It doesn’t often happen that I hear something on the news that makes me shout “hooray” as I’m driving along in the car. I did that yesterday when I heard the Obama administration has revoked a rule passed by their predecessors excusing oil and gas companies in polar bear habitat from special reviews to make sure their work doesn’t harm the animals.

(One of those great pics for WWF by Erik Malm)
It was a scandalous decision, taken as one of President Bush’s last official acts, which illustrates his low respect for nature conservation and backward policies on fossil fuels and climate change.
US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said science had to serve as the foundation for government decisions and federal agencies would have to consult with biologists before taking any action that might affect threatened or endangered species. Good on you Mr Salazar, and more power to you and your team. As President Obama marks his first 100 days in office, there are plenty of positive signs for the environment and climate policy. Nature conservation, renewable energies for energy security and job creation – let’s take that as an upbeat ending to today’s blog post. Good news for the bears for a change. We’ll catch up with the penguins’ problems later…

I recently had an interesting visitor. Moira Rankin, from the US Soundprint Media enterprise, one of my partners in the ongoing Arctic feature series, dropped in to Bonn on a trip to Europe. She is heading for Siberia, to visit a core drilling project, which I hope to be able to give you more news on in May.
Moira was telling me about a forum they’d held to get peoples’ reactions to some of our programmes on climate change. One of the main things that came out was that people really want to know “what does it mean for me”? Climate change really comes home to people when they know it is going to affect them personally.
Well here in Bonn, on the Rhine, in the German state of North-Rhine Westfalia, we’ve been presented with the results of a study looking exactly at that today.
The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the world’s most renowned bodies of its kind, conducted a study commissioned by the states’ Ministry for Environment, Conservation, Agriculture and Consumer Protection. And the results indicate the need for future-oriented policy, now.
We are going to get more heavy rain in winter, with higher risk of flooding. In summer, it’s likely to be the very opposite, with hot, dry summers and less water in the rivers. This, in turn, will affect energy, because we need water for cooling. In some regions, we may also see less ground water forming, because of higher evaporation in hot weather. There are a lot of implications for health, agriculture and biodiversity. We can also expect more frequent and more powerful storms.
Of course this in not as dramatic in some areas of the world, where people’s very existence will be under threat and they will have to migrate to survice.
But as Moira found in her listener research – people are more likely to pay attention and see a need for action if they know they’re going to be affected personally.

I’m back! And as is so often the case, there’s a lot waiting to be done that didn’t disappear while I was on holiday. So for today,I’d like to draw your attention to some people who have been looking after the icy regions of the planet while the ice-blogger was still on holiday.
IUCN and WWF jointly produce a podcast called Wild Talk.
In the latest edition, one of the topics is the 50th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty. There’s an interview with Carl Gustav Lundin
head of the IUCN Global Marine Programme about the Treaty and the state of the Antarctic today. Worth a listen.
Ministers from the Arctic Council and the Antarctic Treaty states held their first ever joint meeting in Washington on April 6 celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Antarctic Treaty. WWF provided the ministers with recent evidence from both the north and south poles that clearly demonstrates global temperature increases must be kept well under two degrees Celsius.
“A global average temperature rise of 2 degrees is clearly too much for the poles,” says Rob Nicoll, Manager of WWF’s Antarctic and Southern Oceans Initiative. “Scientists are already unpleasantly surprised at how quickly the impacts of warming such as sea ice loss are showing up in the polar regions, exceeding recent predictions.”
Global average warming due to climate change since the late 1800s is showing severe impacts at less than one degree, as the Arctic is warming at about twice the global average and parts of the Antarctic are also outstripping the global average. The polar regions themselves have profound and not yet fully understood impacts on climate globally, and there are fears that polar tipping points could trigger abrupt change around the world.
A forthcoming report on Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research is expected to up previous estimates on Antarctica’s expected substantial contributions to sea level rises. Marine food chains of global significance are also under threat from warming in the Antarctic.

I’m feeling rather envious – or at least I’m getting itchy feet.
My colleague Stefan Nestler is on his way to the North Pole via Spitzbergen.
Mind you, he’s with an expedition that’s walking, skiing and towing all the necessary rations and equipment on their sledges.That is going to be quite a feat.
His Nordpolblog (in German, but there will be great pictures, I’m sure) looks fantastic.
Visit the North Pole Blog
Meanwhile, I have been doing conference duty here in Bonn, following the UN Climate Secretariat meeting trying to make progress towards an agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December.
Fred has posted a comment asking what I think of all these conferences and their chances of success, and Obama’s role.
Well sometimes I think these giant meetings (more than 2 and a half thousand people at the UN meeting here until April 8th) produce enough “hot air” to raise the temperature of the planet considerably. But if we don’t get all the major players to agree on binding commitments, we have no chance.I don’t know if they really need that many people. And a bit more video-conferencing would save a lot of travel emissions.
Talking to the delegates to the UN meeting, I certainly get the feeling the change of US administration has given a boost to morale and the feeling that we might get there somewhere after all. But there are those who warn against expecting too much.
Let’s give the guy and his team a chance. And let’s see what comes out of this round of talks, and Obama’s special climate summit in April.
Meanwhile, I’m off on a break until after Easter. I’ll leave you with another link to the latest iniative by the online community connect2earth. They’ve launched a new campaign, supported by celebrities like Skandar Keynes (from Chronicles of Narnia – ha! bet you were wondering when Narnia was going to come in to it. Jack, you probably thought it would involve the lion…)
They want to encourage people to debate with the world’s top environmental experts. Check it out yourselves, here’s the link:
Join the green online community?
Check the Ice Blog again around April 14th please!

We haven’t heard a lot about the iron fertilisation controversy in the Antarctic for a while – at least not in the mainstream media.

(The German research vessel Polarstern, belonging to the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, conducting the research with Indian partners).

– See blog entries of 9.-15-1-2009 for the background –
Are you surprised to hear that the controversial experiment did not produce the desired results? Artificially fertlizing the ocean with iron is not a way to substantially reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere!
It seems the scientists on board the Polarstern were surprised by what did actually happen during the German-Indian experiment.