A last look at Arctic Tromsö for this time.

Mind your step?

The Arctic Frontiers conference came to an end in Tromsö on Friday with more presentations and q/a sessions on different aspects of scientific research and findings on the region, from deepsea observatories to melting permafrost and the problems of climate change for indigenous peoples, including reindeer-herders in Arctic areas.
The papers are all available online.
Pick up some scientific papers from Arctic Frontiers

Meanwhile there’s been no stop to developments on climate change in the headlines. President Obama is going full speed ahead with his plans to tackle climate change.

The German government has reached an agreement on a (highly controversial)package to make people scrap their old cars, buy new ones, and – ideally, in theory – reduce emissions.
The German government has also given the go ahead for the iron fertilization experiment in the Antarctic we were discussing before I left for Tromso.
Latest on iron
WWF and others are protesting. There have been some alarming measurements of warming in the Antarctic. The new international Renewable Energies Agency has been launched. And WWF has come up with a new study on the economics of combatting climate change.
The Ice Blogger could blog on all day. Instead, I’ll leave you to check out the links and enjoy a couple of pics of the amazing colours of Arctic Norway from the air.

(No emissions from this one for a while)

Professor Jean-Claude Gascard from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, heads the EU’s Damocles project, identifying the challenges from climate change. He gave a very sobering summary of the state of the Arctic sea ice and confirmed there is virtually no chance of reversing the current warming trend. Only several extremely severe winters could do that, and the scientific community is not expecting that.
Scientists tend to be reluctant to come out with anything they can’t prove, and Prof. Gascard summed up the main elements behind this conviction. Sea ice extent, depths, age and drift are key factors, as well as the air temperature and the number of “freezing degree days”.
By 2002 the ice was at a minimum based on some 50 years of observation. In 2005, there was no “replenishment” of older, multi-year ice exiting the Arctic ocean. This, Prof. Gascard describes as a “tipping point”.
The ice thickness has decreased over a wide area from more than 3 metres 20 or 30 years ago to around 1.5 metres. I remember my trip out on the sea ice in Barrow, Alaska, with Dr. Chris Petrich and the Climate Change College “ambassadors”. I can hear Erika Naga reading out the measurement “1 metre 40”, and the Inupiat telling us how it used to be much thicker.
The ice is melted in various ways: through warmer water from the Atlantic and Pacific underneath, heat from storms and increased radiation from above.
2007 of course was the year that really made everybody wake up. When the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Polarstern went out to set up ice platforms, there was no ice in their target area. The Tara, which has been frozen in and drifting with the ice to compare ice drift with the “Fram” expedition has been drifting three times faster than her predecessor. And the sea ice reached its minimum. 2008 saw almost the same negative record.
Sea ice reflects much more heat back into the atmosphere than water, (albedo effect) which is much darker and absorbs it, exacerbating the warming, in what’s called a “feedback loop”. Again, I was reminded of our trip on the Chukchi Sea with Chris Petrich from the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, who is collecting data on this to be put into global models.
And the number of “freezing degree days” has dropped massively in the last few years.
Professor Gascard’s summary of all this is available online on the Arctic Frontiers site.

And if you have the time and the inclination, have a(nother?) listen to the feature on my trip onto the sea ice with the Climate Change College.

Tromsö today (the days are getting lighter):

Yesterday evening and in the course of the day I had so many interesting talks it’s hard to know where to start.
Heidi Sörensen is Norway’s deputy environment minister and she seems to be really passionate about her job and the urgency of tackling climate change.This is just based on my encounter today.
Being a politican must sometimes be frustrating when things can’t move as fast as you would like them to – and you feel the future of the world is at stake.
In view of the extent to which the Arctic is already melting, she argues for rapid adaptation as well as mitigation. There was a lot of discussion about her government’s insistence on carbon capture and storage as the way to make sure Norway can keep on using and selling its oil and gas while reducing emissions, given that this is in the experimental stage. Quite a few experts here expressed doubts. She is confident that the technology will work – and reasonably fast, although she accepts that there could still be problems. Of course this would allow Norway to exploit the rest of the oil and gas thought to be there in the Arctic. But the Minister also actually said the Greenpeace moratorium idea was worth thinking about.Well, well.

Our venue today.
At the moment I’m listening to a Canadian speaker, who is presenting figures on the huge extent of Canada’s Arctic territory. As he says, it seems amazing Canada has no northern University and no Polar Institute. Good luck to those who are trying to change that.
He finds Tromsö amazing, with such an infrastructure so far north and a renowned university.
Meanwhile Siegfried from Germany has visited the blog and wonders if there will be insights here into what way the new Obama government will go in terms of climate protection.
Well, there is no quick answer to that here, but expectations are certainly very high that a new President Obama will be a positive influence and have the USA sign up to an effective post-Kyoto agreement, and to several other international conventions essential to protecting the Arctic, which the previous administration kept out of.
More later.