In the Maldives, a nation of small islands threatened by rising sea levels, the topic of climate change is a controversial one. Credit: Nattu/CC by 2.0

By Ferry Biedermann
VENICE, Jun 5 2013 (IPS)

On the quay leading to the Arsenale exhibition complex, a block of ice melts in a rare blast of spring warmth. Elsewhere in the city, coconuts bob on the choppy waters of the canals during the opening week of the 55th Venice Biennale.

The ice and the coconuts were both works of art belonging to the Maldives in its first-ever participation in the Biennale. One, by Stefano Cagol, referenced melting ice sheets, which contribute to rising sea levels that may threaten the existence of the fragile island nation.

The second, by the Wooloo group, echoes a disaster that has already happened – the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, after which the sea was littered with bunches of coconuts.

The Maldives’ first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world famous art show that attracts the rich, the famous and other art aficionados to this Italian lagoon city every two years, is all about climate change and the threat posed by rising sea levels to this low-lying chain of islands in the Indian Ocean.

This ecological focus, however, is also part of a Maldivian political controversy.

The pavilion was once the initiative of former president Mohamed Nasheed as a way to focus attention on the issue. It was almost abandoned after he resigned under hotly contested circumstances in February 2012.

The new government, with plenty of other issues demanding its attention, lost interest and allowed a joint Arab-European collective of curators, calling themselves Chamber of Public Secrets, to take over the pavilion and mount a show under the banner Portable Nation.

“They did not care. They did not mind. They don’t believe in the power of art to affect anything anyway,” Maren Richter, an Austrian associate curator, said of the current government’s attitude.

She called the lack of interest fortunate because political attitudes in the Maldives on the issue of climate change have changed dramatically.

“The new government even denies the problem and says that Nasheed was a liar. They say, ‘He built an airport and resorts, why would he do that if sea levels are rising?'” said Richter.

That accusation is voiced in the documentary “Maldives To Be or Not”, by Lebanese curator and artist Khaled Ramadan. It explores Western preconceived notions about the Maldives and its ecology, said Ramadan, who visited the islands as a citizen of the Arab world who wanted to learn about a place with shared identities.

Minimal action on climate change

T. C. Karthikheyan, an observer of the political and the ecological situation of the Maldives and an associate fellow at India’s National Maritime Foundation in New Delhi, confirmed that the current government is spreading the idea that Nasheed has been exaggerating the threat of rising sea levels.

The former president, who earned a degree in Maritime Studies in Liverpool before becoming a political activist, won elections in 2008, ending 30 years of authoritarian rule in the Muslim country. He immediately began making climate change a focus. In 2009, he famously held a cabinet session under water.

But Nasheed stepped down after widespread protests in February 2012, claiming that he had been forced out in a coup, an accusation that a Maldives inquiry called unfounded. He is now gearing up to run for reelection in September and win back the presidency from Mohammed Waheed Hassan.

The current government’s accusations against Nasheed can be interpreted as a attempt to discredit him while simultaneously sidestepping accusations that it has done too little on the issue of climate change since coming to power.

“They are mostly involved in politics and image building,” said Karthikheyan. “They have not done anything considerable in the previous year on the issue of climate change.”

Building awareness

In any case, the environment is not expected to play a major role in upcoming elections. Voters in the Maldives have other issues to worry about, such as the economy, democracy, human rights and the rise of Islamism, said Karthikheyan.

“The climate change aspect is not very prominent in the local campaign. When it comes to international attention then it is prominent,” he said.

The pavilion in Venice has helped the Maldives garner some of the attention that Nasheed sought for the issue of climate change, with many works there directly referencing the issue.

Outside the pavilion, an installation by Swiss artist Greg Niemeyer turns the various sea levels in the Maldives, Iceland, Venice and the Antarctic into sound.

Internet users in the Maldives can click a button on a website that will release the sound of a large tidal wave from the installation in Venice, a creation that is bound to attract notice in a city that itself is at risk from rising sea levels.

The 55th Venice Biennale was launched on 29 May and will be open to visitors until 24 November.

Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 11 2013 (IPS)

“Canada is not a country, it’s winter,” Canadians say with pride. But the nation’s long, fearsome winters will live only in memory and song for Canadian children born this decade.

Winters are already significantly warmer and shorter than just 30 years ago. The temperature regimes and plant life of the south have marched more than 700 kilometres northward, new research shows.If we don't curb carbon emissions, Arctic Sweden might be more like the south of France by the end of the century.

The frozen north is leaving and won’t be back for millennia due to heat-trapping carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, experts say.

By 2091, the north will have seasons, temperatures and possibly vegetation comparable to those found today 20 to 25 degrees of latitude further south, said Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University.

“If we don’t curb carbon emissions, Arctic Sweden might be more like the south of France by the end of the century,” Myneni, co-author of the Nature Climate Change study published Sunday, told IPS.

Canada, Northern Eurasia and the Arctic are warming faster than elsewhere as a result of the loss of snow and ice, he said. In 90 years, Alaska or Canada’s Baffin Island in the Arctic may have seasons and temperatures comparable to those in today’s Oregon and southern Ontario.

Myneni is member of an international team of 21 authors from seven countries who used newly improved ground and satellite data to measure changes in temperatures and vegetation over the four seasons from roughly above the U.S.-Canada border (45 degrees latitude) to the Arctic Ocean.

They found temperatures over the northern lands have increased at different rates during the four seasons over the past 30 years, with winters warming most followed by spring temperatures.

There is a huge difference between winter and summer temperatures in the north, but that difference is less and less every year, according to the study, “Temperature and vegetation seasonality diminishment over northern lands”. This measured change is happening faster than projected by climate models.

“We are changing seasonality…. The north is becoming like the south, losing its sharp contrasts between the four seasons,” said Myneni.

One clear sign is the greening of Arctic. The types of plants that could go no further north than 57 degrees north 30 years ago are now found at 64 degrees.

This change is “easily visible on the ground as an increasing abundance of tall shrubs and tree incursions in several locations all over the circumpolar Arctic,” said co-author Terry Callaghan of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the University of Sheffield, UK.

Seasonality is often called the rhythm of life. Changes will impact many species, considering the enormous numbers of birds, animals and others species that migrate north to feast during the short northern summer.

“The way of life of many organisms on Earth is tightly linked to seasonal changes in temperature and availability of food, and all food on land comes first from plants,” said Scott Goetz, deputy director and senior scientist, Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, U.S.

“Think of migration of birds to the Arctic in the summer and hibernation of bears in the winter: Any significant alterations to temperature and vegetation seasonality are likely to impact life not only in the north but elsewhere in ways that we do not yet know,” Goetz said in a statement.

The Arctic is home to millions of square kilometres of permafrost with its vast amount of frozen carbon. The amplified warming of the Arctic will release some of this carbon, leading to greater warming around the planet for hundreds of years, the study also warns.

In recent weeks, satellite images of the Arctic Ocean have revealed large fractures in the sea ice during the coldest part of winter. Sea ice does not normally begin to break up until at least April. The mid-February fracturing was extensive and unusual, sea ice expert Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told IPS.

Last summer’s record melt of sea ice was 80 percent greater when compared to summers 30 or more years ago. This winter, most of the ice in the Arctic is thin, first-year ice that is more easily fractured and likely to melt quickly when the summer comes.

The ramifications of this planetary-scale change are just beginning to be understood.

The 2012 sea ice collapse amplified the destructive power of Superstorm Sandy, researchers reported last week in the journal of Oceanography. The severe loss of summertime Arctic sea ice appears to affect the jet stream, IPS has previously reported.

That helped Hurricane Sandy take a powerful turn west instead of steering northeast and out to sea like most October hurricanes, researchers say in the paper “Superstorm Sandy: A Series of Unfortunate Events?”.

It’s not only sea ice that is in full meltdown mode. Canada’s land-based glaciers are also melting. Little studied until recently, these glaciers are third in volume only to those of Antarctica and Greenland. By the end of this century, 20 percent will have melted, raising global sea levels by 3.5 cm.

Considering oceans cover 71 percent of the planet, that is an incredible amount of ice turning into water.

“We believe that the mass loss is irreversible in the foreseeable future” assuming continued climate change, wrote researchers from the Netherlands and the United States in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated 50 to 60 billion dollars in damage. Above, a section of Marblehead, Massachusetts during the storm. Credit: Brian Birke/CC by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 2 2012 (IPS)

Killing nearly 200 people in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean and crippling much of New York City and surrounding areas earlier this week, Hurricane Sandy was the kind of extreme weather event scientists have long predicted will occur with global warming.

“Climate change is a reality,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo after Sandy swept through his state.

Sandy was twice the size of an average hurricane, and it hit the eastern coast of the United States, where sea levels have been rising the fastest, said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

“All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,” Trenberth, an expert on extreme events, told IPS.

Whether climate change caused Hurricane Sandy is the wrong question to ask, added Trenberth. He explained that climate change helped make Hurricane Sandy more destructive than it otherwise would have been.

“This is the new normal,” Trenberth said. “It doesn’t make sense to rebuild in some regions – they’ll just be swept away again.”

Oceans and the earth’s atmosphere have warmed significantly in the last 50 years due to hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from burning coal, oil and natural gas. CO2 acts as blanket, keeping the planet warm by trapping some of the sun’s heat.

The extra heat contained by the CO2 blanket is akin to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day, according to James Hansen, a climate scientist who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Most of that heat has gone into the oceans, so land temperatures around the world have risen an average of only 0.8 degrees Celsius (one degree Fahrenheit). As oceans warm, sea levels rise because warm water expands. Melting glacier and ice sheets are also major contributors to sea level rise.

Warmer air can also hold more moisture. Measurements show there is now four to six percent more water vapour in the air, making rainfalls heavier.

Hurricane Sandy’s path took it from the warm waters of the Caribbean up the Atlantic coast of the United States, where waters were exceptionally warm for this time of year. Hurricanes are largely fuelled by warm water and moist air. Sandy had plenty of both.

Higher moisture levels created a stronger storm and magnified the amount of rainfall by as much as five to 10 percent in comparison to conditions more than 40 years ago, Trenberth explained.

Just one year ago, Hurricane Irene slammed into New York City, closing its subway system and forcing the evacuation of 370,000 people. Irene then moved inland to Vermont and New Hampshire, where it produced record flooding. Total damages were estimated at 16 billion dollars.

Sandy’s cost is estimated between 50 and 60 billion dollars, an amount second only to Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on Aug 29, 2005, killing 1,836 people and destroying roughly 300,000 homes. It caused nearly 120 billion dollars in damage, with its total cost to the U.S. economy estimated at 250 billion dollars.

These extreme events will only worsen as temperatures continue to rise. Yet CO2 emissions are still increasing quickly, driven by the oil, gas and coal industries.

In 2012, more than $600 billion will be spent worldwide in oil and gas exploration and production, said Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation.

“The reality is that the oil industry is driven by reaping profits from new production sites,” Kretzmann told IPS.

Massive investments in deep water drilling, tar sands and new oil and gas extraction technologies such as horizontal fracturing are driving production levels to new highs. An analysis by Oil Change International found that those investments by fossil fuel companies and their backers put the planet on the path for temperatures to rise at least eight degrees Celsius.

Leading scientists consider a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius to be catastrophic. At those temperatures, the Arctic will be eight to twelve degrees Celsius warmer. Most of the carbon-laden permafrost will thaw, with disastrous positive feedback. A rise of six degrees Celsius would render large parts of the world unlivable. Hardly anyone has considered the consequences of eight degrees.

“The world needs to aggressively invest in oil demand reduction rather than a continued unsustainable binge,” Kretzmann said.

But such change, which seems unlikely in the near future, occurs, the world will be forced to deal with the consequences.

Arctic sea ice extent. Area of ocean with at least 15 percent sea ice as of Aug. 21, 2012. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center.

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 20 2012 (IPS)

The melt of Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest point this year, shrinking 18 percent from last year’s near-record low.

Summer ice this year is half what it was 30 years ago and is now affecting weather patterns. The massive declines in ice in recent summers have shocked scientists and Arctic experts. Some predict that in just a few years we will witness an event that hasn’t happened in millions of years: the complete loss of summer ice.

“We are now in uncharted territory,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado.

“Few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur” as a result of the burning fossil fuels that are warming the planet, said Serreze.

“We could see an essentially ice-free Arctic ocean in late summer by the year 2030,” he told IPS.

Not long ago experts thought the soonest the Arctic would be ice-free was 2070. Now it’s anywhere from four to 18 years away.

The impacts are already being felt across the entire northern hemisphere. The loss of sea ice in recent years has been affecting weather patterns, recent research has shown. The all-important jet stream – the west-to-east winds that are the boundary between the cold Arctic and the warm mid-latitudes – is slowing down, moving north and become more erratic.

“Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” said James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States.

“In future, cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception” in these regions, Overland told IPS in Oslo in 2010.

The summer’s record loss of Arctic sea ice may mean a cold winter for the UK and northern Europe, Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University, told the Guardian last week.

The region has been prone to bad winters after summers with very low sea ice, such as 2011 and 2007, Francis said.

When continent-sized areas of the Arctic Ocean flip from the all-white ice to dark blue, tremendous amounts of heat are absorbed from the 24-hour summer sun. When the bitter cold Arctic winter sets in over the next few weeks, all the heat in the ocean must be released into the atmosphere before ice can form again.

The Arctic will be ice-covered in winter for decades to come but what’s fundamentally changed is that every fall, unprecedented amounts of heat and water vapour will be released into the atmosphere.

“The polar meltdown shows we’re teetering on the brink of climate change catastrophe,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

“Arctic sea ice plays a critical role in regulating the planet’s climate. As man-made global warming shrinks the ice, our risk of droughts and other extreme weather goes up. We can’t wait any longer to cut carbon pollution,” Wolf said in a statement.

As the sea ice declines, Arctic temperatures increase, thawing more and more permafrost, which will release more climate-heating carbon and methane. Permafrost is frozen soil, sediment and rock spanning 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe. It has twice the carbon that the atmosphere currently holds.

A Canadian study published last week estimated humanity’s climate heat emissions will thaw enough permafrost to release 70 to 500 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100. The amount of additional heating from these permafrost emissions is estimated to be 0.4C to 0.8C. That’s in addition to the estimated three to four C expected with estimated fossil fuel emissions to 2100 based on current commitment pledges.

It is the first-ever modelling study of this, however, it does not include heating from the massive methane emissions that are also expected. Nor does the study incorporate a model that accounts for the rapid melt of sea ice in recent years, said Andrew MacDougall, a University of Victoria, British Columbia researcher.

“In that respect our study underestimates the amount of potential warming,” MacDougall told IPS.

A global average temperature rise of two degrees C means four to six C in the Arctic, enough to melt much of the permafrost. Preventing this requires putting a high price on the carbon, says activist and writer Bill McKibben.

Oil giant Exxon and the rest of the industry derive much of their enormous profits by using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for the climate-damaging carbon they dig out of the ground, he said.

One way to price carbon is through a “fee-and-dividend” scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds to people based on their income to help offset the increased costs. “By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead,” writes McKibben.

Carbon pricing has to happen in the U.S. and that means breaking the fossil fuel industry’s hold on Washington’s politicians, he said.