Web posted
Monday, February 4, 2008
Antarctica trip shows global warming trends
By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer
reporter@arkcity.net
(Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part report on Antarctica by staff writer Foss Farrar who recently returned from a trip there.)
A Notre Dame professor who noted that the Center for Biological Diversity had petitioned the U.S. government to put penguins on the endangered species list as a way to combat global warming got a strong reaction to his talk on a voyage to Antarctica.
"Putting penguins on the endangered list could be a catalyst to force stronger laws against greenhouse gas emissions," said the professor, John Nagle in a talk aboard the French tourist ship, Le Diamant.
Global warming represents the biggest threat to penguins, the Center for Biological Diversity concluded.
Nagle is an enviornmental law specialist and co-author of three casebooks.
The talk was attended by about 160 people making the voyage. They were mostly alumni of various universities throughout the country, including a group of eight people from the University of Kansas Alumni Association.
An audience member apparently skeptical of the anti-global warming strategy asked why penguins were picked for the endangered species list instead of frogs. Penguins aren't a native species in the United States; they are only found in zoos here.
"Polar bears and penguins will get people's attention," Nagle responded. "I don't know whether frogs would."
Nagle predicted that polar bears would be listed on the endangered species list soon, if procedures go through governmental agencies.
Of course global warming has broader implications than putting penguins in danger, Nagle said. It would affect other species too, such as polar bears and certain coral.
But if the 12 penguin species proposed by the Center for Biological Diversity were put on the list, the U.S. would be obliged to "control greenhouse gas so they don't go extinct," he said.
Determining the effects of global warming on Antarctica itself is more difficult than it is elsewhere, said another speaker and meteorological researcher.
The Arctic is in trouble due to global warming, but it is less clear what's going on in the Antarctic, said Richard Cullather, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He also has worked at the Byrd Polar Research Center and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.
"The Arctic is in trouble; it will be warming over the next century," Cullather said. "In the Antarctic there will be considerable warming as well."
In the Arctic, there is a semi-permanent mass of sea ice that has been melting off. But sea ice in Antarctica melts off annually, he said.
Antarctica has huge land mass. The continent is bigger than the U.S. and Mexico combined.
In the Arctic, one-third of the pack ice toward the North Pole melted last summer, for the first time in history, Cullather said.
"There is definitely something going on in the Arctic," he said.
Sea ice loss in Antarctica is caused each summer by turbulence associated with the ocean in all but a few areas, Cullather said.
"You lose the winter sea ice," he said.
An event that has scientists upset is the breaking up of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, Cullather said.
"A Delaware size iceberg calved from the ice shelf a couple of years ago," he said. "If the entire ice shelf breaks up, the fear is that you'd have a rise in sea level; but so far, so good. The Ross ice sheet doesn't appear in danger."
An International Polar Year is planned, probably for 2009-2010, Cullather said. "The idea is to rally around scientists to see what's going on in the polar regions," he said.
Another environmental scientist who spoke during the trip was not on the planned list of speakers. Andy Gunther, who traveled as part of the University of California at Los Angeles group, volunteered to speak even though he wasn't scheduled to do so.
After seeing the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," Gunther trained with former Vice President Al Gore, who for years has been concerned with global warming, Gunther said.
"We are in danger of an ecological upheaval," Gunther said.
He said the global warming theory was developed in the last century. As humans place more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the earth would warm up, proponents of the theory predicted.
The theory is now accepted by scientists based on evidence worldwide, he said.
"Glaciers worldwide are in retreat; they are melting," Gunther said.
By studying ice cores, scientists have a record of temperatures over the ages and they show that temperatures are rising, and doing so in huge jumps in recent years, he said.
"The ocean temperature increase from 1940 to 2004 is way above what is predicted from natural cause," Gunther said. "Scientists conclude it is we that are causing the temperatures to increase.
"The result is stronger, fiercer storms. It's the power that is stronger, not the frequency."
|
