The reactions that convert less reactive chemicals into ozone-destroying ones take place in the polar vortex.  This is a circulation pattern created by the rotation of the Earth and cold temperatures in the Polar Regions. The last winter and spring were characterized by a remarkably strong polar vortex and an abnormally long cold period. The cause is anthropomorphic climate change.

We are all familiar with the Antarctic hole that surfaces every year. Now, there is a hole and this time, a lot closer to home. The journal nature has confirmed that conditions this year have created the ozone hole in the North Pole.

Countries agreed to end their production of the substances ultimately responsible for destruction of the ozone in 1987 with the Montreal Protocol such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).  Even though production has stopped, the gases are still in the atmosphere. They take over a century to completely break down unlike carbon dioxide which takes several years.  This is because the gases were created to be difficult to break down which of course had after-effects that have shown alarming effects on our delicate atmosphere.

Ozone loss is expected to improve in the coming decades as atmospheric levels of these chemicals decline but the effects of carbon dioxide and other gases still need to be monitored. There will be climate change as a result of the Arctic ozone hole because greenhouse gases will heat the air closer to the ground and will also cool the upper atmosphere.  This creates reactions that are the cause of ozone breakdown.  Ultraviolet (UV) rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere in higher numbers than normal as a result of all these events, like a garage door left wide open in the middle of mosquito season.

The results of ozone holes create many problems globally. In addition to the ozone loss creating higher risks of skin cancer, there is a concern over food production.  According to researchers from the Nature journal, just an 11 percent increase in UV light can cause a 24 percent decrease in winter wheat yield, a critical crop for Europe. A 24 percent decrease is a very substantial number for the wheat crop.

Europe is already limited in its farmlands because of its population densities and therefore the urban centers have a high dependency on the winter wheat staple.  A decrease of 24 percent will be enough to affect populations all over and have all food prices go up. The continent will have to rely upon imported other foods which are also expensive.

The effects on crops may not be limited to just Europe. North American wheat and corn production can also be affected. The areas where the crops are grown are not as close to the Arctic as Europe, but still are subject to any changes in atmosphere temperature variations.

The news of the Arctic ozone hole is very clear in that we need to be aware of our consumption patterns that involve the gases which cause climate change. We have the ability to make changes to our future once we gain awareness and make choices that prevent climate change in the long run.

When we take action to prevent climate change and ozone holes, food supplies, human health and other problems affecting us worldwide will have a lot less prevalence.

During the end of September the “Arctic nations” – Canada, Russia, Norway, the United States and Denmark – met in Moscow to agree on territorial claims. (Strangely, I didn’t notice any coverage at all in Danish media – while even Al-Jazeera warmed up for it.)

“Serious political and economic interests are indeed crossing over in the Arctic. But I have no doubt that problems, including the continental shelf problem, can be solved in the spirit of partnership. It is well known that it is difficult to survive in the Arctic on your own. Nature itself makes people, nations and states help each other there. Unfortunately we are faced with alarmist predictions of a looming battle for the Arctic. We are monitoring the situation and making responsible forecasts.”
- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin

“No one problem of contemporary Arctic can be resolved by one country alone. So that’s why I think that we are doomed to co-operate in the Arctic. And military confrontation especially is completely counterproductive.” – Russian Arctic expert Lev Voronkov

Russia plans to invest 312.8 billion US dollars on exploration and promise extra tax breaks for oil corporations wanting to do business in the Arctic. They have sent a submarine to plant the Russian flag on the sea bed but complain about NATO’s presence.

The Arctic is thought to contain 25% of the planet’s undiscovered oil and gas, about 200 billion barrels of oil.

“The industry has been around the world discovering easy oil and gas there are only the more difficult and riskier regions left – and the Arctic is one of them”
- Manouchehr Takin, Centre For Global Energy Studies

“It is a reckless prospecting endeavour, trying to find new oil reserves in this fragile and pristine environment” – Greenpeace protestor

I am reminded of George Monbiot’s speech at Klimaforum09 (alternative COP15):

“If governments were serious about climate change [...] they would be putting proposals here at Copenhagen this week to determine which parts of carbon reserves would be left in the ground. [...] they would also be proposing a total global moratorium on all prospecting for new reserves of coal, oil and gas.”

We have already found more than enough fossil fuel reserves to cause extreme climate change. We don’t need the Arctic reserves to do that. A fact so blindingly obvious since they are only becoming accessible because of the melting ice caps.

Sources include: Reuters / Russia’s Putin urges Arctic resources deal, BBC / Arctic summit in Moscow hears rival claims and BBC / Melting ice opens up potential for Arctic exploitation.

The Deepwater Horizon accident has resulted in eleven lives lost, countless of animal lives affected and an oil spill that is growing in size every day. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that around 5000 barrels of oil is leaking every day from the destroyed oil rig managed by BP. According to reports the oil spill has tripled in size during these past days.

While touring the area at risk from the oil spill Obama blamed the “unprecedented environmental disaster” on BP while saying they “will be paying the bill”:

“Let me be clear: BP is responsible for this leak. BP will be paying the bill,” said Obama as he visited the area and pledged a “fully coordinated, relentless relief effort” in the region where the coastlines of four Gulf states are being menaced. [...]“We a dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster,” Obama said.

And why shouldn’t they? After all BP is the third largest global energy company and the 4th largest company in the world. Reuters also reports that:

“The spill has also forced Obama to suspend politically sensitive plans to expand offshore oil drilling, unveiled last month partly to woo Republican support for climate legislation, one of the U.S. leader’s priorities.”

And following this suspension on offshore oil drilling Greenpeace Executive Director, Philip Radford said that while Obama’s announcement was “a welcome first step” it isn’t enough:

“The President’s announcement today, while a welcome first step, does not go nearly far enough. The only way to prevent human, economic and environmental tragedies like the BP Deepwater Disaster is to re-enact the moratorium on offshore drilling and to replace dirty dangerous fuels with clean energy.”

“If we cannot handle a spill in the Gulf of Mexico, imagine the impact even a small spill could have in the remote, pristine waters of the Arctic”, Radford said in a statement.

Greenpeace also notes that on April 2nd, just days before the BP Deepwater Spill began, President Obama said:

“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”

Maybe this time BP really should go “beyond petroleum“?

Related reading:
- Documents Show BP Opposed New, Stricter Safety Rules
- Rig explosion dirties BP’s green image
- BP Deepwater Disaster and Gulf Oil Spill (Greenpeace)
- Dick Cheney and the oil spill
- BP warned of rig fault ten years ago
- BP accused as size of oil slick triples in a day
- Oil Spill Vs. Wind Spill Vs. Sun Spill.

Photo credit: Pieter Pieterse

In a confidential security review by Australia’s Defence Force, named “Climate Change, The Environment, Resources And Conflict”, the Australian army says climate change will pose “one of the biggest threats to security in the Pacific“. The confidential security review obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper also says that the natural resources under the melting Arctic ice may spark a global conflict.

“”Environmental stress, caused by both climate change and a range of other factors, will act as a threat multiplier in fragile states around the world, increasing the chances of state failure,” said the summary, published in the Herald on Wednesday.

“The Arctic is melting, potentially making the extraction of undersea energy deposits commercially viable. Conflict is a remote possibility if these disputes are not resolved peacefully,” the assessment said.”

According to the security review rising sea levels, caused by climate change, will “affect nations and islands with low-lying coastlines”, create climate refugees from the Pacific islands and result in more illegal fishing as food recourses will become rare.

Photo credit: azrainman

Top German scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber warns that climate change is now happening much more quickly than anyone thought was possible.

In an interview with Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects and acts as an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-change issues, said that “the threats posed by climate change are worse than those imagined by most governments.”

“In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now. We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize.”

Schellnhuber points out that the Arctic ice is melting faster than previously expected and says that “the entire climate pattern at the North Poll has been disrupted to the extent of causing irreversible change.”

The Arctic sea ice is melting more quickly than expected. There are also signs that the entire climate pattern at the North Poll has been disrupted to the extent of causing irreversible change.

For the Arctic, the global warming which has already occurred of 0.8 degrees Celsius has already stepped over the line, Schellnhuber said. If Greenland’s ice cap melts completely, water levels will rise by seven meters (23 feet).

“The current coastline will no longer exist, and that includes Germany,” he said.

Schellnhuber says that to be able to stop global warming the industrial countries need to decrease their emissions by 80-90% and that by 2020 “this process has to be well underway”.

“We did have a commercial cargo vessel that did the first scheduled run from Montreal, up through the eastern Arctic, through the Northwest Passage to deliver cargo to communities in the west,” Brian LeBlanc of the Canadian Coast Guard told CBC News.

“That was the first — that I’m aware of anyway — commercial cargo delivery from the east through the Northwest Passage.”

[…]Rayes, who was on the vessel during its trip through the Northwest Passage, said the company informed the coast guard, which put an icebreaker on standby.

“They were ready to be there for us if we called them, but I didn’t see one cube of ice,” he said.

“They were informed about our presence [and] they were ready to give us the support needed. However, since there was no ice whatsoever, the service was not needed, we didn’t call for it.”

Via Climate Progress

“The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears,” according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don’t have access to their usual food sources.”

Scientists have noticed increasing reports of starving Arctic polar bears attacking and feeding on one another in recent years. In one documented 2004 incident in northern Alaska, a male bear broke into a female’s den and killed her.

Unfortunately there seems to be no light in the tunnel for the polar bears. A new preliminary report from NASA shows that the sea ice at the Arctic continues to disappear and that the ice-levels this year has reached the second-lowest level on record.

NASA reports that the Arctic sea ice has reached a second all-time low “since the dawn of the satellite era”. Previous record low for September was in 2005. NASA says that this year’ loss of sea ice “further reinforces the strong negative trend in summer sea ice extent observed during the past 30 years”. In the past sea ice has covered about 60% of the Arctic. But this winter the sea ice covered less than 30%.

“In March, when the Arctic reached its annual maximum sea ice coverage during the winter, scientists from NASA and the data center reported that thick, older sea ice was continuing to decline. According to NASA-processed satellite microwave data, this perennial ice used to cover 50-60 percent of the Arctic, but this winter it covered less than 30 percent. Perennial sea ice is the long-lived layer of ice that remains even when the surrounding short-lived seasonal sea ice melts to its minimum extent during the summer.”

The image shows that the daily Arctic sea ice extent for September 12, 2008, was 4.52 million square kilometers (1.74 million square miles). The orange line shows the 1979 to 2000 average extent for that day. The black cross indicates the geographic North Pole. A high-resolution image can be found here.

Newly released data from the UK Met Office shows that during the first half of 2008 the global temperatures was more than 0.1 Celcius cooler than any other year after 2000. The reason for this is La Nina, an ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that has a cooling effect on the earth.

But this doesn’t mean the deniers are correct about anything else. Scientists still expects that 2008 will be the 10th warmest year since 1850. And the UK Met Office says that the global temperatures will continue to rise again when La Nina eases away.

“The big thing that’s been happening this year is La Nina, which has lowered global temperatures somewhat,” said John Kennedy, climate monitoring and research scientist at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre.

“La Nina has faded in the last couple of months and now we have neutral conditions in the Pacific,” he told BBC News.

Dr Kennedy also said that “2008 will still be significantly above the long-term average,” and that “there’s been a strong upward trend in the last few decades, and that’s the thing to focus on.”

Even during the temporarily cooling effect from La Nina we see evidence that the rapid man-made warming continues. Images from National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellites show continued breakup of 2 of Greenland’s largest glaciers. According to Canadian authorities the Northwest Passage is navigable. Recently scientists warned that the Arctic could become ice-free during the summers as early as 2013. And just yesterday a huge chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan broke away in Canada’s northern Arctic.

The storms over the Alaska’s Beaufort Sea last week brought with them not just bad weather but also streams of hot air into the Arctic. Satellite images that were taken shortly after could show that the ice caps had started to “disintegrate dramatically.” And because of that the scientists believes that the melting could exceed last year’s record loss of ice.

‘It is a neck-and-neck race between 2007 and this year over the issue of ice loss,’ said Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. ‘We thought Arctic ice cover might recover after last year’s unprecedented melting – and indeed the picture didn’t look too bad last month. Cover was significantly below normal, but at least it was up on last year.

‘But the Beaufort Sea storms triggered steep ice losses and it now looks as if it will be a very close call indeed whether 2007 or 2008 is the worst year on record for ice cover over the Arctic. We will only find out when the cover reaches its minimum in mid-September.’

These huge losses of Arctic sea ice will result in “major meteorological, environmental and ecological” consequences, such as: More and heavier storms being swept into Britain, polar bears and seals losing their habitats, rising sea levels and a further increased in global temperatures.