Current Sea Ice August 2009

When I last posted on the sea ice thirty days ago, I noted that it had taken a sudden dip making a repeat of 2007 possible. Well here we are and it is certainly going to be close.

It may not be as energetic as 2007 but there is less to work on so it is easier to get the same result. I have included the link to the map I like and it is just updated. The North East passage is wide open except at the usual chokepoint. The North West passage is choked with broken multi year ice busily melting and will not likely clear this year. I got that right also.

Once again folks are standing on a very few remaining feet of ice that is disappearing at the rate of six inches per year and stating that we have twenty or more years to wait. At least they are not claiming today that it will take ninety years.

The remaining question is the present state of the multi year ice in the main intact bulk of the sea ice. This zone is large, but all the peripheral ice looks to disappear pretty quickly. It now becomes important to discover what is meant by sixty percent and the like. If the core is still holding up, then it has a ways to go before it finally breaks up. We will still have wide open passages, but possible injection of some thick ice depending on winds.

The destruction of all thick ice will open the passages to icebreaker supported shipping most years.

There is now a lot that we do not know. It has been stated that the ice travels through the Arctic gyre. This may simply be not true. In that case, thick ice can linger in cold spots and avoid breakup. Fine modeling may show that a portion of the sea ice may be retained in a sub gyre that preferentially holds it for several years even if everything else gets melted.

The point today is that it is timely to ask these questions. A strong sub gyre could retain a significant pool of sea ice long after everything else has been cleared out. And I certainly do not count on anyone having mapped it very much.

http://www.socc.ca/cms/en/socc/seaIce/currentSeaIce.aspx

Vast expanses of Arctic ice melt in summer heat

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iwkYPqq0HlSqAe1ebSMegc4ZfTWQD99VINI00

By CHARLES J. HANLEY (AP) – 22 hours ago

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories — The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square miles (square kilometers) of ice on Sunday in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching through satellite eyes for a possible record low polar ice cap.

From the barren Arctic shore of this village in Canada's far northwest, 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) north of Seattle, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice retreating more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend the ice edge lay some 80 miles (128 kilometers) at sea.

"Forty years ago, it was 40 miles (64 kilometers) out," said Gruben, 89, patriarch of a local contracting business.

Global average temperatures rose 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius) in the past century, but Arctic temperatures rose twice as much or even faster, almost certainly in good part because of manmade greenhouse gases, researchers say.

In late July the mercury soared to almost 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in this settlement of 900 Inuvialuit, the name for western Arctic Eskimos.

"The water was really warm," Gruben said. "The kids were swimming in the ocean."

As of Thursday, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported, the polar ice cap extended over 2.61 million square miles (6.75 million square kilometers) after having shrunk an average 41,000 square miles (106,000 square kilometers) a day in July -- equivalent to one Indiana or three Belgiums daily.

The rate of melt was similar to that of July 2007, the year when the ice cap dwindled to a record low minimum extent of 1.7 million square miles (4.3 million square kilometers) in September.

In its latest analysis, the Colorado-based NSIDC said Arctic atmospheric conditions this summer have been similar to those of the summer of 2007, including a high-pressure ridge that produced clear skies and strong melt in the Beaufort Sea, the arm of the Arctic Ocean off northern Alaska and northwestern Canada.

In July, "we saw acceleration in loss of ice," the U.S. center's Walt Meier told The Associated Press. In recent days the pace has slowed, making a record-breaking final minimum "less likely but still possible," he said.

Scientists say the makeup of the frozen polar sea has shifted significantly the past few years, as thick multiyear ice has given way as the Arctic's dominant form to thin ice that comes and goes with each winter and summer.

The past few years have "signaled a fundamental change in the character of the ice and the Arctic climate," Meier said.

Ironically, the summer melts since 2007 appear to have allowed disintegrating but still thick multiyear ice to drift this year into the relatively narrow channels of the Northwest Passage, the east-west water route through Canada's Arctic islands. Usually impassable channels had been relatively ice-free the past two summers.

"We need some warm temperatures with easterly or southeasterly winds to break up and move this ice to the north," Mark Schrader, skipper of the sailboat "Ocean Watch," e-mailed The Associated Press from the west entrance to the passage.

The steel-hulled sailboat, with scientists joining it at stops along the way, is on a 25,000-mile (40,232-kilometer), foundation-financed circumnavigation of the Americas, to view and demonstrate the impact of climate change on the continents' environments.

Environmentalists worry, for example, that the ice-dependent polar bear will struggle to survive as the Arctic cap melts. Schrader reported seeing only one bear, an animal chased from the Arctic shore of Barrow, Alaska, that "swam close to Ocean Watch on its way out to sea."

Observation satellites' remote sensors will tell researchers in September whether the polar cap diminished this summer to its smallest size on record. Then the sun will begin to slip below the horizon for several months, and temperatures plunging in the polar darkness will freeze the surface of the sea again, leaving this and other Arctic coastlines in the grip of ice. Most of the sea ice will be new, thinner and weaker annual formations, however.

At a global conference last March in Copenhagen, scientists declared that climate change is occurring faster than had been anticipated, citing the fast-dying Arctic cap as one example. A month later, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted Arctic summers could be almost ice-free within 30 years, not at the century's end as earlier predicted.

Best Practise for Biochar

It has taken less than two years, but many voices are now been heard on the biochar front in support of using the method as a way to best sequester carbon and plausibly gain an advantage from the effort.

There continues to be some lingering concern as to the method’s efficiency for all prospective soils. My answer to that is very simple. First every farmer will want to do his own conformation of the process. Thus after one is able to convert available biomass into biochar one starts with a one acre patch or strip. This allows you to draw biomass from a much larger field and to readily concentrate the input. That way you can take it up to as high as fifteen percent and to test it out over three years. You can also then continue to broadly augment the remaining fields with a very low level of input to commence the process.

Once you understand the effect of fifteen percent, spread the acre out over two acres and repeat the process. This brings the concentration down below seven percent. Again evaluate the effect on the crops over three years. At this point, you fields are likely at one to two percent if you had plenty of biomass to work with and you have a fair comfort about were you want to end up at. At that point you adjust the two acres to the level you want.

This simple process allows the farmer to develop his own confidence in the process and never risk any thing more than a single acre if that. It is a lot less scary than using roundup, and I assure you that most farmers acted just like I described with that. After all, few could read the related scientific literature very well.

This editorial confirms that others are connecting the dots when it comes to biochar. No one has picked up yet on my method of forming an earthen kiln from dried out corn stover and using the roots to form the kiln walls. I suspect that was the method used to expand its usage by the Amazonian Indios. It was not overly necessary in the garden itself but its application would generate a best result for little extra effort. In the fields however, it was a necessity. Maize and cassava were the two principal crops according to the archeological record over the time periods involved and maize is otherwise a surprise in this environment.

Most likely, state taxation drove its adoption and the establishment of larger fields. Thus a method that also preserved fertility was core to the economy.

We so far have no cultural confirmation of the three sisters culture used in North America and little in the archeological record, but it seems reasonable that method also dominated there.

The reason that I bring this topic up is that a family with only the land and no significant tools for making biochar can easily make it with their bare hands if it is necessary and thus secure a patch of fertile tropical soils to themselves. Therefore, it is simple to encourage this technology world wide. In fact, it is the farmers already practicing industrial farming who will likely have the most difficulty in implementing this method.


Editorial

Nature Reports Climate Change

Published online: 2 June 2009 doi:10.1038/climate.2009.53

Best practice for biochar

Olive Heffernan

http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0906/full/climate.2009.53.html

With just six months left to go, all sectors are vying for a place at the table in Copenhagen, where negotiators will begin sketching what should eventually become an all-embracing climate deal. While some players are seeking assistance in adapting to the impacts of climate change (page 68), others are hoping to stake a claim in the emerging green economy (page 72).

The prospects of the latter are bright for those involved in the nascent biochar industry, which plans to sequester vast quantities of carbon in soil using an ancient Amazonian agricultural practice and to sell the latent emissions as credits on a global carbon market.

The concept is simple: if terra preta — or charcoal-enriched soil — was re-created globally, as much as 6 billion tonnes of CO2 could be prevented from entering the atmosphere annually, a substantial fraction of the 8–10 billion tonnes emitted each year by humans. Proponents, who include no small number of world-class climate scientists, say that burying biochar not only would slow the rate of warming, it would enhance soil fertility — and the charcoal-making process could produce sustainable biofuels to boot.

In late May, the United Nations released its draft negotiating text for Copenhagen (UNFCCC document FCCC/AWGLCA/2009/8), which specified that biochar should be considered eligible as an advanced mitigation option under a post-Kyoto treaty. Should negotiators — who will discuss the document over the coming weeks in Bonn and again in Copenhagen — find the suggestion favourable, the biochar industry will unavoidably become a legitimate source of tradable carbon credits.

And why not? Burying biochar could be the closest contender yet for a silver-bullet solution to climate change (Guardian 13 March 2009), in which case its deployment can't come quickly enough. And unlike some of the more technologically complex methods of sequestering greenhouse gases, such as carbon capture and storage, it could, in theory at least, be easily adopted worldwide through small- and medium-scale operations.

But despite its astounding potential, caution is warranted in implementing biochar on any sizeable scale. Though re-creating terra preta sounds simple, recent research suggests that modern-day soils may respond less well to the treatment and that the carbon may escape sooner than anticipated. On these questions alone, all of the evidence is not in. Yet we clearly don't have the luxury of time to answer them definitively.

The recent exuberance over biochar is reminiscent of the earlier fervour over biofuels, as critics have been eager to highlight (Guardian 24 March 2009). But both face some of the same problems — most controversially, the need for land should carbon credits command a high enough price — suggesting there is scope here to learn from previous errors.

What's now needed is an international code of best practice for biochar that evolves as knowledge comes in. For a start, this would clearly define acceptable land-use policy for plantations, as well as a lower limit on carbon sequestered from those claiming certification. Inclusion in a global climate deal will certainly speed the adoption of biochar, but it can also help ensure that this solution is applied responsibly.

Canada to Launch Carbon Market

I was asked a couple of years ago to review the options available regarding a carbon market in Canada and immediately put it on the back burner, been well aware of the glacial speed by which government operates. Now we are going to attempt a market and that is at least a good start. The problem is not the idea so much as the gaming going on in the early going that makes the market very dicey.

The European history demonstrates this totally.

The first problem is that each country adopts a beggar thy neighbor approach in which they try to solve it by balancing their own books. And of course there is no real local solution to eliminating the carbon in the first place, anymore than there is an internal solution for North American crop production surplusess.

The only viable solution that can be applied universally is the use of biochar as a soil builder everywhere. The benefits are themselves huge and worthwhile in their own right. The measurement can be done comfortably every five years or so to a high level of precision. Even if the operator tries gaming the system, in the long run it will naturally average out.

Most important, it is done just as easy by those prepared to use hand labor instead of a lot of heavy equipment.

I would go so far as to make it the only accepted carbon sequestration system at all. The reason for this is that alternatives provide no secondary benefit whatsoever unless it is to encourage more oil to the surface. Try and argue for that one.

If the carbon market woke up and discovered that the only offset to a carbon problem is a patch of enhancible farmland, then we would have an agricultural land rush that would make the populating of the prairies a small time event. There is money for this and two billion folks with shovels waiting for a little bit of financial support from us.

Two billion new farmers will turn into two billion new land holders and have families who are part of the modern world, just by turning the tropical soils into fertile crop lands known as terra mulato.


Yes folks, it really can be just that easy. Except for all the self serving farm lobbies in the developed world that fear a level playing field of any kind and will pay huge money to queer what common sense demands.

As an aside, both Canada and particularly the US could adopt a biochar protocol in the corn growing lands in particular as a method of restoring soils and rebuilding those soils lost in the past century. We would then be spending the next century rebuilding those soils back to their original health.

Therefore if industry found that a large chunk of their problem got solved this way, it is pretty easy to see what they will do to get rid of the rest profitably in tropical latifundia..

Canada to establish carbon trading market

http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Canada_to_establish_carbon_trading_market_999.html


by Staff Writers
Ottawa (AFP) June 10, 2009

Canada announced Wednesday plans for a carbon market that could eventually link up with nascent EU and proposed US markets to form a global system for carbon pollution trading.

The local market would provide Canadian companies and individuals an opportunity to reduce their carbon emissions, which are linked to global warming.

"It does so by establishing a price for carbon in Canada -- something that has never been done before in this country," Environment Minister Jim Prentice said in a speech to the Economic Club of Canada.

"Anyone wanting to offset their emissions will be able to purchase credits -- from small businesses, to individuals, to travelers," he said.

"Every offset credit will represent a real and verified emission reduction, equal to the equivalent of one tonne of carbon dioxide."

Rules and requirements for generating offset credits, including registration of projects and issuance of actual credits and an explanation of how CO2 cuts would be verified, are to be published after a 60-day public consultation.

"Projects that could qualify for offsets span the economy," said Prentice, "from farmers using reduced or no-till techniques to store more carbon dioxide in their fields, to wind turbines producing clean electricity using only the wind, to landfill sites that are able to turn captured methane into usable fuel."

The new system would also target emissions from activities and sectors not covered by planned limits on big industrial polluters, he said.

Under Europe's nascent Emissions Trading System, the EU allocates carbon polluting allowances to member states to meet its obligations under the UN's Kyoto Protocol.

The states then assign quotas to those industries that belch most CO2 into the atmosphere.

Companies that emit less than their allowance can sell the difference on the market to companies that exceed their limits, thus providing a financial carrot to everyone to become greener.

The ETS is touted by supporters as a model for US President Barack Obama's own cap-and-trade scheme and others seeking to cut greenhouse gases and boost green technologies.

However, since its inception it has twice crashed.

In 2007, carbon quotas, set during an initial two-year test period, turned out to be far too generous. After a months-long slump, prices picked up when governments set tougher targets for the 2008-2012 period.

The price of a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) or its equivalent again nosedived this month as big European polluters, responding to plummeting demand for their products in a global recession, emitted less.

In December, the United Nations is to hold its 15th climate change conference in Copenhagen.

The summit aims to forge a new global agreement on climate change, to take over from the Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012.

"Failure to make progress in Copenhagen is simply not an option," Prentice also commented.

"The consequences are too great, the stakes too high, not to bring to that meeting our best efforts and unwavering resolve," he said.