Time for reflections…

I have persuaded myself to travel without a laptop this summer.But I will have my camera, so there may be some new glacier pics in the autumn (although the European glaciers I will be visiting have been retreating considerably).
Please look in to the Ice Blog again in OCTOBER…..

I have just heard that the experiment I reported on from Svalbard has been concluded. A press release from Greenpeace quotes Professor Ulf Riebesell from the IFM-GEOMAR Kiel Uni ocean acidification project as saying the experiment was a success.

(I took this pic of Prof. Riebesell watching the deployment of the mesocosms last month, see earlier posts).

That doesn’t mean the news is good:
“Not only do we now have the most comprehensive data set ever on the impacts of ocean acidification in Arctic waters, we have also learned from this experiment that ocean acidification in these waters has a definite impact on the base of the food web, which can have implications for the entire ecosystem.” says Prof. Ulf.
“If we keep emitting CO2 at the current rate, marine organisms will experience changes in ocean acidity beyond anything they have experienced in the last 20 million years of their evolutionary history.”
Worrying times indeed.

(Ice off Greenland, 2009)

Sitting here in Germany during a heatwave I often think of the pleasantly cool temperatures up in the Arctic where I was just a few weeks ago. But I just read a worrying report quoting figures from the National Snow and Ice Data Report.
It seems the Arctic sea ice has reached another record low. The ice covered area is smaller than ever since satellite measurements began in 1979. The report says 88,000 square km of ice melted during June. The average is around 53,000 square km.
It’s hardly surprising that wwf is watching with concern what this means for polar bears.
In Churchhill, Canada, western Hudson Bay, the current average daytime temperature is 17° C. says WWF. The average is 12°C. The conservationists are worried that a lot of bears may not survive the coming winter, especially if the sea ice starts to form as late in the year as it did last time. Without ice to hunt on, the bears lose a lot of weight.

(Sea ice off Greenland 2009)

In between discussing the role of the media in communicating climate change at the Global Media Forum here in Bonn and producing radio and online stories from my Arctic trip, I have just read a press release from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI)I’d like to mention here.
It doesn’t really surprise me, but it concerns me to read that the Arctic sea ice is expected to reach a critical minimum again this summer, although probably not the shock low of 2007.
AWI scientists and a team from Hamburg University’s “climate campus” have published figures in the Sea Ice Outlook looking at the forecasts for the ice cover in September (the month when it reaches its minimum) made by a dozen international research institutes. The Hamburg team and the AWI team come to different results, using different methods, but both agree there’s an 80% probability that the ice area will be between 4,7 und 5,7 million km2. Just for comparison, between 1980 and 1990, it always covered more than 7 million km2.

I’d like to share an interesting conversation I had at the Arctic Station in Ny Alesund with Max Koenig, head of the
Sverdrup Station run by the Norwegian Polar Institute. We were speaking in German, as Max is a native German speaker, so I have translated what he said.

Max finds the idea of believing or not believing in climate change a strange and interesting development. He says it has turned into a question of faith for a lot of people. But the climate change issue is not about faith, he says, but about facts on the table. He is surprised that there seems to be a lot of “false information” floating around. “If you consider that 95% of climate researchers are generally in agreement about the nature of the problem, then I really wonder where the scepticism comes from”, says the polar specialist. “On average, our planet is warming. And we understand the physics, he says. “
When it comes to the role of the media, Norway’s Arctic station chief says he is often surprised to find different views expressed in one publication, depending on which researcher is being interviewed. He sees one of the main problems in the tendency to always have a climate scientist and a sceptic placed one against the other.
“This can give the public the impression that half of the researchers think climate change is happening and the rest don’t”, he says. “Actually, almost all researchers say climate change is taking place and yes, something has to be done now.”
The debate has also become too emotional, Max says. He thinks a real discussion is becoming increasingly difficult.
Thanks for sharing those ideas with me Max, and with the Ice Blog readers. Thanks also once again for your hospitality and the coffee, looking out onto the melting snow around the bust of Roald Amundsen.

(Ny Alesund, early June 2010)
As we get ready for a big conference here in Bonn, starting on Monday, Global Media Forum
“The Heat is On: Climate Change and the Media”, these are exactly the sort of thing we’ll be talking about. I feel a huge sense of responsibility as a journalist. Of course we want to present the “whole picture”. But we don’t want to distort the facts by getting the balance wrong.