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Sail-World.com : North West Passage Alarm - totally ice free by 2015
North West Passage Alarm - totally ice free by 2015
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'Polar bears depend completely on ice for hunting'
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It might be appealing to think of sailing through the dreaded North West Passage above Canada, but most cruising sailors would gladly give it a miss if it meant we could reduce the apparently irreversible (if you go by the feeble reactions of many nations) effects of the global warming which is producing it.
The International Energy Agency has just warned that climate change is irreversible by 2017. Arctic Sea ice is shrinking so rapidly that by the summer in as little as four years’ time it could vanish altogether at the top of the globe.
Sailing season along the entire Arctic coast of Siberia became one month longer than the 2010 season. Shipping companies take advantage of the shrinking ice cap as global warming speeds up.
 | If the ice is gone, so may be the polar bears - .. . |
Polar bears could be robbed of their hunting ground in the summer period and will hardly survive as the rising global temperature puts the Arctic sea ice in a death spiral. Polar bears totally depend on the sea ice when hunting seals.
Time is running out to limit the earth’s warming, warns the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a report issued this week. If the world’s energy production doesn’t change dramatically towards non-carbon uses before 2017 it will be harder and more expensive to meet the climate goals, says IEA in its World Energy Outlook 2011 report.
The globally agreed goal is to limit the temperature rise to 2°C. If the temperature rises more, climate changes could be irreversible. The world will lose the chance to limit global warming if it doesn’t take hard action in the next five years, reads the report.
While the International Panel on climate change (IPCC) predicts the Arctic Sea ice could be gone by the summer of 2030, Cambridge University Professor Peter Wadhams says new models indicate that it could be all gone by the summer of 2015.
'It is really showing the fall-off in ice volume is so fast that it is going to bring us to zero very quickly. 2015 is a very serious prediction and I think I am pretty much persuaded that that’s when it will happen,' says Peter Wadhams interviewed last week.
Earlier models have mainly focused on the extent of the Arctic Sea ice, while climate scientists this year are more focusing on the thickness of the ice. Research shows that it is less and less multiple year ice, and the thickness of the multiple year ice is also shrinking dramatically.
Last winter, the maximum extent of Arctic sea ice before the melting season started was at its lowest ever measured by satellites.
2010 made a record increase in greenhouse gas emissions with a 6 percent growth compared with 2009, according to the IEA report. The major global greenhouse gas emitters per capita are China, USA and India. The Norwegian emission of greenhouse gasses increased with 4,8 percent in 2010 compared with 2009, reads a report from Statistics Norway.
by Thomas Nilsen, Barents Observer/Sail-World
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12:14 PM Sat 19 Nov 2011 GMT
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