1:54 p.m. | Updated The sun rose over the horizon at the North Pole last weekend and the six-month “day” just began there, making this a good time to check in on ice and climate trends up north. I can’t believe it’s seven years now since I spent three days camped on the ice pack near 90 degrees North with a rugged team of climate and cryosphere researchers trying to improve understanding of the complex interface between air, ice and water.

The latest research shows that while a decades-long trend toward thinner and sparser ice looks to continue, with warming from greenhouse gases and soot contributing to the change, expect a lot of variability along the way to a projected open-water summertime Arctic.

When the extent of the pack of sea ice drifting around the North Pole hit a remarkable low in 2007 (animation below), the resulting, and persistent, front-page thought was that the system was in a “death spiral” far more dramatic than any climate model had foreseen.

Even in 2007, some Arctic climate and ice specialists were warning that the ice retreat was “as much a result of ice moving as melting,” adding that the unpredicted changes could just as easily betray weaknesses in climate models as hints of some accelerating meltdown.

A new study scheduled for publication in Geophysical Research Letters supports the earlier research on the importance of winds in shaping the fate of sea ice both year to year and over recent decades. Read more…

Over at Climate Progress, the three-line headline this morning is:

Revkin: “The idea that we’re going to fix the climate change problem or solve global warming has always been a fantasy, totally wishful, from my standpoint.”

I’d like to thank Joe Romm for not jumping to conclusions based on what appears to be a substantial mashup of what I said in my first speech on “two decades of greenhouse diplomacy — and rising greenhouse emissions.” (I need to see a transcript to believe I completely rejected a role for laws and regulations, for instance. Anyone have one?) This was a roll-out of a new talk built on notes. I’m writing a series of posts building on this talk, which you’ll see here as I introduce some new directions for Dot Earth starting next month.

On the overarching question of “solving” the climate problem, I’m sure Joe would agree that global warming is inevitably going to be, at best, managed — not “fixed” — given the trajectories for emissions in a world inexorably headed toward roughly nine billion people seeking energy-enabled lives and with substantial warming already in the pipeline, according to a heap of research.

As I mentioned in my talk, it’s not hard to find signals that diplomatic and legislative efforts are destined to be inadequate and new approaches are needed. When Friends of the Earth (U.K.) says that some geo-engineering options need to be explored (cloud management and direct air capture of carbon dioxide) you know they’re not counting on emissions pledges.

On climate adaptation, you can read a snippet below from my text notes from the talk on why the word is deeply problematic, and “climate resilience” is perhaps a better goal. (This is all separate from considering how to curb emissions.)

There are several problems with the word, only one of which is the lack of predictability in what is to come in many places (outside of sea-level rise, where the impacts are straightforward, but the pace remains uncertain). Read more…

March 20, 11:15 p.m. | Updated A couple of readers have noted a news release from the government of Iceland explaining that the records showing shipments of whale meal to Denmark were in error and the shipments were actually fishmeal. Here’s the relevant quote:

Regarding the alleged illegal exports of whale meal to Denmark, it has now been confirmed that the two shipments, 775 kilos of meal in January 2009 and 22,750 kilos of meal in March 2009, were fish meal, wrongly quoted in export declarations by the Icelandic exporter as whale meal. Statistics Iceland has confirmed that this will be corrected on their website, effective on 31 March 2010 when revised figures for 2009 will be published. Information regarding this matter will also be conveyed to the Danish Authorities.

March 19 | This is a query for contacts in Denmark or around the European Union who might know whether there’s any way to track how ground-up whale, called whale meal, ends up being used after it’s imported from Iceland.

The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society has posted Icelandic government records showing sales of whale meat, oil and meal included about 26 tons of whale meal bound for Denmark in 2009. The shipments are part of a growing international trade in whale and whale products — Japan is by far the dominant buyer — that has prompted growing criticism from the conservation group and other whale campaigners.

“Iceland has apparently returned to the business of mincing whales to make meal, and seems to be testing out potential markets for their products,” said Chris Butler-Stroud of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. “All governments must be vigilant and take the strongest possible steps to prevent this trade continuing.”
Read more…

Andrew C. Revkin Istanbul is full of buildings vulnerable to a predicted earthquake.

Ali Ağaoğlu, a billionaire developer in Turkey, caused a stir last year when he admitted that his family’s company – and most other developers –routinely used inappropriate materials during a building boom in Istanbul in recent decades, creating enormous vulnerability because of the long history of powerful earthquakes in the sprawling city.

I wasn’t able to reach him when I researched my article on the city’s efforts to limit losses when the next earthquake strikes (as it inevitably will), but we were able to talk a few days ago by Skype video. Mr. Ağaoğlu defended proposals to replace hundreds of thousands of shoddy structures with stronger buildings as part of a wave of gentrification, and warned other fast-growing cities in harm’s way to adopt better planning and standards. Here’s a transcript of our chat (carried out with the aid of a translator), with a few edits for clarity and compression:

For several years now I’ve been trying to understand ways to reduce vulnerabilities to earthquakes in big cities in developing countries, including Istanbul. Last year, in an interview with a Turkish newspaper, you spelled out clearly that it was normal, when many buildings were erected, to use materials that you would not use now. That’s a difficult position to be in.

I am ‘coming from the kitchen’ in this business, as we say, meaning all my family, under my father, were also a part of this sector, the construction sector. I grew up working with him, witnessing all of the development at that time. I’m not in a position to regret what I’ve said. The fact is that 70 percent of all the settlements in Istanbul, I would say, are vulnerable to a major earthquake. This is a diagnosis. Without the proper diagnosis treating a patient is not possible. The construction materials used for various settlements in different parts of Istanbul used to be of poor quality. Read more…

Here’s another “Your Dot” installment, highlighting a couple of readers’ views of the climate-energy challenge. Robert Robinson, from upstate New York, echoes concerns expressed here by Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University, who notes that slow environmental changes are absorbed by society incrementally in ways that work against calls for substantial shifts in policy. Len Arends of San Bruno, Calif., compares rising human awareness of a looming problem driven by an unnecessary dependency to the situation of a person entering the first step of a 12-step rehab program.

Len Arends:

Why I take human-accelerated global warming seriously …

• The “hockey stick” record of temperature change remains valid despite an intense, decade-long critical assault. This is the linchpin: if the difference between pre-industrial and modern temperatures is not as dramatic as this analysis indicates — i.e. if modern GLOBAL temperatures are comparable to those of the Medieval Warm Period (named for a REGIONAL phenomenon) — then there is little need for urgency.

• No change in the planet’s energy equation explains the observed climate results nearly as well as the increase in atmospheric CO2 caused by human industry.

• Such unprecedented rising temperatures — combined with anticipated rapid industrialization of the developing world — suggests we run a great risk of pushing the climate past a “tipping point” within a lifetime.

• If global civilization cannot continue to adjust to these climate changes in an evolutionary manner, then revolutionary means (economic depression, famine, mass migration, unilateral seizure of resources, unilateral efforts at geo-engineering) leave us and our descendants vulnerable to perpetual warfare, with ever-increasing chances of unrestrained nuclear exchanges. Read more…

For several years, Rhett Herman, a physics professor at Radford University, has been leading students on an expedition each spring break to study the condition of the sea ice off the coast near Barrow, Alaska. A blog of this year’s trip and photos and journals from previous trips are online. Below you can read a “Dot Earth postcard” Dr. Herman sent last week (they’ve just returned home). I’ll be adding some of the students’ post-trip thoughts in the comments section. The photo below, by Dr. Herman, shows students using an OhmMapper to generate a cross section view of the ice beneath their feet. (Mythianne Shelton hauling the gear, Susan Christopher at the tail end of the array and Jason McLarty nearby.)

If you know of students and teachers at any level involved in field work related to the core questions explored on Dot Earth, encourage them to send a postcard from the field (video, imagery, even audio clips accepted). Ever since my high school biology teacher in East Greenwich, R.I., got our class hooked up with state natural resources scientists doing a study of a salt marsh, I’ve understood the educational value of getting dirty and wet.

From Rhett Herman, Barrow, Alaksa:

I’m teaching a class at Radford University called Physics 450—Arctic Geophysics. This class is built around a trip to Barrow, Alaska, to do some real research on the structure and possible health of the polar sea ice. The students learned how to use the equipment and process the data before we left, do the research at the beach (yes, we’re staying on the beach just like so many college students now), and then we do a lot of data processing after the trip so that we can present it to the university in a forum in mid April.

Here is an image from the data that we got today [March 9] with the OhmMapper (made by Geometrics, Inc.).

The OhmMapper gives what is essentially a CAT-scan-like image (after a lot of data processing) showing the different electrical properties of whatever is beneath your feet. Solid ice is a lousy electrical conductor while (salty) seawater is a good electrical conductor. So when we see the electrical conduction go from bad to good, and all things between, we can see the structure of the sea ice. Read more…

Letter-signing campaigns are not necessarily an effective way to shift attitudes on scientific institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, given that any entrenched camp in the climate policy fight can pull together heaps of signatures from people with PhDs.

But at least a few hundred scientists and climate policy specialists (so far) appear to be convinced that it can’t hurt to try. Here’s “An Open Letter from Scientists in the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Errors Contained in the Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007.”

I hope you’ll read the whole thing. It goes well beyond defending the integrity of the process and echoes earlier calls, some made by longtime panel contributors, for a series of changes that could reduce the chances that outright errors and errors of omission will creep in when the panel’s fifth set of assessments is written in the next three years. (It expressly refrains from defending or critiquing how the panel selects lead authors and contributors.) Here are several notable excerpts.

– A line clearly chastising the leadership of the panel for its slow and defensive response to criticisms in recent months:

Despite its excellent performance for accurately reporting the state of the science, we certainly acknowledge that the I.P.C.C. should become more forthcoming in openly acknowledging errors in a timely fashion, and continuing to improve its assessment procedures to further lower the already very low rate of error.

- A line stressing that “the current temperature plateau” does not undercut projections of long-term warming:

Because the long-term warming trends are highly significant relative to our estimates of the magnitude of natural variability, the current decadal period of stable global mean temperature does nothing to alter a fundamental conclusion from the AR4: warming has unequivocally been observed and documented. Moreover, well-understood lags in the responsiveness of the climate system to disturbances like greenhouse gas increases mean that the current temperature plateau will very likely not persist much longer.

- A line emphasizing the importance of promptly assessing and acknowledging outright errors or the inappropriate dropping of caveats while also rejecting claimed errors when the claims themselves prove ill-founded:

While striving to simplify technical details and summarize major points, some important qualifications were left behind. These errors of omission in the summary process should also be recognized and corrected. Other claims, like the one reported at the end of February suggesting that the AR4 did not mention the millions of more people who will see increases in water availability that were reported in the cited literature along with the millions of more people who will be at risk of water shortage, are simply not true.

Finally, the original signatories on the letter — all past authors on panel reports — called on the panel leadership to embrace the Web as a way to deal expediently and transparently with criticism, both justified and unjustified:

To this end, we urge the I.P.C.C. to put an erratum on its Web site that rectifies all errors that have been discovered in the text after publication…. The Web site should, as well, respond rapidly and openly when reports of errors in past assessments are themselves in error. We cannot let misperceptions fester any more than errors go uncorrected.

Charles Komanoff at a bike rental shop in Guangzhao, China.

Charles Komanoff is an environment, energy, transportation and traffic specialist, who for decades has focused on New York City. But last week he was in China, helping the country explore approaches — like congestion pricing — to prevent  vehicle overload in city centers. Mr. Komanoff helped shape and promote a pricing strategy in New York, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought to start charging drivers for access to Manhattan’s busiest blocks. The effort failed when it was opposed by state officials beholden to car-owning commuters. Below, you can read a “Dot Earth postcard” from Mr. Komanoff, describing his experience there (he shot the photo in a traffic jam):

I’m in Guangzhou, China’s third largest city, for an “International Symposium on Analysis and Countermeasures of Traffic Congestion in Urban Centers.” Although the talks run the transportation gamut from infrastructure to travel-demand management, the purpose of the meeting is to explore congestion pricing as a possible antidote to traffic that is snarling China’s booming cities.

Guangzhou’s new Bus Rapid Transit system is barely a month old, yet its high-speed service, with pre-paid boarding and exclusive lanes, is already attracting 800,000 passengers a day — half as many people as ride New York City transit buses. Five subway lines have been built since 1999, and four more are slated to open in the next several years. I toured these facilities this week and also saw real-time traffic information systems that dispatch buses and taxis and help police clear traffic crashes.

Yet this dizzying growth in smart transit infrastructure is unlikely to stem the deterioration in Guangzhou’s traffic conditions. Read more…

Dale R. McIntyre of Bartlesville, Okla., a frequent contributor, sent in the following description of a bison encounter as a comment on my piece exploring a plan to rebuild wild bison populations in the West. I thought it was worth highlighting as an example of a powerful personal interaction with the planet’s other inhabitants and would love to use this “Your Dot” post as an invitation to others to describe experiences they’ve had that have changed how they think or behave in relation to the wider environment.

Librado Romero/ The New York Times TOP Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge near Prairie City, Iowa. BOTTOM The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is home to 2,460 bison, below, a herd that has grown from the 300 reintroduced there in 1993.

There is a magnificent herd of more than 2,500 bison which populates the 39,000-acre Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, Okla.

The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is already doing exactly what you describe in this posting; returning the land to a state of nature with the dominant species, the bison, in its proper place.

Last September I drove my family through the winding gravel roads of the preserve. The rolling prairie was covered with thousands of acres of wildflowers, bluebonnets and Indian Paint Brushes, in colors vivid enough to delight Chagall. Hundreds of bison grazed the low hills.

Just beside the road we noticed an enormous old bull buffalo, standing as tall, at his hump, as I am. This grizzled old patriarch was snorting and rolling his shoulders and wallowing in the dust. We stopped to watch. Read more…

Women at some environmentally conscious nonprofits are indignant that a new group overseeing financing for a United Nations climate change effort has 19 members — none of them women.

The group’s task is to allocate funds to developing countries to help mitigate the impact of climate change.

“It includes equal representation between industrialized countries and developing countries,” Elizabeth Becker, a member of Oxfam America, and Suzanne Ehlers, president of Population Action International, wrote in a joint blog post on Grist. “But what it does not include at all is women.”

The group’s members were appointed by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, after consultation with governments, said Dan Shepard, a United Nations spokesman. It will be led by two prime ministers, Gordon Brown of Britain and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia.

Read more…

A group of scientists has proposed creating a new unit for avoided electricity use, named for Arthur Rosenfeld.* (The photo above, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shows Dr. Rosenfeld in 1973.) The details are here:

Pioneering French physicists Marie and Pierre Curie have the curie, a unit of radioactivity, named after them. Renowned inventor Nikola Tesla is honored with the tesla, which measures a magnetic field. And now, the Rosenfeld, proposed as a unit for electricity savings, will be named after the man seen by many people as the godfather of energy efficiency, Arthur Rosenfeld. “In keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question,” a group of scientists propose today in a refereed article in Environmental Research Letters to define the Rosenfeld as electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year, the amount needed to replace the annual generation of a 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant. Read more….

[* A reader, Josh King, noticed the faulty original headline referred to energy when this unit, kilowatt-hours per year, is a unit of power.]

Louis Psihoyos, the former National Geographic photographer who won an Oscar on Sunday for “The Cove,” his first documentary film, sat down for a conversation with me at the Asia Society on Tuesday on various aspects of the ongoing slaughter of dolphins in Japan and his team’s work exposing the serving of Sei whale meat at The Hump, a sushi restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. Here’s video of the discussion:

Among other things, Mr. Psihoyos predicted that Japan would be more likely to shut down the seasonal capture and killing of thousands of dolphins because of the human health implications of eating dolphin meat — which the film shows is laced with high levels of mercury — than because of complaints about cruelty in the killing of the marine mammals, which the film captures in wrenching detail.

“I don’t think we are going to win this issue in Japan on an animal rights issue,” he said. “To me, we are going to win it on the humanitarian reasons. It is a crime against humanity when people are serving poison as food.”

He also discussed the connection between the dolphin killing and the booming worldwide business of marine mammal shows at aquariums and zoos that prompts the dolphin roundups in the first place (the animals that are killed are those not bought in auctions for live dolphin shows). Read more…

3:20 p.m. | Updated The InterAcademy Council, the global association of national science academies, is going to assess how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change undertakes its assessments of climate science and policy choices. The details are on the Web site of the National Academies. Here’s the news story in The Times.

It’s hard to see a down side to this effort. Along with examining the panel’s practices, from how it decides on levels of certainty to how it polices referenced research, it’d be great to see the review include an examination of any missing focal points in the periodic climate reviews.

One evident gap I’ve noted off and on is the lack of a substantial focus on how humans perceive and respond to long-term and uncertainty-laden environmental risks. (See “Is the Climate Problem in Our Heads?) The more I talk to social scientists and psychologists about humanity’s growing pains in its current population and appetite surge, the more it’s clear that the “market failures” described by economists examining environmental issues derive from fundamental patterns of behavior rooted deep in the brain. Read more…

For years, there’s been a building drumbeat of criticism of the media for failing to tell the climate story “right,” and thus perpetuating public disengagement and, in turn, allowing elected officials to relax and avoid pushing for meaningful actions to blunt greenhouse emissions.

Tom Yulsman of the University of Colorado

Tom Yulsman, with whom I worked at Science Digest magazine in the early 1980s, when science journalism was a booming enterprise, has been exploring the (increasingly ugly) interface of science, media and public policy on the Center for Environmental Journalism blog. (He teaches journalism at the University of Colorado.) He’s also been part of an ongoing e-mail discussion with a batch of communicators and communications researchers over the way climate scientists and their institutions have reacted to recent assaults. Here’s a brief commentary from Tom (an old friend) assessing sources of climate confusion and policy stasis, and the attitudes of the climate scientists whose private views were revealed in a batch of leaked e-mail messages.

Recent attacks by skeptics like Marc Morano, and the devolution of discourse on climate change back to the simplistic “global warming: yes or no?” debate, has prompted some prominent scientists to push back. That much is clear from the recent series of email exchanges between a group of scientists made public by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. [Here's a pdf file of the full text of the e-mail messages.] Read more…

March 20 | Updated It appears that intense public pressure and adverse publicity have prompted the owners of the Hump Restaurant, caught serving whale sushi, to shut it down. The restaurant was famed for exotic dishes, including serving fish alive:

One definition of chutzpah: The day after a team of activist filmmakers garner an Academy Award for “The Cove,” the documentary showing in wrenching detail the slaughter of hundreds of dolphins in a Japanese town, they disclose a sting operation they conducted with law enforcement officials at one of the hottest sushi bars in Santa Monica, Calif. — in which they say they confirmed that Sei whale meat was on the menu. Read the details in Jennifer Steinhauer’s Times story. Here’s a snippet:

Their work, undertaken in large part here last week as the filmmakers gathered for the Academy Awards ceremony, was coordinated with law enforcement officials, who said Monday that they were likely to bring charges against the restaurant, the Hump, for violating federal laws against selling marine mammals.

“We’re moving forward rapidly,” said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the United States attorney for the Central District of California. Mr. Mrozek declined to say what charges could be brought against the restaurant, but said they could come as early as this week.

In the clash of two Southern California cultures — sushi aficionados and hard-core animal lovers — the animal lovers have thrown a hard punch.

Elsewhere in the world, the appetites and indulgences of wealthy consumers are sustaining the flow of gorilla hands and other bush meat from African forests to swelling cities and the flow of exotic, endangered species to medicinal products companies and restaurants in Asia. Is it jarring, or not, to see such activity here?

The disclosure in California comes as the International Whaling Commission considers a compromise that would end the longstanding moratorium on commercial whaling in return for Japan and other whaling countries reducing* their independent whale hunts. On his Facebook page, Carl Safina, the author and ocean campaigner, put up a link to the Times article on the sushi find and said: “This is why whale hunting must be crushed once and for all — not expanded.”

[1:15 p.m. | Updated: *The marine biologist Sidney Holt wrote in to correct my original description of this proposal (that Japan Iceland and Norway would stop their independent whaling). As he explains: "They would at most agree to reduce their catches somewhat, below present levels. The proposal is an absolute disaster for 50 years of effort to bring whaling under control, if not to end it, mostly led by the U.S.A. And a huge disgrace to this Administration for supporting the dreadful 'deal'."]