UN chief appeals for restraint amid more inter-religious strife in Nigeria

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today voiced his concern about the situation in the Nigerian city of Jos, where inter-religious violence has once again taken a deadly toll, and called for all sides to exercise maximum restraint.

New Constitution: Give Women a Bigger Say

New constitution: Give women a bigger say

By Biata Beatrice Nyamupinga
Zimbabwe Herald

Zimbabwe is in the process of formulating a new constitution, following the signing of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) in September 2008, and the formation of the inclusive Government in February 2009.

Part of the management structure of the constitution-making process includes organising public hearings, consultation with, and the gathering of views of the people, and the drafting of the new constitution.

The question is, do women out there know what to say?

On political and governance issues, the inclusive Government, through the Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme I document, Articles 25 and 27 recognised and expressed its commitment to the making of a new and people-driven constitution.

Indeed, the surest guarantee for a good constitution is to ensure that all persons and interested groups participate in its formulation.

For Zimbabwe, with 52 percent of its population being women, it is paramount and legitimate that women participate in this process as respected and equal citizens.

The most reliable means women can participate fully is through the 50-50 representation, which is in line with the Sadc Protocol on Gender and Development, which was ratified by the Parliament of Zimbabwe on October 23, 2009.

The Zimbabwe Women Parliamentary Caucus recognises the significant progress that has been achieved in enacting laws that promote the status of women in this country.

Further to that, Article VI of the GPA acknowledges the fundamental right and duty of the Zimbabwean people to make a constitution by themselves and for themselves; and to make the constitution inclusive, democratically owned and driven by the people.

The same article provides that the new constitution needs to deepen the national democratic values and principles of equality of all citizens particularly the enhancement of full citizenship and the equality of women.

Below are excerpts from Article VI (Constitution) of the GPA, which reads in part:

Acknowledging that it is the fundamental right and duty of the Zimbabwean people to make a constitution by themselves and for themselves;

–Aware that the process of making this constitution must be owned and driven by the people and must be inclusive and democratic;

–Recognising that the current constitution of Zimbabwe made at Lancaster House Conference, London (1979) was primarily to transfer power from the colonial authority to the people of Zimbabwe;

–Acknowledging the draft constitution that the parties signed and agreed to in Kariba on the 30th of September 2007;

–Determined to create conditions for our people to write a constitution for themselves;

–And mindful of the need to ensure that the new constitution deepens our democratic values and principles and the protection of the equality of all citizens, particularly the enhancement of full citizenship and equality of women.

More importantly Article XI of the GPA bestows special duty to and recognises political parties as critical role players in the constitution making process.

Consistent with the GPA, Article 42 of the STERP document refers to the need to avail resources to ensure women’s effective and equal participation in the process and outcome of the constitution-making process.

However, as women have already argued, it is quite evident that they are under-represented in the management structures of the constitution-making process. Below are examples to demonstrate that:

–The Management Committee comprises seven members who include three co-chairpersons, three negotiators, and the Minister of Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs. However, out of the seven, only one of the members is a woman. This translates to 14 percent women representation in the Management Committee.

–The Steering Committee comprises six members who include three co-chairpersons; the Minister of Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs, and two co-chairpersons from the first Stakeholders’ Conference. Again, from the six-member group, there is only one woman. This translates to 16 percent women representation in the Steering Committee.

–The Select Committee has 25 members, and there are only nine women members. This also translates to 36 percent women representation in the Select Committee. Only two women hold positions of deputy chairperson.

Thus, the average representation of women in the management structure of the constitution-making process’s management structure is only 16 percent.

In addition, women chair only four of the 17 thematic areas. This translates to 22 percent female representation.

The above statistics fall far short of the 50-50 gender and women representation as provided for in the Sadc Protocol on Gender and Development.

The Zimbabwe Women Parliamentary Caucus has called for urgent rectification of this anomaly in order to ensure that the constitution-making process is as credible and as legitimate as possible, in accordance with provisions of Article VI of the GPA.

The three major political parties are mandated with the responsibility of ensuring that there is gender balance through the nomination of women representatives who should be put into the restructured constitutional management committee.

The Zimbabwe Women Parliamentary Caucus expresses gratitude to Vice President Joice Mujuru and Deputy Prime Minister Thokozani Khupe for coming out forcefully to seeing to it that women representation is effected within the constitution-making process management structures.

As the Zimbabwe Women Parliamentary Caucus, we hope to come up with a strategic plan and budget to enable us to go and carry out the constitution-making exercise; to educate people, women in particular, at grassroots level so that they are ready for the constitution-making process.

However, our problem is funding. At the moment, no one is coming up to help us with funding, and we are frustrated.

Thus the Zimbabwe Women Parliamentary Caucus is calling upon co-operating partners, development agencies, women support groups and UN agencies to come on board and assist with the funding required.

–Biata Beatrice Nyamupinga is the chairperson of the Zimbabwe Women Parliamentary Caucus, and also Zanu-PF Member of Parliament for Goromonzi constituency.

Sneaky app shows potential for smartphone botnets

Cellphone apps can be made that secretly pass your personal data back to their creators, researchers show

Businesses failing to recycle

Millions of tonnes of recycling is still being sent to landfill by businesses despite a multimillion pound Government campaign, according to spending watchdogs.

By Louise Gray, Environment CorrespondentPublished: 7:00AM GMT 05 Mar 2010
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spent £240 million between 2005 and 2008 on encouraging businesses to cut waste. The money was spent on raising awareness, training managers and developing easier ways to recycled.
But a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) found the 200 million tonnes of waste from construction and industry only fell by 11 per cent during the period.

Amyas More, head of the NAO, said at this rate the Government was unlikely to meet a target to cut the amount of waste from business going to landfill by 20 per cent by 2010.
“The low awareness of the Programme among businesses and the absence of clear targets and reliable information to measure progress mean we cannot say whether the Department achieved value for money from the £240 million spent on the Programme,” he said.
Taxpayers face huge fines from Europe unless landfill is cut.
Edward Leigh, Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, pointed out that business generates three-fifths of all waste.
“It is easy to see why it has not been a very successful programme: lack of detailed information means that the Department cannot measure its progress or target the initiative effectively and with no evaluation of the programme to date it is not possible to say if value for money has been achieved or not,” he said. “But the pièce de résistance must be the fact that the strategy underpinning the Department’s programme was not fully implemented until April 2008, just after the programme had officially ended. Talk about shutting the stable door once the horse has bolted.”

Met Office analysis reveals ‘clear fingerprints’ of man-made climate change

Climate scientists say the 100 studies of sea ice, rainfall and temperature should help the public to make up their own minds on global warming
Alok Jha
The Guardian, Friday 5 March 2010
It is an “increasingly remote possibility” that human activity is not the main cause of climate change, according to a major Met Office review of more than 100 scientific studies that track the observed changes in the Earth’s climate system.
The research will strengthen the case for human-induced climate change against sceptics who argue that the observed changes in the Earth’s climate can largely be explained by natural variability.
Climate scientists and the UN’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have come under intense pressure in recent months after the IPCC was forced to admit it had made two errors in its fourth assessment report published in 2007. Emails hacked from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in November have also sparked a series of inquiries into allegations of a lack of transparency by researchers and manipulation of the peer review process.
Asked whether his study was specifically scheduled as a fightback, Peter Stott, who led the review, said that the paper was originally drafted a year ago. But he added: “I hope people will look at that evidence and make up their minds informed by the scientific evidence.”
Scientists matched computer models of different possible causes of climate change - both human and natural - to measured changes in factors such as air and sea temperature, Arctic sea ice cover and global rainfall patterns. This technique, called “optimal detection”, showed clear fingerprints of human-induced global warming, according to Stott. “This wealth of evidence shows that there is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors.” The paper reviewed numerous studies that were published since the last IPCC report.
Optimal detection considers to what extent an observation can be explained by natural variability, such as changing output from the sun, volcanic eruptions or El Niño, and how much can be explained by the well-established increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
According to Nasa, the last decade was the warmest on record and 2009 the second warmest year. Temperatures have risen by 0.2C per decade, over the past 30 years and average global temperatures have increased by 0.8C since 1880.
The evidence that the climate system is changing goes beyond measured air temperatures, with much of the newest evidence coming from the oceans. “Over 80% of the heat that’s trapped in the climate system as a result of the greenhouse gases is exported into the ocean and we can see that happening,” said Stott. “Another feature is that salinity is changing - as the atmosphere is warming up, there is more evaporation from the surface of the ocean [so making it more salty], which is most noticeable in the sub-tropical Atlantic.”
This also links into changes in the global water cycle and rainfall patterns. As the atmosphere warms, it has been getting more humid, exactly as climate modellers had predicted. “This clear fingerprint has been seen in two independent datasets. One developed in the Met Office Hadley Centre, corroborated with data from satellites.”
Arctic sea ice is also retreating - the summer minimum of sea ice is declining at a rate of 600,000 km² per decade, an area approximately the size of Madagascar. Again, decreasing sea ice is predicted by climate models.
Rainfall is also on the rise in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere and large swaths of the southern hemisphere, while in the tropics and sub-tropics, there are decreases. “The already-wet regions are getting wetter and the dry regions are getting drier,” said Stott. “We now have studies that can identify this fingerprint in the observational data.”
The review, published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, found that the natural causes of climate variation, including changing energy output from the sun and volcanic eruptions, could not explain the observed changes by themselves. “There hasn’t been an increase in solar output for the last 50 years and solar output would not have caused cooling of the higher atmosphere and the warming of the lower atmosphere that we have seen,” said Stott.
If the observed climate change was entirely due to solar activity, the Earth’s atmosphere would have warmed more evenly - both the troposphere and stratosphere would have been affected. Warming due to the Sun would also have meant temperatures should have increases more quickly early than late in the 20th century, which is the reverse of what was actually measured.
The review is published as scientists also report a rise in methane emissions from a section of the Arctic Ocean sea floor. That study, published today in the journal Science, shows that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic shelf, once considered an safe store of methane, is leaking large amounts of the gas into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming as this is a greenhouse gase around 30 times more potent than CO2.
“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans. Sub-sea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap,” said Natalia Shakhova, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s International Arctic Research Centre. “The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to three to four times. The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

There is no ‘green treachery’ in questioning this solar panel rip-off

We do not have a moral obligation to blindly support inefficient, expensive renewable technologies • George Monbiot: Are we really going to let ourselves be duped into this solar panel rip-off?• Jeremy Leggett: Solar panels are not fashion accessories
Once again I am a traitor to the cause, a corporate sell-out, a dangerous maverick who has gone over to the dark side. My column this week on feed-in tariffs provoked the same sort of charges that were levelled against me when I first came out against biofuels in 2004. We’ve now seen how that’s panned out. When other greens wake up to the amazing waste of money and opportunities this scheme represents, I think the feed-in tariff scandal will go the same way.
One of the more sophisticated responses came from my old sparring partner Jeremy Leggett, chairman of the installation company Solar Century. He managed to ignore most of my arguments, but never mind. Here is the fork he is impaled on. Either solar photovoltaic (PV) power in the United Kingdom is, as he claims, a cheap, efficient technology, or it isn’t. If it is, why should we be subsidising it to the tune of 41p per kilowatt hour? If it needs this subsidy, it is neither cheap nor efficient. If it doesn’t need it, the feed-in tariffs are even more of a swindle than I thought.
A recent paper Leggett helped to write (pdf) claims that solar PV will achieve “grid parity” for homeowners in 2013. This means that the electricity produced, when all costs are taken into account, will be no more expensive than the electricity we buy from the grid. Assuming we can agree on terms and measurement, I have £100 that says his prediction won’t come true. Will Leggett accept my bet?
But here again he runs into the same contradiction. If Jeremy really believed his sales pitch, he would be calling for the feed-in tariff for new installations to be scrapped in 2013, as it would then be redundant. But the government does not share his view. Its table of tariffs shows that in 2013 it will pay 38p/kWh for new retrofitted PV: a decline of just 8% from this year’s figure, rather than the 56% Leggett anticipates.
If he has the courage of his convictions, Leggett should demand that the tariff is either abandoned that year or brought down to 18p, which is what his paper claims (though without attribution) grid-based electricity will cost then. He can’t have it both ways: defending the tariff while suggesting that the tariff won’t be necessary.
Leggett maintains that:
The companies who manufacture solar PV in the UK have shown that putting solar panels on all available building surfaces would generate more electricity in a year, under typical cloudy British skies, than the entire electricity consumption of our energy-profligate nation.
We could argue about that, but even if it were true it would be a ridiculous thing to do if, as the government’s tariffs suggest, solar PV costs nine times as much as other renewables. Every pound spent on PV is a pound not spent on a more effective technology. You need to spend £9 on solar to have the same impact as £1 spent on largescale wind or hydro. Does Leggett dispute these figures? If so he should, again, be campaigning against the feed-in tariffs.
He argues that:
Monbiot gets the precedent for the British government’s solar ‘cash-back’ scheme – the German feed-in tariff – upside down … all feed-in tariffs are supposed to decline
Indeed they are. But the German reduction was not a planned, gradual drawdown of the subsidy, but a sudden, additional cut. In fact the government had originally pressed for a 40% cut, but was beaten down to 16% by industry lobbying. The realisation in Germany, after 10 years of minimal returns, that they have been getting shockingly bad value for money from their scheme coincides with the launching of the same fiasco in the UK. Are we incapable of learning from other people’s mistakes?
Leggett goes on to claim, again without attribution, that the Germans have “created over 50,000 jobs in solar PV alone.” Of course you could justify any scheme with the creation of jobs: even employing people to throw bundles of banknotes into power station furnaces. But Leggett is confusing gross jobs created with net jobs. Given that tax money like this is necessarily scarce, you have to consider the opportunity costs of using the tariff for solar PV. As solar is capital intensive (the units are expensive) it is likely to employ fewer people than a labour-intensive, capital-light programme such as insulating and draft-proofing people’s homes. In this respect it could well be the case, as the paper in Energy Policy suggests, that Germany’s solar programme has destroyed more jobs than it has created.
The other question this raises is jobs where? Many of the panels Germany installed were manufactured in China and Japan. I have nothing against stimulating employment in those countries, but I think the electricity users who have to pay for the tariff would be rather put out to discover that the jobs the government says it will create are actually on the other side of the world.
Which brings us to his final point: who pays? Leggett suggests that it’s untrue that the poor will carry the costs of this scheme, as all electricity users must contribute. Yes, but all electricity users include the poor who a) often pay more for their power than better-off people and b) being less likely to own their homes or to afford the £10-12K needed to install solar panels are the least likely to benefit from the scheme. Their bills will rise just like everyone else’s to pay for a scheme which will mostly benefit the middle classes. This is why it is deeply regressive.
I won’t list all the points Leggett fails to address – his space was limited - but the killer fact he ignores is this: feed-in tariffs cannot reduce our carbon emissions by 1g while the UK remains within the European emissions trading scheme. This is because any savings they make will be offset by the extra emissions that other industries will be allowed to release. Either we are in the trading scheme and must make it work, in which case measures like the tariff are redundant, or we accept that it doesn’t work and get out of it. But at the moment all the feed-in tariff can do is to subsidise polluting industries to produce more greenhouse gases.
To the greens who accuse me of treachery I say this: we do not have a moral obligation to support all forms of renewable energy, however inefficient and expensive they may be. We do have a moral obligation not to be blinded by sentiment. We owe it to the public, and to our credibility, to support the schemes which work, fairly and cheaply, and reject the schemes which cost a fortune and make no difference.
www.monbiot.com

Rise in UK carbon emissions disputed by report

Soil deposits of CO2 ‘not fuelling global warming yet – but will in future’
The Observer, Sunday 7 March 2010

A major study for the UK government has cast doubt over claims that rising temperatures are causing soil to pump greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further fuelling global warming.
In 2005 it was reported in the science journal Nature that over the past 25 years 100m tonnes of carbon dioxide had been released by the soil of England and Wales. The figure cancelled out all emissions cuts in the UK since 1990.
However, a national survey of the soils of Great Britain, funded by the department for environment food and rural affairs, claims to have found no net loss of carbon over approximately the same period.
Scientists have now proposed that a special study group, with an independent statistical expert, should examine why the reports differ and which result is more likely to be correct.
The latest questions follow weeks of claims that predictions about the impacts of climate change have been overstated or miscalculated, including the melting of Himalayan glaciers, and separate allegations of bias based on leaked emails from scientists at the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia.
The author of the latest report, Professor Bridget Emmett of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), warned that finding there had been no loss of carbon so far should not be taken to mean the absence of a threat. In the long term, scientists predict a “tipping point” when the faster activity of microbes in warmer soils starts to generate more CO2 than can be absorbed by plants.
“That’s when you start losing carbon as a whole,” said Emmett. “Most of the models say that will be later this century.”
The 2005 report in Nature was based on the National Soil Inventory, carried out initially between 1978 and 1983, and again from 1994 to 2003, by the National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University. That study said that from 1978 to 2003 there had been an estimated loss of 4m tonnes of carbon a year from the soils of England and Wales, and the researchers estimated that, because of the higher carbon content of Scotland’s peaty soils, the annual loss from the UK as a whole was 13m tonnes a year. The fact that the losses occurred across all types of land use suggested a link to climate change, said the team.
At that time, one of the research team, Professor Guy Kirk of Cranfield University, told a conference: “It had been reckoned that the CO2 fertilisation effect was offsetting about 25% of the direct human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. It was reckoned that the soil temperature emission effect would catch up in maybe 10 to 50 years’ time. We are showing that it seems to be happening rather faster than that.”
The latest report by the CEH, just released as part of the ongoing analysis of the 2007 Countryside Survey of Great Britain, compared studies between 1978 and 2007. It found carbon concentration in the top 15cm of soil increased over the first two decades, and decreased between 1998 and 2007. The only exception was arable land, where there was a net loss of carbon, probably because of disruption by ploughing.
“Overall there was no change in carbon concentration … and [we] cannot confirm the loss reported by the National Soil Inventory,” states the report.
Kirk told the Guardian that the Cranfield team were still “confident in our results [that] there was a net loss of carbon”. But he said subsequent studies had suggested that “at best” 10% of the loss of carbon was due to climate change, and the rest was due to changes in land use and management, such as conversion of grassland to crops.
Reasons being examined for the difference in results include where and how samples were chosen and analysed and how the data was compiled.
“The amount of carbon in topsoils across England and Wales is about 2bn tonnes, so detecting a change of even 4m tonnes per year is very challenging,” said Emmett. “Small differences in methods between the two surveys can therefore have a large effect.”

How public trust in climate scientists can be restored

The Met Office’s review of latest climate research will strengthen the case for human-induced climate change

Chris Huntingford
The Guardian, Friday 5 March 2010
We know from many long-term records of environmental change (for instance, analysis of bubbles of air trapped in ice cores) that planet Earth is a truly remarkable “living” entity. The climate has had both warm and cold periods in the past. But what is different about the present is the speed at which the planet is warming.
Our computer simulations can only recreate this rapid warming when the addition of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human sources is included. If this warming continues, we may reach a situation where very unwelcome changes occur to our weather patterns, which for developing nations could cause major difficulties with food and water security.
So what are the potential flaws in this line of argument? First we have to completely trust the temperature measurement records, such as those developed by colleagues at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. Although their temperature numbers are very similar to those produced by other American groups, the revisiting of their analysis is in many ways to be welcomed. I cannot imagine what my colleagues at CRU are going through at the moment, but although we cannot pre-empt any form of inquiry, most climate researchers believe that their analysis will have been shown to be accurate.
Second there is the question of whether major policy decisions should really be made on the basis of simulations of the climate system, as performed on a few specialised computers dotted around the world? There are compelling reasons to trust these computer models, but at the same time, more direct evidence underpinning the claim that climate is changing is needed. That is why the work by Peter Stott and colleagues is important. It looks beyond temperature to other artefacts of a changing environment. Direct measurements show decreasing amounts of Arctic sea ice, changes in rainfall patterns and associated levels of moisture in the atmosphere, rapid variations in ocean levels of saltiness. All of these things can be attributed to impacts of global warming. They are all additional strands of evidence that climate change remains a concern.
The recent furore surrounding the science of climate change is difficult for those working on the subject, yet most of us do think that ultimately something good will come from this. There certainly has to be more openness about the underpinning research. To preserve public confidence, we must “buy out” the copyright from research journals of key papers so that these can be freely available to all for inspection. Datasets must also become more available for general scrutiny. Effort should also be made to avoid statements on climate change that could, inadvertently, be perceived as scare-mongering. Researchers need to calmly present their findings on climate change as an issue, among many others facing the world, on which well-considered collective thought and economic or technical action is likely to be needed.
I sincerely hope we can win back the trust of the public. If we do so, then hopefully society will keep emissions on a pathway that ensures a safe climate for future generations while avoiding any damage to the global economy.
• Dr Chris Huntingford is a climate change researcher working at Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

Togo Opposition Rejects Poll Results

Sunday, March 07, 2010
20:56 Mecca time, 17:56 GMT

Togo opposition rejects poll result

Fabre has vowed the opposition will stage protests over the election result

Togo’s political opposition has said it will contest the results of the country’s election, which returned Faure Gnassingbe, the incumbent president, as leader of the West African state.

The opposition’s complaint came on Sunday, a day after Togo’s election commission said Gnassingbe had won 1.2 million of the two million votes cast, over 60 per cent of the vote.

“I do not recognise the so-called victory of Faure Gnassingbe,” Jean-Pierre Fabre, who heads the opposition Union of Forces for Change (UFC), told hundreds of supporters at his party the headquarters in Lome, Togo’s capital.

“I have never wanted to use violence, but if I am stolen from, I will not give up the fight … We are going to stage protests, we are not going to take this lying down.”

The electoral commission’s figures showed that Fabre scored about 692,000 votes, or almost 34 per cent of the vote.

Election dispute

Fabre said his party has proof the ruling party rigged the election in several ways, including intimidating opposition supporters and buying off other voters.

“The ruling party told our supporters that when they put their fingerprint on the ballot, they’re going to be able to come and find them,” he said.

“They gave money to buy people’s consciences, there is fraud on a massive scale, we have the proof in our possession.”

He vowed to present evidence of his claim in court.

In the immediate wake of the election, held on Thursday, both sides had claimed victory.

Then on Saturday police fired tear gas on some 200 protesters angry that the opposition party was trailing, Abalo Assih, a police spokesman, said.

The vote was seen as a key test of democracy in a region that in recent weeks has seen a coup in Niger and street riots over delayed elections in Ivory Coast.

Possible protests

International observers said the poll had gone smoothly, despite some procedural flaws. More than 3,000 local and nearly 500 European and West African observers monitored the election.

Gnassingbe, first took the presidency in 2002, after 38 years of authoritarian rule under Gnassingbe Eyadema, his father.

Tensions have risen in Lome as the president’s supporters have warned they are willing to fight back.

“They accuse us each time that we stole their votes, threatening to pour on the streets,” said Evariste Adoul, a pro-Gnassingbe activists.

“We shall show them that we also can take to the streets.”

Election officials have been trying to prevent a situation similar to Togo’s presidential election in 2005 when hundreds of people died in post-election violence.

The violence that followed that disputed vote left up to 800 dead according to various sources, but the UN put the toll at 400 to 500 deaths.

Yet parliamentary elections two years later were peaceful, raising hopes of an end to Togo’s long history of political violence and leading to the restoration of foreign aid.

Source: Agencies

Trek to gauge carbon’s impact on Arctic sealife

Two teams of explorers and scientists are on their way to the Arctic for the first international project to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in water beneath the ice.

Three British explorers will be airlifted to a remote location in the Arctic Ocean to start a 50-day trek towards the geographic North Pole in temperatures as low as minus 75 degrees Celsius, including wind chill.

A second team of international experts on ocean acidification will be working from a temporary ice base on Ellef Ringnes Island, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean near the Canadian coast.

Both teams will be drilling into the ice to collect water samples used to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the water at various depths, according to the director of the Catlin Arctic Survey, arctic explorer Pen Hadow.

“There is very little if any information about to what extent increasing levels of carbon dioxide in recent times has acidified the waters under the ice,” Hadow said.

Oceans are believed to absorb around one third of the CO2 in the atmosphere, according to the Fourth Assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Ocean acidification refers to the increasing acidity of sea water as carbon dioxide is absorbed from the earth’s atmosphere. The ocean’s acidity is measured by its pH level, which since 1750 has dropped by 0.1 units, according to the IPCC report.

Some scientists believe the ice acts as a cap that prevents carbon dioxide being absorbed into the water. Others believe carbon dioxide is able to move through pores in the ice into the water.

Part of the team’s research will include the permeability of sea ice to carbon dioxide and the likely impact the thawing of large areas of ice will have on future CO2 levels in the sea.

The last time the Catlin Arctic Surveyteam ventured into the Arctic, in 2009, they measured ice thickness and concluded that ice could stop forming over the Arctic Ocean during summer in as little as 20 years.

“The sea ice is looking like it’s not going to be a year round feature in the next 20 or 30 years. So the lid is coming off an ocean which is suddenly able to absorb carbon dioxide in a way that it hasn’t been able to before,” Hadow said.

This year’s expedition will also test the likely impact of rising carbon dioxide levels on microscopic sea life.

Zooplankton and phytoplankton will be exposed to levels of CO2 that some scientists say could be present in the oceans by 2100 if the world keeps emitting carbon dioxide at current levels.

“The prediction is that shell-based organisms will start to lose these shells because you’re creating more carbonic acid in the water,” said the survey’s science manager, Dr Tim Cullingford.

A research paper published in the Nature Geoscience earlier this month suggested that oceans are acidifying at their fastest rate in 65 million years.

Researchers from Bristol University compared the current rate of acidification to a sudden rise in temperatures at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary.

Then, surface ocean temperatures rose by up to six degrees Celsius within a few thousand years causing “widespread extinction” of organisms living deep down on the ocean floor.

“The widespread extinction of these ocean floor organisms during the Paleocene-Eocene greenhouse warming and acidification event tells us that similar extinctions in the future are possible,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Andy Ridgwell.

The report said laboratory tests showed that lower pH levels in the sea could result in the dissolution of shells, slower growth, muscle wastage and dwarfism which could have knock-on effects on the whole ecosystem.

The scientists at the Catlin Arctic Survey ice base will include experts from Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the European Project on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA), Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, Villefranche and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

On their return in late April, the data will be distributed to about 13 organizations for examination worldwide.

Source:
Cable Network News, “Trek to gauge carbon’s impact on Arctic sealife“, accessed March 7, 2010