Arctic summer ice could vanish by 2013

The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10 in this image released September 16, 2008.

OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region’s sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover “appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models”, which call for an ice free summer in 2013.

The year “2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we’ve been wrong — each year we’re finding that it’s a little bit faster than expected,” he told Reuters.

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008.  In 2004 a major international panel forecast the cover could vanish by 2100. Last December, some experts said the summer ice could go in the next 10 or 20 years.        Breaking News

Obama ready to hear ideas on green jobs

WASHINGTON – Green jobs, where are they and how to get them, will be the focus when President Barack Obama’s task force on middle-class working families formally begins its work on Friday in Philadelphia.

The panel, chaired by Vice President Joe Biden, will hear from experts on the potential to create and fill these jobs.

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill Obama signed last week includes billions to help create such jobs as installing solar panels and building wind turbines, which also is part of his goal to nudge the country away from dependence on foreign oil and toward reliance on renewable forms of energy.

It is Obama’s belief that such jobs will help raise living standards for middle-class families, who didn’t fare well before the current economic downturn set in and are now feeling pinched along with millions of other people who have lost their jobs and homes, and watched retirement and college savings disappear.        Breaking News

Massive Antarctic ice shelf about to collapse

A New Zealand frigate patrols past the Ross Ice Shelf in the Southern Ocean in Antarctica.

Professor David Vaughan has an infectious enthusiasm, even when he’s issuing dire warnings about the future of Antarctica. That’s where he is right now, at the Rothera Research Station. He’s just returned from a flight to the Wilkins Ice Shelf – which juts out of the western tip of the Continent. It will probably be his last.

An Englishman whose home is among the dreaming spires of Cambridge, where the British Antarctic Survey has its headquarters, Professor Vaughan has been visiting the world’s coldest places for twenty years. He was surprised to find that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which began disintegrating a decade ago, hasn’t yet disappeared. But he says it’s in its death throes.

Last year, AC360° reported the Survey’s finding that a slice the size of Manhattan had broken off the ice shelf. Vaughan says the whole shelf is now connected to the rest of Antarctica by a strip of ice just a few hundred meters wide. It’s like looking at an hour glass. This huge slab of ice –11,000 square kilometres (the size of Jamaica) – is about to collapse into the sea. Maybe within weeks, maybe later in the year, says Vaughan.        Breaking News

5 dolphins trapped behind drifting pack ice

SEAL COVE, Newfoundland – Five exhausted dolphins have been trapped behind drifting pack ice for several days and now need rapid rescue, according to the mayor of an eastern Canadian village.

The 8-foot animals somehow became separated from the open Atlantic and have been swimming for four days in a shrinking open-water area of Seal Cove’s harbor, just 100 feet from shore, said Mayor Winston May said Wednesday.  “They keep going round circles, trying to keep this little pool of water open so that they can have their breathing area. And the whole bay seems to be froze up, there’s no where else for them to go,” said May.        Breaking News

zero emission research station: Alternative energy viable even in the coldest regions

PRINCESS ELISABETH BASE, Antarctica – The world’s first zero-emission polar research station opened in Antarctica and was welcomed by scientists as proof that alternative energy is viable even in the coldest regions.  Pioneers of Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth station in East Antarctica said if a station could rely on wind and solar power in Antarctica — mostly a vast, icy emptiness — it would undercut arguments by skeptics that green power is not reliable. “If we can build such a station in Antarctica we can do that elsewhere in our society.

We have the capacity, the technology, the knowledge to change our world,” Alain Hubert, the station’s project director, told Reuters at the inauguration ceremony Sunday.        Breaking News

French toxic ship ends global odyssey

LONDON, England (CNN) — A ship laden with toxic substances is due to arrive in northeast England for recycling Sunday, ending an odyssey that has seen it turned away from at least three other countries.
The scrapping of the aircraft carrier has been hugely controversial and a major headache for France.

The French Navy spent years looking for a site that would decommission the former aircraft carrier Clemenceau, now known simply as the Q790. The ship contains asbestos, which can cause cancer.

Greenpeace activists boarded the ship off the coast of Egypt in 2006 to prevent it being sent to India to be scrapped. The environmental campaign group said at the time it contained “high levels of asbestos and other hazardous materials.” Two activists climbed the ship’s masts and hung banners reading “Absestos carrier: stay out of India.”        Full Story

Ships collide in Antarctic over whaling clash

SYDNEY – A boat carrying a group of radical anti-whaling activists collided with a Japanese whaling vessel in the Antarctic Ocean on Friday in a clash Japan condemned as “unforgivable.” No one was injured.

Activist Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society said his boat was trying to prevent a Japanese ship from dragging a whale on board when another Japanese boat shot in front of Watson’s vessel, causing a collision.

“The situation down here is getting very, very chaotic and very aggressive,” Watson told The Associated Press by satellite phone from his boat, named after the late Australian conservationist and TV personality, Steve Irwin.        Full Story

Sarah Palin and Ashley Judd face off

Defenders of Wildlife recruit Ashley Judd for ad criticizing state program

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – An animal rights group is getting help from actress Ashley Judd in its campaign to try to stop Alaska’s practice of killing wolves and bears from airplanes.

Judd appears in a new Internet video for Defenders of Wildlife, and targets not only the state’s predator control program but also one of the program’s chief supporters, Gov. Sarah Palin.  “It’s time to stop Sarah Palin and stop this senseless savagery,” Judd says in the video posted on a Web site operated by the political arm of the group, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.    Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, countered that the program is scientifically based and an important tool to sustain moose and caribou populations for Alaska subsistence hunters.     Full Story