRIP and GISP2 ice cores reveal continuous reflection horizons that allow for the transfer of age-depth relationships obtained from the ice cores to the continuous radar reflections. Accurately dated and spatially continuous isochrones are valuable for calibration and verification of ice sheet models. The observed isochrones provide a detailed description of spatial and temporal variations in accumulation rate over the past 500 years and constrain the selection of parameters and climate history used to force numerical models. DE: 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540) DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0933 Remote sensing SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 13:55h AN: C43A-02 TI: A new high-resolution assessment of Greenland ice sheet surface mass balance: 1957- 2008 AU: * Ettema, J EM: J.Ettema@uu.nl AF: Utrecht University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, PO Box 80005, Utrecht, 3508TA, Netherlands AU: Van den Broeke, M EM: m.r.vandenbroeke@uu.nl AF: Utrecht University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, PO Box 80005, Utrecht, 3508TA, Netherlands AU: Van Meijgaard, E EM: Erik.van.Meijgaard@knmi.nl AF: Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, PO Box 201, De Bilt, 3730AE, Netherlands AU: Van de Berg, W EM: w.j.vandeberg@uu.nl AF: Utrecht University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, PO Box 80005, Utrecht, 3508TA, Netherlands AU: Bamber, J EM: j.bamber@bristol.ac.uk AF: Bristol Glaciology Centre, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS, United Kingdom AU: Box, J EM: box.11@osu.edu AF: Byrd Polar Research Center The Ohio State University, 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210-1002, United States AB: Large uncertainties remain in the surface mass balance (SMB) of the Greenland ice sheet. To assess the current state and variability of the SMB components we use the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model (RACMO2.1). A model integration for the period 1957-2008 is performed at an unprecedented high horizontal grid resolution of 11 km, which is sufficient to resolve the large melt gradients in the narrow ablation zone and study in detail processes such as percolation, retention and refreezing of melt water. The model results show excellent agreement with observations. Comparison of SMB results with other regional climate models show similar spatial patterns, but locally substantial improvements. Increasing the horizontal resolution enhances the gradients in the SMB and its components. For example, the orographically forced precipitation amount in the south-east of Greenland is much larger than previously concluded. Newly gained surface mass balance observations in this area support this. The integrated ablation and subsequent surface runoff is comparable to other studies, leading to a more positive surface mass balance for the Greenland ice sheet. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223) DE: 0798 Modeling SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 14:55h AN: C43A-06 TI: Rapid crustal uplift due to unloading of ice from the main outlet glaciers in Greenland AU: * Khan, S A EM: abbas@space.dtu.dk AF: DTU Space - National Space Institute, Juliane Maries Vej 30, Copenhagen, 2100, Denmark AU: Wahr, J EM: wahr@anquetil.colorado.edu AF: Department of Physics and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, United States AU: Hamilton, G EM: gordon.hamilton@main.edu AF: Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Maine, OR 04469, United States AU: Stearns, L EM: leigh.stearns@maine.edu AF: Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Maine, OR 04469, United States AU: Dam, T v EM: tonie.vandam@uni.lu AF: Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, L-1511, AU: Francis, O EM: olivier.francis@uni.lu AF: Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, L-1511, AB: The main outlet glaciers in Greenland have more than doubled their ice volume loss in the past decade. Ice volume loss due to thinning of glaciers would result in a rapid mass unloading of the earth's crust. The elastic adjustments of the lithosphere is detectable using geodetic observations. Here, we use continuous Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements to study vertical crustal motions. We analyze data from ~20 GPS receivers, all located along the edge of the Greenland ice sheet. The rapid unloading of ice from the southeastern sector of the Greenland ice sheet causes an elastic uplift of ~12 mm/yr at a GPS site in Kulusuk (a settlement located ~50 km from the ice sheet margin) and 16 mm/yr at a GPS site in Isortoq (located few km from the ice sheet margin) and 20 mm/yr at HEL2 (a GPS site near the front of the Helheim Glacier). The GPS observations can be explained as due to ice volume loss of ~150 km3 yr-1 due to thinning in the southeastern sector of the Greenland ice sheet (including the Helheim glacier and the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier). Additionally, data from 4 continuous GPS receivers located between 0-150 km from the front of Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier, suggest an annual net loss of 20-25 km3 of ice from Jakobshavn Glacier. DE: 0720 Glaciers DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223) DE: 1240 Satellite geodesy: results (6929, 7215, 7230, 7240) DE: 1244 Standards and absolute measurements SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 15:25h AN: C53A-08 TI: Local sea-ice influence on Greenland surface melt AU: * Rennermalm, A K EM: akr@ucla.edu AF: University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951525, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States AU: Smith, L C EM: lsmith@ucla.edu AF: University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951525, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States AU: Stroeve, J EM: stroeve@kryos.colorado.edu AF: National Snow and Ice Data Center, National Snow and Ice Data Center, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States AU: Chu, V W EM: vena.chu@gmail.com AF: University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951525, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States AB: Continued reduction of Arctic sea ice may significantly alter the climate of the northern high latitudes and the mass balance of the Greenland ice-sheet. While sea ice loss and Greenland ice-surface melting both increased in the late-20th/early-21st century, the influence of sea ice on Greenland surface melt is unknown. In this presentation, we study the relationship between the variability of sea-ice/open-water and ice-sheet snow-melt extent by employing passive microwave satellite observations of both concurrently. We show that although melt and sea-ice/open-water extent vary independently in most of Greenland, anomalous covariability is observed in the general area of Kangerlussuaq, south-west Greenland. A prevalent time lag of approximately 0-2 days between the two variables suggests that sea-ice/open-water drive parts of the melt variability. In the Kangerlussuaq area, the anomalous sea-ice/open-water influence on melt variability may be a result of the proximity to the location of the average summertime sea ice edge in Davids Strait. We speculate that further northern retreat of sea ice could cause this covariability anomaly to also migrate north, to the vicinity of the Jakobshavn Isbrae. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0740 Snowmelt DE: 0750 Sea ice (4540) DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 1620 Climate dynamics (0429, 3309) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31B-0501 TI: Warm Atlantic water drives Greenland Ice Sheet discharge dynamics AU: * Christoffersen, P EM: pc350@cam.ac.uk AF: Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom AU: Heywood, K J EM: k.heywood@uea.ac.uk AF: School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom AU: Dowdeswell, J A EM: jd16@cam.ac.uk AF: Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom AU: Syvitski, J P EM: james.syvitski@colorado.edu AF: Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, CB2 1ER803, United States AU: Benham, T J EM: tjb52@cam.ac.uk AF: Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom AU: Mugford, R I EM: r.i.mugford@reading.ac.uk AF: Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom AU: Joughin, I EM: ian@apl.washington.edu AF: Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, United States AU: Luckman, A EM: a.luckman@swansea.ac.uk AF: School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University, Swansea, SA2 8PP, United Kingdom AB: Greenland outlet glaciers terminating in fjords experience seasonal fluctuations as well as abrupt episodes of rapid retreat and speed-up. The cause of abrupt speed-up events is not firmly established, but synchronous occurrences suggest that it is related to Arctic warming. Here, we report major warming of water masses in Kangerdlugssuaq Fjord, East Greenland, immediately prior to the fast retreat and speed-up of Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier in 2004-05. Our hydrographic data show that this event occurred when Atlantic water entered the fjord and increased temperature of surface water by 4°C and deep water by 1°C. On the basis of meteorological records and satellite-derived sea surface temperatures, which fluctuate by up to 4°C in periods of 2-3 years, we infer that inflow of Atlantic water is controlled by the direction and intensity of prevailing winds that force coastal and offshore currents. Our results demonstrate that Greenland Ice Sheet discharge dynamics are modulated by North Atlantic climate variability, which is identified by shifts in the position of atmospheric low pressure over the Labrador and Irminger seas. A persisting westerly position of the Icelandic Low since 1999 may explain why winters in Greenland have been particularly mild during the last decade and it is feasible that widespread and synchronous discharge fluctuations from outlet glaciers, which resulted in high rates of ice loss in southeast Greenland, are a consequence of this synoptic condition. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0774 Dynamics DE: 1621 Cryospheric change (0776) DE: 3305 Climate change and variability (1616, 1635, 3309, 4215, 4513) DE: 4540 Ice mechanics and air/sea/ice exchange processes (0700, 0750, 0752, 0754) SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 13:40h AN: U23F-01 INVITED TI: Melting and surface mass balance over the Greenland ice sheet from satellite data, model results and ground measurements during IPY: extreme events and updated trends. AU: * Tedesco, M EM: mtedesco@sci.ccny.cuny.edu AF: University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States AU: * Tedesco, M EM: mtedesco@sci.ccny.cuny.edu AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States AU: * Tedesco, M EM: mtedesco@sci.ccny.cuny.edu AF: The City University of New York, 138th St. and Convent Av., New York, NY 10031, United States AU: Fettweis, X EM: xavier.fettweis@ulg.ac.be AF: University of Liege, allée du 6 Août, Liege, 4000, Belgium AU: van den Broeke, M EM: m.r.vandenbroeke@uu.nl AF: University of Utrecht, Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, 3584, Netherlands AU: van de Wal, R EM: r.s.w.vandewal@uu.nl AF: University of Utrecht, Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, 3584, Netherlands AU: Smeets, P EM: C.J.P.P.Smeets@uu.nl AF: University of Utrecht, Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, 3584, Netherlands AB: The International Polar Year is offering a unique opportunity for demonstrating, following and getting involved with cutting-edge science. Many projects have been selected and many others have been stimulated and pushed forward by the discussions, results and new questions arising from the many collaborations within the IPY framework. In this study, we report results regarding an ongoing collaboration for improving snowmelt detection and surface mass balance estimation over the Greenland ice sheet from combined satellite data, model results and ground measurements. In particular, passive microwave observations are used to derived melt extent and duration over the entire Greenland ice sheet on a daily basis. These results are then compared with those obtained with a regional model (MAR), with the modeled net surface energy fluxes and with the trends of surface temperature collected along the coast at selected locations. Surface mass balance data of the Greenland ice sheet is also derived from the MAR model and compared with those from ground measuerements performed on the ablation zone of the west Greenland ice sheet along the 67° N latitude circle, at distances of 6, 38 and 88 km from the ice sheet margin at elevations of 490, 1020 and 1520 m a.s.l. Results are updated through the 2008 melting season and evaluated in the context of the 1979 – 2008 period. Satellite results show that 2008 was in agreement with the recently observed increase of melting over the Greenland ice sheet. Moreover, model results suggest a negative surface mass balance for the second year in a row, comparable to or lower than that modeled for 2007. Ground results are being analyzed at the moment of abstract submission and will be reported during the talk. DE: 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540) DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0740 Snowmelt DE: 0758 Remote sensing DE: 0764 Energy balance SC: Union [U] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C31C-0519 TI: Velocity changes in the ablation zone of the Greenland ice sheet. AU: * wal, R v EM: r.s.w.vandewal@uu.nl AF: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands AU: Boot, W AF: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands AU: Broeke, M v AF: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands AU: Smeets, C AF: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands AU: Reijmer, C AF: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands AU: Oerlemans, J AF: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands AU: Donker, J AF: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands AB: Continuous Global Positioning (GPS) observations are used to study variations in the flow of the western ablation zone of the Greenland ice sheet. Velocities increase by a factor 4 within days of increased melt water production. Over a longer period of 17 years annual ice velocity in the region decreased slightly, suggesting an adjusting hydraulic system, where increased meltwater input increases the efficieny. Results along the K-transect are now available for a 3 year period with hourly low precision GPS measurements. At the same time weather station are operated at three sites including Sonic Height Ranger instruments which are used to study hourly ablation changes. In this presentation we will address the interannual variations in the flow characteristics. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0774 Dynamics SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting HR: 0800h AN: C21A-0502 TI: Spatio-temporal Variability of Melt Intensity over the Greenland ice sheet from 2000-2005 using coupled MODIS Optical and Thermal Measurements AU: * Lampkin, D EM: djl22@psu.edu AF: Department of Geography Department of Geoscience College of Earth and Mineral Sciences Pennsylvania State University, RM 313 Walker Building, University Park, PA 16801, United States AB: Increased ice sheet velocity in the equilibrium zone of western Greenland Ice Sheet coincident with periods of summer melting has been demonstrated and attributed to infiltrated melt water that enhances glacial sliding. The assessment of surface melting beyond a binary classification of melt and no-melt events using passive microwave techniques, has been demonstrated using a liquid water fraction (LWF) retrieval model applied to higher resolution, cloud-free, composited MODIS optical and thermal data. Estimates of LWF were derived for composited periods from May through August for 2000 through 2005. An increase in the areal distribution of estimated LWF varies from (0-1%) during May to upwards of 15% later in the season inter- annually. A comparison to QuikSCAT derived melt zones indicate low LWF amounts associated with dry snow zones and higher LWF amounts with wet snow zones. This relationship holds spatially and temporally during the analysis period. DE: 0726 Ice sheets DE: 0736 Snow (1827, 1863) DE: 0740 Snowmelt DE: 0758 Remote sensing SC: Cryosphere [C] MN: 2008 Fall Meeting

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