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.

My question is....... Who are the specific scientists making this claim? The only one I see quoted is a polar researcher.

Other experts blame La Nina...... "La Nina is causing warm moist air to move to the south of China," said Professor Yan Yuk- yee, who specializes in climatology at Hong Kong Baptist University. "When this meets the cold air of the monsoon, it causes freezing conditions."

The La Nina idea makes more sense to me personally, and the article does indeed quote a specific climatologist. But, I will keep an open mind on the issue since there is just not enough information out there yet in order to prove either link.

Over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily impacted by human activities such as fishing, pollution, in addition to climate change, according to scientists working with the National Science Foundation's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

The goal of the research is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the oceans's ecosystems.

"This project allows us to finally start to see the big picture of how humans are affecting the oceans." said lead scientist Ben Halpern of NCEAS. "Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me."

The study reports that the most heavily affected waters in the world include large areas of the North Sea, the South and East China Seas, the Caribbean Sea, the east coast of North America, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Bering Sea and several regions in the western Pacific. The least affected areas are largely near the pole, according to the National Science Foundation

"Unfortunately, as polar ice sheets disappear with warming global climate and human activities spread into these areas, there is a great risk of rapid degradation of these relatively pristine ecosystems," said Carrie Kappel, a scientist at NCEAS.

You can check out the results of the study and the different maps used in the research
right here.

A few weeks ago Dr. James Hansen, who is the Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS) and has been recently interviewed by AccuWeather.com, wrote a piece on Columbia U. website about the widespread problem of government science having to submit to political command and control. According to Hansen, it is not just an issue with the current administration, but with past democratic administrations as well. Keep in mind, Hansen also briefly promotes a book written about him and scientific censorship in his op-ed, but I still thought it would be of interest to many of you.

Here is the the link to "The Shadow on American Democracy", by Dr. James Hansen.

By the way, no video this week from Katie Fehlinger.

I found an interesting piece on Climateaudit.org, which is run by climate data analyst Steve McIntyre. In Steve's Feb. 15th blog, Anthony Watts shows us an example of how poor temperature data from a climate station has found its way into the NASA GISS temperature analysis.

Watts takes us to Lampasas, Texas, which is a fairly rural community. The climate station was moved to a new location back in 2000. Looking at the new location, you can see many obvious problems that would have a large warming effect on the temperature. There is way too much asphalt surrounding the site, while there is also a large building with brick right behind the sensor, which would obviously radiate heat back toward the instrument.

Check out the first graph shown on Climateaudit.org (blue one) and you can see the dramatic rise in annual temperature since 2000. Now I cannot prove it, but I would have to say at least half of that warming has got to be due to the change in location.

Unfortunately in this particular case, the usual GISS homogeneity adjustment made no downward adjustment (post 2000) like it did for much of the 20th century, and actually left the plot as is, which just further enhances the warming trend after 2000.

Now, I do not know how widespread this particular problem is across the country, and even the world, but surfacestations.org is doing a good job trying to find that answer in the U.S. I think the government will say that the problem is too isolated to have much impact on the overall temperature trends when you average it all out for the country and that there is just not enough money available in the budget to fix these sites, but obvious things like this need attention ASAP. What do you think?

Just for fun, here is the GISS temperature plot for Llano, Texas, a similar rural area just 36 miles away from Lampasas. It does indeed show a rise in temperature post 2000, but nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, I could not find a picture of the observing site.

Again, here is the plot for the contaminated Lampasas, TX station below....

You can find out more about the quality of many climate station sites across the U.S. at surfacestations.org.

The latest northern hemispheric sea ice extent and concentration, courtesy of The State of the Canadian Cryosphere. You can animate this image and others here.

The recent spell of very cold weather across far northern Canada has expanded sea ice coverage by about 2 million square kilometers compared to the average winter coverage over the past three years, according to a CBC News report.

The key point in this report.....Arctic sea ice is about 10-20 cm thicker in some areas, compared to last year and that is significant, according to Gilles Langis, an Ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service.

What type of impact, if any, will this have on the all important summer sea ice coverage in the Arctic? Langis added that it's too soon to say what impact this winter will have on the Arctic summer sea ice, which reached its lowest coverage ever recorded in the summer of 2007.

It looks like we will have to wait and see.

Anyone need a ride?

A pair of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have come up with a concept for removing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into gasoline!

The scientists, Jeffrey Martin and William Kubic Jr. have titled their concept "Green Freedom", and here is how it would work. Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel such as methanol, gasoline and jet fuel. The closed cycle - meaning equal amounts of carbon dioxide emitted and removed from the air would mean that cars, trucks and airplanes using the synthetic fuels would no longer contribute to global warming, according to the New York Times article.

I know, you're saying that there must be a catch, well sort of........no prototype has yet to be built, but the scientists say it is all based on existing technology. One major caveat to building a (CO2 to gasoline) factory is that it would require a great deal of energy. A nuclear power plant and the development of a new electrochemical process might be able to overcome that obstacle.

The Los Alamos proposal does not violate any laws of physics, and other scientists, like George A. Olah, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the University of Southern California, and Klaus Lackner, a professor of geophysics at Columbia University, have independently suggested similar ideas. Dr. Martin said he and Dr. Kubic had worked out their concept in more detail than previous proposals.

What would be the cost of the project? About 5 billion.

The concept would be able to produce gasoline at a cost of $1.40 per gallon and it would be made economically viable at a cost of $4.60 to the consumer. Technology advances might be able to get that cost down to $3.40.

This is the world sea-surface anomaly from January 10th, 2008, showing negative sea-surface anomalies extending throughout much of the eastern and central equatorial Pacific, right up to the South American coast.

Here is the latest world sea-surface anomaly image (Feb 18th, 2008). Note: the colder anomalies have moved westward away from South America.

There are now some subtle hints that the La Nina conditions (colder than normal sea surface water temperatures) across the equatorial Pacific may have peaked in intensity. The latest oceanic index value from NOAA for the (NOV/DEC/JAN) time period was a -1.4. A number less than -0.5 for a three consecutive running mean is characterized as a La Nina, while a number above 0.5 is considered an El Nino.

Sea surface water temperatures across the central and western equatorial Pacific are still solidly below normal, but positive anomalies have recently begun to show up in the eastern (1+2 nino) region near the west coast of South America, and this "may" already be having some impact on the overall weather pattern across North America.

The latest IRI experimental ensemble SST forecast for the Nino 3 region, which covers the eastern half of the equatorial Pacific, is forecasting sea surface temperature anomalies to be back to normal by early summer, if not slightly above. This is certainly an upward trend compared to what it was forecasting back in January. Now, as I have said in the past, the track record of these forecasts is nothing great, and this particular one is experimental, but I think it is on to something as it is common to see these La Nina's peak out by late in the winter. It will be interesting to see what actually happens through the spring.

Here is that new IRI forecast.......

The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists is a myth, according to a survey of scientific literature of the era. I found this story in Wednesday's online edition of USAToday by Doyle Rice. This subject has been previously brought up on numerous occasions within the comment section of this blog.

Indeed, major publications such as Newsweek, Time, the New York Times and National Geographic published articles in the 1970's about the possibility of a new ice age, but Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965-1979 and found the following.......

7 supported global cooling.
44 predicted warming.
20 were neutral in regards to future climate trends.

Excerpts from the USAtoday article...........

The study concludes, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."

"I was surprised that global warming was so dominant in the peer-reviewed literature of the time," says Peterson, who was also a contributor to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report.

The research will be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

In this week's Headline Earth video, Katie Fehlinger brings you to the "Focus the Nation" teach-in event that was recently held at Penn State University. This particular setting was just one of over 1400 that occurred that day across many campuses throughout the nation. You might recognize a few of the speakers.

Radar image of Hurricane Andrew making landfall south of Miami, Florida in 1992.

From a NOAA press release..........

A scientific team has determined that economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the United States over time due to greater population, infrastructure and wealth on the U.S. coastlines and not because of any spike in the number and intensity of hurricanes.

My first thought when I read this yesterday was "no sh..!" but, it is still nice to see this type of report being released through NOAA. There is just way too much building going on along exposed, low-lying coastal areas in this country. You are just asking for trouble in my opinion.

According to Chris Landsea, operations officer at NOAA's National Hurricane Center, the economic costs of land-falling hurricanes have steadily increased over time, but there is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damge record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts. The report states that the economic damage from hurricanes is doubling every 10-15 years!

Here is the link to the study pdf.

The U.S. Department of Energy, along with a consortium of midwestern companies unveiled the first carbon dioxide injection well in the country Thursday. The experimental well, located in Michigan will sequester the gas 3,700 feet underground in porous rock.

The well is already taking carbon dioxide from a nearby DTE natural gas-burning power plant.

According to the report from the Detroit Free Press, the start of this project could open the door to a storehouse that could accomadate all the carbon dioxide from every Michigan power plant and many surrounding states for hundreds of years, especially since the deep sandstone layers of Michigan are perfect for safely and permanently storing carbon dioxide.

Taking into account the effect of the drag caused by the outer atmosphere of the dying sun, University of Sussex (UK) astronomers now predict that the earth will be swallowed up by the sun in about 7.6 billion years unless the earth's orbit can be altered. Now I'm scared!

But don't worry, life will have already disappeared long before that 7.6 billion years as the earth will be a very hot, dry and uninhabitable ball in about a billion years, according to Dr. Robert Smith, Emeritus Reader of Astronomy.

What can be done? A team from Sant Cruz University suggest harnessing the gravitational effects of a close passage by a large asteroid to "nudge" the earth's orbit gradually outwards away from the encroaching sun.

"This sounds like science fiction," says Professor Smith. "But it seems that the energy requirements are just about possible and the technology could be developed over the next few centuries." However, it is a high-risk strategy - a slight miscalculation, and the asteroid could actually hit the Earth, with catastrophic consequences. "A safer solution may be to build a fleet of interplanetary 'life rafts' that could manoeuvre themselves always out of reach of the Sun, but close enough to use its energy," he adds in the press release from the University.

Dr. Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the Earth and Biosphere Institute (UK) says it is time for a real climate change body count. According to Lewis, there is currently no official climate change body count and the most likely reason is that it is very tough to quantify. That's no surprise to me since there is still not enough information out there to link specific weather disasters (floods/hurricanes etc..) with climate change. The only global estimate of people killed due to global warming is published by the World Health Organisation, and they estimate that 150,000 people are killed each year due to global warming, as stated in the Guardian op-ed. Now we are probably all wondering where that number comes from, well it comes from a 2002 modelling study which looked at four probable impacts of climate change.....

1. Malaria
2. Malnutrition
3. Diarrhoea-type diseases
4. Flooding

The authors of this study say this is a highly conservative estimate that is already out of date. It also seems that these four could easily be caused by many other factors in addition to climate change.

This seems like a number (body count) that we may never know or even come close to knowing, at least in the near-term. What do you think?

The Pine Island Glacier.

Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) say they have found strong evidence of instabilities in the ice of West Antarctica. A group of glaciers covering an area the size of Texas have recently surged sharply in speed towards the ocean, according to the BBC News article.

Satellite measurements show that three large glaciers have been speeding up for more than a decade. Specifically, the Pine Island Glacier is putting more ice into the sea than any other glacier in Antarctica. The 30 km wide and couple of kilometers thick ice sheet is now moving at a rate of 3.5 kilometers per year. The scientists are now trying to figure out how the glacier moved in the long-term past.

The Pine Island Glacier is located in the top half of the area outlined in red on the map below, courtesy of the University of Hull.

Julian Scott of the BAS said that the Pine Island Glacier was accelerating 1% per year during the 1990's, but last season that figure was up to 7%. What could be the reasons for this? The scientists think a lack of sea ice in that particular region is allowing a warmer, deep ocean current to undercut the glacier and lubricate its flow toward the sea. There is also evidence of a volcano that erupted through the ice about 2,000 years ago and the whole region could be volcanically active, releasing geothermal heat to melt the base of the ice and help its slide towards the sea, according to Scott. However, they do not feel that this is a result of the warming of the surrounding air.

Icebergs calving on the edge of the Brunt Ice Shelf.

David Vaughn of the BAS thinks a major collapse of this section of the West Antarctica ice sheet should be taken seriously. If the Pine Island Glacier continues to surge and discharge most of the ice into the sea it could raise the global sea level by 25 cm (10 inches) in decades or a century.

Here is a link to several Antarctica webcams that are updated at least hourly, courtesy of the BAS.

2008 International Conference on Climate Change

The first, major international conference to focus on issues and questions not answered by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming will take place in New York City from March 2 - March 4, 2008, according to conference coordinator James Taylor from the Heartland Institute, which is the primary sponser of the event.

The conference will bring together leading scientists, economists and policy experts to explain the "other side" of the climate change debate, according to the conference website.

Approximately 100 scientists, economists, and policy experts will participate as speakers and panelists. Here is a list of confirmed speakers. I am sure you will recognize several of the speakers, some of which have been interviewed by Katie Fehlinger on Headline Earth, while others have personally interacted in the blog's comment section.

Admission is open to the general public, but attendance is limited to 500 people. I wonder if Dr. Hansen will be attending, especially since this conference is being held right in his own back yard.

The Svalbard global seed vault. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Norway finally opened the frozen doomsday vault this past Tuesday. The vault, located 620 miles from the North Pole, will store millions of seeds in order to safeguard the world's food crops in case of wars or natural disaster.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the vault an "insurance policy" and added his own biblical comparison: "It is the Noah's Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations."

The vault, which cost 9.1 million to build, is designed to house 4.5 million crop seeds from all over the world and is designed to withstand earthquakes, nuclear strikes and global warming, according to the AP article posted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The interior design of the vault. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The vault will run like a bank box, Norway owns the bank, but countries depositing seeds own them and can use them free of charge.

The temperature inside the vault is kept at -0.4 degrees F., which should allow the seeds to last 1000 years or more.

I would say this is certainly money well spent and no doubt one of the best insurance policies that I have seen.

Katie Fehlinger of Headline Earth explores how a carbon tax could impact you and your wallet. Charles Komanoff of the non-profit Carbon Tax Center explains what he sees as the benefits of the tax.