This story is comfirming (yes, again) the deep shit we’re in. But it is now 800,000 years of proof instead of 600k.

Also, this article makes it quite clear– to those of us who aren’t scientists who fall alseep with too much jargon– HOW we know.

/s/ Andrew

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By Jonathan Amos

Science reporter, BBC News, Norwich

2006/09/04

Carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than at any time in the last 800,000 years, the latest study of ice drilled out of Antarctica confirms.

The in-depth analysis of air bubbles trapped in a 3.2km-long core of frozen snow shows current greenhouse gas concentrations are unprecedented.

The East Antarctic core is the longest, deepest ice column yet extracted.

Project scientists say its contents indicate humans could be bringing about dangerous climate changes.

“My point would be that there’s nothing in the ice core that gives us any cause for comfort,” said Dr Eric Wolff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

“There’s nothing that suggests that the Earth will take care of the increase in carbon dioxide. The ice core suggests that the increase in carbon dioxide will definitely give us a climate change that will be dangerous,” he told BBC News.

The Antarctic researcher was speaking here at the British Association’s (BA) Science Festival.

Slice of history

The ice core comes from a region of the White Continent known as Dome Concordia (Dome C). It has been drilled out by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica), a 10-country consortium.

The column’s value to science is the tiny pockets of ancient air that were locked into its millennia of accumulating snowflakes.

Each slice of this now compacted snow records a moment in Earth history, giving researchers a direct measure of past environmental conditions.

Not only can scientists see past concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane – the two principal human-produced gases now blamed for global warming – in the slices, they can also gauge past temperatures from the samples.

This is done by analysing the presence of different types, or isotopes, of hydrogen atom that are found preferentially in precipitating water (snow) when temperatures are relatively warm.

‘Scary’ rate

Earlier results from the Epica core were published in 2004 and 2005, detailing the events back to 440,000 years and 650,000 years respectively. Scientists have now gone the full way through the column, back another 150,000 years.

The picture is the same: carbon dioxide and temperature rise and fall in step.

“Ice cores reveal the Earth’s natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range,” explained Dr Wolff.

The “scary thing”, he added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.

“The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we don’t have an analogue in our records,” he said.

Natural buffer

The plan now is to try to extend the ice-core record even further back in time. Scientists think another location, near to a place known as Dome A (Dome Argus), could allow them to sample atmospheric gases up to a million and a half years ago.

Some of the increases in carbon dioxide will be alleviated by natural “sinks” on the land and in the oceans, such as the countless planktonic organisms that effectively pull carbon out of the atmosphere as they build skeletons and shell coverings.

But Dr Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and BAS, warned the festival that these sinks may become less efficient over time.

We could not rely on them to keep on buffering our emissions, she said.

“For example, we don’t know what the effect will be of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems. There is potential for deterioration,” she explained.

More CO2 absorbed by the oceans will raise their acidity, and a number of recent studies have concluded that this will eventually disrupt the ability of marine micro-organisms to use the calcium carbonate in the water to produce their hard parts.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/5314592.stm

Published: 2006/09/04 22:27:27 GMT

© BBC MMVI

Scientists say they have measured a significant slowing in the Atlantic currents that carry warm water toward Northern Europe. If the trend persists, they say, the weather there could cool considerably in coming decades.

Some climate experts have said the potential cooling of Europe was paradoxically consistent with global warming caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping “greenhouse” emissions. But several experts said it was premature to conclude that the new measurements, being described in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Nature, meant that such a change was already under way.

The currents, branching off from the Gulf Stream, are part of an oceanic circulatory system that disperses tropical heat toward the poles and makes Northern Europe far warmer than its latitude would suggest.

Warming, in theory, could stall the salty, sun-heated, north-flowing currents by causing freshwater to build up in high-latitude seas as ice melts and more precipitation falls.

The scientists, from the National Oceanography Center in Britain, measured sea temperature, currents and other conditions across the Atlantic from the Bahamas to Africa last year and found a 30 percent drop in the flow of warming waters since a similar set of measurements were taken in 1957.

The team, led by Harry L. Bryden, wrote that that even though they had measurements from only 5 years out of the last 50, the pattern of change seen at various depths supported the idea that the shift was a significant trend and not random variability.

They also cited independent measurements of a long-term decline in the flow of water between some Arctic seas and the North Atlantic as evidence that a slowing of the overall Atlantic circulation was under way.

In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Detlef Quadfasel of the University of Hamburg, who was not involved with the British study, said it provided “worrying support for computer models that predict just such an effect in a world made warmer by greenhouse gas emissions.”

Other scientists were more cautious. Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the estimated decline in ocean circulation should have produced a perceptible dip in surface temperatures but that no such dip had been measured.

Robert Dickson of the British Center for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science said that given the complexity and variability of the seas, much more data was needed to determine whether a slowdown was under way.

“However much statistical rigor is brought to bear, five trans-ocean sections is still a small number on which to depend,” he said.

They say the affect of melting polar ice caps and glaciers worldwide will increase over the upcoming decades, according to even the most conservative estimates, The Christian Science Monitor reports.

A team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography looked at the affect on the Rhine River in Europe and on Canadian prairies and found it mirrored what was happening in the western United States.

They found farmers were more at risk of drought and shipments of goods on the waters would be reduced.

A Chinese study found glaciers in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountains have been dramatically getting smaller over the past 25 years.

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at 12 climate change models to estimate how the extra water — and fewer glaciers — would affect the world.

It found a 10 to 40 percent increase in water flows in parts of Africa, Eurasia and North and South America and a 10 to 30 percent decline in Southern Africa and Europe, the Middle East and western North America.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International

Robert May, president of the country’s leading scientific body, the Royal Society, issued the warning as a 12-day conference was set to get underway Monday in Montreal to decide the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations’ troubled treaty for curbing greenhouse gases.

“The impacts of global warming are many and serious: sea-level rise … changes in availability of fresh water … and the increasing incidence of extreme events — floods, droughts, and hurricanes — the serious consequences of which are rising to levels which invite comparison with weapons of mass destruction,” May said in an advance copy of a speech released Monday to coincide with the start of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on the same day.

The Montreal meeting is the first by the convention since the UN’s pollution-cutting Kyoto Protocol, signed by 156 countries, took effect on January 16.

But a notable non-signatory of the pact committing industrialised nations to reducing or offsetting emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases is the planet’s heaviest polluter: the United States.

Observers are gloomy about the prospects of the Montreal round coming up with a post-2012 deal that satisfies the European Union, green groups, business and US President George W. Bush, who argues Kyoto penalises the oil-dependent US economy.

But May said the convention attended by up to 10,000 delegates from 180 countries could help by agreeing to a pollution analysis calculating the potential costs of corrective action — and the fallout if nothing was done.

“The Montreal meeting could be constructive if there at least emerged agreement to initiate a study of target levels for atmospheric concentrations, as a basis for discussing appropriate plans of action,” he said.

“We need countries to initiate a study into the consequences of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at, below, or above twice pre-industrial levels, so that the international community can assess the potential costs of their actions or lack of them.

“Such an analysis could focus the minds of political leaders, currently worried more about the costs to them of acting now than they are by the consequences for the planet of acting too little, too late,” May said.

The scientist pointed to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US jazz capital of New Orleans in August, as an example of what could happen more often if politicians failed to tackle global warming.

Studies undertaken before the storm suggested rising sea temperatures would mean more severe hurricanes, May said.

“The estimated damage inflicted by Katrina is equivalent to 1.7 percent of US GDP this year, and it is conceivable that the Gulf Coast of the US could be effectively uninhabitable by the end of the century,” he said.

May is set to deliver his last address of his five-year term as the head of the Royal Society on Wednesday.

Third Warmest Year In a Row 

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Oil Expert To Address Theory That Peak Oil Has Arrived

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There was no such thing as hell on Earth

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The research, published in the latest edition of Science, follows on from results by Professor Harrison and his colleagues published earlier this year that confirmed that our planet was also likely to have had oceans during most of the Hadean.

“A new picture of early Earth is emerging,� Professor Harrison said. “We have evidence that the Earth’s early surface supported water – the key ingredient in making our planet habitable. We have evidence that this water interacted with continent-forming magmas throughout the Hadean.

“And now we have evidence that massive amounts of continental crust were produced almost immediately upon Earth formation. The Hadean Earth may have looked much like it does today rather than our imagined view of a desiccated world devoid of continents.�

Professor Harrison and his team gathered their evidence from zircons, the oldest known minerals on Earth, called zircons. These ancient grains, typically about the width of a human hair, are found only in the Murchison region of Western Australia. The team analysed the isotopic properties of the element hafnium in about 100 tiny zircons that are as old as 4.35 billion years.

Conventionally, it has been believed that the Earth’s continents developed slowly over a long period of time beginning about 4 billion years ago – or 500 million years after the planet formed.

However, hafnium isotope variations produced by the radioactive decay of an isotope of lutetium indicate many of these ancient zircons formed in a continental setting within about 100 million years of Earth formation.

“The evidence points to almost immediate development of continent followed by its rapid recycling back into the mantle via a process akin to modern plate tectonics,� according to Professor Harrison.

The isotopic imprint left on the mantle by early melting shows up again in younger zircons — providing evidence that they have tapped the same source. This suggests that the amount of mantle processed to make continent must have been enormous.

“The results are consistent with the Earth hosting a similar mass of continental crust as the present day at 4.5-4.4 billion years.

“This is a radical departure from conventional wisdom regarding the Hadean Earth,� said Professor Harrison.

“But these ancient zircons represent the only geological record we have for that period of Earth history and thus the stories they tell take precedence over myths that arose in the absence of observational evidence.�

“The simplest explanation of all the evidence is that essentially from its formation, the planet fell into a dynamic regime that has persisted to the present day.�