Greenland ice loss accelerating: study

Greenland’s ice losses are accelerating and nudging up sea levels, according to a study showing that icebergs breaking away and meltwater runoff are equally to blame for the shrinking ice sheet.

The report, using computer models to confirm satellite readings, indicated that ice losses quickened in 2006-08 to the equivalent of 0.75 mm (0.03 inch) of world sea level rise per year from an average 0.46 mm a year for 2000-08, an annual loss of 273 thousand million tons of ice.

Melting of the entire sheet would raise sea levels globally by about 7m (20ft). For the period 2000-2008, melting Greenland ice raised sea levels by an average of about 0.46mm per year. Since 2006, that has increased to 0.75mm per year,

“Mass loss has accelerated,” said Michiel van den Broeke, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who led the study, in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“The years 2006-08, with their warm summers, have seen a huge melting,” he told Reuters of the study with colleagues in the United States, the Netherlands and Britain.

“The underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future,” Jonathan Bamber, a co-author at the University of Bristol, said in a statement.

An ice sheet can lose mass because of increased melting on the surface, because glaciers flow more quickly into the ocean, or because there is less precipitation in the winter so less bulk is added inland.

The new research shows that in Greenland, about half the loss comes from faster flow to the oceans, and the other half from changes on the ice sheet itself - principally surface melting.

The computer models matched satellite data for ice losses — raising confidence in the findings — and showed that losses were due equally to meltwater, caused by rising temperatures, and icebergs breaking off from glaciers.

“This helps us to understand the processes that affect Greenland. This will also help us predict what will happen,” van den Broeke said. Until now, the relative roles of snowfall, icebergs and thawing ice have been poorly understood.

Greenland locks up enough ice to raise world sea levels by 7 meters (23 ft) if it ever all thawed. At the other end of the globe, far-colder Antarctica contains ice equivalent to 58 meters of sea level rise, according to U.N. estimates.

COPENHAGEN

About 190 governments will meet in Copenhagen from December 7-18 to try to agree a U.N. pact to slow global warming, fearing that rising temperatures will bring more powerful storms, heatwaves, mudslides and species extinctions as well as rising sea levels.

The study said losses of ice from Greenland would have been roughly double recent rates but were masked by more snowfall and a re-freezing of some meltwater before it reached the sea.

In total, Greenland lost about 1,500 billion tons of ice from 2000-08, split between icebergs cracking into the sea from glaciers and water runoff. “The mass loss would have been twice as great,” without offsetting effects, Van den Broeke said.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated in 2007 that world sea levels could rise by 18-59 cms by 2100. A natural expansion of water as it warms would account for most of the rise, rather than melting ice.

Greenland’s current rate, of 0.75 mm a year, would be 7.5 cms if continued for 100 years. “This is…much more that previous estimates of the Greenland contribution,” van den Broeke said.

Source:
Reuters, “Greenland ice loss accelerating: study“, accessed November 12, 2009
BBC, “Greenland ice loss accelerating“, accessed November 12, 2009

Chinese officials waste half their environmental budget

Close to half the money budgeted for protecting the environment is being wasted by Chinese officials on vanity projects, according to a senior government official.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai Published: 11:54AM GMT 15 Nov 2009
China has poured billions into cleaning up its often toxic landscape and is set to invest 1.4 trillion yuan (£140 billion) next year on environmental protection. However, Wang Jinnan, the deputy director of the Academy For Environmental Planning, said that “more than 40 per cent” of the money will end up being wasted by Communist party cadres on extravagant follies to boost their personal prestige.
“How much of the money is used to clean up the pollution and improve the environment?” asked Mr Wang in the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist party.
Some of the projects approved by officials in recent years include large recreational squares and lawns, and even golf courses alongside polluted rivers that were supposed to be cleaned up.
The latest report from China’s National Audit Office revealed that China’s six most polluted lakes and rivers remain heavily contaminated, in spite of the fact that 91 billion yuan was allegedly spent on cleaning them up between 2001 and 2007. The report said that 11 of the 13 provinces involved in the programme either misused the funds or faked spending.
Along the Pearl River, which flows through the southern province of Guangdong, more than 40 per cent of people have felt sick this year because of heavy pollution, according to a government survey.
Guangdong, which has a population the size of Germany’s, is the centre of China’s manufacturing industry, and has been heavily polluted for years. The Guangdong provincial social research and study centre, which conducted the survey, said the number of lung cancer patients in the past decade has doubled, and is seven times the number at the end of the 1970s.
The government said on Saturday that it had rejected requests to build new industrial projects worth almost 200 billion yuan, and will close some heavily-polluting factories.

India to Boost Funding for Solar Power

By AMOL SHARMA
NEW DELHI — India plans to announce increased subsidies for solar-power generation, a senior government official said, as the country looks to boost production of renewable energy and show it is committed to mitigating climate change.

India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is expected to release details of the latest solar-power policy in the next weeks. In an interview, Dr. B. Bhargava, a director in the agency, said the plans will significantly increase the number of solar projects that can receive government support.
The hope, he said, is that the new policy will encourage manufacturers of solar panels such as Moser Baer India Ltd. and Tata BP Solar India Ltd. to ramp up production, thereby reducing per-unit costs and driving down the high price of solar power.
It is now about five times as expensive to generate solar power than oil-based power. “If the costs aren’t reduced, this [subsidy] policy can’t be sustained on a long-term basis,” Mr. Bhargava said.
Climate change will be among the issues on the agenda when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits the White House next week.
India generates a tiny fraction of its power from solar energy. Coal accounts for more than half of the country’s power capacity, and wind makes the biggest contribution among renewable sources, which together provide about 7.5% of India’s energy.

Solar power is promising, because sunlight is abundant across the country, unlike wind and hydro power, which are better for only some regions. The government’s new policy is aimed at increasing solar-power generation to 20,000 megawatts by 2020 from three megawatts. “The potential is infinite with solar,” Mr. Bhargava said.
India’s existing policy supports a modest amount of solar-power capacity — 50 megawatts — with subsidies of up to 25 cents per kilowatt hour. Mr. Bhargava said that program is already “fully subscribed” and will be expanded substantially, though he declined to offer specifics. He said the new guidelines also will streamline the process for solar-power developers to collect subsidies and payments from state utilities.
Beyond expanding solar power, India has pledged in a “national action plan” on climate change to pursue a range of other measures, from increased fuel-efficiency in automobiles to more-efficient consumer appliances.
Write to Amol Sharma at amol.sharma@wsj.com

World leaders deal major blow to Copenhagen climate change deal

Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Leo Lewis in Singapore

A key element of the international plan to address climate change is in jeopardy after several of the most powerful nations failed to confirm a previous commitment to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) forum, which includes the US, China, Japan and Russia, deleted the commitment from the final version of the official communiqué issued after a two-day meeting in Singapore. The commitment had been made by G8 leaders at L’Aquila in Italy in July and the decision to remove it is a retrograde step.
The resolve of world leaders to take firm action on climate change appears to be weakening, with President Obama confirming that there would be no legally binding deal at the UN summit in Copenhagen next month.
Officials at the Apec meeting said the view of Mr Obama, President Hu Jintao of China and other leaders was that Copenhagen was merely a “staging post” towards a global deal on climate change. They said a legally binding deal was very unlikely to be agreed until late next year.

The Apec communiqué talked only vaguely of working “towards an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen”. It failed to mention any targets, including those previously agreed.
A draft version of the Apec communiqué said that “global emissions will need . . . to be reduced to 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050”. But the subsequent version was non-committal.
Most climate scientists believe that a 50 per cent reduction in global emissions by 2050 is the minimum needed to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic change. Chinese officials made it clear that they regarded the original draft as controversial. “If we put it in this [final] statement, I think it would disrupt the negotiation process,” Yi Xianliang, a Chinese foreign ministry official, said.
Michael Froman, a senior climate change negotiator for the United States, said: “I don’t think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that many of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen.”
Ed Miliband, the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary, tried to talk up the prospects of eventually agreeing a deal. He said: “It’s a bit like when you buy a house. Exchange may happen at Copenhagen and completion some months afterwards. What is most important, as far as I am concerned, is to get a really ambitious set of commitments from all world leaders.” He urged Mr Obama to commit to attending the Copenhagen conference.
Mr Obama has said that he would go to Copenhagen if he was confident that his presence would secure a meaningful agreement.
Joss Garman, Greenpeace climate campaigner, said: “It’s been twelve years since Kyoto and two years since negotiations began on Copenhagen, but now Obama says we need another year of talks about talks. The world can’t afford more prevarication and procrastination.”

Britain cuts down forests to keep ‘green’ power stations burning

Robin Pagnamenta

Britain is set to plunder the lungs of the world to feed its growing hunger for wood to burn in power stations.
A series of biomass-fired plants are being built in the UK that will trigger a 150 per cent surge in timber imports from 20 million tonnes today to 50 million tonnes by 2015, according to the Forestry Commission.
British power plants are already shipping wood from Canada, Brazil, Scandinavia and South Korea.
Just one of the new biomass plants at Port Talbot, South Wales, will consume three million tonnes of wood per year — equivalent to 30 per cent of the UK’s domestic annual wood harvest of ten million tonnes.

But the plant, which is due to open in 2012, will generate only 300 megawatt hours of electricity, or about 0.4 per cent of the UK’s current power-generating capacity. At least four more 300-megawatt plants are planned, including three in Yorkshire that have been proposed by Drax, operator of Britain’s largest coal-fired power station. Another company, MGT, plans to build one on Teesside.
A spokesman for Prenergy, which is behind the Port Talbot plant, said 90 per cent of its wood supplies would be imported, although he insisted that all of it would be sourced from proven sustainable sources.
Nevertheless, environmental campaigners have raised concerns about the carbon emissions involved in shipping the wood such large distances, while to meet UK pest control laws the timber will need to be baked before it can be shipped to the UK.
Wood industry officials have warned that British families could face soaring prices for a range of wood-based products, including furniture, wood panels and even wallpaper because of its impact on low-grade timber and wood pulp prices.
“It’s going to push timber prices through the roof,” said Gavin Adkins, chairman of the Wood Panel Industry Federation. He is concerned that large parts of the £1 billion industry that rely on wood as its main raw material will be forced offshore.
Although wood prices have moderated during the recession, rapid growth in demand had led to a 25 per cent rise since 2007, Mr Adkins said. “We operate in a low-margin industry and our ability to absorb such increases in raw material costs is limited. Inevitably these costs will have to be passed on to the consumer. Obviously, the timing could not be worse for the construction industry, which has been seriously hit in this recession.”
He said the number of jobs that may be lost was causing concerns for companies in the saw-milling, wood-panel and paper and pulp industries. The federation is lobbying for the biomass industry, which is supported by a government subsidy regime, to be given extra incentives to use waste wood instead of virgin timber for fuel. An estimated 4.5 million tonnes of waste wood are landfilled in the UK each year, according to government estimates.
A recent report from the Environment Agency stated that shipping timber from overseas could halve the potential carbon dioxide savings from biomass power.
Natural fuel
1% The amount of UK energy consumption from biomass
744 sq miles The size of forest needed for UK wood-fuelled power station growth in next three years
50% The rise in carbon discharges caused by long-distance transport and burning of wood over burning coal
30 years The time new trees need to absorb the equivalent amount of carbon released by cutting down and burning wood for fuel
Sources: Times Database; Massachusetts Environmental Energy Alliance; Biofuelwatch.co.uk

UK faces major obstacles in bid to be a low-carbon leader

The UK risks missing out on its slice of the £4.5 trillion low-carbon industry, the manufacturers’ trade body has warned.

By Josephine MouldsPublished: 6:10PM GMT 15 Nov 2009
The EEF said the country faces major obstacles to becoming a leading centre for so-called “cleantech” products and services, “most notably question marks over the long-term supply of core skills”.
The manufacturing lobby group criticised the UK’s tax system, claiming that it “discourages the capital investment that manufacturing depends on”. It said the Government’s low-carbon industrial strategy also lacks sufficient focus.
Roger Salomone, the EEF’s energy adviser, said: “Whilst the UK now has a low-carbon industrial strategy that has laid the foundations, we cannot ignore the fact the UK is behind the curve and playing catch-up in this area.”
On the positive side, the EEF cited the UK’s good pool of science, technology, engineering and maths graduates, and clusters of essential skills, such as offshore and automotive engineering.
The EEF estimates that the low-carbon economy will be worth £4.5 trillion globally by 2015, from £3 trillion in 2008.
It recommended that the Government focus on a small number of industries – nuclear, offshore renewables, carbon capture and storage, and low-carbon vehicles – in order to make its green policies more effective.
The Government should make greater use of public procurement to stimulate the development of low-carbon technologies. The EEF also suggested a “green bond” scheme that would allow manufacturers to use future tax benefits to finance low-carbon technologies.

The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker

Considerable effort has gone into Christopher Booker’s definitive manual for sceptics. Shame he’s talking bunk, says Philip Ball
Philip Ball
The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009

Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph columnist and bete noir of climate campaigners, has here produced the definitive climate sceptics’ manual. That’s to say, he has rounded up just about every criticism ever made of the majority scientific view that global warming, most probably caused by human activity, is under way, and presented them unchallenged. If you share his convictions, you’ll love it, and will dismiss the rest of this review as part of the cover-up.
The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History?
by Christopher Booker
368pp,
Continuum International Publishing Group,
£16.99
Buy The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History? at the Guardian bookshop
Me, I was moved to a queer kind of admiration for the skill and energy with which Booker has assembled his polemic. Unlike other climate-sceptic diatribes such as the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle or the writings of Nigel Lawson, this one cannot be dismissed with off-the-shelf knowledge. And some of it is true. But much, including the central claim, is bunk.
Some of Booker’s stratagems are transparent enough. One is to introduce all climate sceptics with a little eulogy to their credentials, while their opponents receive only a perfunctory, if not disparaging, preamble. This reaches its apotheosis on the back cover with a quote from “the world’s leading atmospheric physicist and ‘climate scientist”’, MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Unusually for sceptics, Lindzen does have significant academic status, but probably only his mother would endorse this description.
Another of Booker’s techniques is to latch on to genuine flaws in the science or its dissemination with the tenacity of a bulldog. Predictably, he attacks the infamous “hockey stick” graph, a plot of global mean temperatures over the past 1,000 years produced by two scientists in 1998 which shows little change for the entire period until suddenly soaring in the 20th century.
It is now mostly accepted that the analysis that produced these data was wrong. The question, still unresolved, is “how wrong?” – have we experienced comparable warming in the historical past, in which case the argument that it is a natural fluctuation seems plausible, or is the current trend truly unusual? But Booker’s implication that the entire edifice of the global-warming consensus rested on the shaky hockey stick is absurd: it was one strand among many. For a balanced critique of this episode, look instead to Richard Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents (Norton).
In the end, the devil is in the detail. And therein lies the problem, for to dismantle Booker’s case would require an equally long and citation-encrusted book. You are going to get nothing more (here at least) than my word for it that, say, the first of Booker’s accusations about faulty science and procedural misdemeanour that I chose at random to investigate further – the resignation of hurricane specialist Chris Landsea from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2005, and the UK chief scientific adviser David King’s trip to a bizarre climate meeting in Moscow the same year – proved to have a rather different complexion from the one presented here.
Yet some of the cracks become evident just from paying attention. When Booker commits the cardinal sin, for which climate scientists have often castigated alarmists, of making a swallow into a summer (or, here, winter) by using the cold snap of 2008 as a reason to doubt the warming trend, it’s game over. And by claiming that the slight cooling trend since around 2003 undermines the IPCC’s climate models, he fails to understand that different timescales demand different models: the projections for 2100 are hardly meant to predict whether next summer will be a scorcher. Don’t even get me started about the graph on page 328 that shows this cooling; just take a look at http://tiny.cc/mpjJB and then tell me what you feel about it.
Besides, Booker admits that a climate model in which medium-term ocean circulation was included was able in 2009 to rationalise the current cooling (which may last until 2015). We are supposed to regard this result as suspiciously convenient, but even Booker can come up with no scientific reasons to discard it. Indeed, he later criticises the IPCC models for failing to simulate shifts in ocean currents. His aim is simply to sling enough mud and to hell with consistency.
Suppose you are genuinely undecided on climate change and determined not to be guided simply by what you’d like to believe. If unpicking the real story demands so much effort and insider knowledge, how can you possibly make up your mind? Here’s an unscientific suggestion. Booker’s position would require that you accept something like the following: 1) Most of the world’s climate scientists, for reasons unspecified, decided to create a myth about human-induced global warming and have managed to twist endless measurements and computer models to fit their case, without the rest of the scientific community noticing. George W Bush and certain oil companies have, however, seen through the deception. 2) Most of the world’s climate scientists are incompetent and have grossly misinterpreted their data and models, yet their faulty conclusions are not, as you might imagine, a random chaos of assertions, but all point in the same direction.
There’s a third option: the world’s climate system is hugely complex, hard to predict and constantly surprising; yet in the long term the world is getting warmer, for reasons we basically understand, and there is good reason to believe that humans are mostly responsible for it.

Copenhagen: a non-negotiable deadline

Time is not on our side. We need our leaders to take on to the big challenges of climate change with a sense of urgency

Tony Juniper
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 November 2009 15.30 GMT
Barack Obama and other leaders have confirmed what has been likely for some time – that there won’t be a legally binding deal coming from next month’s Copenhagen climate change summit. Instead, and as many insiders have been saying for months, the talks will need to continue into 2010, with a deal hopefully thrashed out during the course of next year. More time might help politicians come up with a workable solution, but time is not on our side.
While politics is sometimes about compromise and being flexible, unfortunately it is not possible to negotiate with nature. The longer the world delays in putting in place the aggressive emissions reductions needed to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, the more risk we are placing before our children and grandchildren. The science tells us that to have a reasonable chance of keeping global average temperature increase below 2C (compared with the pre-industrial average), humankind will need to begin a global cut in emissions within the next five years or so. That will require planning and clear strategies to change energy and land use patterns.
The reasons the world has thus far been unable to do this are familiar enough. Present patterns of economic growth rely on vast quantities of cheap fossil energy, and while countries are not prepared to look at different economic strategies, solving the global climate challenge is virtually impossible. In the west we have become accustomed to ever-increasing levels of material consumption – and developing countries wish to have that too. The result is massive and increasing pressure on natural resources, land and water. And then there is the matter of global inequality and how it will be possible to cut poverty while reducing emissions and to put in place strategies that will enable countries to adapt to what are now already inevitable climate change impacts. Who will pay for that, and how, remains unresolved.
These are really big issues, but leaders need to face them and others with a renewed sense of urgency. Perhaps a wartime analogy is apposite. At the start of the second world war, the US and Britain demonstrated a remarkable ability to rise to a grave challenge. Public support for action was galvanised, and new technologies were deployed on a vast scale in a short time. Both of these things happened, in part through clear and inspirational political leadership. And perhaps this is what the world needs now – some leaders who are prepared to speak of the threat as it really is, and to inspire societies to rise to it with an appropriate response. If we don’t get that in 2009, we will certainly need it during 2010.
Each day that goes by the threat grows, each day we delay means more pain and cost in the future. We must urge countries to use the Copenhagen summit to raise humankind’s collective ambition, and to see 2010 as the time when that is converted into an action plan that will work.

Scientists find key to creating clean fuel from coal and waste

‘Gasification’ process enhanced to save millions of tonnes of carbon and provide energy
Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009
Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.
Scientists have adapted a process called “gasification” which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.
However gasification is very energy-intensive, requiring high-temperature air, steam or oxygen to react with the organic material. Heating this up leads to the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. In addition, gasification is often inefficient, leaving behind significant amounts of solid waste at the end of the process.
To find out how to make the process more efficient, researchers led by Marco Castaldi, at the department of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University, tried varying the atmosphere in the gasifier. They found that, by adding CO2 into the steam atmosphere of a gasifier, significantly more of the biomass or coal was turned into useful syngas.
The technique has a double benefit for the environment: it provides a use for CO2 that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and, after the hydrogen is siphoned off from the syngas, the remaining carbon monoxide can be buried safely underground.
Castaldi’s results will be published this week in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology. His team calculated that using CO2 during gasification of a biomass fuel such as beechgrass, in order to make enough biofuel for a fifth of the world’s transport demands, would use up 437m tonnes of the greenhouse gas. Preventing that from entering the atmosphere would be equivalent to removing 308m vehicles from the road.
Replacing 30% of the steam atmosphere of a gasifier with CO2 ensured that all the solid fuel was turned into syngas. Castaldi’s process reduces the amount of water that needs to be heated in the gasifier, thereby saving energy, and is 10 to 30% more efficient than standard gasification.
“You take a solid fuel like a biomass or a coal or even municipal waste and typically what you do is gasify it using steam, air or oxygen,” said Castaldi. “In that typical oxidation process, the air reacts very quickly and forms a very recalcitrant carbon char that takes very high temperatures to get converted into gases.
“When you use steam, the problem is that it’s not as reactive as oxygen but it’s a little too slow.” He added: “CO2 is a little more reactive than steam but not as reactive as oxygen. The CO2, as it’s converting a solid fuel to a gas, also has the ability to react with the carbon char that is forming.”
Working at the same temperature as a normal gasifier, using CO2 means a better conversion of solid fuel into syngas.
“If I operate at 1,000C and don’t use CO2 I’ll have some residual carbon left over, which could be a fuel – that’s an efficiency penalty,” said Castaldi. “Using about 30% CO2, for that same 1,000C you get the complete gasification of the carbon into the syngas.”
Applied to a modern IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle) power station, which gasifies coal, this can lead to an efficiency gain of up to 4%.
“While that may not sound like much, for a power plant producing 500 megawatts of energy, it is significant,” said Castaldi. He added that energy researchers were already investigating the use of CO2 in producing fuel.

Global warming a growing threat to Arctic reindeer

On Norway’s border with Russia, the consequences of climate change are affecting the reindeer population as rising temperatures hit food stocks and industry growth eats into vital grazing land.

“Over the past three years, I’ve had to give some hay to my 800 reindeer during the coldest months. It’s more expensive and it gives me more work,” said Jan Egil Trasti, a reindeer herder from the native Sami people.

The reason: the lichen his animals graze on has become tougher to find as winter temperatures rise. The snow thaws, and along with rain, then freezes anew — covering the ground in layers impervious to all but the most tenacious reindeer.

Grazing land is also disappearing under the weight of industry as buildings, pipelines, roads and other infrastructure increasingly dot old pastures.

Trasti’s nomadic ancestors have raised these beasts for hundreds of years. His grandfather worked the Russian tundra before moving to the Norwegian coast.

“I have it in my blood. I hope one of my sons will take over,” the herder said. He has, though, a hint of doubt in his eyes, his meager earnings well below the average Norwegian salary.

Only a minority of Sami — some 3,000 — make their living raising and herding in Norway, home to around 240,000 reindeer.

In this month of November, just weeks ahead of a key UN climate summit in Denmark, snow has not yet blanketed the flora in the Far North.

Indeed temperatures in this region near the Barents Sea are unseasonably mild, above zero degrees Celsius.

In the past, when the snows have come, they have generally fallen on dry ground, whereas now they fall on lichen engorged with water.

Trasti is no scientist, and environmental experts hesitate to link specific weather events to long-term climate change, but trends over the last several decades have clearly shown the Arctic hit hard by global warming.

In September, a study in the journal Science reported dramatic effects on animals in the Arctic due to a one-degree Celsius warming over the past 150 years.

The Arctic tends to warm three times faster than elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere because of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification — a separate study in the same journal noted that summer temperatures were some 1.4 degrees Celsius warmer than they should have been by the year 2000.

Jonathan Colman, specialist in “reindeer ecology” at the University of Oslo, explained that sometimes “there’s wet ice in the lichen.”

“It gets into their stomachs and they can’t digest the food.”

To avoid losing precious livestock, the Sami are forced to move reindeer to drier ground, meaning it is more important than ever to respect the tradition of driving herds across the entire north of the nation.

An animal can sell for 240 euros (359 dollars), and its meat for around seven euros a kilogram (10.46 dollars per 2.2 pounds).

Trasti can make extra money selling the hides or antlers to tourists, and also gets compensation if his animals are killed by predators.

Norwegian Sami follow the herd with vehicles, but their cousins in Russia still accompany the animals with sleds, camping as they go.

But the drive, and the ability to follow the reindeer, has been increasingly hampered by industrialization.

An iron ore mine which was closed down 15 years ago has re-opened nearby, while elsewhere liquid gas terminals, wind farms and roads are dotted across, or separate, traditional pastures.

The International Center for Reindeer Husbandry has expressed regret that “the herders have only a marginal influence on the development of their own traditional lands.”

That’s despite a law that “Norway was built on the territory of two people, the Sami and the Norwegians,” said Christina Henriksen, a Sami who coordinates an aid program for native peoples in the Arctic region.

“For me, being a Sami means herding reindeer,” said Trasti, who does not speak his native language.

“My parents weren’t allowed to speak Sami at school in the 60’s,” he said, and out of guilt, they “didn’t teach us the language.”

For the moment though, reindeer numbers are holding up under the strain of global warming, but that’s a fact Colman puts down to their very resilience.

“If reindeer weren’t as adaptable, there wouldn’t be any left,” he said.

Source:
Google News, “Global warming a growing threat to Arctic reindeer” accessed November 12, 2009