(Greenland 2009)

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released figures confirming that 2010 tied with 2005 for the warmest global surface temperatures ever recorded. According to the analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007.The GISS records go back to 1880.
“If the warming trend continues as is expected, if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the 2010 record will not stand for long”, says the Institute’s director James Hansen.
NASA says their temperature record is a close match with those of others, independently produced, including the UK’s
Met Office Hadley Centre
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.
Hansen says the records show a rise in temperature over the last ten years in spite of year-to-year fluctuations associated with the El Nino – La Nina cycle of tropical ocean remperature. There is also a possibility that the cold spell which had us diving for the snow shovels here in northern Europe could have been influenced by the decline of Arctic sea ice and linked to warming temperatures at more northern latitudes. The sea ice helps insulate the atmosphere from the ocean’s heat.
The GISS experts say winter weather patterns are “notoriusly chaotic”. Well, climate is certainly a complex business. But whatever way you look at it, it looks like we all have our work cut out for us to have any chance of halting the worrying upward trend in temperature.

Snow on trees – beautiful, if you ask me, and appropriate weather for this time of year. Of course not everybody sees it that way. Most of the people supposedly always “Dreamin’ of a white Christmas…” have been whinging non-stop since the snow started, admittedly a good bit ahead of the feast itself.
And then, yes, off we went. They’re at it again. Newspapers, people on the (much delayed) train, friends on the telephone… the same old story… “so much for climate change. Do you know how much snow is on my doorstep…?”
Well I was in a way relieved to know that George Monbiot has been encountering the same problem – and has a suitable explanation to hand. Let me direct you to “That snow outside is what global warming looks like” in a recent edition of the Guardian.
“The cold has reason in a deathly grip” – does that sound a bit drastic?

“He’s cute” – is the response I’ve been getting to this Svalbard reindeer, pictured at Ny Alesund earlier this year.
Well reindeer and I would like to wish all iceblog readers all the very best for the Christmas holidays. In case you won’t be reading again until 2011, I’ll wish you a happy new year when it comes. But I am planning to be posting again before the turn of the year.
But do take time now for a quick click to another blog I’d like to draw your attention to. I’ve just contributed a post and will do so again on occasion.
The Global Ideas Blog and the whole project is all about finding solutions to our climate problems.”Thinking for a cooler world”. What do you think?
All the best for now.

(Thinking hard, walking on the Chukchi Sea, Alaska, 2008)

Do you ever find yourself in the situation where somebody talks about a meeting you’ve been to – and you wonder whether you were really in the same room? People’s subjective perceptions of what was said can be so different.
Well, at least with international climate meetings there is no shortage of documentation in black and white. But there’s plenty of room to disagree in assessing it.
Following my own conclusion (based admittedly on reading mostly German media, but across the political spectrum from left to right or vice versa)that it was being viewed positively because expectations had been talked down to a minimum beforehand, I was interested to read a comment in the British Guardian from Michael Jacobs, a climate and environment expert currently at the London School of Economics, saying reactions to Cancun had been “almost universally downbeat”. He also quotes Friends of the Earth International as calling it a “slap in the face”.
Well, I suppose it comes back to the old idea of the glass being half-full or half-empty. There’s one idea which pops up in English and German in various comments from journalists and ngos,though, which is that Cancun saved the talks – but not, by a long chalk, the climate. The show is on the road, but there’s a long way to go. And who knows if we can make it in time?
Jacobs himself says Cancun gives us hope. His ideas are worth a read. “The real danger is that pessimism becomes self-fulfilling”. He’s got a point there. “Optimism”, he says, “is not just an essential psychological condition; it’s a vital political posture”. Food for thought?

(Melting ice, Svalbard 2010)

Somehow I find it hard to jump up and down and rejoice about the package that’s being hailed as the big success of the Cancun climate conference. Sure, it’s great that there has been some progress on funding adaptation for vulnerable countries, forest protection, technology transfer and monitoring and verification. But what is actually going to be monitored? The Cancun package includes agreement that we need to stay below a two-degree rise in temperature. But there is widespread agreement that the emissions reductions pledged so far will not get us anywhere near that, but rather somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees. By 2015, the agreement says, this should be monitored and corrected. I wonder what is supposed to happen between now and then to make especially the big emitters USA and China “up” their commitments so radically?
There was a lot of effort put into reducing expectations ahead of the Cancun meeting. If you don’t expect too much, every little appears like a bonus. After the Copenhagen fiasco, there had to be a package coming out of Cancun which would keep the talks “on the road”. But it’s still a long, long road to go. The fact that ngos like IUCN, Germanwatch or WWF are welcoming the Cancun outcome almost make me wonder if I am being too pessimistic. They probably assume there is just no alternative, and it’s better to keep countries around the negotiating table. But although I see myself as a “born optimist”, I find it hard to feel confident that we will see emissions peak by 2020 and then be reduced steadily afterwards to get to the 2 degree limit which many scientists say is already too high.