Alaska Dispatch AP Weird News
NYT Science News National Science Foundation BBC Science News IPY News NSF Discoveries Reuters Science News CNN Science News Volcanoes Latest Tsunami Info AAAS Ocean News News from Nature ENN Climate News Climate Change Wire Anchorage Daily News Fairbanks News-Miner EarthquakesStudents around the world launched “virtual” balloons Thursday to kick off the International Polar Year.
From investigating the properties of ice to comparing their locale to a class or school in Arctic regions, the kids (and their teachers) reported on their launch activities and posted their balloon on a world map.
People must act fast to avoid world-wide climate catastrophe, but we still have time to make a difference, according to a new report released this week by a panel of 18 scientists working for the United Nations Foundation.
The report — “Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable” — argues that policy makers must marshal modern technology and get people to reduce emissions before temperature rise accelerates even more.
“To avoid a entering a regime of sharply rising danger of intolerable impacts on humans, policy makers should limit temperature increases from global warming to 2-2.5 ° C (3.5 to 4.5 °F)above the 1750 pre-industrial level. It is still possible to avoid unmanageable changes in the future, but the time for action is now.”
The victim has been wounded. The gun still smokes. The assailant has all but admitted to squeezing off that first shot. But can he be forced to disarm?
That’s one way to describe the issue at an extraordinary hearing on whether inaction over climate change has violated the human rights of the Inuit people of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia.
The Inuit Circumpolar Conference filed a petition two years ago arguing that the United States should have its feet held to the fire over its contributions to global warming. The ICC will make its case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C., on March 1 — though the issue will no longer focus solely on the U.S. role.
“They are giving us an hour — myself, and my legal team, but they want to broaden the debate,” Shelia Watt-Cloutier, former ICC chair and a nomineee for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, said during CTV’s Question Period on Sunday. “They want to see how this relates to the real legal aspects for all people who are vulnerable and who are negatively impacted by global warming and climate change.”
Why blame the U.S.?
The roiling, sulfurous ash blasting from Mount Augustine during last winter’s eruptions triggered “spectacular lightning,” offering Alaska volcanologists the most detailed glimpse ever of one of the Earth’s most elusive electrical phenomena.
And watching for such a “dirty thunderstorm” over Alaska’s volcanoes may be one more trick to monitor eruptions and keep the lid on hazards that threaten aircraft and communities, according to University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers Steve McNutt, Guy Tytgat and Edward Clark.
An article describing the findings, “Electrical activity during the 2006 Mt. Augustine volcanic eruptions,” appeared Feb. 23 in the prestigious journal of Science.
A villager once called it “next door to heaven,” a rocky islet with stilt homes perched on its steep slope, amid the bountiful Bering Sea.
Now an Oregon-based research team has recovered evidence that a village flourished 800 to 900 years ago on King Island, suggesting that Inupiat walrus hunters inhabited the tiny island 40 miles off the coast of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula for at least a millennium.
The multi-disciplinary group of scientists, led by OSU anthropologist Deanna Kingston, confirmed the age of materials at the village site using carbon dating techniques.
Alaska Natives have warned that the Earth “moves faster,” seasons have shifted. Break-up comes sooner, ice forms later. The old ways of reading the land and sea have been undercut as the climate changes.
Scientists have increasingly listened to these observations, recognizing that such “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” offers data and insight into the Arctic world.
Canadian researchers have also begun to focus on the value of Native knowledge in studies discussed this past week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fall storms eat the land. Permafrost that stabilized bluffs for centuries washes away. Homes topple, roads collapse. And now the community must move.
Alaska’s village of Shishmaref, nestled on a barrier island along the Chukchi Sea, took the international stage Sunday during a global warming “town hall meeting” at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The meeting featured the premiere of a video illustrating how Shishmaref’s very existence has been threatened by shifting Arctic climate, forcing the 600 residents to seek as much as $100 million to relocate the village on stable ground. Late-forming sea ice in the fall lets storms pound the shore, allowing surf and high water to erode the land beneath homes, schools and roads.
