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Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 03 Sep 2011
Arctic sea ice cover has already shrunk to its third lowest level on record this year, in an irreversible trend that may see an ice-free summer around 2030, said the head of the world’s main monitoring centre.
 The Arctic is on track to be completely ice-free in summer at some point this century The sea ice area will be reduced further in the next two weeks but was unlikely to beat a 2007 retreat in a 32-year satellite data record, said Mark Serreze, director of the US-based National Snow and Ice Data Center.
While sea ice does not raise sea levels when it melts, just as melting ice in a glass of water, an ice-free summer would have implications for the exploitation of resources in the area, scientists say. It could also disrupt weather patterns or cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt more rapidly.
Exxon Mobil Corp and Rosneft signed an agreement on Tuesday to extract oil and gas from the Russian Arctic, in exploration which may be assisted by the recent trend of summer sea ice retreat north of Russia.
“The numbers today are saying that if all further melt stopped right now it would be the third most in the satellite record,” Serreze said today.
“We just dropped below 4.6 million square kilometres and that’s what we had in 2010 (at the minimum). We’re continuing the overall pattern of loss, and there’s still a couple of weeks to go in the melt season.” Continue reading Shrinking sea could disrupt weather patterns
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 22 Aug 2011
Plants and animals are responding up to three times faster to climate change than previously estimated, as wildlife shifts to cooler altitudes and latitudes, researchers said on Thursday.
 In Borneo, moths shifted 220 feet upward on Mount Kinabalu Scientists have reported this decade on individual species that moved toward the poles or uphill as their traditional habitats shifted due to global warming, but this study analyzed data on over 2,000 species to get a more comprehensive picture.
In this analysis, researchers found that on average, wildlife moved to higher elevations at the rate of about 40 feet per decade.
They are moving toward the poles at an average rate of 10.31 miles a decade, scientists reported in the journal Science.
The altitude shift is twice what scientists had estimated as recently as 2003, according to Chris Thomas, a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in Britain, and the leader of the project.
The average latitude shift is triple earlier estimates, Thomas said in a telephone interview. But he noted that not all species move toward the poles as quickly as that, some don’t move much at all and others actually move slightly toward the Equator, depending on what they need most to survive.
What became clear in this study, Thomas and the other authors said, was that species moved furthest in places where the climate warmed most, an unambiguous link to climate change over the last 40 years. Continue reading Wildlife migration to cooler altitudes is happening faster
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 08 Aug 2011
The right to food, health and shelter is threatened due to global warming, International Relations and Cooperation Minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, said on Monday.
 In drought prone areas it is women who have to fend for their families “Climate change affects the economic and social rights of countless individuals. This includes their rights to food, health and shelter,” she said.
The minister was speaking at a consultative dialogue on Women and Climate Change in Limpopo. She said that as climate change will continue to affect humanity, it was key to safeguard the lives of the people that are adversely affected, which are women.
“As incoming president [of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change], I will strive to ensure the centrality of women in all global fora to advance the multilateral efforts to address climate change, which impacts in a very pernicious manner on women, especially in developing countries,” said Nkoana-Mashabane.
Women, she said, are the propellers and carriers of development.
“In flood prone regions, it is women who have to deal with the impact. In drought prone areas, it is women who have to fend for their families ensuring that the children are fed, and that the sick and the indigent are taken care of. Continue reading Climate change a threat to countless individuals
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 21 July 2011
Climate change could exponentially increase the scale of natural disasters while at the same time threatening world security, a senior UN official told the UN Security Council Wednesday.
Floods, such as the ones [...]
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 19 July 2011
 Polar bear cubs that swam long distances had a 45% mortality rate Polar bear cubs forced to swim long distances with their mothers as their icy Arctic habitat melts appear to have a higher mortality rate than cubs that didn’t have to swim as far, a new study reports.
Polar bears hunt, feed and give birth on ice or on land, and are not naturally aquatic creatures. Previous reports have noted individual animals swimming hundreds of kilometres to reach ice platforms or land, but this is one of the first to show these swims pose a greater risk to polar bear young.
“Climate change is pulling the sea ice out from under polar bears’ feet, forcing some to swim longer distances to find food and habitat,” said Geoff York of World Wildlife Fund, a co-author of the study.
York said this was the first time these long swims had been quantitatively measured, filling a gap in the historical background on this iconic Arctic species.
To gather data, researchers used satellites and tracked 68 polar bear females equipped with GPS collars over six years, from 2004 to 2009, to find occasions when these bears swam more than 50km at a time. Continue reading Polar bears at risk over melting ice
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