Many media outlets, including AccuWeather and Headline: Earth have been accused of biased global warming reporting. Host Katie Fehlinger discusses news organizations' responsibility and talks to media expert Dan Fagin.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

I had mentioned in my Thursday blog that I would be attending one of the 1400+ "Focus The Nation" teach-ins on climate change that were held across the country that day. The one I attended was held at Penn State University. There were several experts who spoke about climate change throughout the day and it was quite interesting. At least three of the speakers on the Penn State panel had a role in the writing of a particular chapter of the IPCC report. One of those authors stated that he was initially a strong skeptic, but after 15 years of researching climate change he is no longer a skeptic.

One of the speakers at the event was Dr. Brent Yarnal, a professor of Geography at Penn State and the director of the Center for Integrated Regional Assessment (CIRA). Dr. Yarnal helped author the Middle Atlantic Regional Assessment (MARA) of Impacts from Climate Change. Granted, this is just one region in the U.S. and one small piece of the planet, but I thought some of the assessment was interesting. The assessment includes the region from central New York state to northeastern North Carolina.

The assessment considers two climate change scenarios, one from the Hadley Centre in the UK and the other from the Canadian Climate Center (CCC). Based on these two scenarios the authors of the MARA team came up with the following for the impact of climate change on the Middle Atlantic region........

--A much more variable climate (More extreme storms, floods, but also more drought)

--Agriculture across the region would be able to adapt, but uncertainties about weeds, pests and disease could alter that assessment

Forests
--Forests across the region would continue to migrate. Much of the maple/birch region being replaced by oak and hickory. Maple syrup industry more confined to Canada and out of northern New England and New York state.

Water
--Seasonal stream flow shift.
--Uncertain amount of water.
--Increase in intense rainfall.
--Decrease in water quality.

Coastal Zones
--Sea level rise (they have an impact map showing this in the assessment I linked to)
--Storm surges enhanced.
--Estuaries at risk

Ecosystems
--Functions impaired.
--Biodiversity diminished.

Human health
--Heat mortality increase.
--Water-borne disease increase (ex. cholera)
--Vector-borne disease increase (tiger mosquitoes are already getiing into the D.C. area and are known to feed during the day, not just the night.

Socioeconomic System
--Regional economy resilient to climate change.
--Some populations hurt, others are helped.

Positive impacts on...
--Soybeans, corn, tree fruit, more mixed forest growth, warmer water fisheries and
an increase in average stream flow.

Image courtesy of the U.S. Global Change Research Program

An international group of climate experts have identified nine areas that are in the greatest danger of passing critical threshholds or "tipping points" beyond which they will not recover due to climate change. Three areas that are at the top of the list are the Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet and the dieback of the Amazon rainforests. Also mentioned were the boreal forests, El Nino, the western Antarctica Ice Sheet and the African and Indian monsoons. The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although the scientists cannot be sure precisely when each region will reach the point of no return, their assessment warns it may already be too late to save Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, which they regard as the most immediately in peril. By some estimates, there will not be any sea ice in the summer months within 25 years, according to the Guardian Unlimited article.

"There's a perception that global warming is something that will happen smoothly into the future, but some of these ecosystems go into an abrupt decline when warming reaches a certain threshold," said Tim Lenton, an environmental scientist at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study.

"If we know when the different tipping points are, we can use them to inform targets to limit global warming. It gives us something to aim for," he added.

Dr. Klaus Keller, an assistant professor of Geosciences at Penn State spoke about climate thresholds at the "Focus the Nation" teach-in that I attended at Penn State last Thursday. Dr. Keller is also a contributing author to the fourth assessment of the IPCC report. Dr. Keller co-authored the chapter titled "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and The Risk from Climate Change".

In Dr. Keller's short presentation he talked about examples of potent climate threshold such as...

--The Greenland Ice sheet melting (as mentioned in the article)
--Coral bleaching
--El Nino
--The possible shutdown of the North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) which is a critical ocean circulation that transfers heat from the lower latitudes to the higher latitudes and has a large impact on the climate of the earth. But, according to Dr. Keller, the IPCC says that it is unlikely (1-10% chance) that the MOC will undergo a large abrubt transition in the 21st century.

Images courtesy of NASA.

The above images are from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite and they show changes in ice characteristics along the Antarctic Peninsula between January 24th and January 30th, 2008 during the summer melt off.

The January 24th image shows solidly frozen fast ice. ( Fast ice is ice that is anchored to the shoreline.)

Nearly a week later you can see a distinct blue area, which indicates areas where the snow has melted, revealing a layer of sea ice below. There might also be a thin film of water on the blue ice surface, according to the NASA news release.

This process is typical during the Antarctic summer months and not a sign of global warming. Actually, the summer thaw down there was later than normal, and NASA believes that La Nina might have something to do with that. Usually, the breakup of fast ice around the Antarctica Peninsula occurs in early to mid-December, but this area was solidly frozen well into January.

By the way, according to the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the current southern hemispheric sea-ice area is at 2.9 million sq/km, which is about 400,000 sq/km greater than the normal level expected for this time of year, or slightly above-normal. Based on the latest trend on the chart, it appears that the southern hemispheric sea-ice area could be right at normal by March.

A pair of senior Church of England bishops have called on Christians to give up carbon for the 40 days of Lent, which began today, instead of the usual chocolate or soda.

This year Christians will be asked to think about their own carbon footprint and follow a few simple steps designed to help cut CO2 emissions. From the Telegraph article, they include:

-- avoiding plastic bags
-- giving the dishwasher a day off
-- insulating the hot water tank
-- checking the house for drafts
-- removing one lightbulb from a prominent place in the house and live without it for 40 days, then replace it with a long lasting, low-energy bulb.

In the UK alone, each person is responsible for 9.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

What do you think of this idea?

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) just released the January climate summary for the contiguous United States, along with some January weather highlights across the globe.

All images courtesy of NOAA/NCDC.

According to the NCDC findings, January was the 49th coolest January on record for the contiguous U.S., or you could say it was the 65th warmest on record. This is based on the data from 1895-2008. January was also the 50th driest on record or 65th wettest, depending on how you want to look at it.

Other U.S. highlights for the month....

--73% of the southeast remained in a moderate to exceptional drought.

--The second largest January tornado outbreak on record (54 unconfirmed tornadoes) happened on January 7th-8th. I wonder where Tuesday night's terrible outbreak will rank for February?

The NCDC will not release the global statistics until the 14th, but they did include some regional highlights.....

--Severe winter weather (cold/heavy snow) impacted parts of China. Some of the worst in 50-100 years.

--January was the hottest on record in Australia for the country as a whole.

--Large parts of the Middle East were exceptionaly cold with unusual snow, especially the first half of the month.

By the way, AccuWeather.com's senior meteorologist and long range weather expert Joe Bastardi just recently posted an article about the global warming debate and computer modeling on the icecap blog. If you are interested in reading about Joe's opinion on the subject, here is the link to the article.

In part two, host Katie Fehlinger discusses the issue of journalistic balance in regards to climate change with NYU media expert Dan Fagin. Is it always necessary to present both sides of the argument?

Evan Myers, who is our Chief Operating Officer (COO) and senior Vice president here at AccuWeather offers his personal take on global warming in our new Climate Change Forum on AccuWeather.com.

The forum is a great place to get into some excellent discussion on climate change. Registration is free and quick. In addition to the Climate Change Forum, we have forums which cover the weather in the United States, Canada and International.

Biofuels used today cause more greenhouse emissions than conventional fuels when you take into account the environmental cost of their production, according to two new studies that are published in the journal Science.

Biofuels were originally touted as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when plants grew.

Production of almost all biofuels either directly or indirectly resulted in new lands being cleared either for food or fuel, and that has led to the destructions of large ecosystems such as tropical rainforests and South American grasslands which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are either burned or plowed. This process in return makes the land less capable of absorbing carbon emissions.

From the New York Times article........."When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially," said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. "Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis."

The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “So for the next 93 years you’re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions.”

Here is a link to the abstract.

The below image shows changes in the Jakobshavn Glacier calving front between 1851 and 2006 in western Greenland.

Scientists from the University of Buffalo report that the sea level rise estimated this century could be twice as high as current projections based on new research involving new techniques in gathering ice sheet datasets.

The team found important details about the Greenland Ice sheet which have long been missing from the ice sheet models in which sea level rise and global warming are based.

The use of remote sensing and digital imaging techniques can produce rich datasets without field data and give ice sheet modelers more precise, detailed data, according to the ScienceDaily story.

Traditional ice sheet models are very simplified, according to Dr. Beata Csatho, assistant professor of Geology at UB and the lead author of the study. "Ice sheet models usually don't include all the complexity of ice dynamics that can happen in nature. If current climate models from the IPCC included data from ice dynamics in Greenland, the sea level rise estimated during this century could be twice as high as what they are currently projecting," she said.

The research paper, which was just published in the Journal of Glaciology focuses on Jakobshavn Isbrae, Greenland's fastest moving glacier and its largest, measuring four miles wide.

The Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier has experienced rapid thinning and has doubled the amount of ice it discharges into Disko Bay during the past decade. The thinning started as early as the end of the 18th century, but the changes that the researchers are seeing are now bigger than can be accounted for by normal, annual perturbations in climate, according to Dr. Csatho.

Different views of the breakup of the massive Larsen B Ice Shelf which made numerous media headlines across the world back in 2002.

Climate change was not the only thing responsible for the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctica Peninsula six years ago, but it was only only one of a number of contributory factors, according to a new study just published in the Journal of Glaciology by Dr. Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University and Ted Scambos from Colorado University.

The study, as reported by the BBC article says that the ice shelf was on the brink of collapse for decades and that a combination of atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors contributed to its demise.

Melting from higher ocean temperatures or a gradual decline in the ice mass of the peninsula over the centuries pushed the Larsen B shelf to the brink, according to Dr. Scambos.

In their conclusion, the author's mentioned the following main reasons for the collapse....

1. Structural glaciological discontinuities played a large part because they rendered the ice shelf mechanically weak.

2. Failures along weakly sutured flow-unit boundaries.

3. Loss of ice at the shelf front, which is the strongest part of the shelf.

4. Perturbations of input velocity from tributary glacier flows caused the sutures to rupture and cause the ice shelf to collapse rapidly.

The abnormally cold weather that has occurred over parts of the world recently is now being blamed on global warming by some scientists, according to an article in the Hong Kong Standard.

"We are seeing extremely unusual weather across the world," said polar researcher Rebecca Lee Lok-sze. "This is due to human activities and our style of living. Carbon dioxide emissions are heavy, which is changing the weather rapidly. We could see colder winters and hotter summers in the future in Hong Kong."

Greenpeace officials concur saying mainland scientists concluded that the extreme cold weather in China was triggered by climate change. "This does not only cause an increase in global warming but also causes extreme weather patterns," said campaigner Edward Chan.