lightblueline

In today's (April 15, 2007) Seattle Times, a journalist explores the various opportunities that a single family has to change their carbon footprint and do their share in the struggle against unwanted and perhaps dangerous climate change.

"...personal choices matter, said Dina Kruger, director of EPA's Climate Change Division in Washington, D.C.

'There are enormous opportunities for individuals to make a difference,' she said.

Dr. Vivian Gornitz (January 2007) at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies provides a concise account of global ice melt and sea level since the last ice age.

The Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets has published a set of coastal inundation maps for several regions of the planet. NOTE: the datasets are not high-res enough to paint lines. They also have Google Map layers for the same data!

You can see these resources here:

Sea Level Rise Maps and GIS Data

BELOW: an example (downsampled) for Southeast United States.

The Santa Barbara Public Library has joined with other organizations to promote a community-wide reading effort around the topic of Climate Change.
We are all reading the book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change,
By Elizabeth Kolbert. This book outlines the science and the public issues around climate change.
She has much to say about ice melt and sea level rise!

You can participate in any of several events, and join in the conversation.

Check out the website:
Santa Barbara Reads

Goddard Space Flight Center's science visualization studio has taken NASA studies of Greenland's ice sheet and produced a wealth of graphics for classroom and student use! Also great for press use.

Greenland's Receding Ice

"Less ice, more ocean. That's the troubling conclusion emerging from new NASA research to study the condition of Greenland's ice sheet. Using a laser altimeter repeatedly flown across the surface of Greenland, experts say the edges of the ice found there may be thinning at the rate of nearly one meter per year.

Observation of change is one of the most sophisticated methods for understanding the nature of something. In complex systems like the Earth's climate, researchers examining specific features or processes can often extrapolate broader understandings of the larger whole. The changing conditions surrounding Greenland's ice cap are a good example of this. By measuring fluctuations, experts look for clues into broader subjects like global warming and atmospheric changes over time."

Check out the text and the great graphics here:

Greenland's Receding Ice

Check out Apple's global warming imagery and upcoming talk in SF and Chicago...

Greenpeace International says the following about the topic of sea-level rise:

"Consequences

Between the Greenland ice sheet and the Western Antarctic ice sheet the world could well be facing a 13 metre (43 foot) rise in sea level if we do not drastically curb our greenhouse gas emissions. Even a small fraction of this much sea level rise would be an economic and humanitarian disaster. A few possible consequences of rising sea levels:

• Billions spent on adaptation – if you can afford it. The US has roughly 20,000 km (12,400 miles) of coastline and more than 32,000 km (19,900 miles) of coastal wetlands. A recent study estimated the costs of adapting to even a one metre sea level rise in the US would amount to US$156 billion (3 percent of GNP). Most countries don't have this kind of money to spend.

The Arctic Sea ice

The floating sea ice of the Arctic covers an area equal to that of the United States. The permanent presence of sea ice, ice sheets, and continuous permafrost are unique features of the Polar Regions. Even though it is characterized by its harsh environment and vast landscapes the Arctic serves as the home of many forms of life, including organisms living in the ice, fish and marine mammals living in the sea, birds, land animals such as polar bears, and human societies. But much more than that, its white ice cover reflects huge amounts of sunlight and thereby helps the world stay cool.

Writing in Spiegel Online International, Franziska Badenschier reports on new models developed in Germany that challenge the IPCC model on sea level rise.

"The United Nations panel IPCC assumes that the average global temperature will increase by up to 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, and that the sea level will rise by up to 43 centimeters as a result of the water's thermal expansion alone. Moreover, the incipient melting of Greenland's pack ice could significantly increase that number, according to the upcoming IPCC report, which is due to be released in February 2007.
Nine, 43, or 140 centimeters by the end of the century: 'The fact that we get such varying results with different methods emphasizes just how uncertain our current sea level predictions still are,' says [Stefan] Rahmstorf. But that's also why other experts consider Rahmstorf's numbers to be dubious. 'His report is a valuable contribution to the discussion, but we still have to give more consideration to whether the data is good enough,' says Hans von Storch, director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, told SPIEGEL ONLINE....

National Geographic News (December 14, 2006) reports on a new study of potential sea level rise in this century. "[T]he physics of how ice sheets melt and how the oceans will expand in a warmer world is still poorly understood.

So Stefan Rahmstorf, an ocean physicist at Potsdam University in Germany, took a different approach: He used studied actual observations of changes in sea level collected in the 20th century to make predictions for the 21st century.

Current models don't jibe with actual sea level rise during recent decades, Rahmstorf says. So he crafted a formula based on a relationship between global temperature and sea level seen during the past hundred years.