tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28641833699814808522024-03-05T02:11:31.076-08:00Reference MaterialsTenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-23019006942778100022012-01-28T22:16:00.001-08:002012-01-28T22:16:36.323-08:00Map of Arctic Seas<span class="lead_image" style="background-color: white; color: #4b5c68; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><img alt="Increasing freshwater on the U.S. and Canadian side of the Arctic from 2005 to 2008 is balanced by decreasing freshwater on the Russian side, so that on average the Arctic did not have more freshwater" border="0" height="350" src="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/earth/20120104/earthA20120104-640.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-top: 10px;" width="640" /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #4b5c68; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;"></span><span class="photo_caption" style="background-color: white; color: #4b5c68; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 0.7em; line-height: 1.3em; text-align: left;">Increasing freshwater on the U.S. and Canadian side of the Arctic from 2005 to 2008 is balanced by decreasing freshwater on the Russian side, so that on average the Arctic did not have more freshwater. Here blue represents maximum freshwater increases and the yellows and oranges represent maximum freshwater decreases. Credit: University of Washington </span> <br />
<span class="photo_caption" style="background-color: white; color: #4b5c68; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 0.7em; line-height: 1.3em; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-002">http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-002</a> </span>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-42280981757854753392012-01-28T20:36:00.000-08:002012-01-28T20:39:40.584-08:00The Motherlode! Free access to thousands of High North (i.e., the Arctic) research documents made available by Norway's University of TromsøFree access to thousands of High North research documents<br />
<br />
<a href="http://highnorth.uit.no/"></a> <br />
<br />
Alaska Dispatch | Jan 26, 2012<br />
<br />
Arctic policy nerds and Far North students of all kinds, prepare to get your geek on ... According to the <a href="http://www.barentsobserver.com/free-access-to-research-documents-on-the-high-north.5013306.html" style="color: #336699; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Barents Observer</a>, the library of Norway's University of Tromsø has collected a registry of thousands of research documents that concern the High North -- and has made it available online free of charge.<br />
<br />
The searchable collection, called "<a href="http://highnorth.uit.no/" style="color: #336699; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">High North Research Documents</a>," features all sorts of writing and images from around the world concerning topics important in the circumpolar North.<br />
<br />
The documents are written in many different languages, but the majority of them are in English, the library announced in a press release.<br />
<br />
"This will be a very useful service for anyone interested in the High North, be it journalists, decision makers in business and public administration, politicians, NGOs, students and researchers," says academic librarian Leif Longva at the University of Tromsø.<br />
<br />
At its launch, the website contained records of nearly 100,000 documents, but its administrators intend for it to be dynamic and ever-growing. Nearly 10,000 of the items pertain directly to Alaska.<br />
<br />
Read more, <a href="http://www.barentsobserver.com/free-access-to-research-documents-on-the-high-north.5013306.html" style="color: #336699; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">here</a>, and look up your favorite research topic, <a href="http://highnorth.uit.no/" style="color: #336699; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/free-access-thousands-high-north-research-documents" style="color: #776644; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/free-access-thousands-high-north-research-documents</span></a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-91183052308087977042012-01-27T13:34:00.001-08:002012-01-27T13:34:52.712-08:00NASA Animation of Polar Vortex Splitting in Two in February 2009<a href="http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/36000/36972/npole_gmao_200901-02.mov"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/36000/36972/npole_gmao_200901-02.mov</span></a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-86687747066293827592011-07-02T06:11:00.001-07:002011-07-02T06:11:51.737-07:00University of Wisconsin global mosaic water vapor animations<a href="http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/</span></a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-72773129758906377052011-07-02T06:10:00.001-07:002012-01-27T13:20:32.965-08:00Roy Spencer's satellite temps<a href="http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/</span></a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-13866403246887679652011-01-23T09:14:00.001-08:002011-01-23T09:14:19.699-08:00Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Daily Graph, Univ. Bremen<a href="http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_s.png">http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_s.png</a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-2545492896292404542011-01-01T09:58:00.001-08:002011-01-01T09:58:26.312-08:00Glacier Mass Balance Data: 2008, 2009<a href="http://www.wgms.ch/mbb/sum09.html">http://www.wgms.ch/mbb/sum09.html</a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-87374916601702653162011-01-01T09:56:00.000-08:002011-01-01T09:56:33.981-08:00Sea Level Rise, other key indicators, from NASAAnd other key indicators of climate change:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#seaLevel">http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#seaLevel</a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-80207477796370909272010-12-15T09:01:00.001-08:002012-01-27T13:28:10.292-08:00NASA's Earth Observatory Global Water Vapor Animation 2002-2011<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/view.php?d1=MYDAL2_M_SKY_WV">http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/view.php?d1=MYDAL2_M_SKY_WV</a></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNHyGK6Nf4YSGkDyRjTOIAfESHgmXgEMzo-EvZ3r935stgRfXteNbxBoib3Uq3utVV0kPIkcby3Mjy6JL7hzdak6U_hj6zK1CqzjGS3aiRVjsYPRhdVGzB1a05TYHRgLztT_USPn-SkhnC/s1600/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.2012.01.27.19.29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="520" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNHyGK6Nf4YSGkDyRjTOIAfESHgmXgEMzo-EvZ3r935stgRfXteNbxBoib3Uq3utVV0kPIkcby3Mjy6JL7hzdak6U_hj6zK1CqzjGS3aiRVjsYPRhdVGzB1a05TYHRgLztT_USPn-SkhnC/s640/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.2012.01.27.19.29.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg</span>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-9105795092990767922010-12-15T09:00:00.001-08:002010-12-15T09:00:38.589-08:00World Sunlight Map<a href="http://www.die.net/earth/">http://www.die.net/earth/</a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-14360223731898263672009-10-03T12:16:00.001-07:002009-10-03T12:22:40.013-07:00Additional information for Forest Voice online, Spring 2008, "The Real Score on Logging and CO2 Emissions"<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span lang="EN-US">Summary<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">US emissions are estimated to be in the range [110, 190] Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>, with the caveat that the upper limit might still be a reach. The midpoint of this interval is roughly 2.5 times that of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Canada</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s estimated emissions, which should agree with the countries’ respective timber harvest volumes.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Canadian emissions are estimated at 56.6 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span lang="EN-US">Estimate for US logging-related emissions for 2005</span></b><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">I used three primary sources to bound an estimate for logging-related emissions of CO2 for 2005:</span><br />
</div><div class="ListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US">1.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US">Heath and Birdsey (1993), “Carbon trends of productive temperate forests of the coterminous US”</span><br />
</div><div class="ListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US">2.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US">Turner et al. (1995), “A carbon budget for forests of the conterminous US”</span><br />
</div><div class="ListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US">3.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US">EPA (2007), LULUCF & Annex 3</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">First, these estimates do <u>not</u> include: (1) emissions associated with harvesting, transporting, or processing harvested wood; (2) partial offsets from energy production; and (3) offsets from substitution of more energy intensive building materials (e.g., cement).</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><u><span lang="EN-US">Heath and Birdsey (1993)<o:p></o:p></span></u></b><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">To be consistent with the estimates from Turner et al. (1995) as well as the estimates from the EPA report, I thought the numbers presented from Heath and Birdsey should include carbon stored in wood products and landfills. The results still indicate that much greater carbon sequestration can be achieved with the no-harvest option, but including HWP storage does dampen the effect. Secondly, as the model predicts net sequestration, I would avoid calling the annual change “CO2 emissions.”</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><u><span lang="EN-US">Changes in pools (Tg yr<sup>-1</sup>) for US timberlands under alternate harvest scenarios.<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> <u> </u><u>2010</u><u> </u> <u>2030</u><u> </u> <u> </u><u>2050</u><u> </u> <u> </u><u>2070</u></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Normal harvest 73 71 37 -63 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">HWP, normal 78 82 79 66</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Total, normal 151 153 116 3 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">No harvest 552 297 261 169 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Difference 401 144 145 166 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><u><span lang="EN-US">Comparison of endpoints under alternate harvesting scenarios</span></u><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> <u> </u><u>1987</u> <u> </u><u>2070</u></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Carbon in forest, normal harvest 31,890 34,460 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Carbon in storage*, normal harvest 741 6,829 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Carbon in forest, no harvest 31,890 59,130 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">* Numbers actually provided for year 1990, but I assume a similar quantity in 1987 for purposes of estimation.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><u><span lang="EN-US">Comparison of annualized sequestration<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">C change in forest, 1987-2070, normal harvest +2,570 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">C change in storage, normal harvest +6,088 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Total C change, normal harvest +8,658 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">C change per year, in CO2, normal harvest +382 Mt CO2</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">C change**, 1987-2070, no harvest +27,240 </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">C change per year, in CO2, no harvest +1,203 Mt CO2</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">**Assuming no substantial change in storage pools under the no harvest option, though we would expect some if not most of the initial storage to decay over the period of interest (1987-2070).</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Assuming the difference between annual CO2 uptake rates under normal and no harvest scenarios is a fair estimate for logging-related emissions, these results suggest that logging could annually release as much as 821 Mt CO2, or 224 Tg C. This estimate appears high, which could stem from any number of reasons, including outdated assumptions about carbon flux and product usage. For instance they assume 20% loss of initial soil C after harvest across the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region>, but more recent accounting methods (e.g., Hoover et al. 2000, “How to estimate carbon sequestration on small forest tracts,” <i>Journal of Forestry</i>) only assume that percentage loss for the southeast, and assume 0% loss elsewhere.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Another approach is to use representative values presented in the conclusions of the article. Heath and Birdsey estimate that absent harvest the forest C pool would increase at a rate of 328 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. Under the normal harvest scenario forests continue to sequester additional carbon but at a decreasing rate, with an average value of 60 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. Additionally, carbon sequestered in wood products and landfills adds on average 75 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. Expected annual net sequestration from switching to a no harvest scenario is therefore 193 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. This is likely a high estimate given current sequestration is much higher than 60 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>; the EPA estimate for net sequestration by US forests in 2005 was 190.6 Tg C. </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Theoretically the difference between scenarios represents annual harvest-related emissions. The uncertainty surrounding this number is likely high, as it represents average values projected into the future. </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><u><span lang="EN-US">Turner et al. (1995)</span></u><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Turner et al. (1995) estimated that harvest related activities can annually transfer 266 Tg C out of the live tree biomass pool. Of the 266 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>, 124 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup> is a reduction in growing stock, with the remaining 142 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup> non-growing stock partitioned between harvest emissions (72 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>) and transfer to the woody debris pool (70 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>). Additional releases from rapid changes in the forest floor and understory following harvest amounted to 33 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. Thus their estimate for on-site harvest related emissions was 105 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. Of the removed growing stock, 50-75% is stored in long-term forest products, and the rest is expected to be released to the atmosphere within 5 years. If half is released and we assume a constant decay rate, an additional 12.4 Tg C would be released per year, for a total of (105 + 12.4) = 117.4 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. Scaling this up by 7% to account for the larger harvest value in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> for 2005 results in an estimate of 125.6 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><u><span lang="EN-US">EPA (2007)</span></u><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">It is important to distinguish between: (1) emissions associated with harvests that occurred in 2005 and (2) emissions associated with harvests that occurred prior to and including 2005. The later quantity represents the balance between inputs and outputs, and requires information on previous harvest quantities and decomposition rates. Because the US EPA report only provides net changes in these pools over time, it is difficult to estimate the relative contributions of recruitment into and decomposition from various pools. To do so would require much more information than is provided in the EPA documents (contacting Smith or Heath might be the place to start). I therefore estimate the first quantity – emissions associated with harvests that actually occurred in 2005. Total emissions would of course be higher, but this presents a reasonable lower bound.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Total HWP emissions can be calculated as the total harvest less any increase in HWP storage. From Table A-200, column 5, total harvest in 2005 was 132.9 Tg C, and the net increase in storage was 28.2 Tg C (A-200, columns 2A + 2B, or A-198). Total HWP emissions are therefore 104.7 Tg C (A-200, column 7). This emissions estimate does not include releases from on-site carbon that was transferred to new pools after harvest, e.g., slash.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Tree carbon corresponds to 35-48% of total on-site carbon (Harmon, personal communication). During harvest, approximately 65% of the tree is removed, or 23-31% of total on-site carbon. Of this quantity harvested, between 50-75% ends up in long-term forest products, or 11-23% of total carbon. If 132.9 Tg C represents roughly 30% of total on-site carbon, then total on-site carbon can be estimated as 443 Tg C. Assuming half of that total carbon is in stable soil pools, 222 Tg C of labile carbon was on-site prior to harvest. After removal of 132.9 Tg C from harvest, 89.1 Tg C is left on site to decompose over time. Assumptions about transfers into various pools and decomposition rates influence estimates for the quantity that would be released within a year of harvest. Slash decays within 5-30 years, sometimes longer (Harmon, personal communication).</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Below I vary the percentage of remaining on-site biomass that decays within a year and estimate slash-related emissions, as well as total harvest-related emissions.<br />
<br />
</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"> <u> </u><u>Slash</u><u> </u> <u> </u><u>Total</u></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">5% 4.5 Tg C 109.2 Tg C</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">10% 8.9 Tg C 113.6 Tg C</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">15% 13.4 Tg C 118.1 Tg C</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">20% 17.8 Tg C 122.5 Tg C</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">25% 22.3 Tg C 127 Tg C</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></b><b><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></b> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span lang="EN-US">Estimate for Canadian logging-related emissions for 2005</span></b><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">My primary source here was a document the Canadian government sent to IPCC (FCCC/SBSTA/2005/MISC.9), in particular Figure 3 (Production Approach) on page 9.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Total harvest (fuelwood, firewood, IRW): 50,107 Gg C</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Increase in reservoir of long-lived products consumed in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Canada</st1:place></st1:country-region>: 12,784 Gg C</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Estimate HWP emissions: 37,323 Gg C.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Adding slash (19,273 Gg C), brings total harvest-related emissions to: 50,107 (harvest) + 19,273 (slash) - 12,784 (HWP storage) = 56,596 Gg C. </span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><b>Breakdown</b></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Annual HWP Contribution (annual change in carbon stock associated with HWP):</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">12,784 Gg C (12.8 Tg C)</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Annual HWP-related emissions:</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">37,323 Gg C (37.3 Tg C)</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Estimated total harvest-related emissions (including HWP storage):</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span lang="EN-US">56,596 Gg C (56.6 Tg C)</span><br />
</div>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-58017832280855193832009-02-19T05:57:00.000-08:002009-02-19T06:01:47.398-08:004th International Polar Year (IPY) & Damocles Integrated Project, Arctic sea will not likely recover<h1 class="articleHeadline">Arctic sea ice will probably not recover</h1> <p class="standfirst"><span style="font-style: italic;">Environmental Research Web</span>, February 19, 2009</p><p class="standfirst">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.</p> <div class="articleBody"> <p> 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. </p><p>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. </p><p> 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 <i>et al</i>. 2005). </p><p> 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. </p><p> 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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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 <i>et al</i>. 2008) and oceanic circulation (Zhang <i>et al</i>. 1998, Polyakov <i>et al</i>. 2005 and Dmitrenko <i>et al</i>. 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. </p><p>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? </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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). </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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). </p><p>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. </p><p> 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 <i>et al</i>. 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 <i>et al</i>. (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. </p><p>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. </p><p> <strong>Recommendations</strong></p><p>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.<br /></p><p>2. Large European involvement for Arctic exploration: promotion of the Aurora Borealis European icebreaker and European full partnership in the Arctic Council.<br /></p><p>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).<br /></p><p>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.<br /></p><p>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.<br /></p><p> 6. The human dimension of climate changes is global and this is why we called the new era the anthropocene. </p><p>Source: <a href="http://www.ipy.org/">ipy</a></p><p>Link: <a href="http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/yournews/37877">http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/yournews/37877</a><br /></p> </div>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-65509723849487785132009-02-15T17:59:00.000-08:002009-02-15T18:10:22.373-08:00Dan McDougall, Observer: Doug Tompkins' Patagonia<div id="article-header"> <div id="main-article-info"> <h1>Welcome to my world</h1> <p id="stand-first" class="stand-first-alone">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</p> </div> </div> <div id="content"> <ul class="article-attributes no-pic multi-pub"><li class="byline"> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/danmcdougall" name="&lid={contentTypeByline}{Dan McDougall}&lpos={contentTypeByline}{1}">Dan McDougall</a> </li><li class="publication"> <a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/" name="&lid={contentTypeByline}{The Observer}&lpos={contentTypeByline}{2}">The Observer,</a> Sunday 15 February 2009 </li><li class="history"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/12/doug-tompkins-patagonia-conservation-environment-fashion-dan-mcdougall#history-byline" classname="rollover historylink" id="historylink-byline" class="rollover historylink">Article history</a></li></ul> <div id="article-wrapper"> <p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/whaling">whaling</a> 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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/fashion">fashion</a> 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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/conservation">conservation</a> effort, buying vast stretches of wilderness in Chile and <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/argentina">Argentina</a> to protect it from development.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Que Pasa</span> recently. "His objective is, to say the least, dark, covering a vast territory from mountains to sea."</p><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>"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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>In the 1980s, with Esprit flying high, Tompkins read George Sessions's and Bill Devall's primer, <span style="font-style: italic;">Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered</span>, 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?"</p><p>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."</p><p>"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."</p><p>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."</p><p>And currently it is salmon farming that is his particular <span style="font-style: italic;">bête noir</span>. 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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>"It's just another battle I have to take on," says Tompkins, banking left and heading back to the fjord.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>"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."</p><p>Link to article: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/12/doug-tompkins-patagonia-conservation-environment-fashion-dan-mcdougall">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/12/doug-tompkins-patagonia-conservation-environment-fashion-dan-mcdougall</a><br /></p> </div> </div>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-16707575556851853172009-02-14T05:44:00.000-08:002009-02-14T06:00:23.246-08:00Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, "The Tempest" (article on Bill Gray)<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/"><img src="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/images/homepage/logos/twp_logo_300.gif" alt="washingtonpost.com" border="0" width="300" height="47" /></a> <div id="pfmnav"> <div class="pad"> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/?nav=pf">NEWS</a> <span class="wp_pipe">|</span></div></div><div style="float: right; padding-left: 17px;"><div style="margin-top: 4px; margin-bottom: 4px; clear: left;"><noscript><br /></noscript> <script language="javascript"><!-- if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & BIGBOX_FLEX ) == BIGBOX_FLEX ) { document.write('</div>') ; } // --> </script></div> </div> <div><style> .correction { margin-top:8px; padding-top:10px; margin-bottom:8px; border-bottom:1px solid #CCCCCC; padding-bottom:10px; font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; color:#333333; } .correction strong { color:#CC0000; text-transform:uppercase; } </style><span style="font-size:+2;"><b>The Tempest</b></span><br /><p><span style="font-size:-1;">by Joel Achenbach, <span style="font-style: italic;">Washington Post</span>, Sunday, May 28, 2006; W08<br /></span></p><p><i>As evidence mounts that humans are causing dangerous changes in Earth's climate, a handful of skeptics are providing some serious blowback</i></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>But he's also angry. He's outraged.</p><p>He recently had a public shouting match with one of his former students. It went on for 45 minutes.</p><p>He was supposed to debate another scientist at a weather conference, but the organizer found him to be too obstreperous, and disinvited him.</p><p>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.</p><p>Which is this: Global warming is a hoax.</p><p>"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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin to cool again.</p><p>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.</p><b>Parallel Earths</b><br /><p>HUMAN BEINGS ARE PUMPING GREENHOUSE GASES INTO THE ATMOSPHERE, warming the planet in the process.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>But when you step into the realm of the skeptics, you find yourself on a parallel Earth.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Hot Talk, Cold Science</span>, 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 <i>Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media</i>. 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.</p><p>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?</p><p>Now look at the ice in Antarctica: Getting thicker in places!</p><p>Sea level rise? It's actually dropping around certain islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.</p><p>There are all these . . . anomalies.</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>"It's a big can of worms!" Gray says. It's his favorite line.</p><p>The models can't even predict the weather in two weeks, much less 100 years, he says.</p><p>"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!"</p><p>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 <a href="http://financial.washingtonpost.com/custom/wpost/html-qcn.asp?dispnav=business&mwpage=qcn&symb=XOM&nav=el" target="">Exxon Mobil</a> existed.</p><p>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.' "<br /></p><p>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.</p><p>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 -- <i>it's fertilizer.</i></p><b>The Free Market Solution: Zoos</b><br /><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://financial.washingtonpost.com/custom/wpost/html-qcn.asp?dispnav=business&mwpage=qcn&symb=GM&nav=el" target="">General Motors</a>, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Plastics Council, the Chlorine Chemistry Council and Arch Coal.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Including national parks? I ask.</p><p>"Probably wouldn't touch it for political reasons," he says.</p><p>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.</p><p>"Maybe he <i>is</i> running," Smith says.</p><p>When Gore shows a big graph of rising CO2, Smith says, "That's a phony scale."</p><p>The film shows footage from Hurricane Katrina.</p><p>"It was a Category 3 hurricane," Smith says. Not the Cat 5, at landfall, you keep hearing about.</p><p>Gore reveals that insurance losses because of hurricanes have steadily climbed.</p><p>"That's just dishonest," Smith says. There are more beach houses and so on -- it's just an infrastructure issue.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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.</p><p>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.</p><p>We pass an asbestos ad.</p><p>"When I was a kid, this was called the miracle mineral," he says.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"Terrible toos," Horner says. I'm confused. He explains that it's shorthand for environmental doom and gloom.</p><p>"Terrible toos. Too many people, using too many resources."</p><p>Smith has a different equation: "Less people, less affluence, less technology: We call that death, poverty and ignorance."</p><p>They believe the rise of carbon dioxide may be a symptom of global warming, not the cause. Look at the chart Gore used:</p><p>Didn't it look like the warming comes before the CO2 increase?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>I want to make sure I understand what he is saying, so I begin to ask a question: "For endangered species, people should --"</p><p>"-- own them," Smith says.</p><p>But isn't there a difference between animals that live in zoos and animals that live in the wild?</p><p>"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."</p><p>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."</p><p>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.' "</p><p>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.</p><p>"We're playing the baseline game," Horner says.</p><p>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.</p><p>"We've got lots of land."</p><p>For the gorillas, he means.</p><p>"Build a Jurassic Park in Central America."</p><p>Horner says that perhaps we are getting off track.</p><b>And Then There's Hitler</b><br /><p>LET US BE HONEST about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>Somehow Hitler keeps popping into the discussion. Gore draws a parallel between fighting global warming and fighting the Nazis. Novelist Michael Crichton, in <i>State of Fear</i> , 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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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 <span style="font-style: italic;">London Evening Standard</span> reported online. This would cause "a surge in sea levels threatening the lives of billions of people."</p><p>Wrong, but <i>whatever.</i></p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><b>The Hurricane Conference</b><br /><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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.</p><p>Hurricanes aren't getting worse -- we're just in an uptick of a regular cycle. But the alarmists won't let anyone believe that.</p><p>"The world is boiling! It's getting worse and worse!" Gray shouts. "Hell is approaching."</p><p>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 (<span style="font-style: italic;">Science Digest</span>, 1973; <span style="font-style: italic;">Newsweek</span>, 1975) fretting about the Cooling World.</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>The modelers are equation pushers.</p><p>"They haven't been down in the trenches, making forecasts and understanding stuff!"</p><p>The news media are self-interested.</p><p>"Media people are all out for Pulitzer Prizes!"</p><p>The IPCC is elitist.</p><p>"They don't talk to us! I've never been approached by the IPCC."</p><p>He spots a famous meteorologist in the back of the room. It's Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center.</p><p>"Neil, have they ever approached you?"</p><p>"No," Frank answers.</p><p>A TV reporter asks Gray a key question: "What if you're wrong?"</p><p>"We can't do anything about it if I'm wrong. China and India are going to burn fossil fuels."</p><p>After Gray finishes, he gives more interviews. Frank, waiting in the wings, tells me he agrees with Gray.</p><p>"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.</p><p>"Exactly! Maybe we're living in a carbon dioxide-starved world. We don't know."</p><b>Skeptics and Conspiracies</b><br /><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Held studied under Lindzen years ago and considers him a friend and a smart scientist -- but highly contrarian.</p><p>"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.</p><p>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!</p><p>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!"</p><p>Gray admits that he has a dark take on human nature: "I have a demonic view on this."</p><p>The most notorious example of climate change conspiracy-mongering is in Crichton's <i>State of Fear</i>. 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>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.</p><p>The most famous anomaly, long cited by skeptics, was the satellite data. It didn't show the warming of the lower atmosphere.</p><p>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post</span>.)</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Or at least not in denial.</p><b>Back in Orlando</b><br /><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>That's not entirely true. He has many friends and colleagues, and the meteorologists tend to share his skeptical streak.</p><p>I ask if he has ever collaborated on a paper with Richard Lindzen. Gray says he hasn't. He looks a little pained.</p><p>"Lindzen, he's a hard guy to deal with," Gray says. "He doesn't think he can learn anything from me."</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>"It becomes an absolute can of worms!"</p><p>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:</p><p>"Don't believe everything you read in the paper! This whole business about global warming --"</p><p>But he steps from the mike, and his final words are inaudible.</p><p>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.</p><b>Adapting to Uncertainty</b><br /><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>"Why is that standard being applied to greenhouse warming and not to other risks, like terrorism or military risks or avian flu?" she asks.</p><p>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.</p><p>Or as an excuse to do nothing.</p><b>Our Friend CO2</b><br /><p>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.</p><p>"They've joined the club."</p><p>The club of believers in global warming.</p><p>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.</p><p>"Or their kids come home from school and say, 'Daddy, why are you killing the planet?'"</p><p>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.</p><p>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:</p><p>"It's called carbon dioxide," she says, "CO2."</p><p>There's an image of an impoverished woman hacking the ground with a hand tool.</p><p>"The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a life of backbreaking labor."</p><p>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.</p><p>"Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."</p><p>End of ad.</p><p>"It should always bring a tear to your eye," Fred Smith says, delighted.</p><p><i>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.</i></p> <p class="posted">Link to article: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305_pf.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305_pf.html</a><br /></p></div>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-653767927095066212009-02-12T04:41:00.000-08:002009-02-12T04:57:40.533-08:002008 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union -- Greenland abstracts<span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><table border="0" cellpadding="6"><tbody><tr><td><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2008 Fall Meeting <br /><b>Search Results</b></span></td> <td align="right" bg valign="top" style="color:#c0c0c0;"> <span style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-2;">Cite abstracts as <b>Author(s) (2008), Title, <em>Eos Trans. AGU,<br />89</em>(53), Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract xxxxx-xx</b></span></td> </tr></tbody></table> <table border="0"> <tbody><tr><td><dl><dt><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> Your query was:</span></dt><dd><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> <b>greenland</b> </span></dd></dl> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">You've chosen <b>25</b> documents: </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31B-0499<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Does Warming of the North Atlantic over the Last Decade Explain the Acceleration of Outlet Glaciers in Southeast Greenland?<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Straneo, F<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> fstraneo@whoi.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MS 21, Woods Hole, MA 02543,<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Sutherland, D A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> dsutherland@whoi.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MS 21, Woods Hole, MA 02543,<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Hamilton, G S<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> gordon.hamilton@maine.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, 4 Sawyer Lab Annex, Orono, ME 04469,<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Stearns, L A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> leigh.stearns@maine.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, 4 Sawyer Lab Annex, Orono, ME 04469,<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0720 Glaciers<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 4215 Climate and interannual variability (1616, 1635, 3305, 3309, 4513)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 4217 Coastal processes<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 08:00h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C41D-01<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Acceleration of Jakobshavn Isbrae Triggered by Warm, Subsurface Irminger Waters<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Holland, D M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> holland@cims.nyu.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> New York University, 251 Mercer St, New York, NY 10012, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Thomas, R H<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> robert_thomas@hotmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> EG&G, Wallops, NASA, Building N-159, Wallops Island, VA 23337, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> deYoung, B<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> bdeyoung@physics.mun.ca<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Memorial University, Chemistry-Physics Building, St John's, NL A1B 3X7, Canada<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Ribergaard, M H<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> mhri@dmi.dk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, Copenhagen, DK-2100, Denmark<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Lyberth, B<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> bjarne@natur.gl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Postboks 570, Nuuk, 3900, Greenland<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> UR: <span class="ur"> <a href="http://efdl.cims.nyu.edu/project_oisi/realistic/jakobshavn/">http://efdl.cims.nyu.edu/project_oisi/realistic/jakobshavn/</a><br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0728 Ice shelves<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 4200 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 11:20h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C32B-05<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Controls on Greenland Outlet Glacier Sensitivity to Climate Forcing: A Comparative Approach<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * McFadden, E M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> mcfadden.109@osu.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> OSU Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Howat, I M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ihowat@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> OSU Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Ahn, Y<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ahnysleo@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> OSU Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Joughin, I<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ian@apl.washington.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of Washington, 1013 NE 40th Street, Seattle, WA 98105, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> UR: <span class="ur"> <a href="http://www.bprc.osu.edu/GDG/">http://www.bprc.osu.edu/GDG/</a><br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0720 Glaciers<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0774 Dynamics<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 17:45h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C44A-08<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> A Reconstructed 1784-2007 Time Series of Greenland Melt Extent<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Knappenberger, P C<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> chip@nhes.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> New Hope Environmental Services, Inc., 536 Pantops Center, #402, Charlottesville, VA 22911, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Frauenfeld, O W<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> oliverf@colorado.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado 449 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Michaels, P J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> pmichaels@cato.org<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20001-5403, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0794 Instruments and techniques<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1621 Cryospheric change (0776)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C11B-0501<br /></span> TI: <span class="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<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Robinson, A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> robinson@pik-potsdam.de<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, Potsdam, 14412, Germany<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Calov, R<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> calov@pik-potsdam.de<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, Potsdam, 14412, Germany<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Ganopolski, A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ganopolski@pik-potsdam.de<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, Potsdam, 14412, Germany<br /></span> AB: <span class="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 CO<sub>2</sub> phase space by performing a set of equilibrium experiments for different CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations and initial conditions.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0764 Energy balance<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1621 Cryospheric change (0776)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C41A-0476<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Hydrologic response of the Greenland Ice sheet: the role of oceanographic warming<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Hanna, E<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ehanna@sheffield.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield, S10 2TN, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Cappelen, J<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, Copenhagen, DK2100, Denmark<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Fettweis, X<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Département de Géographie, Université de Liège, allée du 6 Août, 2, Liège, 4000, Belgium<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Huybrechts, P<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Departement Geografie, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Brussel, B-1050, Belgium<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Luckman, A<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Ribergaard, M<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, Copenhagen, DK2100, Denmark<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1621 Cryospheric change (0776)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1637 Regional climate change<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31E-0570<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> MODIS-derived Greenland ice sheet equilibrium line altitude 2000-2008: comparison with surface melt and accumulation variability<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Benson, R<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> russtron@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Box, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jbox.greenland@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 3309 Climatology (1616, 1620, 3305, 4215, 8408)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31E-0563<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> High-Resolution Bathymetry of Disko Bay and Ilulissat Icefjord, West- Greenland<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Weinrebe, W<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> wweinrebe@ifm-geomar.de<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Cluster of Excellence "The Future Ocean", University of Kiel, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Weinrebe, W<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> wweinrebe@ifm-geomar.de<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Kuijpers, A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> aku@geus.dk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland - GEUS, O. Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Klaucke, I<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> iklaucke@ifm-geomar.de<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Fink, M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> mfink@ifm-geomar.de<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR, Wischhofstr. 1-3, Kiel, 24148, Germany<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Jensen, J B<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jbj@geus.dk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland - GEUS, O. Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Mikkelsen, N<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> nm@geus.info<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland - GEUS, O. Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark<br /></span> AB: <span class="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 km<sup>3</sup> 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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0730 Ice streams<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0732 Icebergs<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1625 Geomorphology and weathering (0790, 1824, 1825, 1826, 1886)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1824 Geomorphology: general (1625)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 3045 Seafloor morphology, geology, and geophysics<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31E-0546<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Marine geophysical evidence for former expansion and flow of the Greenland Ice Sheet across the northeast Greenland continental shelf<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Evans, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> J.Evans2@lboro.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3SJ, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> O Cofaigh, C<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> colm.o'cofaigh@durham.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Dowdeswell, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jd16@cam.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Wadhams, P<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> pw11@damtp.cam.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Sea Ice Group, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, United Kingdom<br /></span> AB: <span class="ab"> Fast-flowing glaciers in NE Greenland drain approximately 300,000 km<sup>2</sup> 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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0720 Glaciers<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0730 Ice streams<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1707 Cryosphere<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 3000 MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 12:05h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C12A-08<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Terrestrial photogrammetry of Greenland glacier discharge variability: comparison with surface climate anomalies<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Box, J E<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jbox.greenland@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Yushin, A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ahnysleo@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Balog, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jamesbalog@mac.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Extreme Ice Survey, 262 Bristlecone Way, Boulder, CO 80304, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Lewinter, A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> adam.lewinter@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Extreme Ice Survey, 262 Bristlecone Way, Boulder, CO 80304, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Orlowski, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> orlowski@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Extreme Ice Survey, 262 Bristlecone Way, Boulder, CO 80304, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> UR: <span class="ur"> <a href="http://extremeicesurvey.org/">http://extremeicesurvey.org/</a><br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1621 Cryospheric change (0776)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31A-0485<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Greenland Surface Melt Trends From SSM/I And QuikSCAT Data<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Bhattacharya, I<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> bhattacharya.21@osu.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Scott Hall Room 108,1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Jezek, K C<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jezek@frosty.rsl.ohio-state.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Scott Hall Room 108,1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Wang, L<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> leiwang@lsu.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 227 Howe- Russell, Geoscience Complex, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Liu, H<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> liu@geog.tamu.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, Room 810, Eller O&M Building, College Station, TX 77843, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0740 Snowmelt<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31B-0496<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> GRACE Observes Small-Scale Mass Loss in Greenland<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Wouters, B<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> bert.wouters@tudelft.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> TU Delft, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Kluyverweg 4, Delft, 2629HS, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Chambers, D<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> chambers@csr.utexas.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin, 3925 West Braker Lane, Suite 200, Austin, TX 78759-5321, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Schrama, E<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> e.j.o.schrama@tudelft.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> TU Delft, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Kluyverweg 4, Delft, 2629HS, Netherlands<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1217 Time variable gravity (7223, 7230)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31B-0494<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Mass-balance measurements from a network of automatic weather stations in the ablation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * van As, D<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> dva@geus.dk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> GEUS, Oster Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Ahlstrom, A P<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> apa@geus.dk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> GEUS, Oster Voldgade 10, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0740 Snowmelt<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0764 Energy balance<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0772 Distribution<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0794 Instruments and techniques<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31C-0508<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Greenland Ice Sheet Seasonal Speedup Coupled With Surface Hydrology<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Palmer, S J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> s.j.palmer@sms.ed.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> School of GeoSciences, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Shepherd, A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> Andrew.Shepherd@ed.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> School of GeoSciences, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Nienow, P<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> Peter.Nienow@ed.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> School of GeoSciences, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, United Kingdom<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0746 Lakes (9345)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0774 Dynamics<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 1340h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C23A-0586<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Structural Glaciology and Recent Changes of Helheimgletscher and Fenrisgletscher, East Greenland<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Mayer, H<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> mayerh@tryfan.colorado.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Terra Mobilis Research, P.O. Box, Lafayette, CO 80026, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Herzfeld, U C<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ute.herzfeld@colorado.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Sucht, S<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> steven.sucht@hotmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0720 Glaciers<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /><br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0774 Dynamics<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 08:45h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C21D-04 INVITED<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Greenland ice sheet surface air temperature and accumulation rate reconstruction (1840- 2007) from in-situ data records<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Box, J E<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jbox.greenland@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall, Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Yang, L<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> lei.miren.yang@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, 164 West XinGang Road, Guangzhou, 510301, China<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Bromwich, D<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> bromwich@polarmet1.mps.ohio-state.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall, Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Bai, L<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> bai@polarmet1.mps.ohio-state.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center, Scott Hall, Rm 108 1090 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 3309 Climatology (1616, 1620, 3305, 4215, 8408)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 13:40h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C43A-01 INVITED<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Recent Surface Changes in Southern Greenland Outlet Glaciers from NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper Experiments<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Krabill, W B<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> william.b.krabill@nasa.gov<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> NASA/GSFC/Wallops Flight Facility, Building N159, Room E201, Wallops Island, VA 23337, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Sonntag, J G<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> sonntag@osb.wff.nasa.gov<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> EG&G Services, Inc., NASA Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, VA 23337, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> UR: <span class="ur"> <a href="http://atm.wff.nasa.gov/">http://atm.wff.nasa.gov/</a><br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0720 Glaciers<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0776 Glaciology (1621, 1827, 1863)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31B-0498<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Spatial and Temporal Trends in Snow Accumulation From Radio Echo Eounding, Summit, Greenland<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Overly, T B<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> toverly@ku.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="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<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0933 Remote sensing<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 13:55h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C43A-02<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> A new high-resolution assessment of Greenland ice sheet surface mass balance: 1957- 2008<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Ettema, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> J.Ettema@uu.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Utrecht University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, PO Box 80005, Utrecht, 3508TA, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Van den Broeke, M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> m.r.vandenbroeke@uu.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Utrecht University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, PO Box 80005, Utrecht, 3508TA, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Van Meijgaard, E<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> Erik.van.Meijgaard@knmi.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, PO Box 201, De Bilt, 3730AE, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Van de Berg, W<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> w.j.vandeberg@uu.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Utrecht University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, PO Box 80005, Utrecht, 3508TA, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Bamber, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> j.bamber@bristol.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Bristol Glaciology Centre, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Box, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> box.11@osu.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Byrd Polar Research Center The Ohio State University, 1090 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210-1002, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0798 Modeling<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 14:55h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C43A-06<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Rapid crustal uplift due to unloading of ice from the main outlet glaciers in Greenland<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Khan, S A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> abbas@space.dtu.dk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> DTU Space - National Space Institute, Juliane Maries Vej 30, Copenhagen, 2100, Denmark<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Wahr, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> wahr@anquetil.colorado.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Department of Physics and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Hamilton, G<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> gordon.hamilton@main.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Maine, OR 04469, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Stearns, L<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> leigh.stearns@maine.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Maine, OR 04469, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Dam, T v<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> tonie.vandam@uni.lu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, L-1511,<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Francis, O<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> olivier.francis@uni.lu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, L-1511,<br /></span> AB: <span class="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 km<sup>3</sup> yr<sup>-1</sup> 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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0720 Glaciers<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0762 Mass balance (1218, 1223)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1240 Satellite geodesy: results (6929, 7215, 7230, 7240)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1244 Standards and absolute measurements<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 15:25h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C53A-08<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Local sea-ice influence on Greenland surface melt<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Rennermalm, A K<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> akr@ucla.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951525, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Smith, L C<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> lsmith@ucla.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951525, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Stroeve, J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> stroeve@kryos.colorado.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="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<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Chu, V W<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> vena.chu@gmail.com<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951525, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0740 Snowmelt<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0750 Sea ice (4540)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1620 Climate dynamics (0429, 3309)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31B-0501<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Warm Atlantic water drives Greenland Ice Sheet discharge dynamics<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Christoffersen, P<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> pc350@cam.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Heywood, K J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> k.heywood@uea.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Dowdeswell, J A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> jd16@cam.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Syvitski, J P<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> james.syvitski@colorado.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, CB2 1ER803, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Benham, T J<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> tjb52@cam.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Mugford, R I<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> r.i.mugford@reading.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, United Kingdom<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Joughin, I<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> ian@apl.washington.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Luckman, A<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> a.luckman@swansea.ac.uk<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University, Swansea, SA2 8PP, United Kingdom<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0774 Dynamics<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 1621 Cryospheric change (0776)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 3305 Climate change and variability (1616, 1635, 3309, 4215, 4513)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 4540 Ice mechanics and air/sea/ice exchange processes (0700, 0750, 0752, 0754)<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 13:40h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> U23F-01 INVITED<br /></span> TI: <span class="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.<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Tedesco, M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> mtedesco@sci.ccny.cuny.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Tedesco, M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> mtedesco@sci.ccny.cuny.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Tedesco, M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> mtedesco@sci.ccny.cuny.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> The City University of New York, 138th St. and Convent Av., New York, NY 10031, United States<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Fettweis, X<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> xavier.fettweis@ulg.ac.be<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of Liege, allée du 6 Août, Liege, 4000, Belgium<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> van den Broeke, M<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> m.r.vandenbroeke@uu.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of Utrecht, Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, 3584, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> van de Wal, R<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> r.s.w.vandewal@uu.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of Utrecht, Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, 3584, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Smeets, P<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> C.J.P.P.Smeets@uu.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> University of Utrecht, Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, 3584, Netherlands<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0700 CRYOSPHERE (4540)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0740 Snowmelt<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0764 Energy balance<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Union [U]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C31C-0519<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Velocity changes in the ablation zone of the Greenland ice sheet.<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * wal, R v<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> r.s.w.vandewal@uu.nl<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Boot, W<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Broeke, M v<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Smeets, C<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Reijmer, C<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Oerlemans, J<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> Donker, J<br /></span> AF: <span class="af"> Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Princetonplein 5, utrecht, 3584 cc, Netherlands<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0774 Dynamics<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> <!--------------------> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;">HR: <span class="hr"> 0800h<br /></span> AN: <span class="an"> C21A-0502<br /></span> TI: <span class="ti"> Spatio-temporal Variability of Melt Intensity over the Greenland ice sheet from 2000-2005 using coupled MODIS Optical and Thermal Measurements<br /></span> AU: <span class="au"> * Lampkin, D<br /></span> EM: <span class="em"> djl22@psu.edu<br /></span> AF: <span class="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<br /></span> AB: <span class="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.<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0726 Ice sheets<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0736 Snow (1827, 1863)<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0740 Snowmelt<br /></span> DE: <span class="de"> 0758 Remote sensing<br /></span> SC: <span class="sc"> Cryosphere [C]<br /></span> MN: <span class="mn"> 2008 Fall Meeting<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:-1;"> </span><hr /> </td></tr></tbody></table> </span><p><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <a href="http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm08/waisfm08.html"><b>New Search</b></a> </span></p> <span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.agu.org/"><img src="http://www.agu.org/images/agu_foot.gif" alt="AGU Home" border="0" /></a> </span>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-88325273684486283362008-08-01T09:03:00.000-07:002008-08-01T09:28:31.555-07:00GISS-TEMP Methodology and Modifications<table align="right" border="0" width="216"><tbody><tr><th style="padding: 0pt 0pt 6px 6px;" width="216"><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/">Graphs<br /> <img src="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/link_graphs.gif" alt="Go to Graphs page" border="1" width="216" height="124" /></a> </th> </tr> <tr> <th style="padding: 0pt 0pt 6px 6px;" width="216"> <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/">Global Maps<br /> <img src="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/link_maps.gif" alt="Go to Maps page" border="1" width="216" height="124" /></a> </th> </tr> <tr> <th style="padding: 0pt 0pt 6px 6px;"> <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/">Station Data<br /> <img src="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/link_stations.gif" alt="Go to Station Data page" border="1" width="216" height="124" /></a> </th> </tr> <tr> <th style="padding: 0pt 0pt 6px 6px;"> <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/animations/">Animations<br /> <img src="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/link_animations.jpg" alt="Go to Animations page" border="1" width="216" height="124" /></a> </th> </tr> <tr> <th style="padding: 0pt 0pt 6px 6px;"> <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/time_series.html">Time Series of Zonal Means<br /> <img src="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/link_LT.gif" alt="Go to Time Series page" border="1" width="216" height="124" /></a> </th> </tr> <tr> <th style="padding: 0pt 0pt 6px 6px;"> <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/seas_cycle.html">Seasonal Cycle of Zonal Means<br /> <img src="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/link_SC.gif" alt="Go to Seasonal Cycle page" border="1" width="216" height="124" /></a></th></tr></tbody></table><h4><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/">http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/</a><br /></h4><h4>Latest News</h4> <p>2008-06-07: Various insignificant changes to analysis, see "Updates to Analysis" below.</p> <p>2008-03-01: USHCN data now taken from NOAA's ftp site rather than from CDIAC website. For more, see "Updates to Analysis" below.</p> <p>2008-01-16: The <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/">2007 temperature summation</a> has been posted. There is also a related <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080116/">NASA news release</a>.</p> <h4>History</h4> <p> The basic GISS temperature analysis scheme was defined in the late 1970s by James Hansen when a method of estimating global temperature change was needed for comparison with one-dimensional global climate models. Prior temperature analyses, most notably those of Murray Mitchell, covered only 20-90°N latitudes. Our rationale was that the number of Southern Hemisphere stations was sufficient for a meaningful estimate of global temperature change, because temperature anomalies and trends are highly correlated over substantial geographical distances. Our first published results (<a href="http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1981/Hansen_etal.html">Hansen et al. 1981</a>) showed that, contrary to impressions from northern latitudes, global cooling after 1940 was small, and there was net global warming of about 0.4°C between the 1880s and 1970s. </p> <p> The analysis method was documented in <a href="http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1987/Hansen_Lebedeff.html">Hansen and Lebedeff (1987)</a>, showing that the correlation of temperature change was reasonably strong for stations separated by up to 1200 km, especially at middle and high latitudes. They obtained quantitative estimates of the error in annual and 5-year mean temperature change by sampling at station locations a spatially complete data set of a long run of a global climate model, which was shown to have realistic spatial and temporal variability. </p> <p>This derived error bar only addressed the error due to incomplete spatial coverage of measurements. As there are other potential sources of error, such as urban warming near meteorological stations, etc., many other methods have been used to verify the approximate magnitude of inferred global warming. These methods include inference of surface temperature change from vertical temperature profiles in the ground (bore holes) at many sites around the world, rate of glacier retreat at many locations, and studies by several groups of the effect of urban and other local human influences on the global temperature record. All of these yield consistent estimates of the approximate magnitude of global warming, which has now increased to about twice the magnitude that we reported in 1981. Still further affirmation of the reality of the warming is its spatial distribution, which shows largest values at locations remote from any local human influence, with a global pattern consistent with that expected for response to global climate forcings (larger in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere, larger at high latitudes than low latitudes, larger over land than over ocean). </p> <p> Some improvements in the analysis were made several years ago (<a href="http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1999/Hansen_etal.html">Hansen et al. 1999</a>; <a href="http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2001/Hansen_etal.html">Hansen et al. 2001</a>), including use of satellite-observed night lights to determine which stations in the United States are located in urban and peri-urban areas, the long-term trends of those stations being adjusted to agree with long-term trends of nearby rural stations. </p> <h4>Current Analysis Method</h4> <p> The <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/gistemp.html">current analysis</a> uses surface air temperatures measurements from the following data sets: the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998), United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) records through 2005, and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) data from Antarctic stations. The basic analysis method is described by Hansen et al. (1999), with several modifications described by Hansen et al. (2001) also included. The GISS analysis is updated monthly. </p> <p>The GHCN/USHCN/SCAR data are modified in two steps to obtain station data from which our tables, graphs, and maps are constructed. In step 1, if there are multiple records at a given location, these are combined into one record; in step 2, the urban and peri-urban (i.e., other than rural) stations are adjusted so that their long-term trend matches that of the mean of neighboring rural stations. Urban stations without nearby rural stations are dropped. </p> <p> A global temperature index, as described by <a href="http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1996/Hansen_etal_1.html">Hansen et al. (1996)</a>, is obtained by combining the meteorological station measurements with sea surface temperatures based in early years on ship measurements and in recent decades on satellite measurements. Uses of this data should credit the original sources, specifically the British HadISST group (Rayner and others) and the NOAA satellite analysis group (Reynolds, Smith and others). (See <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/references.html">references</a>.) </p> <p> The analysis is limited to the period since 1880 because of poor spatial coverage of stations and decreasing data quality prior to that time. Meteorological station data provide a useful indication of temperature change in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics for a few decades prior to 1880, and there are a small number of station record s that extend back to previous centuries. However, we believe that analyses for these earlier years need to be carried out on a station by station basis with an attempt to discern the method and reliability of measurements at each station, a task beyond the scope of our analysis. Global studies of still earlier times depend upon incorporation of proxy measures of temperature change. References to such studies are provided in Hansen et al. (1999). </p> <p> Programs used in the GISTEMP analysis and documentation on their use are <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/">available for download</a>. The programs assume a Unix-like operating system and require familiarity with FORTRAN, C and Python for installation.</p> <h4>Updates to Analysis</h4> <p>Graphs and tables are updated around the 10th of every month using the current GHCN and SCAR files. The new files incorporate reports for the previous month and late reports and corrections for earlier months. NOAA updates the USHCN data at a slower, less regular frequency. We will switch to a later version, as soon as a new complete year is available. </p> <p>Several minor updates to the analysis have been made since its last published description by Hansen et al. (2001). After a testing period they were incorporated at the time of the next routine update. The only change having a detectable influence on analyzed temperature was the 7 August 2007 change to correct a discontinuity in 2000 at many stations in the United States. This flaw affected temperatures in 2000 and later years by ~0.15°C averaged over the United States and ~0.003°C on global average. Contrary to reports in the media, this minor flaw did not alter the years of record temperature, as shown by comparison <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates/200708.html">here</a> of results with the data flaw ('old analysis') and with the correction ('new analysis'). </p> <p><b>August 2003:</b>A longer version of Hohenpeissenberg station data was made available to GISS and added to the GHCN record. This had no noticeable impact on the global analyses. </p> <p><b>March 2005:</b>SCAR data were added to the analysis. This increased data coverage over Antarctica, as evident in the global maps of temperature anomalies. </p> <p><b>April 2006:</b>HadISST ocean temperatures are now used only for regions that are identified as ice-free in both the NOAA and HadISST records. This change effects a small number of gridboxes in which HadISST has sea ice while NOAA has open water. The prior approach damped temperature change at these gridboxes because of specification of a fixed temperature in sea ice regions. The new approach still yields a conservative estimate of surface air temperature change, as surface air temperature usually changes markedly when sea ice is replaced by open water or vice versa. Because of the small area of these gridboxes the effect on global temperature change was negligible. </p> <p><b>August 7, 2007:</b>A discontinuity in station records in the U.S. was discovered and corrected (GHCN data for 2000 and later years were inadvertently appended to USHCN data for prior years without including the adjustments at these stations that had been defined by the NOAA National Climate Data Center). This had a small impact on the U.S. average temperature, about 0.15°C, for 2000 and later years, and a negligible effect on global temperature, as is <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates/200708.html">shown here</a>. </p> <p> This August 2007 change received international attention via discussions on various blogs and repetition by some other media, with no graphs provided to show the insignificance of the effect. Further discussions of the curious misinformation are provided by Dr. Hansen on his <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/">personal webpage</a> (e.g., his post on <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/distro_realdeal.16aug20074.pdf">"The Real Deal: Usufruct & the Gorilla"</a>). </p> <p><b>September 10, 2007:</b> The year 2000 version of USHCN data was replaced by the current version (with data through 2005). In this newer version, NOAA removed or corrected a number of station records before year 2000. Since these changes included most of the records that failed our quality control checks, we no longer remove any USHCN records. The effect of station removal on analyzed global temperature is very small, as shown by graphs and maps <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/">available here</a>. </p> <p><b>March 1, 2008:</b> Starting with our next update, USHCN data will be taken from NOAA's ftp site -- the original source for that file -- rather than from CDIAC's web site; this way we get the most recent publicly available version. Whereas CDIAC's copy currently ends in 12/2005, NOAA's file extends through 5/2007. Note: New updates usually also include changes to data from previous years. Whereas the GHCN and SCAR data are updated every month, updates to the USHCN data occur at irregular intervals. </p> <p> The publicly available source codes were modified to automatically adjust if new years are added. </p> <p><b>June 9, 2008:</b> Effective June 9, 2008, our analysis moved from a 15-year-old machine (soon to be decommissioned) to a newer machine; this will affect some results, though insignificantly. Some sorting routines were modified to minimize such machine dependence in the future. In addition, a typo was discovered and corrected in the program that dealt with a potential discontinuity in the Lihue station record. Finally, some errors were noticed on http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/temperature.html (set of stations not included in Met READER) that were not present before 8/2007. We replaced those outliers with the originally reported values. Those two changes had about the same impact on the results than switching machines (in each case the 1880-2007 change was affected by 0.002°C). See <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates/200806.html">graph and maps</a>.</p> <h3>Annual Summations</h3> <p> NASA news releases about the GISS surface temperature analysis are available for <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080116/">2007</a>, <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20070208/">2006</a>, <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20060124/">2005</a>, and <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20050208/">2004</a>. </p> <p>We also provide here more detailed discussions of global surface temperature trends for <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/">2007</a>, <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/">2005</a>, <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2004/">2004</a>, <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2003/">2003</a>, <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2002/">2002</a>, and <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2001/">2001</a>. </p> <h3>Table Data: Global and Zonal Mean Anomalies dT<sub>s</sub></h3> <p>Plain text files in tabular format of temperature anomalies. Anomaly values indicate the difference from the corresponding 1951-1980 means.</p> <ul><li><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt">Global-mean monthly, annual and seasonal dT<sub>s</sub> based on met.station data</a>, 1880-present, updated through most recent month</li><li><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/NH.Ts.txt">Northern Hemisphere-mean monthly, annual and seasonal dT<sub>s</sub> based on met.station data</a>, 1880-present, updated through most recent month</li><li><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/SH.Ts.txt">Southern Hemisphere-mean monthly, annual and seasonal dT<sub>s</sub> based on met.station data</a>, 1880-present, updated through most recent month</li><li><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt">Global-mean monthly, annual and seasonal land-ocean temperature index</a>, 1880-present, updated through most recent month</li><li><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/ZonAnn.Ts.txt">Zonal-mean annual dT<sub>s</sub></a>, 1880-present, updated through most recent complete calendar year</li><li><a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/ZonAnn.Ts+dSST.txt">Zonal-mean annual land-ocean temperature index</a>, 1880-present, updated through most recent completed year</li></ul> <h3>Gridded Monthly Maps of Temperature Anomaly Data</h3> <p><a href="ftp://data.giss.nasa.gov/pub/gistemp/download/">Users interested in the entire gridded temperature anomaly data may download the three basic binary files from our <b>ftp site</b></a>. Also available there are various FORTRAN programs and instructions to create (time series of) regular gridded anomaly maps from these files. This should make the maintenance of the files mentioned below unnecessary. </p> <p>Data files for individual years may be obtained from the ftp site's subdirectories: <a href="ftp://data.giss.nasa.gov/pub/gistemp/bin/">bin</a> for binary format, <a href="ftp://data.giss.nasa.gov/pub/gistemp/txt/">txt</a> for ASCII text, and <a href="ftp://data.giss.nasa.gov/pub/gistemp/netcdf">netcdf</a> for netCDF.<br />These files will no longer be updated; they will eventually be removed from this site. </p> <h3>Anomalies and Absolute Temperatures</h3> <p>Our analysis concerns only temperature anomalies, not absolute temperature. Temperature anomalies are computed relative to the base period 1951-1980. The reason to work with anomalies, rather than absolute temperature is that absolute temperature varies markedly in short distances, while monthly or annual temperature anomalies are representative of a much larger region. Indeed, we have shown (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987) that temperature anomalies are strongly correlated out to distances of the order of 1000 km. For a more detailed discussion, see <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html">The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature</a>.</p> <h3>References</h3> <p>Please see the <a href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/references.html">GISTEMP references</a> page for more citations to publications related to this research.</p> <p>Copies of many of our papers are available in the <a href="http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/">GISS publications database</a>. Re-prints not available there may be obtained by request from <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html">Dr. James Hansen</a>.</p> <h3>Contacts</h3> <p> Please address scientific inquiries about the GISTEMP analysis to <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html">Dr. James Hansen</a>. </p> <p> Please address technical questions about these GISTEMP webpages to <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/rruedy.html">Dr. Reto Ruedy</a>. </p> <p>Also participating in the GISTEMP analysis are <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/makiko_sato.html">Dr. Makiko Sato</a> and <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/klo.html">Dr. Ken Lo</a>.</p>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-4775210214163069532008-06-22T06:12:00.001-07:002008-06-22T06:32:13.751-07:00Jim Rogers: A "Green" Coal Baron?<nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> <div class="timestamp">By CLIVE THOMPSON, <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times</span>, published June 22, 2008</div> </nyt_byline> <!--NYT_INLINE_IMAGE_POSITION1 --><nyt_text></nyt_text><nyt_text><div id="articleInline" class="inlineLeft"><div id="inlineBox"><div class="image"><a href="javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/06/19/magazine/22rogers.1.ready.html',%20'22rogers_1_ready',%20'width=479,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/19/magazine/22rogers.1-190.jpg" alt="" width="190" border="0" height="232" /> </a> <div style="font-style: italic;" class="credit">Photograph by Peter Hapak; Illustration by Geoff McFetridge</div> <p class="caption"> <span style="font-size:130%;">Jim Rogers is the chief executive of the electric company Duke Energy.<br /></span></p><p class="caption"><span style="font-size:130%;">When I met with Jim Rogers one day this spring, he tossed back two double espressos in a single hour. A charming and natty 60-year-old, Rogers is the chief executive of the electric company <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/duke_energy_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More information about Duke Energy Corp">Duke Energy</a>. But he has none of the macho, cowboy stolidity you might expect in an energy C.E.O. Instead, he lives to brainstorm. He spends more than half his time on the road, a perennial fixture at wonky gatherings like the Davos <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/world_economic_forum/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about World Economic forum">World Economic Forum</a> and the Clinton Global Initiative, corralling “clean energy” thinkers and listening eagerly to their ideas. The day we met, he was brimming with enthusiasm for a new approach to <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/solar_energy/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about Solar Energy.">solar power</a>. Solar is currently too expensive to make economic sense, according to Rogers, because the cost to put panels on a roof is greater than what a household would save on electricity. But what if Duke bought panels en masse, driving the price down, and installed them itself — free?</span></p> </div> </div> </div><span style="font-size:130%;"><a name="secondParagraph"></a></span> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">“So we have 500,000 solar units on the roofs of our customers,” he said. “We install them, we maintain them and we dispatch them, just like it was a power plant!” He did some quick math: he could get maybe 1,000 megawatts out of that system, enough to permanently shutter one of the company’s older power plants. He shot me a toothy grin.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Even in this era of green evangelism, Rogers is a genuine anomaly. As the head of Duke Energy, with its dozens of coal-burning electric plants scattered around the Midwest and the Carolinas, he represents one of the country’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases. The company pumps 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, making it the third-largest corporate emitter in the United States.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Yet Rogers, who makes $10 million a year, is also one of the electricity industry’s most vocal environmentalists. For years, he has opened his doors to the kinds of green activists who would give palpitations to most energy C.E.O.’s. In March, he had breakfast with James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, which regards the earth as a single, living organism, to discuss whether species can adapt to a warmer earth. In April, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/james_v_hansen/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about James V. Hansen.">James Hansen</a>, a climatologist at <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_aeronautics_and_space_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.">NASA</a><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="Recent and archival news about global warming.">global warming</a>, wrote an open letter urging Rogers to stop burning coal — so Rogers took him out for a three-hour dinner in Manhattan. “I would dare say that no one in the industry would talk to Lovelock and Hansen,” Rogers told me. Last year, Rogers astonished his board when he presented his plan to “decarbonize” Duke Energy by 2050 — in effect, to retool the utility so that it emits very little carbon dioxide. and one of the first scientists to publicly warn about </span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Perhaps most controversial, though, Rogers has long advocated stiff regulation of greenhouses gases. For the last few years, he has relentlessly lobbied Washington to create a “carbon cap” law that strictly limits the amount of carbon dioxide produced in the United States, one that would impose enormous costs on any company that releases more carbon than its assigned limit. That law is now on its way to becoming reality: last fall, Senators <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/joseph_i_lieberman/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Joseph I. Lieberman.">Joe Lieberman</a> and John Warner introduced a historic “cap-and-trade” bill that would require the country to reduce its co2 emissions by 70 percent before 2050. Earlier this month, the bill failed to advance, but its sponsors will most likely reintroduce it next year once a new president is in office; meanwhile, a half-dozen other rival bills are currently being drawn up that all seek the same thing. One way or another, a carbon cap is coming.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Prominent environmentalists, thrilled, credit Rogers for clearing the way politically; many are his friends. “It’s fair to say that we wouldn’t be where we are in Congress if it weren’t for him,” says Eileen Claussen, head of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “He helped put carbon legislation on the map.” This should be a golden moment for Rogers: he has godfathered a bill that could significantly reshape the electricity industry, help balance the world’s climate and establish his legacy as a visionary C.E.O. — a “statesman,” as he puts it. Instead, he is very, very worried, fearful that the real-world version of his dream legislation may end up threatening the company he has spent so many years building.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>Though the details</b> are devilish, the basic cap-and-trade concept is simple. The government makes it expensive for companies to emit carbon dioxide, and then market forces work their magic: those companies aggressively seek ways to avoid producing the stuff, to try to get a competitive edge on one another.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">This is precisely how the government dealt with acid rain, back in the late ’80s. Acid rain, like global warming to a great extent, was caused by dangerous byproducts from burning coal: the chemicals sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, or “sox and nox,” as they were known colloquially. Environmentalists in the ’80s tried to get <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/ronald_wilson_reagan/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Ronald Wilson Reagan.">Ronald Reagan</a>’s <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/environmental_protection_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the Environmental Protection Agency.">Environmental Protection Agency</a> to crack down on sox and nox, but an antiregulatory mood prevailed. So a group of politicians and forward-thinking environmentalists turned to the marketplace instead.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Through legislation, the government first set a limit, or cap, on how much sox and nox could be discharged by the nation’s coal-burning utilities. These companies then regularly received allowances based on their historic levels of emissions. At the end of a predetermined period, every company had to possess enough in the way of allowances to cover the gases it released or face stiff penalties. Over time, the cap and the number of allowances were slowly reduced.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">A system like this creates a carrot and a stick. An electrical utility that reduces its pollution below the cap has leftover allowances to sell to other companies. In theory, a virtuous cycle emerges: a company that invests money to clean up its emissions can more than recoup its outlay by selling unused allowances to its dirtier, laggard competitors. Furthermore, entrepreneurs have an incentive to develop cleanup technologies. And sure enough, following the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990, innovations emerged quickly, ranging from new coal blends to chemical “scrubbers” that removed sox and nox from the smokestacks. Government and industry officials predicted that solving the problem of acid rain could cost $4 billion in new investment — but the marketplace was so efficient that only an estimated $1 billion was needed.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">A cap-and-trade program for co2 would try to harness the same dynamics. There are several bills under development — Lieberman-Warner is the most advanced, and the one most likely to pass next year — but they all take roughly the same approach. Greenhouse-gas emissions are capped in key carbon-dioxide-producing industries like gas, oil and electricity. Allowances are issued and companies are free to sell them to one another. Then the cap and number of allowances are ratcheted down over time, sparking, it’s hoped, the same Cambrian-like explosion in the development of cheaper, cleaner technologies.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>I</b>f Rogers is keen on the idea of cap and trade, it’s because the acid-rain fight was one of his formative experiences as a C.E.O. His first job was a three-year stint as a journalist in Lexington, Ky. — “I was a journalist, so I’m allowed to be a little cynical at times,” he likes to joke — before heading to law school and working as a public advocate in his home state of Kentucky. In 1988, by then 40 years old, he switched sides — the Indiana electrical utility PSI Energy teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, and Rogers was offered the job of turning it around.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Part of what ruined PSI was a $2.7-billion write-off of its nuclear plant when local environmentalists forced PSI to halt its construction after the Three Mile Island accident. Rather than demonize the environmentalists, Rogers instead decided to “put on a flannel shirt” and meet with them in a cafe in Madison, Ind. Phil Sharp, a U.S. representative for Indiana at the time, recalls the activists’ astonishment. “They couldn’t believe it,” he says. “They were always used to taking on the big utility companies. Then he came in and instead of saying, 'What craziness is this?' he said, 'O.K., let’s talk.' ” It was partly self-protection, of course; Rogers knew that public opinion could ruin a company. Aware that the environmentalists were also worried about acid rain, Rogers decided it was a problem he should head off.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">When cap and trade was proposed as a solution to acid rain, most energy executives whose companies burned coal hated the idea and lobbied fiercely against it. It wasn’t merely that they tended to resist regulation. They also didn’t believe it would work: they didn’t trust that the necessary technology would evolve fast enough. If it didn’t, they worried, very few firms would have extra allowances to sell, and the price of those on the open market would skyrocket. Companies might go broke trying to buy extra allowances to meet their cap.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Rogers was the outlier. He loved the elegance of the market-based approach, and he had a nerd’s optimism that the technology would bloom quickly. “And we were right,” he says. “So that’s what gave me the faith that this approach works. All you have to do is set the market up right.” PSI spent only $250 million to clean up its smokestacks, and allowances were “cheap and plentiful,” Rogers says.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Even as acid rain was being confronted in 1990, climate change was entering the public debate. By this time, Rogers was friends with a number of environmentalists and decided to dive into the science of global warming. He began inviting climate experts from Harvard, NASA and various research firms to brief him. “Pretty soon, I could see that the science was persuasive,” Rogers recalls. Many policy makers behind the acid-rain cleanup suspected that a cap-and-trade program could whip the carbon problem too. Rogers agreed. “What’s unusual about Jim is that he recognized these problems not as a woe-is-me burden but as real growth opportunities, opportunities to change his industry,” says Tim Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation and a former senator from Colorado who helped write the acid-rain legislation. “That allows him to be cheerful in the face of the opposition.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">And there was plenty of opposition. Back then, merely acknowledging the existence of global warming was a thought crime among coal-burning energy executives. But as early as 2001, Rogers told a meeting of fellow C.E.O.’s in the industry that they should all work to pass a federal carbon cap. “They were stunned,” recalls Ralph Cavanagh, an energy program director at the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/natural_resources_defense_council/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Natural Resources Defense Council">Natural Resources Defense Council</a>, who was present at the meeting. “That was the first time I had heard a major energy executive say anything like this. But because he was chairman of their energy committee, he wasn’t just a flaky maverick.” Sharp, a longtime friend, chuckles when he remembers how much ire Rogers generated. “They hated him,” he says. “Nobody would invite him for golf.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>Rogers’s environmentalism</b> has a weird flavor to it. Most people involved in the cap-and-trade process talk about their polar-bear moment — the instant when they realized the earth is imperiled. (John Warner, the Republican co-sponsor of the Lieberman-Warner bill, told me his inspiration came when he visited a forest he worked in as a teenager and found it decimated by a change in weather patterns.) In eight months of meeting with Rogers, listening to his speeches and watching him in action, I kept waiting to hear about his polar-bear moment, but it never came. Rogers’s environmentalism is practical, enthusiastic and intrigued by clean-tech innovations, not given to heartstring-tugging rhetoric about vanishing species or redwood trees.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Rogers does, however, talk frequently about “the grandchildren test.” “I want them to be able to look back and say, ‘My granddaddy made a good decision, and it’s still a good decision,’ ” he says. Though he’s only 60, Rogers already has seven grandchildren, and he frequently takes them on trips around the world. He told me, when we met for dinner in Charlotte, N.C., how he asked his 10-year-old granddaughter Emma what she wanted to do when she grew up; she said she wanted to “protect endangered species.” He found it striking that such a young child would already have a sense of the precariousness of nature. “She’s an old soul, let me tell you,” he says.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">When asked why Rogers ended up taking such a contrary approach to his job, friends point to the fact that he never trained as an engineer — the background of most energy executives. He isn’t as insular, Sharp points out, so he’s interested in what critics have to say. “Usually what people do is circle the wagons,” Sharp says, “but he listens.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">It is also true that Rogers’s green focus has a purely strategic element. Anyone who was paying attention to public opinion on climate change could see that the government would, sooner or later, have to limit carbon emissions. So why not plan for that — start thinking about how your company would respond, start making friends in Washington? Rogers sunnily agrees that this was a large motivation for his environmental work. “I wanted to get out ahead of it,” Rogers told me the very first time I met him last August, in Washington, which he was visiting nearly weekly to brief and cajole senators.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“It’s the old saw — ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re going to be on the menu,’ ” he says. Last June, Rogers delivered a speech to the Senate environment committee, led by <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/barbara_boxer/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Barbara Boxer.">Barbara Boxer</a>, which was beginning to assess the Lieberman-Warner bill. “I want the Senator Boxers, Senator Lieberman or Warner — I want them to feel confident that they can turn to me as an energy expert and trust me,” he said then.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>To get a sense of</b> the awesome challenge posed by “decarbonizing” electricity, go to one of Duke’s largest coal-fired plants, near Charlotte. When I visited last summer, I first wandered into the building that houses the furnace, a long tubular mass of steel with surprisingly graceful, almost art-deco lines. Then I climbed a flight of metal stairs to the rooftop, ascending through 120-degree air that left my shirt damp with sweat. Off to one side were the “scrubbers” — enormous metal contraptions that capture some of the acid-rain components by pumping the coal fumes through great waterfalls of limestone slurry. The process produces gypsum, a safe and inert mineral, which Duke sells for use in drywall. Looking down from the roof, I saw huge piles of limestone that dwarfed the trucks scurrying around them. Then it hit me: of the half-dozen structures in the coal plant, the majority are devoted not to producing energy but to cleaning it up. Or put another way, burning coal is trivially easy; it’s cleaning up the emissions that requires all sorts of work and machinery.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“Sometimes I tell people that Duke is really just a company that processes chemicals to produce clean air, and we get electricity as a byproduct,” Rogers said with a laugh when we met in his office afterward. If it’s this difficult to strip out acid-rain chemicals, I can hardly imagine what prodigious feats of engineering will be necessary to remove co2 from electricity production.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Rogers, however, maintains that it is possible to cut Duke’s co2 emissions to half of today’s levels by 2030. That would put the company in line with the goals set by the Lieberman-Warner bill or any of the other cap-and-trade alternatives, which mostly call for a 70 percent reduction in emissions by 2050. Rogers put a pad on his desk and began sketching a pie chart to show me how he’ll do it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Currently, nearly all of Duke’s emissions come from its coal-fired plants. But those plants are aging; by 2050, every one of them will have to be replaced. If the company is going to replace them anyway, Duke might as well phase in “clean” sources.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">It isn’t quite that simple, of course. No low-carbon sources are currently big or cheap enough — and it’s not clear when they will be. For example, Rogers calculates that Duke needs two new 2,200-megawatt nuclear plants. (One of them is currently under development in South Carolina.) But these plants are hellishly difficult to construct. They’re so expensive — many billions apiece — that historically they have required government guarantees, because Wall Street is loath to invest so much in such politically fraught projects. Rogers suspects that public opinion will shift in favor of nuclear energy eventually, because it offers huge amounts of reliable power with no direct co2 emissions.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">What about renewable energy, like wind and solar? Rogers says that by 2030 they could make up as much as 12 percent of Duke’s energy supply, but they won’t be a big factor for another decade, because sunshine and wind are too irregular and the plants to harvest them are still too small. This year, Duke signed a 20-year deal to buy the entire electric output of the largest solar farm in the country, SunEdison’s plant in Davidson County, N.C. — it generates all of 16 megawatts, compared with 800 megawatts from a coal plant.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">He drew another wedge in the pie chart for coal: it will shrink from producing nearly two-thirds of Duke’s power to just over a quarter. Rogers predicts coal will never go away, because it’s cheap and more accessible than any other energy source. The technology to remove co2 from the smokestacks and “sequester” it affordably is, he estimates, 10 to 15 years away. Duke is planning to build an experimental plant in Edwardsport, Ind., that will “gasify” coal, a tentative first step to capturing carbon. But Duke embarked on this venture only after securing a government subsidy of $460 million. Even if someone manages to make carbon sequestration feasible, Rogers worries that there’s a limit to what the public will tolerate. “We don’t know what happens if the carbon leaks back out of the ground, and we’ve never done it successfully on scale,” he told me. Later, he said, “So you’ll get the next version of Not in My Backyard — it’ll be Not Under My Backyard.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">When Rogers finished, his pie chart was neatly divided into the various fuel options. This plurality is a key part of his vision: no single energy source will save us. None is so plentiful or without costs that it dominates the others. “There’s no silver bullet,” he concluded, “just silver buckshot.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Interestingly, the one green initiative Rogers says he hopes will emerge most quickly is focused not on generating power but on conserving it. Last year, he concocted the Save-a-Watt plan, which would let Duke profit from helping its customers drastically cut their energy use. Like roughly half the utilities in the United States, Duke is regulated; it can charge more for power only if it builds a new power plant and persuades the regulator to approve a rate increase to pay for it. But the fastest way to reduce a carbon footprint is by improving efficiency. Under Save-a-Watt, Duke would, for example, distribute “smart” meters that automatically turn off customers’ appliances during periods of peak power use. For its first experiment, Duke plans to cut the consumption of its customers in the Carolinas by 1,800 megawatts, which is equal to the output of two new coal-fired plants. The regulator would then let Duke charge higher rates for the electricity its customers do use to pay for all the efficiency technology. Save-a-Watt thus turns the power business on its head: rather than charge customers more to build plants, Duke will effectively charge them not to do so.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“I would rather spend $8 billion implementing efficiency than spend $8 billion on building a nuclear plant,” Rogers told me. Nuclear power has enormous construction and political risks. Efficiency doesn’t. After Rogers spoke with <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Bill Clinton.">Bill Clinton</a> at a private retreat last year, the former president was so fired up that when he later went onstage at the annual Clinton Global Initiative conference he raved about Save-a-Watt, declaring it “a simple, brilliant idea. It has the capacity to fundamentally change what we do in the United States.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>As the Lieberman-Warner</b> bill took shape last spring and summer, Rogers ought to have been feeling triumphant. Instead, he was increasingly uneasy with what the senators were doing. He was particularly alarmed by the way they planned to hand out co2 allowances.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Among the many mind-numbing details in cap-and-trade politics, the allowances — permission to pollute, essentially — are the most charged. In the acid-rain trading market, the government freely gave the worst polluters the largest allowances, under the assumption that they faced the biggest challenges and needed the most financial help. But the Lieberman-Warner bill, like virtually every other cap-and-trade bill in the works, gives away only 75 percent of the allowances; the government auctions off the rest. Year by year, the percentage of allowances that will be auctioned off steadily rises, until nearly all of them are. In essence, with the stroke of a pen, the government creates a new and valuable form of property: carbon allowances. And for the government, we are talking about staggering amounts of money, the biggest new source of cash in years. Carbon allowances are projected to be worth $100 billion in the first year alone, rising to nearly $500 billion by 2050. To put that in context, an estimate prepared by the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/congressional_budget_office/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Congressional Budget Office, U.S.">Congressional Budget Office</a> predicts that the annual revenues from auctioning allowances will be equal to 15 percent of what the I.R.S. takes in.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Rogers sees this as a financial disaster for Duke. By his calculations, Duke would spend at least $2 billion in the first year alone and have to raise its rates immediately by up to 40 percent to cover that. Worse, coal-fired utilities would not get the special treatment they did under the acid-rain legislation. This time around, a large number of allowances would be given away to nuclear and hydroelectric utilities that already produce very little carbon dioxide. Those companies would not need their allowances and so could sell them for a healthy profit in coal-dependent states. The Lieberman-Warner rules, Rogers says, will effectively impose a “hidden tax” on those states — and they’re primarily the heartland states, where energy costs are already pinching industry and working-class families.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">What especially enrages him, though, is how the government wants to spend the cash it raises from the allowances. As Lieberman-Warner worked its way through the Senate environment committee, senators attached assorted riders: $800 billion over the life of the bill for tax refunds to help consumers pay for their higher electric bills, $1 billion for deficit reduction and billions more in handouts to state governments. In industry speeches, Rogers characterized the bill as a “bastardization” of cap-and-trade economics. (He later apologized.) In conversations with me, he expressed special disdain for Barbara Boxer, the California senator who shepherded the bill through the Senate environment committee.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“Politicians have visions of sugarplums dancing in their head with all the money they can get from auctions,” Rogers told me last month. “It’s all about treating me as the tax collector and the government as the good guy. I’m the evil corporation that’s passing through the carbon tax so Senator Boxer can be the Santa Claus!” If the government was going to collect cash from carbon auctions, Rogers figured, at least it ought to invest that money in green-tech research. “A billion dollars for deficit reduction,” he vented. “A billion dollars! What is [Boxer] smoking? I thought we were solving carbon here.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">For all of Rogers’s careful effort to position himself as a forward thinker — and an advocate for the Midwestern coal states — that did not gain him any slack. Congressional insiders who watched Rogers lobby the Senate committee say that regional politics actually worked against him. The Democratic deal makers who promised to deliver the votes for the bill were “a left-center coalition” of senators, most of whom come from urban and coastal states that do not rely heavily on coal. (Boxer, for example, hails from California, which gets only a small percentage of its energy from coal.) “And a lot of people, Jim Rogers in particular, really didn’t play in the negotiations,” says a Congressional aide close to the Lieberman-Warner negotiations who did not have approval to talk to the press. “The members on the Democratic side aren’t particularly responsive to his concerns.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">So by this spring, Rogers found himself in the curious position of fighting tooth-and-nail against a bill he spent years pushing for. It is entirely possible that Rogers is right, and that the auctioning of allowances will lead to economic shocks. Many economists worry about the price of allowances rising out of control. “Clean” technology might not emerge fast enough. Nuclear power could flounder. Desperate to move away from coal, utilities might switch to burning natural gas, driving up its price and thereby substantially inflating the cost of heating American homes.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">As Rogers went on the attack, critics countered that he sounded less like an environmental statesman and more like an old-school C.E.O. fighting for government pork, arguing baldly that what’s best for Duke is what’s best for the country — that cap-and-trade will only work if it’s set up in a way that best benefits Duke. John Rowe, the chief executive of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/exelon_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More information about Exelon Corp">Exelon</a> — the country’s largest nuclear power company, which will profit handsomely by selling its allowances — argues that it’s only fair to hit Duke and others with higher costs. Customers in nuclear states have paid higher electric bills for years, because nuclear power is inherently more expensive to generate, Rowe points out. Duke could have switched to nuclear decades ago but didn’t, so now it must pay the price.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“Duke’s customers had a big cost advantage for a very long time,” Rowe told me. “And our feeling is you’re not entitled to have that made virtually permanent.” And he added, “This is sausage making, but Lieberman-Warner makes a pretty good sausage.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>T</b>he truth, perhaps inevitably, is that as carbon-cap laws become closer to reality, almost no one is happy. Coal-burning energy firms fear they’ll be destroyed. Environmentalists worry that the energy lobby will gut the bills.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">This conflict was laid bare at Duke’s annual shareholders’ meeting in early May. Rogers started things off by devoting a full hour to his 40-year plan to decarbonize Duke. But when it was time for the question period, a dozen environmentalists lined up at the microphones and took up another hour lambasting Rogers for his new coal plant, now being built in Cliffside, N.C. If Rogers was really committed to breaking away from co2 emissions, why wasn’t he pouring the money into renewables?</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“Business as usual for even another decade will be disastrous,” said Jim Warren, executive director of the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network. A 25-year-old shareholder pleaded with Rogers to stop buying coal from mountaintop mines and foreswear nuclear energy. “What you invest in today, my generation has to pay for in the future,” she said. “Please do not steal from your grandchildren and leave us with a mess to deal with.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">But most of the shareholders, who numbered 250 or so, rolled their eyes as the environmentalists spoke; some openly heckled. “I would just like to caution our company not to get on this global-warming bandwagon,” one shareholder stood up to say. “I’ve read a lot of scientists, and there’s no agreement.” Rogers remained unwaveringly polite to the opposition, though — at several points shushing the hecklers, and thanking each speaker who laid into him.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">When I saw Rogers a few days after the event, he grimaced at the memory of it. He is annoyed by opposition to his new coal plant; he also seems genuinely puzzled that local environmentalists don’t see the big picture as he does, that they don’t trust his 40-year plan to slash Duke’s carbon output. He maintains that the new plant will partly replace two older coal-fired ones, and because it is much more efficient, it will produce 30 percent less co2. “Our overall carbon footprint is going to go down,” he insisted. His frustration is the flip side of his desire to talk endlessly to critics of coal; he says he believes he can persuade anyone, which is probably why he seems so alarmed when he fails.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Yet many local environmentalists no longer believe Rogers, and they have precisely the opposite view of how the future should unfold. They view the Lieberman-Warner bill not as too strong but as too weak. They point out, correctly, that Duke stands to reap tens of billions in free allowances, even under the existing bill, money that will subsidize the burning of coal. “This bill gives huge windfall profits to a company that buys a lot of coal, like Duke,” says Frank O’Donnell, the head of Clean Air Watch, an environmental group. “I happen to think that it’s immoral. In a sense, you’re paying the polluter. You’re rewarding the very companies that are the source of the problem.” He says he doesn’t believe that coal-dependent companies will move fast enough unless they feel the tighter pressure of even more aggressive carbon caps. Rogers is simply “greenwashing” his company, saying all the right things so he can wear the mantle of the revolutionary without having to make the hard sacrifices.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Allegations like these perturb Rogers no end. Many protesters, he told me, are an “eco elite” who don’t understand the need working-class people have for affordable energy. But then, in another breath, he admits he also understands why they view him askance.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“There’s an interesting contradiction in my position,” he said. “I’ve struggled with it. On the one hand, I want to smooth out the transition for the customers, because we’ve got low prices. But on the other hand, and this is sort of the awkwardness of it, the other truth is as prices go up, people’s behavior is modified.” Change needs to come, but how fast?</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">“That’s the art in this, and not the science.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><nyt_author_id></nyt_author_id></span></p><div id="authorId"><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about technology.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Link to article at <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times</span> online:</span> <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" ><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22Rogers-t.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22Rogers-t.html</a></span><br /></p></div></nyt_text>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-80365924118548505242008-06-20T10:40:00.000-07:002008-06-20T10:44:07.931-07:00Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century - A special report by Johann Hariby Johann Hari, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Independent</span>, Friday, 20 June 2008<br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span> <p class="tagline"><!--proximic_content_on--><span style="font-size:130%;">Bangladesh, the most crowded nation on earth, is set to disappear under the waves by the end of this century – and we will be to blame. Johann Hari took a journey to see for himself how western profligacy and indifference have sealed the fate of 150 million people went to see for himself the spreading misery and destruction as the ocean reclaims the land on which so many millions depend.</span><!--proximic_content_off--></p> <div class="photoCaption" style="width: 294px; margin-left: 10px;"> <a href="javascript:launchPopup('http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-is-set-to-disappear-under-the-waves-by-the-end-of-the-century--a-special-report-by-johann-hari-850938.html?action=Popup','',%20640,%20800,%20true,%20true,%20true,%20false);"> <img src="http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00033/bangladesh_alamy700_33953t.jpg" alt="" width="294" height="190" /> </a><br /> <p style="font-style: italic;" class="caption"><strong>Alamy, </strong>Battling the waves: many Bangladeshis depend on the ocean</p></div><p><span style="font-size:130%;">This spring, I took a month-long road trip across a country that we – you, me and everyone we know – are killing. One day, not long into my journey, I travelled over tiny ridges and groaning bridges on the back of a motorbike to reach the remote village of Munshigonj. The surviving villagers – gaunt, creased people – were sitting by a stagnant pond. They told me, slowly, what we have done to them.</span></p><!--proximic_content_off--> <!--proximic_content_on--> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Arita Rani, a 25-year-old, sat looking at the salt water, swaddled in a blue sari and her grief. "We couldn't drink the water from the river, because it was suddenly full of salt and made us sick," she said. "So I had to give my children water from this pond. I knew it was a bad idea. People wash in this pond. It's dirty. So we all got dysentery." She keeps staring at its surface. "I have had it for 10 years now. You feel weak all the time, and you have terrible stomach pains. You need to run to the toilet 10 times a day. My boy Shupria was seven and he had this for his whole life. He was so weak, and kept getting coughs and fevers. And then one morning..." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Her mother interrupted the trailing silence. "He died," she said. Now Arita's surviving three-year-old, Ashik, is sick, too. He is sprawled on his back on the floor. He keeps collapsing; his eyes are watery and distant. His distended stomach feels like a balloon pumped full of water. "Why did this happen?" Arita asked. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> It is happening because of us. Every flight, every hamburger, every coal power plant, ends here, with this. Bangladesh is a flat, low-lying land made of silt, squeezed in between the melting mountains of the Himalayas and the rising seas of the Bay of Bengal. As the world warms, the sea is swelling – and wiping Bangladesh off the map. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Deep below the ground of Munshigonj and thousands of villages like it, salt water is swelling up. It is this process – called "saline inundation" – that killed their trees and their fields and contaminated their drinking water. Some farmers have shifted from growing rice to farming shrimp – but that employs less than a quarter of the people, and it makes them dependent on a fickle export market. The scientific evidence shows that unless we change now, this salt water will keep rising and rising, until everything here is ocean. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I decided to embark on this trip when, sitting in my air-conditioned flat in London, I noticed a strange and seemingly impossible detail in a scientific report. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – whose predictions have consistently turned out to be underestimates – said that Bangladesh is on course to lose 17 per cent of its land and 30 per cent of its food production by 2050. For America, this would be equivalent to California and New York State drowning, and the entire mid-West turning salty and barren. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Surely this couldn't be right? How could more than 20 million Bangladeshis be turned into refugees so suddenly and so silently? I dug deeper, hoping it would be disproved – and found that many climatologists think the IPCC is way too optimistic about Bangladesh. I turned to Professor James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose climate calculations have proved to be more accurate than anybody else's. He believes the melting of the Greenland ice cap being picked up by his satellites today, now, suggests we are facing a 2.5-metre rise in sea levels this century – which would drown Bangladesh entirely. When I heard this, I knew I had to go, and see. </span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><b>1. The edge of a cliff</b></span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The first thing that happens when you arrive in Dhaka is that you stop. And wait. And wait. And all you see around you are cars, and all you hear is screaming. Bangladesh's capital is in permanent shrieking gridlock, with miles of rickshaws and mobile heaps of rust. The traffic advances by inches and by howling. Each driver screams himself hoarse announcing – that was my lane! Stay there! Stop moving! Go back! Go forward! It is a good-natured shrieking: everybody knows that this is what you do in Dhaka. If you are lucky, you enter a slipstream of traffic that moves for a minute – until the jams back up and the screaming begins once more. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Around you, this megalopolis of 20 million people seems to be screaming itself conscious. People burn rubbish by the roadside, or loll in the rivers. Children with skin deformities that look like infected burns try to thrust maps or sweets into your hand. Rickshaw drivers with thighs of steel pedal furiously as whole families cling on and offer their own high-volume traffic commentary to the groaning driver, and the groaning city. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I wanted to wade through all this chaos to find Bangladesh's climate scientists, who are toiling in the crannies of the city to figure out what – if anything – can be saved. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Dr Atiq Rahman's office in downtown Dhaka is a nest of scientific reports and books that, at every question, he dives into to reel off figures. He is a tidy, grey-moustached man who speaks English very fast, as if he is running out of time. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> "It is clear from all the data we are gathering here in Bangladesh that the IPCC predictions were much too conservative," he said. He should know: he is one of the IPCC's leading members, and the UN has given him an award for his unusually prescient predictions. His work is used as one of the standard textbooks across the world, including at Oxford and Harvard. "We are facing a catastrophe in this country. We are talking about an absolutely massive displacement of human beings." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> He handed me shafts of scientific studies as he explained: "This is the ground zero of global warming." He listed the effects. The seas are rising, so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from within. (Erosion is up by 40%.) Cyclones are becoming more intense and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) "There is no question," Dr Rahman said, "that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it's simple. From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility." In the past, he has called it "climatic genocide." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The worst-case scenario, Dr Rahman said, is if one of the world's land-based ice-sheets breaks up. "Then we lose 70 to 80 per cent of our land, including Dhaka. It's a different world, and we're not on it. The evidence from Jim Hansen shows this is becoming more likely – and it can happen quickly and irreversibly. My best understanding of the evidence is that this will probably happen towards the end of the lifetime of babies born today." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I walked out in the ceaseless churning noise of Dhaka. Everywhere I looked, people were building and making and living: my eyes skimmed up higher and higher and find more and more activity. A team of workers were building a house; behind and above them, children were sewing mattresses on a roof; behind and above them, more men were building taller buildings. This is the most cramped country on earth: 150 million people living in an area the size of Iowa. Could all this life really be continuing on the crumbling edge of a cliff? </span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><b>2. 'It is like the Bay is angry'</b></span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I was hurtling through the darkness at 120 mph with my new driver, Shambrat. He was red-eyed from chewing pan, a leaf-stimulant that makes you buzz, and I could see nothing except the tiny pools of light cast by the car. They showed we were on narrow roads, darting between rice paddies and emptied shack-towns, in the midnight silence. I kept trying to put on my seatbelt, but every time Shambrat would cry, "You no need seatbelt! I good driver!" and burst into hysterical giggles. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> To see if the seas were really rising, I had circled a random low-lying island on the map called Moheshkhali and asked Shambrat to get me there. It turned out the only route was to go to Coxs Bazar – Bangladesh's Blackpool – and then take a small wooden rowing boat that has a huge chugging engine attached to the front. I clambered in alongside three old men, a small herd of goats, and some chickens. The boat was operated by a 10-year-old child, whose job is to point the boat in the right direction, start the engine, and then begin using a small jug to frantically scoop out the water that starts to leak in. After an hour of the deafening ack-ack of the engine, we arrived at the muddy coast of Moheshkhali. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> There was a makeshift wooden pier, where men were waiting with large sacks of salt. As we climbed up on to the fragile boards, people helped the old men lift up the animals. There were men mooching around the pier, waiting for a delivery. They looked bemused by my arrival. I asked them if the sea levels were rising here. Rezaul Karim Chowdry, a 34-year-old who looked like he is in his fifties, said plainly: "Of course. In the past 30 years, two-thirds of this island has gone under the water. I had to abandon my house. The land has gone into the sea." Immediately all the other men start to recount their stories. They have lost their houses, their land, and family members to the advance. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> They agreed to show me their vanishing island. We clambered into a tuc-tuc – a motorbike with a carriage on the back – and set off across the island, riding along narrow ridges between cordoned-off areas of sand and salt. The men explained that this is salt-farming: the salt left behind by the tide is gathered and sold. "It is one of the last forms of farming that we can still do here," Rezaul said. As we passed through the forest, he told me to be careful: "Since we started to lose all our land, gangs are fighting for the territory that is left. They are very violent. A woman was shot in the crossfire yesterday. They will not like an outsider appearing from nowhere." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> We pulled up outside a vast concrete structure on stilts. This, the men explained, is the cyclone shelter built by the Japanese years ago. We climbed to the top, and looked out towards the ocean. "Do you see the top of a tree, sticking out there?" Rezaul said, pointing into the far distance. I couldn't see anything, but then, eventually, I spotted a tiny jutting brown-green tip. "That is where my house was." When did you leave it? "In 2002. The ocean is coming very fast now. We think all this" – he waved his hand back over the island – "will be gone in 15 years." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Outside the rusty house next door, an ancient-looking man with a long grey beard was sitting cross-legged. I approached him, and he rose slowly. His name was Abdul Zabar; he didn't know his age, but guessed he is 80. "I was born here," he said. "There" – and he points out to the sea. "The island began to be swallowed in the 1960s, and it started going really quickly in 1991. I have lost my land, so I can't grow anything... I only live because one of my sons got a job in Saudi Arabia and sends money back to us. I am very frightened, but what can I do? I can only trust in God." The sea stops just in front of his home. What will you do, I asked, if it comes closer? "We will have nowhere to go to." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I was taken to the island's dam. It is a long stretch of hardened clay and concrete and mud. "This used to be enough," a man called Abul Kashin said, "but then the sea got so high that it came over the dam." They have tried to pile lumps of concrete on top, but they are simply washed away. "My family have left the island," he continued, "They were so sad to go. This is my homeland. If we had to leave here to go to some other place, it would be the worst day of my life." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Twenty years ago, there were 30,000 people on this island. There are 18,000 now – and most think they will be the last inhabitants. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> On the beach, there were large wooden fishing boats lying unused. Abu Bashir, a lined, thin 28-year-old, pointed to his boat and said, "Fishing is almost impossible now. The waves are much bigger than they used to be. It used to be fine to go out in a normal [hand-rowed] boat. That is how my father and my grandfather and my ancestors lived. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> "Now that is impossible. You need a [motor-driven] boat, and even that is thrown about by the waves so much. It's like the bay is angry." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The other fishermen burst in. "When there is a cyclone warning, we cannot go out fishing for 10 days. That is a lot of business lost. There used to be two or three warnings a year. Last year, there were 12. The sea is so violent. We are going hungry." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Yet the islanders insisted on offering me a feast of rice and fish and eggs. I was ushered into the council leader's house – a rusty shack near the sea – and the men sat around, urging me to tell the world what is happening. "If people know what is happening to us, they will help," they said. The women remained in the back room; when I glimpsed them and tried to thank them for the food, they giggled and vanished. I asked if the men had heard of global warming, and they looked puzzled. "No," they said. We stared out at the ocean and ate, as the sun slowly set on the island. </span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><b>3. No hiding place</b></span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Through the morning mist, I peered out of the car window at the cratered landscape. Trees jutted out at surreal angles from the ground. One lay upside down with its roots sticking upwards towards the sky, looking like a sketch for a Dali painting. Shambrat had spat out his pan and was driving slowly now. "There are holes in the ground," he said, squinting with concentration. "From the cyclone. You fall in..." He made a splattering sound. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> It was here, in the south of Bangladesh, that on 15 November last year, Cyclone Sidr arrived. It formed in the warmed Bay of Bengal and ripped across the land, taking more than 3,000 people with it. Like Americans talking about 9/11, everybody in Bangladesh knows where they were when Sidr struck. For miles, the upturned and smashed-out houses are intermixed with tents made from blue plastic sheeting. These stretches of plastic were handed out by the charities in the weeks after Sidr, and many families are still living in them now. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> There have always been cyclones in Bangladesh, and there always will be – but global warming is making them much more violent. Back in Dhaka, the climatologist Ahsan Uddin Ahmed explained that cyclones use heat as a fuel: "The sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have been rising steadily for the past 40 years – and so, exactly as you would expect, the intensity of cyclones has risen too. They're up by 39 per cent on average." Again I circled a cyclone-struck island at random and headed for the dot. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The hour-long journey on a wooden rowing boat from the mainland to Charkashem Island passed in a dense mist that made it feel like crossing the River Styx. The spectral outline of other boats could sometimes be glimpsed, before they disappeared suddenly. One moment an old woman and a goat appeared and stared at me, then they were gone. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The island was a tiny dot of mud and lush, upturned greenery. It had no pier, so when the rowing boat bumped up against the sand I had to wade through the water. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I looked out over the silent island, and saw some familiar blue sheeting in the distance. As I trudged towards it, I saw some gaunt teenagers half-heartedly kicking a deflated football. From the sheeting, a man and woman stared, astonished. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> "I was in my fields over there," Hanif Mridha said. "I saw the wind start, it was about eight at night, and I saw everything being blown around. I went and hid under an iron sheet, but that was blown away by the wind. The water came swelling up all of a sudden and was crashing all around me. I grabbed one of my children and ran to the forest" – he pointed to the cluster of trees at the heart of the island – "and climbed the tallest one I could reach. I went as high as I could but still the water kept rising and I thought – this is it, I'm going to drown. I'm dying, my children are dying, my wife is dying. I could see everything was under water and people were screaming everywhere. I held there for four hours with my son." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> When the water washed away and he came down, everything was gone: his house, his crops, his animals, his possessions. A few days later, an aid agency arrived with some rice and some plastic sheeting to sleep under. Nobody has come since. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> His wife, Begum Mridha, took over the story. Their children are terrified of the sea now, and have nightmares every night. They eat once a day, if they're lucky. "We are so hungry," she said. The new home they have built is made from twigs and the plastic sheet. Underneath it, they sleep with their eight children and Begum Mridha's mother. The children lay lethargically there, staring blankly into space over their distended bellies. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Begum Mridha cooks on a lantern. They eat once a day – if that. "It's so cold at night we can't sleep," she said. "The children all have diarrhoea and they are losing weight. It will take us more than two years to save up and get back what we had." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> If cyclones hit this area more often, what would happen to you? Hanif looked down. He opened his mouth, but no words came. </span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><b>4. Bangladesh's Noah</b></span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> In the middle of Bangladesh, in the middle of my road trip, I tracked down Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan. He was sitting under a parasol by the banks of a river, scribbling frenetically into his notebook. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> "The catastrophe in Bangladesh has begun," he said. "The warnings [by the IPCC] are unfolding much faster than anyone anticipated." Until a few years ago, Rezwan was an architect, designing buildings for rich people – "but I thought, is this what I want to do while my country drowns? Create buildings that will be under water soon anyway?" </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> He considered dedicating his life to building schools and hospitals, "but then I realised they would be under water soon as well. I was hopeless. But then I thought of boats!" </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> He has turned himself into Bangladesh's Noah, urging his people to move on to boats as the Great Flood comes. Rezwan built a charity – Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, which means self-reliance – that is building the only schools and hospitals and homes that can last now: ones that float. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> We clambered on to his first school-boat, which is moored in Singra. In this area there is no electricity, no sewage system, and no state. The residents live the short lives of pre-modern people. But now, suddenly, they have a fleet of these boats, stocked with medicines and lined with books on everything from Shakespeare to accountancy to climatology. Nestling between them, there are six internet terminals with broadband access. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The boat began to float down the Curnai River, gathering scores of beaming kids as it went. Fatima Jahan, an unveiled 18-year-old girl dressed in bright red, arrived to go online. She was desperate to know the cricket scores. At every muddy village-stop, the boat inhaled more children, and I talked to the mothers who were beating their washing dry by the river. "I never went to school, and I never saw a doctor in my life. Now my children can do both!" a thin woman with a shimmering heart-shaped nose stud called Nurjahan Rupbhan told me. But when I asked about the changes in the climate, her forehead crumpled into long frown-lines. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I thought back to what the scientists told me in Dhaka. Bangladesh is a country with 230 rivers running through it like veins. They irrigate the land and give it its incredible fertility – but now the rivers are becoming supercharged. More water is coming down from the melting Himalayan glaciers, and more salt water is pushing up from the rising oceans. These two forces meet here in the heart of Bangladesh and make the rivers churn up – eroding the river banks with amazing speed. The water is getting wider, leaving the people to survive on ever-more narrow strips of land. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Nurjahan took me up to a crumbling river edge, where tree roots jutted out naked. "My house was here," she said. "It fell into the water. So now my house is here –" she motioned to a small clay hut behind us – "but now we realise this is going to fall in too. The river gets wider day by day." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> But even this, Nurjahan said, is not the worst problem. The annual floods have become far more extreme, too. "Until about 10 years ago, the floods came every year and the water would stay for 15 days, and it helped to wet the land. Now the water stays for four months. Four months! It is too long. That doesn't wet the fields, it destroys them. We cannot plan for anything." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> When the floods came last year, Nurjahan had no choice but to stay here. She lived with her children waist-deep in the cold brown water – for four months. "It was really hard to cook, or go to the toilet. We all got dysentery. It was miserable." Then she seemed to chastise herself. "But we survived! We are tough, don't you think?" </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> We sat by the river-bank, our feet dangling down towards the river. I asked if she agrees with Rezwan that her only option soon will be to move on to a boat. He is launching the first models this summer: floating homes with trays of earth where families can grow food. "Yes," she said, "We will be boat-people." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I clambered back on to one of the 42 school-boats in this area. Young children were in the front chanting the alphabet, and teenagers at the back were browsing through the books. I asked a 16-year-old boy called Mohammed Palosh Ali what he was reading about, and he said, "Global warming." I felt a small jolt. He was the first person to spontaneously raise global warming with me. Can you tell me what that is? "The climate is being changed by carbon dioxide," he said. "This is a gas that traps heat. So if there is more of it, then the ice in the north of the world melts and our seas rise here." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I asked if he had seen this warming in his own life. "Of course! The floods in 1998 and 2002 were worse than anything in my grandfather's life. We couldn't get any drinking water, so the dirty water I drank made me very sick. The shit from the toilet pits had risen up and was floating in the water, but we still had to drink it. We put tablets in it but it was still disgusting. What else could we do?" </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mohammed, do you know who is responsible for this global warming? He shakes his head. That answer lies a few pages further into the book. Soon he, and everybody else on this boat, will know it is me – and you. </span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><b>5. The warming jihad</b></span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> What happens to a country's mind as it drowns? Professor Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University believes he can glimpse the answer: "The connection between climate change and religious violence is not tenuous," he says. "In fact, there's a historical indicator of how it could unfold: the Little Ice Age." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Between the ninth and 13th centuries, the northern hemisphere went through a natural phase of global warming. The harvests lasted longer – so there were more crops, and more leisure. Universities and the arts began to flower. But then in the late 13th century, the Little Ice Age struck. Crop production fell, and pack ice formed in the oceans, wrecking trade routes. People began to starve. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> "In this climate of death and horror, people cast about for scapegoats, even before the Black Death struck," he says. Tolerance withered with the climate shocks: the Church declared witchcraft a heresy; the Jews began to be expelled from Britain. There was, he says, "a very close correlation between the cooling and a region-wide heightening of violent intolerance." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> This time, there will be no need for imaginary scapegoats. The people responsible are on every TV screen, revving up their engines. Will jihadism swell with the rising seas? Bangladesh's religion seems to be low-key and local. In the countryside, Muslims – who make up 95 per cent of the nation – still worship Hindu saints and mix in a few Buddhist ideas, too. In the Arab world, people bring up God in almost every sentence. In Bangladesh, nobody does. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> But then, as we returned to Dhaka, I was having a casual conversation with Shambrat. He had been driving all night – at his insistence – and by this point he was wired after chewing fistfuls of pan, and singing along at the top of his voice to the Eighties power ballads. I mentioned Osama bin Laden in passing, and he said, "Bin Laden – great man! He fight for Islam!" Then, without looking at me, he went back to singing: "It must have been love, but it's over now...." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I wondered how many Bangladeshis felt this way. The Chandni Chowk Bazaar – one of the city's main markets – was overcast the afternoon I decided to canvass opinions on Bin Laden. I approached a 24-year-old flower-seller called Mohammed Ashid, and as I inhaled the rich sweet scent of roses, he said: "I like him because he is a Muslim and I am a Muslim." Would you like Bin Laden to be in charge of Bangladesh? "Yes, of course," he said. And what would President Bin Laden do? "I have no idea," he shrugged. What would you want him to do? He furrowed his brow. "If Osama came to power he would make women cover up. Women are too free here." But what if women don't want to cover up? "They are Muslims. It's not up to them." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> A very smartly dressed man called Shadul Ahmed was strolling down the street to his office, where he is in charge of advertising. "I like him," he said. "Bin Laden works for the Muslims." He conceded 9/11 "was bad because many innocents died," but added: "Osama didn't do it. The Americans did it. They are guilty." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> As dozens of people paused from their shopping to talk, a pattern emerged: the men tend to like him, and the women don't. "I hate Bin Laden," one smartly dressed woman said, declining to give her name. "He is a fanatic. Bangladeshis do not like this." As the praise for Bin Laden was offered, I saw a boy go past on a rickshaw, stroking a girl's uncovered hair gently, sensuously. This is not the Arab world. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The only unpleasant moment came when I approached three women selling cigarettes by the side of the road. They were in their early thirties, wearing white hijabs and puffing away. Akli Mouna said, "I like him. He is a faithful Muslim." She said "it would be very nice" if he was president of Bangladesh. Really? Would you be happy if you were forced to wear a burqa, and only rarely allowed out of your house? She jabbed a finger at my chest. "Yes! It would be fine if Osama was president and told us to wear the burqa." But Akli – you aren't wearing a burqa now. "It's good to wear the burqa!" she yelled. Her teeth, I saw, were brown and rotting. "We are only here because we are poor! We should be kept in the house!" </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I wanted to track down some Bangladeshi jihadis for myself, so I called the journalist Abu Sufian. He is a news reporter for BanglaVision, one of the main news channels, who made his name penetrating the thickets of the Islamist underground. He told me to meet him at the top of the BanglaVision skyscraper. As the city shrieked below us, he explained: "In the late 1980s, a group of mujahideen [holy warriors] who had been fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan came back to launch an Islamic revolution here in Bangladesh. They tried to mount an armed revolt in the north and kill the former Prime Minister. But it didn't come to much." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Islamic fundamentalism is hobbled in Bangladesh, because it is still associated for most people with Pakistan – the country Bangladesh fought a bloody war of independence to escape from. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> But Sufian says a new generation of Islamists is emerging with no memory of that war. "For example, I met a 21-year-old who had fought in Kashmir, whose father was a rickshaw driver. He said it was his holy duty to establish an Islamic state here through violence. Most were teenagers. All the jihadis I met hated democracy. They said it was the rule of man. According to them, only the rule of God is acceptable." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> He said it would be almost impossible to track them down – they are in prison or hiding – but my best bet was to head for the Al-Amin Jami mosque in the north-west of Dhaka. "They are fundamentalist Wahhabis, and very dangerous," he said. Yet when I arrived, just before 6pm prayers, it was a bright building in one of the nicer parts of town. Men in white caps and white robes were streaming in. An ice-cream stall sat outside. I approached a fiftysomething man in flowing robes and designer shoes. He glared at me. I explained I was a journalist, and ask if it would it be possible to look inside the mosque? "No. Under no circumstances. At all." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> OK. I asked a few polite questions about Islam, and then asked what he thought of Osama bin Laden. "Osama bin Laden?" he said. Yes. He scowled. "I have never heard of him." Never? "Never." I turned to the man standing, expectantly, next to him. "He has not heard of Osama bin Laden, either," he said. What about September 11 – you know, when the towers in New York fell? "I have never heard of this event, either." Some teenage boys were about to go in, so I approached them. Behind my back, I can sense the Gucci-man making gestures. "Uh... sorry... I don't think anything about Bin Laden," one of them said, awkwardly. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> I lingered as prayers took place inside, until a flow of men poured out so thick and fast that they couldn't be instructed not to speak. "Yes, we would like Osama to run Bangladesh, he is a good man," the first person told me. There were nods. "He fights for Islam!" shouted another. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> The crowd says this mosque – like most fundamentalist mosques on earth – is funded by Saudi Arabia, with the money you and I pay at the petrol pump. As I looked up at its green minaret jutting into the sky, it occurs to me that our oil purchases are simultaneously drowning Bangladesh, and paying for the victims to be fundamentalised. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> After half-an-hour of watching this conversation and fuming, the initially recalcitrant man strode forward. "Why do you want to know about Bin Laden? We are Muslims. You are Christian. We all believe in the same God!" he announced. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Actually, I said, I am not a Christian. There was a hushed pause. "You are... a Jew?" he said. The crowd looked horrified; but then the man forced a rictus smile and announced: "We all believe in one God! We are all children of Abraham! We are cousins!" No, I said. I am an atheist. Everyone looked genuinely puzzled; they do not have a bromide for this occasion. "Well... then..." he paused, scrambling for a statement... "You must convert to Islam! Read the Koran! It is beautiful!" Ah – so can I come into the mosque after all? "No. Never." </span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><b>6. The obituarist?</b></span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> In a small café in Dhaka, a cool breeze was blowing in through the window along with the endless traffic-screams. The 32-year-old novelist Tahmima Anam was inhaling the aroma of coffee and close to despair. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> She made her name by writing a tender novel – </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >A Golden Age</span><span style="font-size:130%;"> – about the birth of her country, Bangladesh. When the British finally withdrew from this subcontinent in 1948, the land they left behind was partitioned. Two chunks were carved out of India and declared to be a Muslim republic – East Pakistan and West Pakistan. But apart from their religion, they had very little in common. The gentle people of East Pakistan chafed under the dictatorial fundamentalism imposed from distant Islamabad. When they were ordered to start speaking Urdu, it was enough. Her novel tells how in 1971, they decided to declare independence and become Bangladesh. The Pakistanis fought back with staggering violence, but in the end Bangladesh was freed. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Now Anam is realising that unless we change, fast, this fight will have been for the freedom of a drowning land – and her next novel may have to be its obituary. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Anam came to Bangladesh late. Her Dhaka-born parents travelled the world, so she grew up in a slew of international schools, but she always dreamed of coming home. Her passion for this land, this place, this delta, aches through her work. About one of her characters, she wrote: "He had a love for all things Bengali: the swimming mud of the delta; the translucent, bony river fish; the shocking green palette of the paddy and the open, aching blue of the sky over flat land." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> "You can see what has started to happen," she says. The vision of the country drowning is becoming more real every day. Where could all these 150 million people go? India is already building a border fence to keep them out; I can't imagine the country's other neighbour – Burma – will offer much refuge. "We are the first to be affected, not the last," Anam says. "Everyone should take a good look at Bangladesh. This story will become your story. We are your future." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> It is, she says, our responsibility to stop this slow-mo drowning – and there is still time to save most of the country. "What could any Bangladeshi government do? We have virtually no carbon emissions to cut." They currently stand at 0.3 per cent of the world's – less than the island of Manhattan. "It's up to you." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> Anam is defiantly optimistic that this change can happen if enough of us work for it – but, like every scientist I spoke to, she knows that dealing with it simply by adaptation by Bangladeshis is impossible. The country has a military-approved dictatorship incapable of taking long-term decisions, and Dutch-style dams won't work anyway. "Any large-scale construction is very hard in this country, because it's all made of shifting silt. There's nothing to build on." </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"> So if we carry on as we are, Bangladesh will enter its endgame. "All the people who strain at this country's seams will drown with it," Anam says, "or be blown away to distant shores – casualties and refugees by the millions." The headstone would read, "Bangladesh, 1971-2071: born in blood, died in water."<br /></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">Link to article: <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-is-set-to-disappear-under-the-waves-by-the-end-of-the-century--a-special-report-by-johann-hari-850938.html"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-is-set-to-disappear-under-the-waves-by-the-end-of-the-century--a-special-report-by-johann-hari-850938.html</span></a></span></p>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-64471164060640767282008-06-11T22:34:00.000-07:002008-12-12T00:05:59.632-08:00Greenland, June 11, 2008<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqOb63LvaON6UUl-k_Yp4eEnjL-s6UUqMW1RAP4QgPF5eIP0a_KyIGyNM0KzWCHVIwt5OToPk3jw2ymeDkDZZTHEgkoTMFLQkuQspgf_SOCU-OvGGqZvclMnnZVExmQuTRzDDX5gbFVUi/s1600-h/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.12.06.08.04.15.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqOb63LvaON6UUl-k_Yp4eEnjL-s6UUqMW1RAP4QgPF5eIP0a_KyIGyNM0KzWCHVIwt5OToPk3jw2ymeDkDZZTHEgkoTMFLQkuQspgf_SOCU-OvGGqZvclMnnZVExmQuTRzDDX5gbFVUi/s400/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.12.06.08.04.15.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5210864970984211282" border="0" /></a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-32057305253382723092008-06-10T14:48:00.000-07:002008-06-10T17:10:50.418-07:00Chart of Temperature Comparisons<a style="color: rgb(153, 153, 255);" href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png</span></a><br /><div class="fullImageLink" id="file"><img src="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/c/c1/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png" alt="Image:2000 Year Temperature Comparison.png" border="0" height="443" width="600" /></div><div class="fullMedia"><p><a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/c/c1/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png">2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png</a>; Other sizes: <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=100&height=100">100</a>, <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=200&height=200">200</a>, <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=300&height=300">300</a>, <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=450&height=450">450</a></p></div><br /><div class="fullImageLink" id="file"><img src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/usuario/CONFIG%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg" alt="" /><img src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/usuario/CONFIG%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg" alt="" /></div><div class="fullMedia"><p><a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/c/c1/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png">2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png</a>; Other sizes: <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=100&height=100">100</a>, <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=200&height=200">200</a>, <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=300&height=300">300</a>, <a href="http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:Resize/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png?width=450&height=450">450</a></p></div> <h2><br /></h2>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-73317303494117742162008-06-10T14:01:00.000-07:002008-06-10T14:06:49.691-07:00Bush Administration's Message Machine -- the Pentagon's War Analysts<span style="font-size:180%;"><nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" "><span style="font-weight: bold;">Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand</span> </nyt_headline></span><h1> </h1> <div class="image" id="wideImage"> <img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/19/washington/20generals_span.jpg" alt="" border="0" height="277" width="600" /> <p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);" class="caption"> <span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN</strong> Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks.</span></p></div><span style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);font-size:130%;" ><nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "></nyt_byline>By <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/david_barstow/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by David Barstow">DAVID BARSTOW, </a></span> <div style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);" class="timestamp"><span style="font-size:130%;">Published: April 20, 2008</span></div> <!--NYT_INLINE_IMAGE_POSITION1 --> <span style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);font-size:130%;" ><nyt_text> <nyt_correction_top> </nyt_correction_top></nyt_text></span> <p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/guantanamobaynavalbasecuba/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about Guantánamo.">Guantánamo Bay</a>. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/amnesty_international/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Amnesty International">Amnesty International</a>, there were new allegations of abuse from <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the United Nations.">United Nations</a> human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.</span></p> <div style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);" id="articleInline"> <div id="inlineBox"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Multimedia</span><div id="inlineMultimedia"> <div class="story first"> <span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/20/washington/20080419_RUMSFELD.html"> <img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/20/washington/20generals_interactive_190.jpg" alt="How the Pentagon Spread Its Message" border="0" height="126" width="190" /><span class="mediaType interactive">Interactive Feature</span> </a></span> <div style="padding-top: 5px;"> <h5> <span style="font-size:130%;"><strong><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/20/washington/20080419_RUMSFELD.html">How the Pentagon Spread Its Message</a></strong></span> </h5> <p class="summary"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Audio, video and documents that show how the military’s talking points were disseminated. </span></p><ul class="refer"><li><span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/19/us/20080419_GENERALS_DOCS.html"> Excerpts From Selected Documents</a></span></li><li><span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/" target="_blank">All Documents Released</a> (Department of Defense Web Site)</span></li></ul></div> </div> </div><div class="enlargeThis"> <div class="story"> <h3 class="promo"><span style="font-size:130%;">Message Machine</span></h3> <span style="font-size:130%;"><em>The Media Battleground</em></span> </div> <div class="story"><p class="summary"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21barstowqa.html"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/homepage/20080418_GENERALS/generals_75.gif" alt="Message Machine" class="callout" style="margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 5px 5px;" border="0" height="75" width="75" /></a> David Barstow answers questions on his article about the Pentagon’s use of military analysts to create favorable news coverage. </span></p> </div></div> <!--Article Comments Include--> <div class="image"> <span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/20/us/20generals_CA2.ready.html', '20generals_CA2_ready', 'width=720,height=570,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"> <img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/20/us/19generals03-190.jpg" alt="" border="0" height="108" width="190" /> </a></span> <p class="caption"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Dining with Donald H. Rumsfeld, second from left, during his final week as secretary of defense were the retired officers Donald W. Shepperd, left, Thomas G. McInerney and Steven J. Greer, right. </span></p> </div> </div> </div><span style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);font-size:130%;" ><a name="secondParagraph"></a></span> <div style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);" id="readerscomment"><h3><span style="font-size:130%;">Readers' Comments</span></h3><div class="content"><blockquote><span style="font-size:130%;">Readers shared their thoughts on this article.</span></blockquote><ul class="more"><li><span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html" onclick="dcsMultiTrack('DCS.dcssip','www.nytimes.com','DCS.dcsuri','/article comments/view-promo3.html','WT.ti','Article Comments View Promo3','WT.z_aca','Promo3-View','WT.gcom','Com')">Read All Comments (1409) »</a></span></li></ul></div></div> <script type="text/JavaScript" language="JavaScript">if (acm.rc) acm.rc.write();</script> <p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/dick_cheney/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Dick Cheney.">Dick Cheney</a> and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The effort, which began with the buildup to the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about Iraq.">Iraq</a> war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/alberto_r_gonzales/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Alberto R. Gonzales.">Alberto R. Gonzales</a> and <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/stephen_j_hadley/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Stephen J. Hadley.">Stephen J. Hadley</a>. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/donald_h_rumsfeld/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Donald H. Rumsfeld.">Donald H. Rumsfeld</a>, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> John C. Garrett is a retired Marine colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/j/joint_chiefs_of_staff/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Joint Chiefs of Staff">Joint Chiefs of Staff</a> and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="bold">Charting the Campaign</span></span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="bold">Assembling the Team</span></span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/joseph_w_ralston/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Joseph W. Ralston.">Joseph W. Ralston</a>, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> There were also ideological ties. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/barry_r_mccaffrey/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Barry R. McCaffrey.">Barry R. McCaffrey</a> and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Saddam Hussein.">Saddam Hussein</a>. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="bold">The Selling of the War</span></span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Al Qaeda.">Al Qaeda</a>; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/l_paul_iii_bremer/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about L. Paul Bremer III.">L. Paul Bremer III</a>, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The Pentagon, though, need not have worried. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="bold">Access and Influence</span></span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/richard_b_myers/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Richard B. Myers.">Richard B. Myers</a> and <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/peter_pace/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Peter Pace.">Peter Pace</a>, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/david_h_petraeus/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about David H. Petraeus.">David H. Petraeus</a> was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_public_radio/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about National Public Radio">National Public Radio</a> whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="bold">Pentagon Keeps Tabs</span></span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/bill_oreilly/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Bill O'Reilly.">Bill O’Reilly</a> that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="bold">The Generals’ Revolt</span></span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job...” </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="bold">View From the Networks</span></span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"> “We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;"><nyt_correction_bottom> </nyt_correction_bottom></span></p><div style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);" class="correctionNote"> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:</span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="date">Correction: April 22, 2008</span><br /><span>An article on Sunday about the Pentagon’s relationship with news media military analysts misidentified the military affiliation of one analyst, John C. Garrett. He retired as a colonel from the Marines, not the Army.</span></span> </p> </div> <div style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);" class="correctionNote"> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:</span></p> <p> <span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="date">Correction: April 24, 2008</span><br /><span>The continuation of an article on Sunday about a Pentagon effort to use military analysts to generate favorable news coverage carried 10 paragraphs that were partly obscured in some editions by a chart.</span></span> </p> </div>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-79078583138983986962008-06-10T09:39:00.000-07:002008-06-10T09:51:33.221-07:00<span style="color: rgb(102, 255, 255);">Disasters are often used to illustrate the range of potential effects of global warming. Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it caused in the Gulf region in 2005 and the 2003 European heat</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 255, 255);">wave that caused 35,000 deaths and $15 billion in agricultural damage are two of the more commonly cited examples. Yet the impact of climate change on human and global security could extend far beyond the limited scope the world has seen thus far.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);">The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) examined the impacts of climate change on natural and social systems in Working Group II of its 2007 assessment report and concluded that climate change will affect species and ecosystems in all parts of the world—such as rainforests, coral reefs, and Arctic ecosystems—and that some already show stress symptoms. [1]</span><br /><br />Due to climate change, the total area stricken with drought will likely increase, and water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover in major mountain ranges such as the Andes and Himalayas will likely decline, jeopardizing access to water in large regions. Where natural<br />resources are already in a critical stage, global warming will tend to further degrade the environment as a source or sink of these resources. By degrading the natural resource base,<br />climate change will increase the environmental stress on the world’s population.<br /><br />A combination of these stress factors could lead to cascading effects. Some of the environmental changes may directly threaten human health and life, such as floods, storms, droughts, and heat waves. Others, such as food and water scarcity, disease, and weakened economic and ecological<br />systems, could gradually undermine human well-being.<br /><br />Environmental changes caused by global warming will not only affect human living conditions but may also generate larger societal effects, by threatening the infrastructures of society or by<br />inducing social responses that aggravate the problem. The associated socio-economic and political stress can undermine the functioning of communities, the effectiveness of institutions, and the stability of societal structures. These degraded conditions could contribute to civil strife and, worse, armed conflict.<br /><br />According to the IPCC, confining the impacts will be difficult: “Where extreme weather events become more intense and/or more frequent, the economic and social costs of those events will increase.”<br /><br />Whether societies are able to cope with the impacts and restrain the risks depends on their vulnerability, which the IPCC defines as a function of the “character, magnitude, and rate of climate change and variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity, and its adaptive capacity.” Societies that depend more on an ecosystem’s services and agriculture tend to be more vulnerable to climate stress. Some regions such as Bangladesh and the African Sahel are<br />more vulnerable due to their geographic and socioeconomic conditions and lack of adaptive capacities. Countries and communities that are not affected initially may become vulnerable later. Due to nonlinear effects, an increase in global mean temperature above a certain<br />threshold, say 2 degrees Celsius, may result in disproportionate impacts. [2]<br /><br />The stronger the impact and the larger the affected region, the more challenging it becomes for societies to absorb the consequences. Large-scale and abrupt changes in the Earth system, beyond so-called “tipping points,” could have incalculable consequences on a continental and global scale. [3]<br /><br />The societal implications of climate change crucially depend on how human beings, social systems, and political institutions respond. Some measures facilitate adaptation and minimize the risks, others may cause more problems. For instance, populations could respond to environmental hardships by migrating, which would spread potential hotspots of social unrest.<span style="font-size:100%;">[4]</span><br /><br />These developments could turn into security problems, as the <span style="font-style: italic;">2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change</span> acknowledges: “Climate-related shocks have sparked violent conflict in the past, and conflict is a serious risk in areas such as West Africa, the Nile Basin, and Central Asia.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Climate change and security</span><br /><br />How is global warming affecting existing competition for resources and changing international security priorities? A survey of recent research shows how complex the picture could become.<br />By Jürgen Scheffran<br /><br /><br /><br />Link to pdf file: <a href="http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/926l0jg36j374838/fulltext.pdf"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/926l0jg36j374838/fulltext.pdf</span></a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2864183369981480852.post-4820068301270749142008-06-09T16:40:00.001-07:002008-06-09T16:40:41.515-07:00Tamino's graphs<a href="http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/you-bet/">http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/you-bet/</a>Tenney Naumerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.com0