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According to a new study published in Nature Geoscience,  the Antarctic icesheets could disintegrate much faster than anticipated, reports Reuters. East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009. The rate speeded up from 2006. Previous estimates projected anywhere between a 4 gigatonne per year loss and a 22 gigatonne per year gain. As Jianli Chen, one of the study's authors from the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Space Research, told Reuters,

the key result is that appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions, since 2006.  This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future.

A good versus evil battle of superhero kids: A short film explaining climate change has been released by Klimaforum09 ahead of the Copenhagen summit. A bit silly maybe, but then...

AFP PHOTO/NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

Yesterday, hundreds of emails and other documents hacked from the University of East Anglia leaked online. The emails, some of them up to 13 years old, were accessed at the university's Climate Research Unit renowned for the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. The emails, many by prominent international climate researchers, exchange and  discuss scientific data, release procedures - and they also discuss how to combat and debase arguments of climate sceptics and deniers. Well, sometimes this was expressed in quite derisive terms.

The story first broke on a blog called the Air Vent, a blog some consider sceptical regarding human made climate change. Sceptics are having a field day. Mike Morano, of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth fame,  has filled his denialist site climatedepot.com with every allegation imaginable. James Delingpole from the Daily Telegraph blares: Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of  'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?Fox commentator and bloggger Michelle Malkin calls it: The global warming scandal of the century.

However, the New York Times quoted several scientists whose names appear in the e-mail messages. They

said they merely revealed that scientists were human, and did nothing to undercut the body of research on global warming.

True, some of those emails are quite juicy. But do they really debunk the general consensus about man-made climate change, refute thousands of research papers, melt glaciers, bring on droughts and floods and reveal the conspiracy against sceptics? Up to you and your common sense...

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The Guardian and the  Independent both report today that a new study by the Global Carbon Project , led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, has found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008. This, writes the Independent,

means an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent over the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy.

And it means a far higher increas in global temperatures than predicted by the United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast just two years ago. The study argues that we could be on course for a 6C rise in temperatures by 2100. If in doubt about the implications of such a rise, i.e. the combustion of the rainforests, the acidification of the oceans and the consequences of irreversable tipping points, I suggest you read Mark Lynas' book "Six Degrees. Our Future on a Hotter Planet", a detailed description of a truely apocalyptic future.

Yet there are still people around who do not accept the human factor in climate change. Thomas Friedman, the voice of choice for mainstream liberal America, rebukes these incorrigible deniers in his column in the New York Times today - from a purely American perspective and for pure self-interest ( and, yes, there could be worse reasons for campaigning for a change of America's energy policy).

So, as I said, you don't believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I'll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don't believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you're hurting America’s future to boot.

And the world's, I might add.

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Some people and news media in China now start to blame  their own trials in cloud seeding for heavy snowfall that by now has killed at least 40 people. Quite a few buildings, a school among them (again), collapsed under the weight of the  snow,

testing the country's disaster preparedness and prompting fresh questions about Beijing's efforts to alter its weather.

Cloud seeding is one of the oldest and probably most tested methods to alter the weather (and eventually the climate). For some years now, it might be considered as part of  geoengineering techniques(see post November 4, Engineering snow in China).

Now, if cloud seeding is even slightly to blame for these storms, we might have to think twice about other methods to influence weather patterns or the whole climate - methods that have not been tested at all. Consider it a warning not to be to self-assured about meddling with the world's  weather...

AFP

It  was to be expected.  And yet. Scientific American just published an analysis on the consequences of failure in Copenhagen:

Climate experts, scientists and negotiators say that, absent international agreement, the children and grandchildren of those living today will negotiate a world where planetary geo-engineering is a part of daily life, sea-walls defend coastal cities, the world's poor are hammered by drought, floods and famine and our planet is heading toward conditions unseen for the last 100 million years.

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You might have heard of those huge patches of plastic that float in the world's oceans. These are our society's debris, carpets of  plastic bottles, caps, plastic straws - and lots of those tiny little plastic pieces  used in peeling creams.

Most of the marine debris in the world is comprised of plastic materials. The average proportion varies between 60 to 80% of total marine debris. In many regions, plastic materials constitute as much as 90 to 95% of the total amount of marine debris. Nearly 80% of marine debris comes from land-based sources,

writes the Conservation Science Institute. They are huge. One, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,  contains approximately 3.5 million tons of trash, doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. Charles Moore, environmentalist and self-ttrained oceanographer, who discovered it in 1997, later wrote in an essay for Natural History,

...as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere...

Here is a TED-talk with James Moore, careful, there are some pretty nasty pictures of what plastic can do...

He went to talk about it to Charles Ebbesmayer, maybe the world's leading expert on flotsam. Ebbesmayer, who lives in California, tracks the world's trash on its journey through the oceans. He has written a book on his experience with beachcombing and a life tracking flotsam - and what it can teach us about the sea and our relation to it.

HarperCollins

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An English High Court judge, Justice Michael Burton, has just ruled that green beliefs deserve the same protection in the workplace as religious convictions, reports the Economist in its weekly online column green.view, quoting Mr Burton:

“A belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperatives is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.”

The plaintiff in this case was Tim Nicholson, a former “head of sustainability” for a residential-property firm. He was laid off in 2008 and sued the company for unfair dismissal on the grounds of his eco-minded beliefs. Under Britain's six-year-old Religion and Belief Regulations it is unlawful to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their religious or philosophical beliefs.

Some now fear the consequences this ruling might have, writes Time.com, quoting an employment specialistthat the decision will

"result in a tidal wave of philosophical-related litigation to employment tribunals."

Nor surprisingly, this ruling is seen as the beginning of a witch hunt by not only one of the innumerable blogs with a, let's say, denialist attitude towards man-made climate change:

So when can we expect "denier" to be replaced by "infidel"?

Well, Justice Burton seems to be a judge who likes to be precise. Two years ago, he reprimed Al Gore and his film "An Inconvenient Truth" for nine scientific errors, in a much publicised case brough to court by a British climate change denier. Not that Justice Burton had a problem with the central thesis that climate change was happening and that it was being driven by emissions from humans. Quite the contrary. But nine statements in the film, the judge said, were not supported by mainstream scientific consensus.

This time he has laid out some tests to prevent frivolous claims:

the belief must be genuinely held; it must be held for a long period of time; it must relate to something of grave importance to humanity; it must reach a certain level of cogency and seriousness; and it must not trample on existing ideas of human rights. By way of example, he said belief in the supremacy of the Jedi knights of “Star Wars” fame would be excluded, but he conceded that allegiance to the doctrines of Marxism or communism might not.

Question is, on which side will the deniers end up? Could those five points hold for them as they hold for the plaintiff?

Whole Trees Construction & Architecture

There are trees, there are houses, there are treehouses, and, well, there are houses based on and supported by trees. Who did not envy Jane for Tarzan's villa high up in the sky, all mods inc? Even when Johnny Weismuller's oily torso was all over the place.

There is a nice feature in today's NYT on an architect, Roald Gundersen, who incorporates whole trees  into his design. Hence the name. Might not be to everybody's taste, as it looks quite  rustic, definitely not minimalist or urbane. But then, is houses resurrrect old childhood memories of Sunday afternoons with Johnny and his tree house.  And, of course, it is in the middle of the woods. There could be worse ways to battle the sellout of nature.

And then I will have to find out whether designs like this are allowed in Germany. I fear they aren't.

What happens when Copenhagen fails (and using when rather than if is quite deliberate)? A few months ago, a dark political thriller was published that envisions a world where Kyoto and its successors have all failed. It's 2032, the coasts of the world are under water, droughts and wildfires are raging. The planet is close  to disaster.  The newly elected American president has to strike a deal with China, by then the world's worst polluter... They talk, diplomacy becomes a struggle of wills, the end is surprising - and frightening. Because there is an ultimatum.

The book is set in the future, but it could just as well describe political dealings and interests today. Says the Economist,

“Ultimatum” does a better job of convincing the reader about the price the world will pay for its complacency about global warming than any international grandstanding or dry scientific reports.

I couldn't stop reading. "Ultimatum" is visionary, but never implausible. So, if  you still need frightening scenarios to be convinced or convince others - go get it. Otherwise, have a great night reading anyway.