America’s first climate refugees: Alaska native villages threatened with coastal erosion – ‘It’s real, global warming, it’s real’

By Suzanne Goldenberg in Newtok, Alaska13 May 2013 (Guardian) – Sabrina Warner keeps having the same nightmare: a huge wave rearing up out of the water and crashing over her home, forcing her to swim for her life with her toddler son. “I dream about the water coming in,” she said. The landscape in winter […]

When science goes silent: With the muzzling of scientists in Canada, Harper’s obsession with controlling the message verges on the Orwellian

By Jonathon Gatehouse3 May 2013 (Maclean’s) – As far as the government scientist was concerned, it was a bit of fluff: an early morning interview about great white sharks last summer with Canada AM, the kind of innocuous and totally apolitical media commentary the man used to deliver 30 times or more each year as […]

Arctic Ocean ‘acidifying rapidly’ – ‘Even if we stop emissions now, acidification will last tens of thousands of years. It is a very big experiment.’

By Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst6 May 2013 (BBC) – The Arctic seas are being made rapidly more acidic by carbon-dioxide emissions, according to a new report. Scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) monitored widespread changes in ocean chemistry in the region. They say even if CO2 emissions stopped now, it would take […]

World Meteorological Organization confirms 2012 was ninth warmest year on record – ‘The sustained warming of the lower atmosphere is a worrisome sign’

GENEVA, 2 May 2013 (WMO) The World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate says that 2012 joined the ten previous years as one of the warmest — at ninth place — on record despite the cooling influence of a La Niña episode early in the year. The 2012 global land and […]

Accord would regulate fishing in Arctic waters as sea ice melts away

By ANDREW E. KRAMER 16 April 2013 MOSCOW (The New York Times) – It was once protected by ice. Now regulation will have to do the work. The governments of the five countries with coastline on the Arctic have concluded that enough of the polar ice cap now melts regularly in the summertime that an […]

As Arctic ice melts, it’s a free-for-all for oil … and mammoth tusks

14 April 2013 (NPR) – It’s widely known that the world’s icecaps are melting. While most people are focused on what we’re losing, some have considered what might be gained by the disappearance of all that ice. In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey released a report estimating that 13 percent of the world’s remaining undiscovered […]

Arctic nearly free of summer sea ice during first half of 21st century: NOAA study

12 April 2013 (NOAA) – For scientists studying summer sea ice in the Arctic, it’s not a question of “if” there will be nearly ice-free summers, but “when.” And two scientists say that “when” is sooner than many thought — before 2050 and possibly within the next decade or two. James Overland of NOAA’s Pacific […]

Phil Plait: The march of antireality continues

By Phil Plait5 April 2013 “Against unreason, the gods themselves contend in vain.” —with apologies to Friedrich Schiller (Slate.com) – Lately I’ve been trying to write more about science, rather than write about those who attack it. I love science, and I love promoting it. It gives us wonder, knowledge, advances in technology and medicine, […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of extensive ice fractures in the Beaufort Sea

[So much for the “recovery” of Arctic sea ice that the antiscience blogs keep predicting. –Des] By Adam Voiland29 March 2013 (NASA) – The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this view of extensive sea-ice fracturing off the northern coast of Alaska. The event began in late-January and spread […]

Scientists link frozen spring to dramatic Arctic sea ice loss – ‘This is what is affecting the jet stream and leading to the extreme weather we are seeing in mid-latitudes’

By John Vidal, environment editor 25 March 2013 (guardian.co.uk) – Climate scientists have linked the massive snowstorms and bitter spring weather now being experienced across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice. Both the extent and the volume of the sea ice that forms and […]

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