HUGE ICECAP FOUND ON THE SOUTH POLE OF MARS

Just like on earth (Antarctica accounts for 91 percent of the total mass of ice on the Earth): Suggesting that on both planets icecap formation is the product of an interaction between solar influence and the similar tilts of the two planets' rotational axes. Journal abstract follows:

Subsurface Radar Sounding of the South Polar Layered Deposits of Mars

By Jeffrey J. Plaut et al.

The ice-rich south polar layered deposits of Mars were probed with the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding on the Mars Express orbiter. The radar signals penetrate deep into the deposits (more than 3.7 kilometers). For most of the area, a reflection is detected at a time delay that is consistent with an interface between the deposits and the substrate. The reflected power from this interface indicates minimal attenuation of the signal, suggesting a composition of nearly pure water ice. Maps were generated of the topography of the basal interface and the thickness of the layered deposits. A set of buried depressions is seen within 300 kilometers of the pole. The thickness map shows an asymmetric distribution of the deposits and regions of anomalous thickness. The total volume is estimated to be 1.6 x 106 cubic kilometers, which is equivalent to a global water layer approximately 11 meters thick.

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A POLITICAL DOCUMENT

Climate change will cause severe droughts and food shortages for billions of people unless governments act now, UN experts have agreed. An agreement was reached after an all-night session in Brussels during which key sections were deleted from a draft report. Scientists angrily confronted government negotiators who they feared were watering down their findings. "It has been a complex exercise," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but in the end agreed to compromises. Five days of negotiations came to an end when the delegates removed parts of a key chart highlighting devastating effects of climate change that come about with every rise of one degree Celsius. There were also disagreements over the level of scientific reliability attached to key statements. But in the end there was little doubt about the science, which was based on 29,000 sets of data, much of it collected in the past five years. The United States, China and Saudi Arabia raised many of the objections to the phrasing, often seeking to tone down the certainty of some of the more dire projections.

The final IPCC report is the clearest and most comprehensive scientific statement to date on the impact of global warming, mainly caused by man-induced carbon dioxide pollution. It said up to 30 per cent of the Earth's species face an increased risk of vanishing if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1980s and '90s. Areas that now suffer a shortage of rain will become even drier, adding to the risks of hunger and disease, it said. The world will face heightened threats of flooding, severe storms and the erosion of coastlines.

Negotiators pored over a 21-page draft summary which was intended as a policy guide for governments. The summary pares down the full 1,500-page scientific assessment of the evidence of climate change so far and the impact it will have on the Earth's most vulnerable people and ecosystems. Though weakened by the deletion of some elements, the final report "will send a very, very clear signal" to governments, said Yvo de Boer, the UN's leading climate change official.

The summary will be presented to the G8 summit of the world's richest nations in June, when the European Union is expected to renew appeals to US President George W Bush to join in international efforts to control emissions of fossil fuels. This year's series of reports by the IPCC are the first in six years from the prestigious body of some 2,500 scientists, formed in 1988.

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An Australian reaction to the latest IPCC "Wisdom"

From the political editor of "The Sydney Morning Herald" -- who gives SOME balance to his coverage

The first thing that strikes you on reading the latest consensus report from the world's climate scientists about the effect of global warming is that it is like the plot of an Armageddon movie. "The climate of the 21st century is virtually certain to be warmer with changes in extreme events," says the chapter on the effects on Australia and New Zealand, due to be published tonight in Brussels.

"Heatwaves and fires are virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency (high confidence)", with the parenthetic notation meaning that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attach a likelihood of greater than 90 per cent to this forecast. "Floods, landslides, droughts and storm surges are very likely to become more frequent and intense, and snow and frost are likely to become less frequent (high confidence)," says the final draft of the document that the panel provided to the institutions that set it up, the world's governments. "Ongoing water security problems are very likely to increase by 2030 in southern and eastern Australia and parts of NZ that are distant from major rivers (high confidence). "Ongoing coastal development is very likely to exacerbate risk to lives and property from sea-level rise and storms. Sea level is virtually certain to rise (high confidence)."

So, for example, by 2050 a rise of 20 centimetres in the sea level along the Sydney coast combined with a big, once-in-50-year storm would bring the sea 110 metres further inland at Collaroy and Narrabeen beaches, a permanent loss of coast, the scientists project. Then there is the damage to major infrastructure from extreme weather by 2030: "Risks include failure of flood plain protection and urban drainage-sewage, increased storm and fire damage, and more heatwaves causing more deaths and more blackouts (high confidence)." Plus there is the expected damage to forestry and farming, the extinction of hundreds of species, and the destruction of unique environmental assets such as the Kakadu wetlands and the Great Barrier Reef.

And all this from a projected rise in average temperature of between 0.3 degrees and 3.4 degrees in the zone from Australia's coast to 800 kilometres inland, a warming that the scientists predict will happen by 2050 on present trends. The warming in Australia so far, since 1910, has been between 0.6 and 1.2 degrees, with most of the rise since 1950. The reported rise in the sea level is seven centimetres.

The report, five years in the making, is the state of knowledge of the world's climate scientists. The chapter on Australia and New Zealand bears the names of 22 authors. The panel operates in three working groups. The report of the first, on the physical science, went public in February. Tonight's is the work of the second, on impacts. The third, to be published next month, is on how to mitigate its effects.

The next thing that strikes you about the report is the high degree of uncertainty to which the authors readily confess. Climate change, the scientists write, "is taken to be due to both natural variability and human activities. The relative proportions are unknown unless otherwise stated". In Australia's case, "it is very likely that increases in greenhouse gases have significantly contributed to the warming since 1950". This wording - "very likely" and "significantly contributed" - is a useful reminder that we are still in the realm of hypothesis in trying to assess whether it is human activity that is responsible for global warming.

Scepticism in science, indeed in every realm of human affairs, is a healthy attitude. The very highest accolade, the Nobel prize, has been awarded for acclaimed breakthroughs that are later discredited, like the 1949 decision to give the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz the prize for inventing the lobotomy as a cure for schizophrenia.

A leading Australian sceptic of man-made climate change is Ian Plimer, a professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide. The fact that the Earth's atmospheric temperature is rising at the same time as humans emit more greenhouse gases is a correlation, and not a causation, he points out: "The Earth's temperature rose by 0.7 per cent in the 20th century, but there was also an increase in piracy. Does that mean piracy causes global warming?"

If Al Gore calls climate change an inconvenient truth, Plimer asks unfashionable questions. "There is new work emerging even in the last few weeks that shows we can have a very close correlation between the temperatures of the Earth and supernova and solar radiation. What if global warming has nothing to do with human activity? "What happens if the astronomers are right, and the world is actually entering a cooling period?" Plimer thinks the climate scientists are in the grip of groupthink and that other branches of science can lend perspective: "We geologists have seen climate change for 4500 million years. Tell us something new."

He dismissed the recent visit to Australia by Sir Nicholas Stern, an adviser to the British Treasury and author of the Stern report on climate change. Stern proposed that Australia cut its carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, and by 60 per cent by 2050, to avert catastrophic global warming. Plimer's response: "Stern bases his argument on science, but he hasn't validated it. So from day one, I don't even let him out of the barrier."

What if the hypothesis is wrong? What if, like the Y2K hypothesis, all the experts turn out to be embarrassingly off the mark? What if Stern is wrong? He has proposed that the world spend 1 per cent of annual economic output for the next few decades to move from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. What if this money, about $US400 billion a year, is spent on the basis of a flawed theory?

It was a question Stern was quite happy to answer during his visit to Sydney. "What if I'm wrong?" he posited in an interview with the Herald. "Well, suppose this science is a big hoax, and we believe it and we invest 1 per cent of GDP per annum. What are we going to get? "We'll get a bunch of new technologies, some of which will turn out to be really super - say the price of solar energy really drops - this is the kind of thing we might get out of it. "We'd get much less air pollution. You'll get cleaner fuels for developing countries, which will make cooking much safer. Air pollution in huts is the second most important cause of death in developing countries, after water shortages from lack of infrastructure. "So you get a lot of collateral benefit. And you've spent 1 per cent of GDP for a while till you find out."

Then he turned the proposition around: "What if you take the much, much more likely hypothesis that the vast majority of the world's scientists are right. And you bet the other way. You say: 'I don't believe all this stuff, I'm going to wait and see.' "What if that bet's wrong? You end up in a position that's extremely hard to extricate yourself. The flow of carbon emissions building up into the stock is like a ratcheting effect. You can't turn the clock back. The basic economics of risk point very strongly to action."

The annual sales of the global insurance industry, excluding life insurance, amount to 3.5 per cent of global GDP, according to McKinsey's management consultants. If the world is prepared to pay the equivalent of 3.5 per cent of its total annual output to guard against the possibility of all sorts of risks that, in any one year for any one client, are quite remote, such as fire and theft, then the prospect of paying a 1 per cent premium to protect against a catastrophic global event seems entirely reasonable.

Australia's political leaders have abandoned scepticism on climate change. Both the Coalition and Labor are now pledged to overcoming climate change. They are going about it in very different ways. Kevin Rudd has embraced the targets for big cuts to Australia's carbon emissions, but refuses to say how these targets would operate. Will they be compulsory? How would they be enforced? He won't say. So Labor's policy is feelgood but, without a great deal more detail, it is phoney.

John Howard rejects any targets, any targets whatsoever, for cutting emissions. He offers a few specific initiatives but they are ad hoc, without any overall pattern or plan. Howard's biggest single environmental initiative to date is his $10 billion plan to revive the Murray-Darling River system, and it is a very good plan. But it seeks to fix a problem of water flow without addressing the climate that produces the water. It addresses a symptom, not a cause. Rudd accuses Howard of "not getting it". Howard accuses Rudd of seeking to destroy the jobs of Australian coalminers in a rush of green fundamentalism.

The good news is that it is an election year and problems, such as this one, that have been long ignored in Australia are getting a lot of attention. The bad news is that it's an election year, a feverish time when, as the Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, told his department recently: "There is a greater than usual risk of the development of policy proposals that are, frankly, bad." The overheating of the political climate in this election year is one form of climate change for which there is 100 per cent certainty.

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Earth's Crazy Climate

Ancient rocks from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean suggest dramatic climate changes during the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era, a time once thought to have been monotonously hot and humid. In this month's Geology, scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research present new evidence that ocean surface temperatures varied as much as 6 degrees Celsius (about 11 degrees Fahrenheit) during the Aptian Epoch of the Cretaceous Period 120 million years ago.

The finding is relevant to the ongoing climate change discussion, IUB geologist Simon Brassell says, because it portrays an ancient Earth whose temperatures shifted erratically due to changes in carbon cycling and did so without human input. "Combined with data from the Atlantic, it appears clear that climate changes were taking place on a global scale during this time period," said Brassell, who led the study.

A previous study from an Atlantic Ocean site had suggested a changeable climate around the same time period. But it was not known whether the Atlantic data indicated regional climate change unique to the area or something grander. "We had virtually no data from the middle of the largest ocean at that time period," Brassell said. "The data we collected suggest significant global fluctuations in temperature."

As part of the National Science Foundation's Ocean Drilling Project, the geoscientists voyaged in 2001 to Shatsky Rise, a study site 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) east of Japan and 3,100 meters below the ocean surface. Shatsky Rise is known to have formed at the end of the Jurassic Period immediately prior to the beginning of the Cretaceous, the last period of the Mesozoic Era.

The scientists' vessel, the JOIDES Resolution, is specially outfitted with a drill that can be lowered to the sea floor for the collection of rock samples. The drill bit was driven 566 meters into Shatsky Rise. Rocks freed by the drill were transported directly to the surface for analysis. The rocks corresponding to early Aptian time were extremely rich in organic material. By analyzing the carbon and nitrogen content of the samples, the geochemists found evidence for changes in carbon cycling and in nitrogen fixation by ocean biological communities associated with changing climate. A special analysis method targeting certain complex carbon-containing molecules provided values for a measurement called TEX86 that revealed mean temperature variations between 30 deg C (86 deg F) and 36 deg C (97 deg F) with two prominent cooling episodes of approximately 4 deg C (7 deg F) in tropical surface temperatures during the early Aptian. By comparison, today's tropical sea surface temperatures typically lie between 29 and 30 deg C.

Brassell says that findings of a changeable climate during the Cretaceous, a time period dominated by dinosaurs and noted for the spread of flowering plants, could influence the current climate change debate. "One of the key challenges for us is trying to predict climate change," Brassell said. "If there are big, inherent fluctuations in the system, as paleoclimate studies are showing, it could make determining Earth's climatic future even harder than it is. We're learning our climate, throughout time, has been a wild beast."

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Snowball Earth Culprit Found?

Threat of global cooling!

For several years geologists have been gathering evidence indicating that Earth has gone into a deep freeze on several occasions, with ice covering even the equator and with potentially devastating consequences for life. The theory, known as "Snowball Earth," has been lacking a good explanation for what triggered the global glaciations.

Now, the California Institute of Technology research group that originated the Snowball Earth theory has proposed that the culprit for the earliest and most severe episode may have been lowly bacteria that, by releasing oxygen, destroyed a key gas keeping the planet warm.

In the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Caltech graduate student Robert Kopp and his supervising professor, Joe Kirschvink, along with alumnus Isaac Hilburn (now a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and graduate student Cody Nash, argue that cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae) suddenly evolved the ability to break water and release oxygen about 2.3 billion years ago. Oxygen destroyed the greenhouse gas methane that was then abundant in the atmosphere, throwing the global climate completely out of kilter.

Though the younger sun was only about 85 percent as bright as it is now, average temperatures were comparable to those of today. This state of affairs, many researchers believe, was due to the abundance of methane, known commercially as natural gas. Just as they do in kitchen ranges, methane and oxygen in the atmosphere make an unstable combination; in nature they react in a matter of years to produce carbon dioxide and water. Though carbon dioxide is also a greenhouse gas, methane is dozens of times more so.

The problem began when cyanobacteria evolved into the first organisms able to use water in photosynthesis, releasing oxygen into the environment as a waste product. More primitive bacteria depend upon soluble iron or sulfides for use in photosynthesis; the switch to water allowed them to grow almost everywhere that had light and nutrients. Many experts think this happened early in Earth history, between 3.8 and 2.7 billion years ago, in which case some process must have kept the cyanobacteria from destroying the methane greenhouse for hundreds of millions of years. The Caltech researchers, however, find no hard evidence in the rocks to show that the switch to water for photosynthesis occurred prior to 2.3 billion years ago, which is about when the Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth was triggered.

For cyanobacteria to trigger the rapid onset of a Snowball Earth, they must have had an ample supply of key nutrients like phosphorous and iron. Nutrient availability is why cyanobacterial blooms occur today in regions with heavy agricultural runoff.

Fortunately for the bacteria, Earth 2.3 billion years ago had already entered a moderately cold period, reflected in glacially formed rocks in Canada. Measurements of the magnetization of these Canadian rocks, which the Caltech group published earlier this year, indicate that the glaciers that formed them may have been at middle latitudes, just like the glaciers of the last ice age.

The action of the glaciers, grinding continental material into powder and carrying it into the oceans, would have made the oceans rich in nutrients. Once cyanobacteria evolved this new oxygen-releasing ability, they could feast on this cornucopia, turning an ordinary glaciation into a global one. "Their greater range should have allowed the cyanobacteria to come to dominate life on Earth quickly and start releasing large amounts of oxygen," Kopp says.

This was bad for the climate because the oxygen destabilized the methane greenhouse. Kopp and Kirschvink's model shows that the greenhouse may have been destroyed in as little as 100,000 years, but almost certainly was eliminated within several million years of the cyanobacteria's evolution into an oxygen-generating organism. Without the methane greenhouse, global temperatures plummeted to -50 degrees Celsius.

The planet went into a glacial period so cold that even equatorial oceans were covered with a mile-thick layer of ice. The vast majority of living organisms died, and those that survived, either underground or at hydrothermal vents and springs, were probably forced into bare subsistence. If correct, the authors note, then an evolutionary accident triggered the world's worst climate disaster.

However, in evolving to cope with the new influx of oxygen, many survivors gained the ability to breathe it. This metabolic process was capable of releasing much energy and eventually allowing the evolution of all higher forms of life.

Kirschvink and his lab have earlier shown a mechanism by which Earth could have gotten out of Snowball Earth. After some tens of millions of years, carbon dioxide would build up to the point that another greenhouse took place. In fact, the global temperature probably bounced back to +50 degrees Celsius, and the deep-sea vents that provided a refuge for living organisms also had steadily released various trace metals and nutrients. So not only did life return after the ice layers melted, but it did so with a magnificent bloom. "It was a close call to a planetary destruction," says Kirschvink. "If Earth had been a bit further from the sun, the temperature at the poles could have dropped enough to freeze the carbon dioxide into dry ice, robbing us of this greenhouse escape from Snowball Earth."

Of course, 2.3 billion years is a very long time ago. But the episode points to a grim reality for the human race if conditions ever resulted in another Snowball Earth. We who are living today will never see it, but Kirschvink says that an even worse Snowball Earth could occur if the conditions were again right.

"We could still go into Snowball if we goof up the environment badly enough," he says. "We haven't had a Snowball in the past 630 million years, and because the sun is warmer now it may be harder to get into the right condition. But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed. We could probably get out only by becoming a runaway greenhouse planet like Venus."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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