A fjord in southern Greenland, near Narsarsuaq. (Photo: Richard Hollingham)
AND ABOVE ALL... Al Gore laying it on the line.
Greenland is an interesting place to go -  use of geothermal heating and cooling  the normal way things are done there...climate change coming?  How about newly created land grabs?  Nobel Prize to IPCC!
THE GOVERNORS' PACT;  Governator makes waves at Yale - story here.  In the Courant...GREAT REPORT!  Read it here...  a new wrinkle in the "green revolution" and next, review of Court since 2000 election;at right, Congress  knows all about hot air...and Weston Building Committee set for new, green chapter!  The U.S. Supreme Court, the law of the land:  Supreme Court recent green decisions. 
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http://ctclimatechange.com/index.html
"CLIMATE CHANGE" MESSAGE FROM...CT DEP;
Global Warming: How the world is changing (I-BBC picture gallery);

 
CONTENTS:

HOT NEWS ON STINKY AIR!
OUR FUTURE

 Town budget gap widens
Greenwich TIME
By Neil Vigdor, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/14/2008 02:34:07 AM EST

Gulp.

A projected $10.5 million gap in the town budget is widening to proportions that officials have never seen before in what has arguably been Connecticut's most prosperous town.

"We went through how big the problem could be. It's $31 million over the next 18 months," said Roland Gieger, the town's budget director.

Budget officials are predicting an $8.5 million shortfall in revenues from conveyance tax receipts, the sale of building permits and bank interest in the current fiscal year, which has six months to go, and a $6 million shortfall in 2008-09.  That comes on top of the anticipated $10.5 million gap, which has been bandied about since early this fall and has been attributed to rising personnel costs and shrinking revenues.

The architects of the town's projected $364 million budget will also have to make up another $6 million, which they had hoped to have left over in the General Fund balance at the end of the current fiscal year to help pare down the tax rate and pay for unanticipated expenses.  Property owners could face a spike in property taxes in excess of the customary 2 to 4 percent annual increase sought by the town if the gap isn't closed, town officials said.

"It's a significant fiscal challenge and one that requires making difficult decisions, which I'm certainly ready to do. It's a matter of prioritization," First Selectman Peter Tesei said.

In a Nov. 26 memo to municipal department heads and the town's appointing authorities, Tesei called for an across-the-board 10 percent minimum reduction in non-salary town expenditures, a clamp-down on employee travel and a hiring freeze for all positions but a few positions in police, fire and other essential areas. Tesei also wants to limit overtime, saying it should be reserved for when public safety warrants it or a potential liability emerges. All overtime requests are to be vetted by Tesei's office.

"We're looking at everything," Tesei said.

Some Representative Town Meeting members want the town to go a step further and put the brakes on an estimated $49.2 million in capital projects for which the money has been appropriated but not yet spent.  Among the options being considered by the town's budget architects is to pare down capital expenditures in the 2009-10 budget, taxing for only $30 million worth of projects instead of the planned $37 million, Gieger said.

The town, he said, is also considering forgoing a discretionary contribution to the town's post-employment benefits fund, which Gieger said pays the health care of municipal retirees and was set to receive $2 million in taxpayer money in 2009-10.

In addition to those measures, Gieger said the town is striving to save $7.9 million in the current fiscal year's budget through various efficiencies and reduce its operating expenses by $14.1 million when the new budget takes effect on July 1, 2009.

Officials based their projections on actual expenditures from the previous fiscal year rather than what was budgeted, which Gieger said turned out to be more than was needed to deliver services.  Michael Mason, chairman of the Board of Estimate and Taxation's Budget Committee, said Greenwich is not immune from the current economic recession gripping the nation.

"Everybody's being very cautious. We all know these are difficult economic times," Mason said.

Mason expressed optimism that budget architects would be able to close the gap.

"I think we have a plan," he said. "I think we're on our way. We're watching revenues. We're running models. The real key to success is how much can we save and not spend within the current fiscal year."

One of the areas that Mason said budget officials are watching closely this winter is the amount of snowfall, which in recent years has depleted the town's snow removal budget and required additional appropriations from the General Fund balance.

"Obviously, we're sitting here hoping we don't have a lot of snow this winter," Mason said. "I don't want to rely on the Farmer's Almanac. I would rather just cross my fingers."


Bangladeshis Rally Against Climate Change
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:33 a.m. ET
November 27, 2008

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) -- Some 500 women rallied in Bangladesh's capital on Thursday, demanding richer nations cut their greenhouse gas emissions and compensate the impoverished countries that experts believe will be hardest hit by the impacts of climate change.

The women, mostly rural poor, wore masks mocking leaders from wealthy nations such as France, Britain and the United States, and marched through Dhaka University's campus carrying banners that read ''Cut emissions, save poor nations'' and ''Stop harming, start helping.''

Organizers from the Campaign for Sustainable Rural Livelihood, an Oxfam-funded network of domestic labor and rights groups, said the rally was timed to send a message to delegates who will gather Dec. 1 in Poznan, Poland for a United Nations conference on climate change.

''We are here with a message that we are suffering, and our sufferings will increase manifold if rich countries do not act aggressively,'' said Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, a Bangladeshi expert on climate change.

''Rich nations like the U.S. and emerging countries such as China and India must act properly,'' he said. ''We need development but not at the cost of our future.''

Bangladesh, a densely populated nation of 150 million people, suffers annual floods, frequent cyclones and increasing salinity in its coastal regions.

Experts say more frequent flooding due to global warming could eventually put as much as one-third of Bangladesh's land mass permanently under water.
Schwarzenegger Opens Climate Change Summit
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 18, 2008
Filed at 2:40 p.m. ET

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has opened his climate change summit in Beverly Hills, Calif., telling attendees from 19 other countries they can protect both the environment and their economies.

Schwarzenegger's message was reinforced by President-elect Barack Obama, who spoke to participants in a taped video.

Obama said the U.S. economy would continue to weaken if climate change and dependence on foreign oil are left unaddressed.

The two-day summit has drawn more than 800 scientists, environmentalists, government and industry officials to discuss strategies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has gained notoriety for his global warming efforts in California. He hopes the summit will influence negotiations over a new global climate treaty during a U.N. gathering in Poland next month.
4.2 Million 'Green' Jobs Possible
Hartford Courant
By H. JOSEF HEBERT | Associated Press
October 6, 2008

A major shift to renewable energy and efficiency is expected to produce 4.2 million new environmentally friendly "green" jobs during the next three decades, according to a study commissioned by the nation's mayors.

The study, released last week by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, says that about 750,000 people work today in what can be considered green jobs — from scientists and engineers researching alternative fuels to makers of wind turbines and more energy-efficient products.

But that's less than one half of 1 percent of total employment. By 2038, another 4.2 million green jobs are expected to be added, accounting for 10 percent of new job growth during the next 30 years, according to the report by Global Insight Inc.

"It could be the fastest-growing segment of the United States economy over the next several decades and dramatically increase its share of total employment," said the report, which The Associated Press obtained.  However, the study cautioned, such job growth won't be realized without an aggressive shift away from traditional fossil fuels toward alternative energy and a significant improvement in energy efficiency.

For example, it assumes that by 2038 alternative energy will account for 40 percent of electricity production, with half of that coming from wind and solar; widespread retrofitting of buildings to achieve a 35 percent reduction in electricity use; and 30 percent of motor fuels coming from ethanol or biodiesel.

Alternative energy, such as wind, geothermal, biomass and solar, currently accounts for less than 3 percent of electricity generation, and nonfossil sources, such as ethanol and biodiesel, account for about 5 percent of all motor fuels, the report notes.

Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, the conference's president, said the report makes "a very compelling economic argument for investing in the green economy and that we're going to get a huge return for it."

"These are things we have to do," Diaz said in a telephone interview, adding that "Washington needs to get on the train."

Both presidential candidates have cited the jobs potential if the country embraces alternative energy and efficiency.

Democratic nominee Barack Obama predicts that investments in a "clean energy economy" during the next 10 years "will help the private sector create 5 million new green jobs" — a more ambitious projection than outlined by the study provided to the mayors.

GOP rival John McCain's energy blueprint makes no specific job growth forecast, but declares the development of green jobs and green technology "vital to our economic future."

The report predicts that the biggest job gain will be from the increased use of alternative transportation fuels, with 1.5 million additional jobs, followed by the renewable power generating sector, with 1.2 million new jobs.

Another 81,000 jobs will be generated by industries related to making homes and commercial buildings more energy-efficient, the study said.

And it predicted an additional 1.4 million green jobs related to engineering, research, consulting and legal work.

"We're trying to show the size of the green jobs economy," assuming policy shifts toward less dependence on fossil fuels, said Jim Diffley of Global Insight.


Ting-Li Wang, NYTIMES

Weather History Offers Insight Into Global Warming
NYTIMES
By ANTHONY DePALMA
Published: September 15, 2008
 
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now.

Every day for the last 112 years, people have trekked up the same gray outcropping to dutifully record temperatures and weather conditions. In the process, they have compiled a remarkable data collection that has become a climatological treasure chest.

The problems that often haunt other weather records — the station is moved, buildings are constructed nearby or observers record data inconsistently — have not arisen here because so much of this place has been frozen in time. The weather has been taken in exactly the same place, in precisely the same way, by just a handful of the same dedicated people since Grover Cleveland was president.

For much of that time, those same weather observers have also made detailed records about recurring natural events, like the appearance of the first spring peeper or the first witch hazel bush to bud in the fall. Together, these two sets of data, meticulously collected in the same area, are beginning to offer up intriguing indicators about climate change — not about what is causing it but rather how it affects the lives of animals, plants, insects and birds.

It all starts with the daily ritual of “doing the weather,” which is what people at Mohonk House call the process of recording temperatures. One day in late summer, it was the turn of a gentle 61-year-old botanist turned naturalist named Paul C. Huth. As he has done most days for the last 34 years, around 4 p.m. Mr. Huth scrambled up the conglomerate outcropping in the shadow of Mohonk House, a National Historic Landmark about 90 miles north of New York City that has retained its 19th-century sensibility. Signs along the resort’s roads plead: “Slowly and Quietly Please.”

Mr. Huth opened the weather station, a louvered box about the size of a suitcase, and leaned in. He checked the high and low temperatures of the day on a pair of official Weather Service thermometers and then manually reset them. Besides the thermometers, the box contained a small flashlight, a can of lubricating oil and a plastic magnifying glass. Those thermometers can be hard to read in the rain.

If the procedure seems old-fashioned, that is just as it is intended. The temperatures that Mr. Huth recorded that day were the 41,152nd daily readings at this station, each taken exactly the same way. “Sometimes it feels like I’ve done most of them myself,” said Mr. Huth, who is one of only five people to have served as official weather observer at this station since the first reading was taken on Jan. 1, 1896.

That extremely limited number of observers greatly enhances the reliability, and therefore the value, of the data. Other weather stations have operated longer, but few match Mohonk’s consistency and reliability. “The quality of their observations is second to none on a number of counts,” said Raymond G. O’Keefe, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Albany. “They’re very precise, they keep great records and they’ve done it for a very long time.”

Mohonk’s data stands apart from that of most other cooperative weather observers in other respects as well. The station has never been moved, and the resort, along with the area immediately surrounding the box, has hardly changed over time. Rain and snow are measured in the original brass rain gauge issued in 1896 by what was then known as the United States Weather Bureau. Mr. Huth also checks the temperature and pH of Mohonk Lake daily, and he measures the level of the lake according to its distance from the top of an iron bar that was bolted to the Shawangunk conglomerate in 1896.

The record shows that on this ridge in the Shawangunk Mountains, about 20 miles south of the better-known Catskills, the average annual temperature has risen 2.7 degrees in 112 years. Of the top 10 warmest years in that time, 7 have come since 1990. Both annual precipitation and annual snowfall have increased, and the growing season has lengthened by 10 days.

But what makes the data truly singular is how it parallels a vast collection of phenological observations taken at this same place, and by many of the same observers, since 1925.

Phenology is the science of natural occurrences, yearly events like the first snow, the first blooming of hepatica and the arrival of the first whippoorwill. Keeping diaries of such occurrences was a hobby of counts and lords in Europe, and there are records in Kyoto, Japan, of the flowering of cherry blossom trees dating back 900 years. Among the most notable American phenological records were those kept by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond.

Today, phenology is recognized as an important, even critical, approach to understanding climate change. The National Phenology Network, with financing from the National Science Foundation and other agencies, has started an field campaign, called Project BudBurst (www.budburst.org), in which volunteers record the way 500 native plants are responding to climate change.

The phenology records at Mohonk House are, in many ways, a model for such observations. They were compiled, in large measure, by Mr. Huth and the naturalist he succeeded, Daniel Smiley Jr. Mr. Smiley, who died in 1989, was a beloved descendant of the two Quaker brothers who founded Mohonk House in 1869. He dedicated much of his life to keeping lists of everything he saw and heard on the mountain, collecting whatever was of interest to him and labeling it carefully for future use.

Mr. Smiley kept his phenology records as meticulously as he “did the weather” for more than 50 years, for which he earned the National Weather Service’s highest award, named for Thomas Jefferson.

He walked the extensive grounds of the resort making notes about every bird call he heard, every animal he saw, every budding flower and flowering tree. Back in his office, he transcribed those notes onto 3-by-5 cards (many early ones were written on the reverse side of the hotel’s old menu cards). Over time, he amassed more than 14,500 cards with notations like this one, from March 28, 1929, filed under “partridge”: “Near Duck Hawk ledge on Sky Top saw one ‘treading’ another, with great commotion down in a brush pile in a crevice, while a third looked on. Too dark for a picture.”

In 1978, the Smiley family carved out 6,500 of its acres around the hotel to form the Mohonk Preserve, the largest nonprofit nature preserve in New York State. In 1980, the preserve created a research center that was named for Mr. Smiley after he died in 1989. Mr. Smiley was an old-school amateur naturalist, but his observations have proved to be solid scientific evidence. For instance, when the hotel’s chlorination system started acting up in 1931, he began taking water temperature and acidity readings. He was surprised to find that the water was unusually acidic, a pH of around 4.5, but he did not know why and just filed away his notes. Jump ahead 40 years to the early 1970s, when acid rain became a concern. Mr. Smiley dug up his old notes and sent them to the Environmental Defense Fund, which used the data as a baseline for extended studies of acid rain.

Similarly, in the 1950s Mr. Smiley found on his walks that the use of DDT to control gypsy moths was killing all kinds of insects, and that the peregrine falcon had nearly disappeared from the Shawangunks. He ordered all spraying stopped on Mohonk land. Of course, DDT spraying was later banned.

Last year, Benjamin I. Cook, a climate modeler and post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and his father, Edward R. Cook, a tree-ring specialist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who met Mr. Smiley in 1971 when he was a military policeman at West Point, published a study in The International Journal of Climatology. They analyzed Mohonk House data to determine how some overwintering birds, insects, animals and 19 species of plants had changed their habits in accord with changes in temperature.

The results showed how sensitive species can be to climate change, even though the climate data itself is mixed. Benjamin Cook said hepatica, bloodroot and red berried elder tended to show the strongest trends toward earlier flowering. And despite a general warming trend, there was no significant increase in the length of the frost-free season. Nonetheless, there were significantly more days without frost.

“This is more than just a normal January thaw,” Mr. Cook said. The increase in warmer days in winter sends false signals to plants and animals whose seasonal changes can be set off by the temporary warmth.

Intrigued by that initial dip into Mr. Smiley’s data, Mr. Cook next intends to look at migrating birds. Mr. Smiley observed that by the early 1980s many migrating species were arriving about a week earlier than they did in the 1920s, and many American robins had stopped migrating altogether.

As a climate modeler, Mr. Cook said he was used to having to correct for inconsistencies in weather records and biases in phenological observations. But he said the Mohonk records were so consistently reliable that there was little need for corrections.

“It was a kind of perfect storm of the Smiley family, with this strong ethos about the land and land preservation, and Dan Smiley himself, with that same ethos but a scientific mind,” Mr. Cook said. “We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We were all just incredibly lucky.”
Defrost cycle
Greenwich TIME
By Colin Gustafson, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 08/12/2008 02:40:44 AM EDT

Cos Cob resident Luc Hardy, 52, and his daughter, Ainhoa, 14, could hardly believe what they were witnessing when they stumbled across a gaping, seawater-filled fissure in the snowy terrain of the Canadian Arctic last month.

The two had spent the afternoon of July 22 on an educational group-hiking expedition across the "Ward Hunt" ice shelf in northern Canada when they saw a crack in the ice and a huge chunk drifting away from the main shelf.

"The ice had split apart completely," said Hardy, a self-employed venture capitalist who organized the trip. Until that moment, the ice fissure had been viewed only in satellite photos by scientists studying global warming, he added.

Now, they were seeing it "for the first time, first-hand."

The discovery was the highlight of a four-week trip that brought a group of intrepid young travelers and grown-up scientists from across the globe to the Arctic wilderness of Canada to observe the impact of climate change.

"We want to teach the younger generation about this, so they, hopefully, can solve the mess that some of us adults have created," Hardy said.

The expedition was part of the second annual "The Young Ambassadors of the Arctic," a youth-education program that raises money for Green Cross International, a non-profit environmental group founded by Mikhail Gorbachev. The program, which Hardy co-founded, this year received $300,000 in sponsorship from diverse groups, such as the Reed Smith law firm, Hewlett Packard and clothing supplier Napapijr.

In summer 2007, the program brought a smaller group to Greenland to learn about biodiversity and to study the impact of global warming on bird migration. This year, a larger group of about 16 people ventured back into the Arctic - this time via Canada - to observe the impact of global warming on the 3,000-year-old Arctic glaciers and ice shelves, many of which are now splitting apart.

When the explorers stumbled across the cracked ice in Ward Hunt last month, they'd been shooting photographs and recording the geographical coordinates of ice formations with the Canadian scientist, Derek Mueller, who first discovered the ice fissures in 2002.

"This ice has become destabilized with cracks over the past six years, and recent open-water conditions (on) the ice shelf have facilitated the latest break off," Mueller said. "The group's observations will help me place exactly when" the split occurred.

In addition to trekking across Ward Hunt, the young travelers - who hailed from Los Angeles, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Canada and Greenwich - also explored such far-flung locales as Iqaluit in Ottawa, Canada.

There they spent several days rafting up the Soper River before arriving in a remote Inuit village. "That was the most memorable part for me," Ainhoa recalled, "seeing them singing and dancing, and just interacting with a different culture."

The travelers also flew to Resolute Bay, in northern Canada, where members of the Canadian Coast Guard whisked them in black helicopters across the snow-covered Arctic waters so they could enjoy aerial views of the glaciers.

Hardy plans to bring a new group to the Russian Arctic next year to study geopolitics and learn about the impact of oil pollution on the environment. He's currently compiling photos and video footage for a book and documentary about the group's travels this summer and, in September, will travel to Moscow to present his work to Gorbachev in hopes of gaining his support for another trip.
The Winning Hand
NYTIMES
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 5, 2008

Sometimes the most logical, most obvious solutions are the most difficult to see.

While the presidential campaign was mired in the egregious and the trivial last week, there was a hearing in Washington that addressed what should be a critical component of the nation’s energy strategy. It got very little attention.

Put aside for a moment all the talk about alternative fuels. They are no doubt important and the wave of the future. But the fastest, cheapest, easiest and cleanest step toward a sane energy environment — a step available to all of us immediately — is the powerful combination of efficiency and conservation.

That was the message delivered again and again at a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee that carried the title, “Efficiency: The Hidden Secret to Solving Our Energy Crisis.”

Two political leaders who are no longer very fashionable were on to this long ago — former Gov. Jerry Brown of California (derided as “Governor Moonbeam”) and former President Jimmy Carter, who presciently said of the energy crisis in 1977: “With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetime.”

It may be hard to believe, but largely because of far-reaching efficiency and conservation measures imposed by Mr. Brown’s administration, California is now among the lowest of all the states in the per capita consumption of energy. If you could take automobiles out of the picture, it would have the lowest per capita consumption of any state.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, noted that California’s extraordinary progress in this area over the past three decades was set in motion during Mr. Brown’s tenure when the state established building standards that required greater efficiency with regard to heating and cooling. Utilities were also required to operate more efficiently. And the state, to the extent that it legally could, required appliances sold in California to be more efficient.

“One of the good things that came out of the oil shock of the ’70s was the dramatic push for energy conservation,” said Senator Schumer. “Why don’t we do more of that now?”

It’s not widely understood how profound a change in overall energy consumption could be realized from a big-time, coordinated efficiency and conservation effort. We don’t hear enough about this because it’s not sexy. It is not something that has captured the public’s imagination.

In addition to the obvious need for more fuel-efficient vehicles, we should be demanding more efficiencies from utilities across the country; we should be requiring (as Senator Schumer has been pointing out) that states revamp their commercial and building codes; and we should be trying to weatherize homes from one coast to the other, including the homes of families without enough money to make such improvements themselves.

And, of course, there are the everyday good energy deeds that would help make a world of difference: car-pooling; taking public transportation when possible; using more efficient lighting; dropping the thermostat a couple of degrees; buying more efficient appliances; unplugging appliances that aren’t in use, and so on.

Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Energy, told the Schumer panel that increased energy efficiency was “the real low-hanging fruit in our economy.” His words echoed those of Al Gore, who described a commitment to efficiency and conservation as “the best investment we can make.”

Mr. Reicher, now the director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google, said, “From cars and homes to factories and offices, we know how to cost-effectively deliver vast quantities of energy savings today.”

He cited estimates suggesting that an additional global investment in “efficiency opportunities” of $170 billion annually over the next 13 years “would be sufficient to cut projected global demand by at least half.”

Combining the development of alternative fuels with a real efficiency and conservation effort is the winning hand in the global energy crisis.

Because of the high price of oil, people in many parts of the country are already frightened, in the heat of summer, about their winter heating bills. Families are worried about having to choose between mortgage payments and fuel bills, or fuel bills and prescription medicine.

The Senate considered but was unable to pass a measure that would have substantially increased financing for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. It was a very bad sign. If the government can’t get that done in the current atmosphere, it hardly seems likely that it could move to an even more important step: finding a way to get the homes of these cash-strapped families properly weatherized so that they use substantially less fuel over the course of each winter.

Energy efficiency and conservation. We know what we should be doing. What we don’t have is the leadership, the common sense or the will to get it done.

The Iceman Cometh
NYTIMES
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 3, 2008

Greenland Ice Sheet,  77 degrees 45 minutes N. latitude, 51 degrees 6 minutes W. longitude - Jorgen Peder Steffensen made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: “If you come to Copenhagen, I will show you a Christmas snow — a real Christmas snow, the snow that fell between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D.”

Now that’s an offer you don’t get every day! But then I don’t go to the Arctic Circle every day. “I can also show you a sample of the very last snow that fell right at the end of the last ice age, which was 11,700 years ago,” said Steffensen. Or, he asked me, “How would you like to see the air samples that contain the sulfuric traces of the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption” that buried Pompeii in A.D. 79?

Steffensen is an ice specialist and curator of the world’s most comprehensive collection of ice core samples, a kind of atmospheric DNA drilled out of the glaciers of Greenland and now preserved in refrigerated vaults in the Danish capital. The more and deeper scientists can drill the ice, the better the picture they can give of the climate in previous eras — and therefore the more we will understand about climate change.

Each layer of ice contains water and air bubbles that were trapped in the snow, which, when analyzed by expert scientists, reveal in great detail the temperature, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the amount and origins of volcanic dust, and even the amount of sea salt in the air and therefore how close the glacier was to the ocean.

Imagine for a moment a freezer filled with such revealing ice cubes. Each ice cube represents one year’s atmospheric data beginning 150,000 years ago, which is how far back the current Greenland icecap dates. Well, Steffensen, his wife, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, both of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, and a team of international experts are assembling precisely that kind of freezer from ice cores drilled here in the far north of Greenland in the Arctic Circle.

I traveled to their newest camp with a group of experts led by Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, and including Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. We flew in on a U.S. Air Force National Guard C-130, which landed on skis — not wheels — since the landing strip was just a plowed strip of ice and snow.

This is surely one of the most remarkable and isolated research stations in the world. Everywhere you look, you see a perfectly flat expanse of snow and ice stretching to the horizon. In fact, you can see so far in every direction that it feels as though you can see the curvature of the earth. The camp consists of a heated geodesic dome where the scientists eat, a dozen barely heated tents where they (and guests) sleep in insulated sleeping bags and an underground research laboratory, carved out of the ice, where they are installing the drill and ice lab equipment. Over the next three “summers,” they will unearth ice core samples all the way down to Greenland’s bedrock — roughly 1.5 miles, or the equivalent of 150,000 years of accumulated ice layers.

Their objective is to do something never done before: project a complete picture of the Greenland climate, from the ice age that lasted from 200,000 to 130,000 years ago, through the warming period known as the Eemian that lasted from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, through the last ice age from 115,000 to 11,703 years ago, right up to the present warming period we’ve been in since. (Remember: the Earth is usually an ice ball; the warm interglacial periods are the exceptions.)

Their last drilling project here, which was completed in 2004, focused on the layers 14,500 to 11,000 years ago. That project is already causing a stir in the climate community. In an article just published in the journal Science Express, Dahl-Jensen’s team wrote about how it had discovered from the ice cores that the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland “changed abruptly” just as the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago.

It seems to have been driven by a sudden change in monsoons in the tropics. The change was so abrupt that it warmed the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland by 10 degrees Celsius in just 50 years — a dramatic increase.

“It shows that our climate system has the ability to make very abrupt changes all by itself,” said Dahl-Jensen.

Some climate-change deniers would say that this proves that mankind is not important in changing the climate. Climate change experts, like Dahl-Jensen, say it’s not so simple: The climate is always changing, sometimes very abruptly, so the last thing that mankind should be doing is adding its own forcing actions — like pumping unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because you never know — you never know — what will tip the balance and send us hurdling into another abrupt change ... and into another era.

Greenland Losing Ice, With or Without Lubrication
NYTIMES
By Andrew C. Revkin
July 14, 2008,  9:01 am

After the journal Science published a paper earlier this month concluding that summertime gushers of meltwater percolating to the base of Greenland’s ice sheet didn’t appear to speed the seaward flow of ice, one result was a burst of excited comments from bloggers and others asserting that the impacts of global warming have been hyped.

Roderik S. W. van de Wal, the lead author of the Science paper, sent me a comment he prepared after the hubbub that he said is aimed at correcting many misinterpretations of the research (whether willful or not) — one of the most important being that Greenland is still losing much more ice than is being added through snowfall, and more losses will come in a warming world.

The note, reproduced with permission, is below. This post was held up by the flood of climate news last week out of the “major emitters” meetings in Japan and Washington:

What about the Greenland ice sheet?
R.S.W. van de Wal, IMAU, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

A paper in Science [July 4] caused some rumor about the role of the Greenland ice sheet in the climate change debate. In the paper the authors argue that there is no evidence for a speed up of the ice marginal zone due to enhanced ablation rates, which by some people was explained as if Greenland was not contributing to sea level change any more. In order to understand what it really means in terms of sea level or climate change in general we have to go back to how an ice sheet works.

The Greenland ice sheet gains mass via snowfall and losses mass via the production of icebergs and by melt of ice in the ice marginal zone. If you add snowfall, melt and ice berg production over the entire ice sheet you know whether the ice sheet in total losses mass or gains mass. So an ice sheet can loose mass either by increased iceberg production, increased melt or decreased snowfall. Current estimates from satellites show that the ice sheet is loosing mass and it is predicted by the IPCC that Greenland will contribute modestly to sea level rise by about 10 cm over this century [just under 4 inches]. [Here’s a nice New York Times graphic showing several mechanisms for Greenland’s ice shedding.]

There are however a few mechanisms, which might considerably increase this number and those are subject of intense scientific debate. First of all there is the interaction between the ocean and the ice sheet. During the beginning of this century several outlet glaciers, which are the glaciers producing the icebergs, retreated unexpectedly. This is still poorly understood and scientists monitor those glaciers with increased attention since then. Secondly, more recently we were surprised with the retreat of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean during summer time. Disappearance of the sea ice likely leads to more absorption of sunlight and hence warming of the area. How this affects the ice sheet is yet unclear. Thirdly, we have the recent paper addressing the ice marginal zones of the ice sheet.

As about 50% of the mass loss occurs via the ice marginal zones it is important to study them. What the current paper shows is that the positive feedback between melt and velocities is not so important as expected over a period of 15 years. What is this feedback and why is it important at all? Ice moves from high and cold regions towards low and warm regions. There are indications that this movement is affected by the melt at the surface. It is shown in the paper and a few other studies that during strong melt events in summer the ice moves faster. The reason for this is that the melt water percolates through the ice to the bottom and lubricates the ice so that the friction reduces and the sliding of the ice increases. So, the positive feedback between melt and velocities implies that more melt leads to higher velocities, which bring in more ice from cold regions to warm regions which increases the melt and hence the velocity etc, with as a final result a rapid loss of ice and hence an enhanced increased sea level.
The Science study shows that it doesn’t work like that. Over a period of 17 years the ice sheet is not speeding up in the ice marginal zone, probably because the ice sheet gets more efficient in removing the water near the bottom if the amount of water at the surface increases. It acts as a sink where the drainage pipes widen as soon as you open the tap.
 
This study does not show that the melt is decreasing, contrary it shows a small increase in ablation which is fully consistent with IPCC predictions concerning melt of the ice sheet. So, no new alarm bells this time from the glaciologists, but the uncertainties concerning outlet glaciers and the effects of sea ice retreat are still in the air and imply that sea level rise estimates might need to be reconsidered.

It would all be so nice, in a way, if the science were simple. But it isn’t. That means society is going to have to make up its mind about climate policies and related energy choices without certainty on the level of threat posed by business as usual. And it means more time must be spent on those ice sheets, both in the melt zones and the places where accumulation of snow still dominates — including Swiss Camp, which I visited on the flanks of the ice sheet in 2004:


Retreat: A photograph taken in August from an icebreaker research cruise in the Arctic Ocean, about 600 miles north of the Alaska coastline.  At right, newest "endangered species."

Global Warming: Is It A Scenario Too Scary To Think About? 
Experts say scope of the problem makes it hard for people to be optimistic 
DAY
By Judy Benson    
Published on 6/22/2008

To Patricia Kremer, climate change is a runaway train carrying Earth toward a forbidding future.

”Just stop the train,” said Kremer, a retiring marine scientist who has witnessed the effects during her studies of the ocean's environments for 30 years. She and her husband, James, who is also about to retire from a career as a marine scientist and professor, work at the University of Connecticut's Avery Point campus.

She is not alone in thinking this. United Nations leader Ban Ki-moon says that whether you call it climate change, global warming or climate disruption, it's “the defining challenge of our age.”

In November, when Ban made his pronouncement, the 2,500 climate scientists from around the world who comprise the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just issued their strongest alert about the global disaster threatening the future.

”If there is no action before 2012, that's too late,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the scientist and economist who heads the IPCC. “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future.”

But global warming isn't just a challenge for humans' problem-solving abilities. It's also tough on the human psyche - it's depressing, scary and complicated, after all - and tackling it goes against some natural human tendencies.

”We've evolved primarily to deal with immediate crises, versus things that are far out in the future,” said Elise L. Amel, associate professor of psychology and director of environmental studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. “But we also have the cognitive capacity to deal with future problems. It's just a matter of finding the right hook.”

Problem is, said her research colleague, Christie Manning of the environmental studies department at Macalester College, also in St. Paul, people don't like thinking or talking about climate change, much less figuring out what to do about it. That's true, she said, even though their research shows more than 95 percent of the public accepts that human industrial and agricultural emissions are to blame.

”Global warming is something that creates anxiety, and anxiety is uncomfortable,” said Manning. “That leads to emotion-focused coping - rationalizing and denying - as opposed to problem-focused coping. People are less likely to become engaged if they don't have the sense that they can contribute to the solution and that the solution will be successful.”

Understanding that dynamic - essentially the human need for hope and some measure of control - is essential for policymakers, environmental activists and scientists as they try to develop effective strategies to slow and adapt to climate change, said Manning and Amel. That's especially true since many of the actions are likely to require behavioral and economic changes in the way people use energy and natural resources.

And it's hard for everyone, even James and Patricia Kremer. Just because they're scientists with expertise in a certain facet of the environment - he in coastal ecosystems and she in jellyfish and related marine creatures - doesn't mean they have any special ability to cope with the frightening projections. But they're trying.

”For me,” said James Kremer, “it's almost doublethink. You hold two mutually inconsistent ideas in your mind at the same time. You have to have a partition. I'm very depressed when I hear the dire predictions, but I'm willing to go ahead and alter my behavior and hope for the best.”

He tries to convince the skeptics who insist on engaging him at cocktail parties that the evidence is solid, the scientific consensus unprecedented. Taking a risk that the overwhelming majority of the world's climate experts are wrong is one humanity can't afford, he argues, but the same isn't true if people do heed the warnings.

”The bottom line is that even if the science is wrong and we take action, it's still not very bad,” he said. “In fact, even though I believe the science, I know it's not perfect. But regardless, there's going to be a net benefit from reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.”

In their personal lives, the Kremers, who live in Groton, have cut back on energy use, taking steps such as putting their television and computer on power strips - to prevent automatic power activators from being a constant energy draw - and driving a fuel-efficient small car. The net gain, James Kremer said, is some personal satisfaction, a bit of savings and being some small part, he hopes, of an overall cultural attitude change.

Doing nothing because you feel whatever difference it makes will be too small to matter, “is like saying you shouldn't vote” because it's only one vote, said Patricia.

”The leadership role an individual can play may not be overt,” said James Kremer, “but it can have a multiplier effect” in influencing others.

As they retire and plan a move to California to live near their daughter and 10-month-old grandson, they're making some other environmentally conscious choices, including having solar panels installed on their new home. Patricia Kremer is also thinking about becoming an activist, now that she's freed from a university scientist's ethical restrictions on political involvement.

The knowledge that their grandson's generation could see some cataclysmic effects of climate change by the time he's an adult is both sobering and motivating.

”I think it's important to think about the fact that the sooner we do take real, concerted action, the less painful it will be,” she said. “The analogy I make is with the fishing industry, and overfishing. If we had taken relatively small actions 20 years ago, they would have had a positive effect and we wouldn't be having these huge collapses we have now.”

The Kremers, said Amel, are taking advantage of the major life change they're making with retiring and moving.

”When your life is in flux,” she said, “that's the best time to change behaviors.”

Amel and Manning said their research shows that people want and need clear direction about what they can do and what's really effective. They need positive feedback when they do take action to reduce their personal contribution to global warming, known as a carbon footprint. People also need to be willing to step outside the norm.

”The way to combat the sense of futility is to be the change you want to see,” said Manning. “That shows others that there are other people behaving differently.”

”Evolutionarily,” added Amel, “we pay very close attention to the people around us. Our bodies react very viscerally to what others are doing. It's hard to do something outside the current zone of acceptability. That's the real reason people don't change even though they want to. It's going to take some early adapters to make these changes. 
State Senate Approves Global Warming Bill
Hartford Courant
Staff and Wire Reports
3:14 PM EDT, May 5, 2008

The state Senate has given final legislative approval to a bill aimed at reducing the pollution that causes global warming.

Senators voted 35-0 in favor of the legislation today and sent it to Gov. M. Jodi Rell. The House of Representatives approved it earlier. If she signs it into law, Connecticut will be the fifth state to adopt mandatory limits on global warming pollution. The state passed legislation back in 2004. But that law, which established benchmarks for air pollution reduction, was voluntary.

The new bill would require total emissions to be capped at 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. It would also require emissions levels to be cut 80 percent below 2001 levels by 2050. Many scientists say those goals must be reached worldwide in order to stave off the worst effects of global warming.

The bill would force state agencies to calculate and list greenhouse gases produced in the state, come up with strategies to meet the new reduction goals and start measuring the state's progress.

Those efforts could affect a broad spectrum of daily life in Connecticut, including the cost of electricity; incentives for conserving energy and using alternative, renewable sources; how homes and businesses are built; the types of motor vehicles on the road and the availability of public transportation.

To get there, it will take a very comprehensive, statewide effort," said state Rep. Patricia Widlitz, D-Guilford, who led the charge for the bill on the House floor last week. Widlitz argued that although the state has made progress, it is falling short of goals set by legislation in 2004.

"When we have a mandatory cap, then people will be serious about doing something that gets us there," she said. "Connecticut doesn't have the power to stop climate change, but we have the resources to diminish its impact."

The bill sets deadlines for state officials to set up an inventory of the state's greenhouse gas emissions and come up with strategies and regulations to reduce emissions. Those strategies will include selling "permits" to emit carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, and possibly setting a low-carbon fuel standard and developing better mass transit.

18 states commit to take action on climate change 
DAY
By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN, Associated Press Writer 
Posted on Apr 18, 5:41 PM EDT

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) -- California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger predicted Friday that an international deadlock over how to deal with global warming will end once President Bush leaves office, while a leading expert warned of dire consequences if urgent action is not taken.

Schwarzenegger spoke at a conference at Yale University in which 18 states pledged to take action on climate change. He noted a dispute over whether the U.S. should commit to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions before China and India do the same.

"But I think the deadlock is about to be broken," said Schwarzenegger, a Republican like Bush.

Schwarzenegger said all three president candidates would be great for the environment and predicted progress after one is inaugurated.

Schwarzenegger has been at odds with the Bush administration over a 2002 California law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency blocked the law from taking effect in California and 16 other states, saying global warming is not unique to the state and that emission goals should be set nationally.

Bush called for a halt Wednesday in the growth of greenhouse gases by 2025, acknowledging the need to head off serious climate change. The plan came under fire immediately from environmentalists and congressional Democrats who favor mandatory emission cuts, a position also held by all three presidential contenders.

Bush for the first time set a specific target date for U.S. climate pollution reductions and said he was ready to commit to a binding international agreement on long-term reductions as long as other countries such as China do the same.

Dr. R. K. Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned that without action to curb global warming agricultural yields would fall and flooding and heat waves would become more intense. Some species could become extinct, he said.

Pachauri said measures to curb warming are not expensive.

"The myth that there will be a loss of jobs and economic output needs to be exploded," Pachauri declared.

Pachauri praised the efforts of governors to deal with the issue.

"But there is a need for the country as a whole to move forward," Pachauri said.

The governors of Connecticut, California, Kansas and New Jersey were at Yale on Friday along with two Canadian premiers to review state programs and develop a strategy to combat global climate change.

"If we can move the states forward toward serious action it is a very substantial commitment and a very significant step toward the start of a thoughtful and serious response to address the problem of climate change," said Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

Esty said the 18 states that signed a declaration committing themselves to action together produce as much emissions as Europe's four biggest economies.

Among other things, the declaration says the states recommit themselves to the effort to stop global warming and call on congressional leaders and presidential candidates to work with them to establish a comprehensive national climate policy.

"Rewarding and encouraging meaningful and mandatory federal and state climate action is the key to success," the declaration states.

It also pledges to reach out to the presidential candidates to shape the first 100 days of the next administration.

The states signing the declaration are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington.

Global warming involved here? 
Feds give city $240,000 for stormwater plan
By ROBERT KOCH, Hour Staff Writer
July 1, 2008

The city has landed $240,000 in federal Clean Water Fund money to prepare a stormwater management plan aimed at curbing flooding and upgrading Norwalk's aged sewer system, according to public works officials.

Norwalk is one of three municipalities participating in the Stormwater Authority Pilot Program, which state lawmakers created to address water-quality issues and fix aging infrastructure.

"The city of Norwalk has undertaken this project to fulfill its obligation to meet new regulatory requirements on stormwater quality, advance its efforts to address flood risks, and to better maintain its aging system of storm sewers and drainage channels," said Elisabeth O. Bardon, operations manager at the Department of Public Works. "The city recognizes the need for improving the management of stormwater within the city and implement an enhanced stormwater management program."

The money, received through the state Department of Environmental Protection, will be matched with $60,000 in city funds to pay for the $300,000 study. Malcolm Pirnie, an engineering consulting firm based in White Plains, N.Y., and the Pepe & Hazard LLP, a law firm with offices in Southport, are preparing the study.

The resulting study will recommend capital improvements to the city's stormwater system and include a financial plan to help the city modernize and manage the system. Public works officials anticipate that the study will be completed within eight months.

"They've got to research what stormwater authorities are doing all around the country, what potential revenue sources would be. There's a lot of work in here," said Harold F. Alvord, director of public works, explaining the cost of the study. "Plus all three towns have to submit a joint report. It's not three single reports. (The study) ought to give us some good ideas on how to raise some more money (for repairs to the system)."

Norwalk, New London, New Haven and Stonington were approved to participate in the pilot program. Stonington since has opted out of the program.

In recent years, a number of Norwalk neighborhoods, including the areas of Olmstead Place, Lockwood Lane and Buckingham Place, have been plagued by flooding. Residents of those and other flood-prone areas have sought compensation from the city for flood damage to their properties, and pressed Alvord and other public works officials to repair and replace aged and undersized drainage pipes.

A number of such projects are in planning or under way. At the same time, Alvord and other officials say there are insufficient dollars to correct each and every deficiency in the system.

State Rep. Christopher R. Perone, D-137, co-sponsor of the bill that resulted in the adoption of the pilot program, said the stormwater management plan will "start the process" of improving the city's stormwater system.

"By creating a plan, you understand where the priorities are, what has to be addressed first," Perone said. "You need a road map if you want to get anywhere."

High Sea, High Risk; Shoreline Towns Beginning To Prepare For The Inevitable
By DAVID FUNKHOUSER | Courant Staff Writer
December 16, 2007

GUILFORD - Pollyanna Rock has always been a familiar foothold for Kathy Waugh, the spot she swam to as a child to test her mettle in the sea during summer days at her grandparents' cottage on Mulberry Point.

The Long Island Sound tide rose and fell, but the black boulder never dropped completely out of sight beneath the water surface. Forty years later, she still visits the modest two-bedroom house, though her family rents it out most of the summer. And now, for about six hours a day, she can no longer see Pollyanna Rock.

This is a small measure of how a rising sea is changing the map of Guilford, as it is changing coastlines around the world. The sea has been coming up for thousands of years, following the retreat of glaciers after the last Ice Age, scientists say. But the water level is rising faster now, and scientists say that is driven by global warming.

Whatever you believe about climate change, some things are irrefutable: The sea off Connecticut's coast rose at least 8 inches over the past century, and it is rising about a tenth of an inch per year now. And Pollyanna Rock is not the only thing that is disappearing.

In this community of 21,000 on the Sound, the higher sea level already affects homes, marinas, roads, beaches and marshes. People have started to assess what might happen, and what they should do about it.

"I'm of two minds," Waugh said, sitting in the backyard of her cottage, a couple of feet above the incoming tide. The family could build up the sea wall or try to find the money to raise the house up on stilts, she said. But she added: "Part of me feels it will be a very natural thing to happen if the sea swallows this house."

Guilford is ahead of many communities in anticipating sea level rise: In 2004, the town brought together local officials, scientists and other experts in coastal resources, insurance and emergency planning for a daylong workshop on the impact of climate change.

The town is rewriting its 25-year-old coastal zone management plan — the document that guides decisions on land use along the shoreline and tidal rivers. But the effort raises tricky questions about public vs. private interests, and it is already clear that Guilford residents and officials will face difficult choices in the years ahead.

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which won the Nobel Peace Prize this year along with former Vice President Al Gore — said in its latest report on Nov. 17 that sea level rise will wreak havoc during the next century. Higher seas will drown islands, erode coastlines and disrupt the lives and food supplies of hundreds of millions of people.

That poses huge risks for heavily populated areas like the low-lying deltas of Bangladesh and Egypt. In the United States, beachfront states from New Jersey south along the Atlantic Coast and the low-lying Gulf Coast are most at risk.

The threat is less severe along the rocky headlands, quiet beaches and sheltered coves of Connecticut's shoreline. But more than 2 million people live near the water. An eroding coastline and higher storm surges could threaten $600 billion in property, roads, bridges, railways and other infrastructure.

The threat is not just a slow, long-term problem, however. Nature has unleashed violence on us before, and most agree it is going to happen again, only next time, it will be much worse.

In A Hurry

Leslie Kane drives her well-used Jeep Cherokee down Neck Road, along the length of a small thumb of land that curls up between Long Island Sound and the East River. Kane, Guilford's environmental planner, is dashing around town to record how high the water reaches today — part of an effort by her and several other residents to document what is happening to the town.

It's 11:30 in the morning on a bright, calm September day. The Earth and sun just passed the equinox, and the moon is full, which means the tides will run especially high.

Kane turns right onto a road that cuts across the marshy peninsula to a state boat launch, and then stops the car. Two sea gulls are floating in the middle of the road.

This peninsula, ironically named Grass Island, is not so far from turning into a real island.

Flooding like this "used to happen rarely," Kane said — maybe during a bad storm. Now it happens three or four times a year.

Much of the marsh, on the inland side of Neck Road, is flooded. Across the road, on the sandy outer edge of the peninsula, homes with million-dollar views face the Sound.

According to the U.N. climate change panel, the latest climate models predict that oceans will keep rising at an increased rate — up to 2 feet by 2100. Most of that is from thermal expansion — as water warms, it expands, and the average temperature of the oceans is going up. Some is from melting glaciers and ice caps.

The warming also appears to be accelerating the melting of major polar ice sheets like the one that covers most of Greenland. If that keeps up, scientists say, the sea level will rise substantially higher and faster.

Global warming also is expected to spur more severe storms and heavier precipitation, the panel said. Higher water means that ocean surges from hurricanes and other storms will reach farther inland, that the land will drain more slowly, and that inland floods will be more severe. A higher sea level will push saltwater farther into fresh water systems, including tidal rivers and groundwater.

The benchmark for flooding is the 100-year storm — the kind of event, like the hurricane of 1938, that has about a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. A report issued last July by the Union of Concerned Scientists predicted that if we do nothing to control global warming, by the end of the century in New London, for example, such a flood could be occurring every 17 years.

The Connecticut shoreline has been changing naturally for thousands of years. But humans — beginning with European settlers — have radically altered the dynamic between land and sea. We've drained marshes for pastureland and filled wetlands so we could build on them. Man-made barriers such as groins, sea walls and bulkheads forced new patterns of sedimentation and erosion. Roads and rail lines cut off inland marshes from the tides and blocked seaward marshes from retreating inland, leaving them to drown — and removing important buffers between sea and land.

You can see all this clearly on Shell Beach Road, a quiet cove near where Leslie Kane grew up. The road crosses the cove close to the shore, pinching the tidal flow through two culverts that run under the road and up into the marsh. Route 146 and the Amtrak line form additional barriers, cutting across marshland farther inland. The wetlands, once rich with grasses, are turning into mud flats.

On Sept 21, 1938, a Category 3 hurricane blew across Long Island and into Connecticut and Rhode Island, killing more than 600 people and leaving swaths of coastline in ruins. Huge ships were smashed onto the New London docks, and the storm set off a devastating fire. A surging wave of water undermined railroad track all along the coast and in Stonington derailed the Bostonian, a passenger train.

The homes on Shell Beach Road were thrown across the marsh and against Route 146. Today, houses are back on the beach, on stilts.

Most people have no conception of how traumatic the '38 storm was. From the federal level on down, officials are encouraging better planning, and some concrete steps have been taken: Over the years, the Army Corps of Engineers has built five hurricane barriers in southern New England, including in Stonington, New London and Stamford. The Corps says these systems of dikes, flood gates and pumps have already prevented millions of dollars in damage.

Still, there is a general recognition that if the southern New England coast got hit again like it did in '38, the losses would be huge.

Insurance companies know what is at stake. They have been slammed by losses from catastrophic storms such as hurricanes Andrew and Katrina. A 2006 Connecticut study found that standard homeowner's insurance is difficult to find for people living within 1,000 feet of the water, and the companies that handle such coverage charge two to three times more than the typical cost of insuring a home farther inland.

Connecticut ranks sixth in the United States in the value of property vulnerable to storm damage, according to the Insurance Information Institute in New York.

Old Saybrook First Selectman Michael Pace has been planning for disaster for years. His town has bought surplus Army trucks, upgraded the emergency radio system and identified the town's most vulnerable areas.

He also has an eye on the town's tax base: 50 years ago, most homes on the shore were $35,000 summer cottages, he said; today, those properties are each worth $800,000 or more. A major storm, Pace said, "would wipe out literally several millions of dollars in tax revenue."

His assessment is in sync with that of the Northeast Regional Ocean Council, a group dedicated to coordinating coastal management. In an August report to New England governors, the council said that a storm of the same magnitude as the '38 hurricane "would rank as the sixth-costliest hurricane in U.S. history."

Regular Flooding

Caren Mintz, an environmental consultant in New York, wrote her master's thesis for Yale University on how Florida and Connecticut are adapting to climate change. One of the towns she studied was Guilford, where she found both enthusiasm for the subject, and reluctance to act.

"Many citizens do not see any benefits to their interests because they lack the information or direct experience to know that their property could be in danger (e.g., they never lived through a hurricane striking their land) and thus resist adaptation changes," Mintz wrote.

Sid Gale, a business consultant who has made climate change a personal cause, has been trying to do something about that. Gale has recorded flooding and storms all over town and lectures wherever he can on sea level rise. He helped organize the climate change conference here in 2004.

Kane meets up with Gale at Grass Island during the equinox tide. Camera in hand, Gale gestures toward the homes along the shore, collectively worth millions of dollars.

"That's the thing about climate change," he said. "It doesn't discriminate by economic levels."

Over at the town dock and marina, water covers the road leading to the narrow harbor and laps up against a side door of The Mooring, a popular local eatery. The marsh behind the restaurant is a lake.

In the marina, ramps leading to the floating docks angle up instead of down, pushed out of kilter by the high water. Across the parking lot, the town boat ramp is swamped.

The inventory continues down the shoreline: At the town beach, the bottom rung of the public boat racks has been removed, because the kayaks stored there were in danger of floating away during especially high tides.

Flooding occurs regularly in the yards of homes on Seaside Avenue, on the road out to Chaffinch Island and Brown's Boat Yard, along low-lying portions of Route 146 — including a causeway raised two decades ago precisely to prevent flooding.

David North is not so sure about global warming. He owns Brown's Boat Yard and serves on the committee that is revising Guilford's coastal zone management plan. He thinks what we are seeing is part of a natural cycle.

"We see it more often because people are there more," he said. "In 1965, 80 percent of the houses were summer houses and people weren't around for the winter storms.

"On Christmas Eve we're going to have 18 inches of water over Chaffinch Island Road — that's predictable. It's happened for 100 years, and it's going to keep happening for 1,000 years.

"It isn't going to start or stop because Al Gore put together a slide show," he said, referring to the former vice president's campaign to address global warming.

North has not seen "An Inconvenient Truth," the movie about Gore's campaign, but, he said, "A lot of things he brings attention to are good things — like using less energy. Americans are pigs — we use it, we want it, we can afford it. If we can be more considerate to the rest of the planet, that's a good thing."

North wants the town and the state to do more to protect the marshes and coastline from erosion, using dredged materials from local harbors to build offshore barriers. Raising roads, he said, is just normal maintenance — like the 3 or 4 inches of gravel he drops onto areas of his boat yard each year, to keep it from flooding.

A Wake-Up Call

Sachem's Head is a rocky peninsula that sticks out into the Sound like a huge hand. The area, dotted with expansive homes and great views, would be cut off from the rest of town by a modest flood.

An hour or so past the peak of the equinox tide, water still covers most of the lawn behind the Sachem's Head Yacht Club barn. Inside the barn, a rough black mark swabbed onto a board 4 feet off the floor records how high the water reached during the 1938 hurricane.

Kane and Gale step onto a metal footbridge to look at the homes that back up to the narrow harbor. Some have stone sea walls, some don't. This suggests the obvious: When the water rises, it will simply find its way around whatever barriers an individual homeowner has erected.

"You'd better think about a community strategy rather than an individual property," Gale said. And if you do try to think about a broader strategy, "then the solutions are going to have to require a long lead time."

People have to get together, agree on what they want to do, and find the money to pay for it. Vulnerable properties in Guilford alone include hundreds of homes, businesses and marinas. Also at risk are the public works yard, the Amtrak line and the Shoreline East train station, major highways, and access roads that are the only way into certain neighborhoods.

Then, Gale said, consider what will have to be protected along the entire Connecticut coastline — I-95, railroads, bridges, sewage treatment plants, oil tanks, schools and an airport.

"That's a lot of people competing for federal money," he said. If people wait until they can see more dramatic results of sea level rise, "we will have lost a lot of valuable time."

"It's hard to grasp the problem," said John Henningson, chairman of the committee reviewing the coastal management plan. "We know the elevations — we know what 1 foot above mean high water looks like. It's easy to see where we're headed.

"We're trying to wake people up to this … even in the short term, a foot can be of great concern. If you have a foot of mean sea level rise, [flooding is] going to be happening every day."

Henningson's committee meets once a month and has consulted with homeowners' associations, town boards, environmental groups and other citizens. Their concerns range from traffic problems, public access and property setbacks, marsh restoration and shell-fishing licenses, to people tearing down old summer cottages to build huge homes that clog the view.

Overshadowing it all is sea level rise.

The town faces serious erosion problems and will have to rebuild some protective barriers, raise roads and causeways, build up beaches and dredge some areas to remove sediment piling up from erosion, Henningson said.

But try to tell someone what to do with their own property, and watch out.

"Some say, 'I pay the taxes, I should be able to do what I want.' I'm inclined to agree with them, to a point," Henningson said. "Where is the boundary between that and the public's rights, your rights, the rights of your neighbor?"

Adapting On The Shore

Architect Philippe Campus recently redesigned a home overlooking marshes on Mulberry Point, just down the street from Kathy Waugh. He turned two low-slung cottages into a three-story home with spectacular views.

The house sits in a V zone — the V is for velocity — the federally designated flood zone that means a property is subject to the force of incoming waves as well as rising water during a severe storm. Campus designed the house to withstand a 4-foot wave: The living area sits on high concrete piers; the garage and ground levels are closed off with loose cinder blocks designed to give way under pressure from incoming waves. Water would rush through the openings under the building and drain back out.

As far as the rising sea is concerned, the Mulberry Point house "is the safest in the neighborhood," Campus said.

But this sort of conversion raises hackles all along the shoreline: Residents complain about losing views and the traditional scale of the neighborhoods when owners raze old summer homes and replace them with million-dollar mansions.

Campus defends his Mulberry Point house: The structure is set back farther from the marsh than the old cottages and uses a more advanced septic system. While the house is taller, it is more compact than what had been there before. And, the house has a much smaller carbon footprint: A geothermal system heats and cools it, and photovoltaic panels help with electrical needs.

While it may be best not to build at all on the water, Campus said, he would rather see a better structure built on an existing property than on vacant land.

There are three basic responses to sea level rise: retreat, accommodation and protection. You move; you compromise with the sea; or you build barriers against it. All involve some sacrifice and can pit public interest against private property rights. The more built-up the shoreline is, the harder the choices become.

While Campus' design reflects the building code, a lot of older homes do not match up with the more up-to-date requirements.

One form of accommodation already adopted in some form in several states is called rolling easements. As the sea rises and moves inland, so does the boundary between public and private land: Anything below mean high water belongs to the public, and legal precedent suggests that private property owners will lose out as their land is submerged.

Rolling easements recognize this shift: Landowners recognize that they may have to move back and eventually abandon their land, if and when the sea moves in.

Federal rules already require new and renovated homes in the area of a projected 100-year flood to meet certain codes, including putting living areas above where the water in such a flood would reach. One defensive option is to raise the standards — in other words, to force people to build stronger and higher. Instead of a standard foundation, say, you use a steel beam construction. You put living space several feet above the level of a 100-year flood.

Guilford and other coastal communities such as New Haven and Bridgeport are weighing such options, along with longer setbacks; shoring up both "hard" and "soft" barriers such as beaches, riverbanks and streets; restoring marshes as a natural barrier to storms; and buying up and conserving land in the flood plain.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency offers grants to communities that take certain steps to mitigate the effects of flooding and other hazards. A dozen Connecticut communities — though not Guilford — have signed on: In return, they can get grants to lift houses or buy homeowners out of the flood plain.

The coastal plan committee in Guilford has produced several "working papers" that lay out the issues the town faces. In the paper on sea level rise, they state:

"Ultimately, the homes in the coastal flood zone might find it easier to relocate to entirely different properties, while the Leete's Island residents and tenants may learn to time their arrival and departure with the tides, as residents of Lieutenant's Island do on Cape Cod, allowing the road to flood twice each day."

Down the street from Campus' creation sits Pollyanna Rock. When the tide is right, Kathy Waugh wades out in the morning with a cup of coffee to sit and watch the sea.

She is 50 and works for WGBH, the public television station in Boston, where she has written for "Arthur" and other children's shows. She holds warm memories of her time exploring the shoreline when she was a child.

She also feels a responsibility for the future: "We need to do something about how we live," she said.

Sitting in her backyard, she remembers a storm last spring when the water washed right up past the house and onto the road behind it.

"I expect the house is going to be gone in 50 years," she said.

"Part of me knows nothing lasts forever. … On good days, I think we'll fix it. On bad days. I feel the politicians won't act in time."


Deja vu all over again
 
Postscript: Grounded Antarctic Ship Freed
NYTIMES
By Andrew C. Revkin
December 8, 2008, 12:03 pm

Passengers from the MV Ushuaia boarding a Chilean navy vessel. (Credit: Agence France-Presse - Getty Images)
The small cruise ship that ran aground along the Antarctic Peninsula last week and spilled some fuel was hauled off the rocks by a Chilean Navy tug boat, according to the Associated Press and Jon Bowermaster, who’s in the region on another vessel. Naval authorities told the news agency that the fuel spill was controlled. After this incident and the sinking of a similar ship one year ago, the growing polar tourism industry is clearly facing some questions about safety.

Ongoing assessments of penguins and other life along the peninsula have not turned up any clear link between population changes and tourism so far, and the main source of change appears — so far — to be the dramatic warming of the regional climate, Ron Naveen told me in a recent e-mail. His nonprofit group, Oceanites, is conducting an ongoing survey of ecosystems in the area.

Here’s how he described the climate shift, and biological response:

The Peninsula’s warming faster, it appears, than any other place on the planet — since 1957, by an average of 5˚F (2.8˚C) year-round, and by 9˚F (5˚C) in winter. Peninsula Adélie and chinstrap penguins are declining (the Adélies significantly), while gentoo penguins are booming. Peninsula Adélies and chinstraps, traditionally, are known are krill consumers, while the gentoos have more catholic tastes, switching easily among krill, fish, and inverts. Therein, a very complicated tale, not yet sorted — but we’re trying to do so.

The Antarctic Sun, the “newspaper” of Antarctica, has a good story on the pengiun project, with some great photos by Mr. Naveen.

Editorial:  Broken Ice in Antarctica
NYTIMES
Article Tools Sponsored By
Published: March 28, 2008

Winter is coming to Antarctica, and that may be the only thing that keeps another of its major ice shelves from collapsing. On Tuesday, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey announced that there had been an enormous fracture on the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf, which started breaking last month.

That province of ice, a body of permanent floating ice about the size of Connecticut, lies on the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, the part of the continent regarded as most vulnerable to climate change. Scientists flew over the break — itself covering some 160 square miles — and what they saw is remarkable: huge, geometrically fractured slabs of ice and, among them, the rubble of a catastrophic breach. A great swath of the ice shelf is being held in place by a thin band of ice.

What matters isn’t just the scale of this breakout. Changes in wind patterns and water temperatures related to global warming have begun to erode the ice sheets of western Antarctica at a faster rate than previously detected, and the total collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf is now within the realm of possibility.

It also comes as a reminder that the warming of Earth’s surface is occurring much faster at the poles than it is in more temperate regions. It is easy to think of ice as somehow temporary, but scientists say that the Wilkins ice shelf may have been in place for at least several hundred years.

Nothing dramatizes the urgency of global warming quite like a fracture of this scale. There is nothing to be done about a collapsing polar ice sheet except to witness it. It may be too late to stop the warming decay at the boundaries of Antarctic ice, yet there is everything to be done. Humans can radically change the way they live and do business, knowing that it is the one chance to find a possible limit to radical change in the natural world around us.

Satellite images of ice loss
Satellite images show the loss of the Markham Ice Shelf over the last year

Major ice-shelf loss for Canada 
I-BBC, 3 September 2008

The ice shelves in Canada's High Arctic have lost a colossal area this year, scientists report.

The floating tongues of ice attached to Ellesmere Island, which have lasted for thousands of years, have seen almost a quarter of their cover break away.  One of them, the 50 sq km (20 sq miles) Markham shelf, has completely broken off to become floating sea-ice.  Researchers say warm air temperatures and reduced sea-ice conditions in the region have assisted the break-up.

"These substantial calving events underscore the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Trent University's Dr Derek Mueller.

"These changes are irreversible under the present climate."  

Scientists reported in July that substantial slabs of ice had calved from Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, the largest of the Ellesmere shelves.  Similar changes have been seen in the other four shelves.  As well as the complete breakaway of the Markham, the Serson shelf lost two sections totalling an estimated 122 sq km (47 sq miles), and the break-up of the Ward Hunt has continued.

Cold remnants

The shelves themselves are merely remnants of a much larger feature that was once bounded to Ellesmere Island and covered almost 10,000 sq km (3,500 sq miles).  Over the past 100 years, this expanse of ice has retreated by 90%, and at the start of this summer season covered just under 1,000 sq km (400 sq miles).

Much of the area was lost during a warm period in the 1930s and 1940s.  Temperatures in the Arctic are now even higher than they were then, and a period of renewed ice shelf break-up has ensued since 2002.
Unlike much of the floating sea-ice which comes and goes, the shelves contain ice that is up to 4,500 years old.

A rapid sea-ice retreat is being experienced across the Arctic again this year, affecting both the ice attached to the coast and floating in the open ocean.  The floating sea-ice, which would normally keep the shelves hemmed in, has shrunk to just under five million sq km, the second lowest extent recorded since the era of satellite measurement began about 30 years ago.

"Reduced sea-ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer," said Dr Luke Copland from the University of Ottawa.

"And extensive new cracks across remaining parts of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf mean that it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years."

Loss of ice in the Arctic, and in particular the extensive sea-ice, has global implications. The "white parasol" at the top of the planet reflects energy from the Sun straight back out into space, helping to cool the Earth.

Further loss of Arctic ice will see radiation absorbed by darker seawater and snow-free land, potentially warming the Earth's climate at an even faster rate than current observational data indicates.
28 August 2008
Arctic ice 'is at tipping point'
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Fishing boat in ice
Scientists suggest the Arctic is already at a climatic "tipping point"

Arctic sea ice has shrunk to the second smallest extent since satellite records began, US scientists have revealed.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says that the ice-covered area has fallen below its 2005 level, which was the second lowest on record.

Melting has occurred earlier in the year than usual, meaning that the iced area could become even smaller than last September, the lowest recorded.

Researchers say the Arctic is now at a climatic "tipping point".

"We could very well be in that quick slide downwards in terms of passing a tipping point," said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the Colorado-based NSIDC.

"It's tipping now. We're seeing it happen now," he told the Associated Press news agency.

Under covered

The area covered by ice on 26 August measured 5.26 million sq km (2.03 million sq miles), just below the 2005 low of 5.32 million sq km (2.05 million sq).

But the 2005 low came in late September; and with the 2008 graph pointing downwards, the NSIDC team believes last year's record could still be broken even though air temperatures, both in the Arctic and globally, have been lower than last year.

Last September, the ice covered just 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles), the smallest extent seen since satellite imaging began 30 years ago. The 1980 figure was 7.8 million sq km (3 million sq miles).

Graph
The 2008 graph shows a steeper decline than at the same time last year

Most of the cover consists of relatively thin ice that formed within a single winter and melts more easily than ice that accumulated over many years.

Irrespective of whether the 2007 record falls in the next few weeks, the long-term trend is obvious, scientists said; the ice is declining more sharply than even a decade ago, and the Arctic region will progressively turn to open water in summers.

A few years ago, scientists were predicting ice-free Arctic summers by about 2080.

Then computer models started projecting earlier dates, around 2030 to 2050; and some researchers now believe it could happen within five years.

That will bring economic opportunities, including the chance to drill for oil and gas. Burning that oil and gas would increase levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere still further.

The absence of summer ice would have impacts locally and globally.

The iconography of polar bears unable to find ice is by now familiar; but other species, including seals, would also face drastic changes to their habitat, as would many Arctic peoples.

Globally, the Arctic melt will reinforce warming because open water absorbs more of the Sun's energy than ice does.







LINK TO I-BBC VIDEO PAGE FOR MORE ICE-FLOATING DANGERS AHEAD!
A medium-sized iceberg is grounded in a cove near St. John's. Medium-sized bergs range from 16 to 45 meters tall above the waterline and up to 120 meters long, with seven-eighths of their total mass below the surface. 

'Another Titanic Can Always Happen' 
The Coast Guard's Groton-based International Ice Patrol works off the coast of Newfoundland to track potentially deadly icebergs 
DAY
By Jennifer Grogan    
Published on 5/25/2008 
 
St. John's, Newfoundland - Scott Baumgartner looked out the aircraft window at the tops of clouds and spoke into his headset.

”Zero visibility.

”Wait, right side.

”About three miles, a couple of bergs.”

Crew members from the U.S. Coast Guard International Ice Patrol like Marine Science Technician Third Class Baumgartner track icebergs near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland during the “ice season,” the time when icebergs drift into the trans-Atlantic shipping lanes. Their goal is to prevent ships from colliding with these icebergs.

”Another Titanic can always happen,” Senior Chief Petty Officer John Stengel said. “And obviously, saving lives is why we're here.”

Last week, the crew was flying over a 500,000-square-mile area to look for icebergs and relay that information back to their operations center at the University of Connecticut's Avery Point campus in Groton. The Ice Patrol then disseminates warnings to mariners traveling between major ports in Europe and North America.  Baumgartner put his face inches from the window and tried to determine the icebergs' size and shape to mark in his log.

”I never saw an iceberg on the right. They must have been real close,” a radar operator said. The radar system he was looking at is angled, creating a blind spot close to the plane and underneath it.

In a few seconds, the break in the cloud cover was gone.

”This is how a lot of patrols are, looking at clouds,” Baumgartner said.

The number of icebergs that survive the two- to three-year trip south from West Greenland varies annually, depending on atmospheric and oceanographic conditions.  Eleven made it in 2005, none in 2006 and 324 in 2007. This year, more than 900 icebergs have entered the shipping lanes so far, making it already one of the top 20 years in the past century for the most icebergs. The season typically runs from February to July. 
About 1,000 icebergs crossed into the lanes south of 48 degrees North Latitude in 1912 - the year the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank.  A small mark on the radar screen brightened, signaling a possible ship or iceberg. The radar operator zoomed in.  Bright spots that rock back and forth are ships. Ships move with the waves. Icebergs, because of their large size, do not.

”Got it,” Avionics Electrical Technician Chief Pat Mudge said, examining the image.

”Berg,” Mudge said.

”Berg,” Marine Science Technician First Class Horace Lee Brittle Jr. said, looking at Mudge's screen.

Another mark brightened, but this time Mudge could not tell whether it was a ship or an iceberg. Small icebergs and small fishing boats can be hard to distinguish.  He needed a closer look.

”Divert.”

The plane turned and descended.  Brittle told Kevin Whalen, a cadet from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy who was sitting by the window, to keep his eyes open.

”It's going to come down on the left side. Two miles, 10 o'clock position,” said Brittle, who is stationed in Groton.

”I think I spot a berg off the left wing,” Whalen reported.

”Got binoculars on it? Get a reticle,” Brittle said, instructing the intern to use the scale inside the binoculars to read the iceberg's size.

It was Whalen's first time searching for icebergs so Brittle ran to his side to look too. He did not see anything.  The target showed up only intermittently on radar.

”Marine life.”

”Returning to flight track.”

The crew - four from the Ice Patrol, eight from U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, N.C., who were training three from Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater, Fla., and the cadet working as an intern - arrived in St. John's May 14. They canceled the patrols for the first two days because of dense fog and a broken radar system on the plane.  Boarding the plane for the first patrol on May 17, the crew put on headsets to communicate.  It was about 110 decibels inside, the same level of noise as a chain saw or a rock concert. The floor vibrated from the plane's engines.  The HC-130H was built for cargo, not for comfort.  The crew flew over the southern, highest-priority portion of their operational area to see how far south the icebergs had drifted. The Ice Patrol charts need to reflect where mariners should travel to avoid icebergs.

The Ice Patrol staff draw a black line around all the icebergs on the chart. The line shows the “limit of all known ice” or LAKI. Ships in the area that stay outside the line should not encounter icebergs. There were 389 icebergs still within the LAKI as of the patrol trip. Others seen earlier in the season had melted in warmer ocean temperatures or had broken apart with the constant pounding of the waves.

”If you miss something, if an iceberg gets by you, now there's something south of the limit,” said Avionics Electrical Technician First Class Scott Bernard, one of the radar operators from Elizabeth City. “If someone hits it, that destroys our credibility.”

That line, Bernard said, is “where you stake your reputation.”

Stengel flipped open his white binder to review his notes for his “Ice Message” back to Groton.

”Good patrol of southern LAKI,” he wrote. “Patrol shortened due to fuel concerns for landing. Aircraft and sensors performed well.”

Baumgartner and Yeoman First Class David Phillips typed up the iceberg sightings from the paper logs and computer records, while Whalen observed to learn the procedure.  Staff at the Ice Patrol Operations Center in Groton were waiting to enter the iceberg locations into their computer model. That information, along with ocean current and wind data, predicts where the icebergs will drift and is used to then estimate the limit of all known ice.

Mariners can listen to this information in the form of an “Ice Bulletin” over the radio, view it online or receive the chart as a fax.

Stengel, the tactical commander for the deployment, tallied the final statistics. He counted seven icebergs and five unidentifiable objects from the day's patrol of 1,540 nautical miles. The five would still be entered into the model to err on the side of caution; they could have been icebergs.  Normally the patrols find only a few icebergs at the southernmost boundary of their operations.

The Ice Patrol has searched for icebergs near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland every year since 1914, except during World Wars I and II.  An international treaty says that ship captains must use the Ice Patrol charts. But nothing requires ships to go around the icebergs. They can sail through them if they want to.  Skyrocketing fuel costs have given mariners an added incentive this year to take shortcuts through iceberg-infested waters.

”With fuel prices today, they want their transit to be economical, so they travel along the line of many bergs,” said Cmdr. Scott Rogerson, commanding officer of the Ice Patrol. “I worry about ships that say 'The fuel prices are too high, time is of the essence and I'm going to blast right through there.'”

There has not been a reported loss of life or property from collision with an iceberg from ships that have heeded the Ice Patrol's warnings and steered clear of the area with icebergs.  Rogerson is frequently asked why the Ice Patrol is still needed today, given the radars and lookouts on ships.

”Icebergs are still a threat, even with good lookouts and good radars,” he said. “During stormy conditions or during fog, both their radars and lookouts are possibly not going to be able to see everything that's out there.”

”We don't want ships navigating through and around icebergs,” he added. “We would rather they go around completely because they're so difficult to detect.”

Given the number of icebergs this year and the temptation to cut through them, Rogerson said, “it could be only a matter of time before a ship collides with one.” 

----------------------------

Profiles Of Ice Patrol Members 
Published on 5/25/2008 
 
NAME : Senior Chief Petty Officer John Stengel, 42

”It's a great team,” Stengel said. “We have good camaraderie and a good command.”

”It's a small unit with a big mission.”

NAME : Marine Science Technician First Class Horace Lee Brittle Jr., 34