lightblueline

Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says: CNN.com 12/17/2008. By Emanuella Grinberg

You can read the whole story here:
Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says

Excerpt below:

"(CNN) -- Between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted at an accelerating rate since 2003, according to NASA scientists, in the latest signs of what they say is global warming.

Source: AFP: June 17, 2008
The Jason 2 satellite will keep sea-level data stream going for some years.

You can read the original article here: Satellite for tracking sea levels set for launch

Excerpt below:
"The French-US satellite Jason 2, slated for lift-off Friday from California, will provide precise monitoring of rising sea levels and currents and track the effects of climate change.

Source: CNN December 11, 2007

Scientist: 'Arctic is screaming'

Excerpt:

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

May 15, 2007
A team of NASA and university scientists has found clear evidence that extensive areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to warm temperatures. This was the first widespread Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA's QuikScat satellite and the most significant melt observed using satellites during the past three decades. Combined, the affected regions encompassed an area as big as California.

Goddard Space Flight Center's science visualization studio has taken NASA studies of Greenland's ice sheet and produced a wealth of graphics for classroom and student use! Also great for press use.

Greenland's Receding Ice

"Less ice, more ocean. That's the troubling conclusion emerging from new NASA research to study the condition of Greenland's ice sheet. Using a laser altimeter repeatedly flown across the surface of Greenland, experts say the edges of the ice found there may be thinning at the rate of nearly one meter per year.

Observation of change is one of the most sophisticated methods for understanding the nature of something. In complex systems like the Earth's climate, researchers examining specific features or processes can often extrapolate broader understandings of the larger whole. The changing conditions surrounding Greenland's ice cap are a good example of this. By measuring fluctuations, experts look for clues into broader subjects like global warming and atmospheric changes over time."

Check out the text and the great graphics here:

Greenland's Receding Ice

As Santa Barbara prepares to welcome James Hansen on February 5, we can read an interview he did which aired on February 2 on the program Living on Earth.

Dr. Hansen describes the scenario where ice sheet melting in the past resulted in a sea level rise at the rate of one meter every twenty years. When lightblueline talks about the vulnerability that climate change brings to coastal cities, this type of nonlinear process is precisely the target of our action. We are not predicting a seven meter rise in a century, even though this has happened in the past. We are predicting that the "business as usual" scenario of carbon generation will result in a global climate where we cannot be certain that the polar ice sheets will remain intact over the next several hundred years. The vulnerability to sea level rise is the same whether it takes seven decades or seventeen decades. We share a common future in Santa Barbrara that our children's children will face. We have only a few years to turn the situation around.

Recently the National Academy of Sciences held a review of the current and future scientific needs for satellites that provide data about the Earth system and its climate. This review concluded that since 2000 NASA's Earth science satellite program has been failing to meet the needs of scientists to a steady and improving data resource. In an editorial in the Boston Globe (January 31, 2007), Derrick Z. Jackson describes this as President Bush's "Sputnik Moment," and quotes the NAS report's cochair:

"'Since 2000, this thing has gone off a cliff,' said Berrien Moore, cochair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on studying Earth from space and director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire. Moore said the Bush administration has created a 'perfect storm' with the 'collapse of the earth science budget, down 30 percent at NASA,' and the inept development of a polar-orbiting environmental satellite system by NOAA and the Pentagon. The system is three years behind schedule and $3 billion over budget, and many climate-detection instruments have been thrown out to slash costs.

In a report just released from the National Academy of Sciences, NASA researchers (and lightblueline painter, Dr. David Lea) are warning that the Earth may be on the brink of a climate not seen for a million years--a time when the oceans were 80 feet higher than today. "We conclude that global warming of more than 1°C, relative to 2000, will constitute "dangerous" climate change as judged from likely effects on sea level and extermination of species."