MEXICO TO HOST WORKSHOP ON WATER & CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION IN THE AMERICAS THIS WEEK...

Dear water and climate friends,



You are hereby cordially invited to a workshop on water and climate change adaptation in the Americas to be held on September 7-8, 2011, in the World Trade Center in Mexico City, as part of the “Workshops of the Americas’ Targets and Solutions Groups on the road to the 6th World Water Forum”. 

This workshop will focus on key messages that affect water-based climate change adaptation, such as social organization, equity and poverty alleviation, hydro-climate information systems, institutional capacity development, infrastructure development and use of financing, and ecosystems.



Hosted by the National Water Commission of Mexico and organized by dozens of participating organizations in the Americas region, this will be one of six parallel workshops aiming to define a coherent position on the six thematic priorities for the Americas region towards the 6th World Water Forum, to be held in Marseilles, France in March 2012. These thematic priorities are water and climate change adaptation; guarantee access to water services and integrated sanitation for all; governance for Integrated Water Resources Management; water for food security; harmonizing water and energy; and water and ecosystems services. Please note that participation in this event is free of charge. You will find more details on the program, purpose, logistics, etc. of these workshops here (in English) and here (in Spanish). Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact cinternacional@conagua.gob.mx.



This workshop is the latest milestone in the Americas’ Regional Policy Dialog on Water and Climate Change Adaptation that is being carried out by over 20 relevant organizations in the region, in line with global, regional and local processes and events related to water, the environment, broader development and climate change. For more information on this Regional Policy Dialog, please visit   http://www.waterclimatechange.org/ (in English) or http://www.aguaycambioclimatico.org/ (in Spanish, coming very soon).



Best regards



Colin Herron



Asesor para Proyectos Estratégicos / Punto Focal para Agua y Cambio Climático – Advisor on Strategic Projects / Focal Point for Water and Climate Change

Comisión Nacional del Agua - National Water Commission of Mexico (CONAGUA)

Subdirección General de Programación-Gerencia de Planificación Hídrica / Deputy Director General’s Office for Planning-Water Planning Department

E-mail: colin.herron@conagua.gob.mx colin.anthony.herron@gmail.com

Tel: (+52 55) 5174 4000 ext 4437#

Skype: colin.herron







Juntos cuidamos el Agua



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CLIMATE CHANGE OPENS UP ARCTIC SHIPPING ROUTES THAT WERE PREVIOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE...OPENING UP TRADE FOR RUSSIA...

Arctic shipping routes open

by Staff Writers
Paris (ESA) Aug 26, 2011


Detailed images and captions highlighting changing ice conditions can be found here at ESA


Satellite measurements show we are heading for another year of below-average ice cover in the Arctic. As sea ice melts during the summer months, two major shipping routes have opened in the Arctic Ocean.

In 2008 satellites saw that the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route were open simultaneously for the first time since satellite measurements began in the 1970s - and now it has happened again.

While the Northern Sea Route above Russia (also known as the Northeast Passage) has been open to shipping traffic since mid-August, recent satellite data show that the most direct course in the Northwest Passage now appears to be navigable as well.

Located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the Northwest Passage can be a short cut for shipping between Europe and Asia - but with the opening of the sea route comes the potential for both sovereignty claims and marine species migration across the Arctic Ocean.

In 2007, Arctic sea ice hit a record low since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years before. That same year, the historically impassable Northwest Passage opened for the first time.

Unusual weather contributed to 2007's record ice loss: skies opened over the central Arctic Ocean and wind patterns pushed warm air into the region, promoting a strong melt.

Weather patterns have been different this year, but the early opening of the passages indicates that we could be about to hit a new record low in ice cover.

"The minimum ice extent is still three to four weeks away, and a lot depends on the weather conditions over the Arctic during those weeks," says Leif Toudal Pedersen, a senior scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.

"Whether we reach an absolute minimum or not, this year again confirms that we are in a new regime with substantially less summer ice than before.

"The last five summers are the five minimum ice extent summers on record."

Every year, the Arctic Ocean experiences the formation and then melting of vast amounts of floating ice, but the rate of overall loss has accelerated.

During the last 30 years, satellites observing the Arctic have witnessed reductions in the minimum ice extent at the end of summer from around 8 million sq km in the early 1980s to the historic minimum of less than 4.24 million sq km in 2007.

Before the advent of satellites, obtaining measurements of sea ice was difficult: the Arctic is both inaccessible and prone to long periods of badweather and extended darkness.

Radars on Earth observation satellites such as ESA's Envisat are particularly suited to monitoring polar regions because they can acquire images through clouds and darkness.

In the coming weeks, ESA will continue to monitor the situation in the Arctic with its Envisat, CryoSat and SMOS satellites.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Arctic_shipping_routes_open_999.html

VERY, VERY COOL...NEW CURRENT DISCOVERED OFF ICELAND THAT IS KEY TO OCEAN TEMPERATURES...

Newly discovered Icelandic current could change climate picture

by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 24


This is the Northern Denmark Strait showing newly discovered deep current, in relation to known pathway. Credit: WHOI.

If you'd like to cool off fast in hot summer weather, take a dip in a newly discovered ocean current called the North Icelandic Jet (NIJ). You'd need to be far, far below the sea's surface near Iceland, however, to reach it. Scientists have confirmed the presence of the NIJ, a deep-ocean circulation system off Iceland. It could significantly influence the ocean's response to climate change.

The NIJ contributes to a key component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), critically important for regulating Earth's climate.

As part of the planet's reciprocal relationship between ocean circulation and climate, the AMOC transports warm surface water to high latitudes where the water warms the air, then cools, sinks and returns toward the equator as a deep flow.

Crucial to this warm-to-cold oceanographic choreography is the Denmark Strait Overflow Water (DSOW), the largest of the deep, overflow plumes that feed the lower limb of the AMOC and return the dense water south through gaps in the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.

For years it has been thought that the primary source of the Denmark Overflow was a current adjacent to Greenland known as the East Greenland Current.

However, this view was recently called into question by two oceanographers from Iceland who discovered a deep current flowing southward along the continental slope of Iceland.

They named the current the North Icelandic Jet and hypothesized that it formed a significant part of the overflow water.

Now, in a paper published in the August 21st online issue of the journalNature Geoscience, the team of researchers--including the two Icelanders who discovered the current--has confirmed that the Icelandic Jet is not only a major contributor to the DSOW but "is the primary source of the densest overflow water."

"We present the first comprehensive measurements of the NIJ," said Robert Pickart of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Instititution in Massachusetts, one of the co-authors of the paper.

"Our data demonstrate that the NIJ indeed carries overflow water into Denmark Strait and is distinct from the East Greenland Current. The NIJ constitutes approximately half of the total overflow transport and nearly all of the densest component."

The researchers used a numerical model to hypothesize where and how the NIJ is formed.

"These results implicate water mass transformation and exchange near Iceland as central contributors to the deep limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and raise new questions about how global ocean circulation will respond to future climate change," said Eric Itsweire, program director in the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research.

"We've identified a new paradigm," Pickart said, likely a new, overturning loop of warm to cold water.

The results, Pickart says, have "important ramifications" for ocean circulation's impact on climate.

Scientists have been concerned that this overturning loop--some call it a conveyor belt--is slowing down due to a rise in global temperatures.

They suggest that increasing amounts of fresh water from melting ice and other warming-related phenomena are making their way into the northern North Atlantic, where it could freeze and decrease the need for the loop to deliver as much warm water as it does now.

Eventually, this could lead to a colder climate in the northern hemisphere.

While this scenario is far from certain, researchers need to understand the overturning process, Pickart said, to make accurate predictions about the future of climate and circulation interaction.

"If a large fraction of the overflow water comes from the NIJ, then we need to re-think how quickly the warm-to-cold conversion of the AMOC occurs, as well as how this process might be altered under a warming climate," said Pickart.

Pickart and a team of scientists from the U.S., Iceland, Norway, and the Netherlands are scheduled to embark on August 22nd on a cruise aboard the research vessel Knorr. They will collect new information on the overturning in the Iceland Sea.

"During our upcoming cruise we will deploy an array of year-long moorings across the entire Denmark Strait to quantify the NIJ and distinguish it from the East Greenland Current," Pickart said.

"Then we'll collect shipboard measurements in the Iceland Sea to the north of the mooring line to determine more precisely where and how the NIJ originates."

The cruise will be chronicled at the North Icelandic Jet Cruise website. In addition to Pickart, authors of the Nature Geoscience paper include Michael Spall and Daniel Torres of WHOI; lead author Kjetil Vage, and co-authors Svein Østerhus and Tor Eldevik, all of the University of Bergen, Norway; and Heðinn Valdimarsson and Steingrimur Jonsson--the co-discoverers of the NIJ--of the Marine Research Institute in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Research Council of Norway also funded the work.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Newly_discovered_Icelandic_current_could_change_climate_picture_999.html

CLIMATE CHANGE IS INDISPUTABLE: UNDERSTANDING THE CAUSE IS ANOTHER ISSUE...

Climate Change and Food Production: A Misunderstood Connection

by Jay Lehr
on AUGUST 7, 2011





                                                                          The world's food producers are frequently blamed for being responsible for some part of the "greenhouse gas” emissions thought to contribute to global warming, and consequently are targeted for regulations or carbon taxes. 

But the connection between climate change and food production is nearly the opposite of this popular but mistaken belief.

Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – whether from humans, or from oceans and other much larger sources – increases all vegetation growth rates, making food and animal feed more plentiful and ultimately less expensive.

The idea that man has significant impact on the earth’s temperature is both arrogant and absurd.

 Between 1978 and 1998 when the earth was warming (it is not warming any longer) Mars, Pluto, Jupiter and the largest moon of Neptune warmed at the same rate. Our Hubble telescope found no SUVs on any of these celestial bodies.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. 

On the contrary it makes crops and forests grow faster. Mapping by satellite shows that the earth has become about 6 percent greener overall in the past two decades, with forests expanding into arid regions. 

The Amazon rain forest was the biggest gainer, with two tons of additional bio-mass per acre per year. 

Certainly, climate change does not help every region equally. 

But careful studies predict overall benefit — fewer storms, more rain, better crop yields, longer growing seasons, milder winters and decreasing heating costs in colder climates. The news is certainly not bad and on balance may be rather good.

Someday the world will wake up and laugh when the public finally understands that the entire pursuit of economic ruin in the name of saving the planet from increasing carbon dioxide is in fact a terrible joke. 

It is an unarguable fact that the portion of the Earth’s greenhouse-gas envelope contributed by man is barely one-tenth of one percent of the total. 

Do the numbers your self. 

CO2 is no more than 4 percent of the total (with water vapor being over 90 percent, followed by methane and sulpher and nitrous oxides). 

Of that 4 percent, man contributes only a little over 3 percent — the remainder coming from the oceans and decaying vegetation. Elementary school arithmetic says that 3 percent of 4 percent is 0.12 percent. 

And for that we are sentencing the planet to a wealth of damaging economic impacts?

With regard to raising beef cattle: Yes, methane produced by all animals is a green house gas — but that produced as part of the domesticated food chain is an insignificant part of methane’s small percent as well.

Some 900,000 years of ice-core temperature records and carbon dioxide content records show that CO2 increases follow rather than lead increases in Earth temperature — which is logical because the oceans are the primary source of CO2, and they hold more CO2 when cool than when warm, so warming causes the oceans to release more CO2. Again, the production of animal protein for human consumption has nothing to do with the earth’s temperature. 

Nor does any other aspect of agriculture, and it is time that those of us working diligently to provide the world with abundant healthy and inexpensive food stop pandering to green ant-agriculture environmental zealots intending to enslave the world and destroy its economy with alarmist lies.

We know that 200 million years ago, when the dinosaurs walked the Earth, average CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was 1800 ppm, five times higher than today.

Never mind that the overall polar bear population has increased from about 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today, and that the only two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past 50 years. 

Also ignore the fact that polar bears were around 100,000 years ago, long before at least one important interglacial period when it was much warmer than the present. 

Clearly, they survived long periods of time when the climate of the Arctic was much warmer than today. 

Yet they are not expected to survive this present warming without help from government regulators and environmental groups attempting too curtail agricultural productivity?

No computer model ever used to compute climate change has been able to calculate our recent past Earth temperature, though all measured data inputs were known and available. So why do people give any credence to made up math equations said to emulate the Earth’s climate when they say the temperature is warming and animal husbandry is partially to blame?

The late, great author Michael Crichton once said the claim of consensus in science has been the first refuge of scoundrels.

 It has been a way to avoid debate by claiming a matter to be settled. 

Whenever you hear that a consensus of scientists agree on something or other, reach for your wallet because you are being scammed.

Since credible scientific evidence established that CO2 from mankind has little impact on temperature and none on public health, the net result of CO2 limitations will be a transfer of wealth and the ceding of more authority to the United Nations as a global government, and the reduction of our ability to increase the healthy animal protein intake of the developing world.

Once we accept the principle that carbon should be monitored, controlled and taxed, we open the door to the most invasive kind of bureaucratic meddling — and to all the carbon cops who want to stick their noses into every aspect of the way we live, whether it is the kind of car we drive, our holiday destination, our pleasure boat or even the food miles calculated into our evening meal. And, of course, how we raise our livestock.

There is no consensus of scientists in favor of human-caused or feedlot-caused global warming. While opinion polls do not determine truth in science, more than 31,000 American scientists signed a petition drafted by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine which stated:


There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other green house gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the Earth Atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.

Climate change is not a scientific problem that found political support. This is about eco-activists and politicians who found a scientific issue they feel they can leverage into power and control. The environment is a great way to advance a political agenda that favors central planning and an intrusive government. What better way to control someone’s property than to subordinate one’s private property rights to environmental concerns. Does this not sound familiar as to the threats to modern agriculture?

While the most extreme environmental zealots may be relatively few in number, they have managed to gain undue influence by exploiting the gullibility of many ordinary and scientifically illiterate people — who are only too-willing to believe that the planet needs saving from man’s excesses. Perhaps it is a psychological throwback to those earlier civilizations that offered human sacrifices to the gods to assuage their sins and spare them from punishment in the form of drought, flood, famine or disease. There are certainly many parallels between modern environmentalism and religion.

By focusing our priorities on future generations, we focus less on improving the lives of people who are alive today. These future generations bear no closer relationship to us than those now living in developing countries whose lives we deign to save. The beef cattle industry tries to feed people in the world who are hungry, while alarmists place road blocks in their way.

Global warming is a major industry today. 

Between 1992 and 2008, the U.S. government spent $30 billion on climate change research and now contributes $6 billion a year. This finances jobs, grants, conferences, international travel and academic journals. It not only keeps a huge army of people in comfortable employment, but also fills them with self-righteousness and moral superiority, regardless of the fact that real science did not support it. 

By villifying industries like agriculture (which has done an historically incompetent job of telling its positive story to the public) it diverts attention from the scam being perpetrated.

It is clear that with the deep roots of the global warming scare it is not about to go away. 

It has the added advantage of not being able to be proven false in our lifetime. 

In the meantime, the sanest course for us would be to gain what limited perspective we can (remembering the global cooling alarm of a generation ago) and proceed cautiously. The beef cattle industry and all of agriculture is going through a scare with many causes — and we need to step back from it, take a long second look at the scientific evidence, and not do anything rash.

In my opinion the beef cattle industry is making a large mistake by attempting to pacify the alarmists by promoting a smaller carbon and methane footprint. 

It simply convinces the public that the cattle industry shares guilt for crimes against the earth. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth, and it is time to stand up for sound science rather than false claims.




by Jay Lehr

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. is senior fellow and science director of The Heartland Institute, an independent nonprofit organization based in Chicago. In 2008 he was named chief hydro-geologist for Earth Water Global (EWG) corporation, one of the world's largest providers of water supply projects. He is an internationally renowned speaker, scientist, and author who has testified before Congress on more than three dozen occasions on environmental issues, and consulted with nearly every agency of the federal government and with many foreign countries.
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NORTHERN TRADE ROUTES OPEN UP FROM ASIA TO THE WEST AS RECORD ICE MELTS AROUND ARCTIC CIRCLE...RUSSIA HOPES TO COMPETE WITH SUEZ CANAL...

Russia says high ice melt opens Arctic trade routes





MOSCOW | Wed Aug 3, 2011 5:41pm EDT

(Reuters) - Arctic ice cover receded to near record lows this summer, opening elusive northern trade routes from Asia to the West, Russia's climate research agency said on Wednesday.

After the third hottest year on record since 1936 in the Arctic last year, ice cover has melted as much as 56 percent more than average across northern shipping routes, making navigation in the perilous waters "very easy," it said.

"Since the beginning of August icebreaker-free sailing is open on almost all the routes," the climate monitoring agency said on its website www.meteoinfo.ru.

It added that the mild conditions would last through September on shipping lanes that are tens of thousands of kilometers shorter than southern alternatives.

With retreating ice opening new strategic trade routes, Russia hopes to make Arctic passage a competitor to the Suez Canal, profiting from taxes and the lease of its unique nuclear icebreaker fleet to escort cargo ships along its Siberian coast.

Despite higher costs, Russian state shipping giant Sovcomflot sent more cargoes of gas condensate on the Northern Sea Route this year, an ambitious move that highlights the Kremlin's drive to mark its stake in the energy-rich region.

If the current pace of ice melt continues, the Arctic Ocean could become entirely ice-free during the summer months by 2050, Russia's top forecaster Alexander Frolov predicted last year.

But mariners admit many obstacles, such as ice-floes and shallow waters, remain before the northern Russian shipping lane can take business from existing southern thoroughfares -- not least a summer that lasts just a few weeks.

(Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel, editing by Tim Pearce)


http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/03/us-russia-arctic-idUSTRE7726EC20110803?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&dlvrit=309301

AS GO THE GLACIERS...SO TO...GOES A WAY OF LIFE...ENJOY THEM WHILE YOU CAN...THE EARTH'S GLACIERS ARE MELTING AWAY...

Twilight of the Glaciers

Djamila Grossman for The New York Times

A century and a half ago there were 150 glaciers in what is now Glacier National Park. Twenty-five remain.

By STEPHEN P. NASH
Published: July 29, 2011



AN hour or so up ahead, at the higher elevations along the trail that leads over Siyeh Pass, huckleberries were ripening. Even a dawdling day hiker like me knows that huckleberries can quickly mean grizzlies in Glacier National Park. I indulged a nervous tic and patted around for the loud red aerosol can on my belt, whose label reads Counter Assault. It’s effective as a bear repellent, but even more reliable at making an urbanite feel faintly ridiculous.



Montana’s Fading Glaciers


Glacier National Park




I was in northwest Montana for the hikes and the huckleberries, but most of all to experience the namesake glaciers, which, I had recently learned, might be around for only another decade or so. Given that a century and a half ago there were 150 and now there are 25, the trip makes me an enlistee in the practice known by a somewhat prickly term: last-chance tourism.

For now, though, there are still glaciers to be seen. The park’s skein of well-maintained trails traverses every section of its million-plus acres and can accommodate any level of ability, from backpackers to the sheets-and-coverlets crowd. Even visitors who prefer to commune with nature through a car window can be awed by the views of the Jackson and Blackfoot Glaciers from Going-to-the-Sun Road, the often car-choked highway that more or less bisects the park west to east.

And for those who want to get closer, some serious legwork over steep terrain can put you right next to both the Grinnell and Sperry Glaciers, respectively a day and an overnight’s hike away. There are other glaciers to be glimpsed in the distance during a hike, but they can’t be reached by trails. These are excursions that require ice ax, ropes or crampons: the well-sequestered Pumpelly Glacier, for example, at 8,420 feet, and its close neighbor, the Pumpkin Glacier.

Other glaciers are nearer a trail, but still display their remote and frigid glory at some distance, and in a way the craggy surroundings make them even more vivid. I chose the Siyeh Pass Trail because it affords a prolonged, spectacular view of the Sexton Glacier from below.

Alpine glaciers like Sexton don’t look like peaks or cubes. A couple of miles into the hike, as the trail opened into a valley, it came into view: a massive, ragged smear of snow-laden ice, perched just under the sawtooth granite skyline.

My audio track, meanwhile, was the cascading water of Baring Creek, which runs parallel to much of the trail. Descending from the glacier, it charges over a series of red-rock ledges and then makes its way down into the azure St. Mary Lake far below.

As the trail continued, the bottom edge of Sexton became visible — a violent crumble, broken loose by gravity and temperature. Glaciers are forceful, slow-flowing rivers of ice. With binoculars, I could see Sexton’s thickness and true magnitude. The perspective also offers, if you’re up for it, a rather stunning view into the future. As I pushed ahead, a graying volunteer ranger approached me at a nimble gait. No bears sighted, he reported. (O.K.!) He was a veteran of decades here, it turned out. We craned our necks up at the still-formidable Sexton, and he said that it had once looked far larger to him. I read later that it has, in fact, lost at least 30 percent of its surface area since the mid-’60s.

There are several measures of what qualifies as a glacier. One generally accepted rule of thumb is that they are a minimum of 25 acres in size. The most recent report has Sexton at 68.

I moved on, ascending the switchbacks that pull the Siyeh trail up toward the 8,000-foot pass. I was well above tree line by now, and only a few peaks away from the Canadian border. Not far off, out on the moraines, a quartet of mountain goats appeared, munching and then settling.

A good idea. I was tired, too. According to Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage,” which follows the cross-country trek of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Lewis was able to bushwhack 30 miles in a day. I was going to do 11, and without the whacking. (The Lewis and Clark expedition came within sight of these mountains in 1806.)


As I rested I heard women’s voices come from up the trail, sounding like an exuberant traveling book group. They seemed delighted to find a sprawled, worn-out guy to greet in passing. “How do you like it? This is our backyard!” the leader announced, adding that they were from Kalispell, Mont., just southwest of the park. I responded in superlatives, and asked whether folks here talk much about what’s happening with the glaciers.

There was a pause and the temperature seemed to decline a degree or two. “God will take care of everything we need,” one said.

“I don’t think man has anything to do with that,” her friend put in.

(A bartender at one of the lodges, not-authorized-to-speak-publicly-on-the-matter, confided that not all locals share these views.)

After a bit, they warmed enough to point out some huckleberry bushes nearby. (This is a popular shrub around here, and not just for bears; after a few days in the area, I can attest to the virtues of locally marketed huckleberry beer, jam, pie, syrup, Riesling, lip balm, French toast, soda, cobbler, lemonade, ice cream, daiquiris, tea and milkshakes.)


Retracing my steps back down to the trailhead, I was alone again — not a wise practice, according to park brochures. Lewis recounted that one grizzly, already shot four times through the lungs, charged and dispersed a six-man hunting party while its stalwarts were still firing. Still, over the past hundred years, and despite tens of millions of visitors, only 10 fatal grizzly attacks have been recorded here. They do, however, take up a fair portion of mind space.


The Siyeh Pass Trail can either be an extended loop or a somewhat shorter out and back of about 11 miles — the option I chose. As I headed back down into the valley it wasn’t much of a stretch to think of the looming Sexton as alive. The pressure of the glaciers’ weight causes the ice to flow forward over the landscape; colder temperatures allow for a buildup of ice, which speeds up the flow. Heat — a warmer day, season or era — is the competing force, and the glaciers ebb. That movement is a defining feature, part of what makes glaciers distinct from your more prosaic all-year patches of snow.

The day before, I had spoken with Daniel Fagre, who coordinates climate change and glacial geology studies here for the United States Geological Survey. He is a 20-year veteran of research at the park. The retreat of the glaciers began around 1850, he said, as part of a slow, natural climatic variation, but the disappearing act has accelerated during the last hundred years. Until recently, his research projected that, as global warming hit its stride, the park’s glaciers would all be gone by the year 2030. Now he thinks it may be as soon as 2020.

Outsize snows this past winter, which kept many park roads and trails closed well into July, could briefly forestall the meltdown, but the longer warming trend is inexorable, he said.

No reprieve? “No, I think we are continuing on that path,” he said.

The science is preliminary, but it’s clear that this loss will be more than aesthetic for the park’s ecosystem, he said. Those glacial reservoirs provide a steady supply of cool meltwater through hot summers and dry spells, helping to sustain a constellation of plants and animals, some rare — big-horned sheep, elk and mountain goats among them.

Passing again under the glacier as daylight faded, the trail neared its end. Those prospective losses weighed heavily — nostalgia, of a sort, laced with dread.

MORE pleasantly, the park celebrates nostalgia of a different sort — from the Art Deco typography on the official signage to the fleet of low-slung, roll-top tour buses known as “red jammers,” which date from the ’30s. These ply the roads between robber-baron-era hotels, offering full- and half-day tours to various sections of the park ($30 and up).

There’s a wealth of accommodations along the eastern and western boundaries of the park, especially in the towns of East Glacier Park and West Glacier. Despite their names, these towns, with populations of only a few hundred each, are more like distant cousins than identical twins. West Glacier, half an hour from the Kalispell airport, is generally newer, and sprawls.

East Glacier Park, two and a half hours north of the Great Falls, Mont., airport, is a charming, tumbleweedy throwback with a string of weathered eateries and motor-court lodgings that are only slightly post-World War II. There’s also the Backpacker’s Inn, a combination hostel and super-cheap motel with a mostly youthful clientele who like the clean, spare single rooms for $30 a night. I’ve stayed in each of these places a time or two, but this night — after a fiery, pepper-laden dinner of enchiladas pasillas at Serrano’sMexican restaurant among a crowd of other glacier-gawkers and local ranchers — I opted for the Mountain Pine Motel. It has endured, with appearance and ambience intact, since 1947. The owners are descendants of the pioneer Sherburne family that helped settle the park area in the 1890s.

Nearby is the century-old Glacier Park Lodge, a grandly creaky log cabin writ very large. There are three such concessioner-run legacy hotels at the park, erected by the Great Northern Railroad to lure tourism. My favorite is the Many Glacier Hotel, a darkly comical but generally comfortable old wooden monstrosity with a Swiss theme (the bellhops wear lederhosen). Its broad verandas face a transfixing view of a horizon of pinnacles that surround Swiftcurrent Lake — one of 131 named lakes in the park (631 others are as yet unnamed; feel free to follow my example and name a few after your friends).

When my wonderful clawfoot tub leaked onto the occupants of the room below, the two repair-crew guys who showed up grinned and shrugged after some futile work: that’s kind of the way this place is, they said. The only other available room was infested with bats, and smelled like it, I was told. It was a great stay, just the same. Half of the hotel is being renovated all this season and is closed, along with one of the dining rooms.


The Many Glacier Hotel is also the start of one of the park’s most popular hikes, to Grinnell Glacier. The 8- or 10-mile hike is strenuous, though less so than the Siyeh Pass Trail, and the payoff is that you can get within a stone’s toss of the glacier itself, the surface area of which is more than twice Sexton’s.

I embarked with a ranger-guided group on Chief Two Guns — a trim 45-footer, built locally and hauled up here somehow 50 years ago — for a quick trip over Swiftcurrent Lake. Then a short walk to another boat, the even older Morning Eagle, across Lake Josephine to the trailhead. The boats moved past a shifting panorama of jagged rock faces, slender waterfalls, and high above, the destination glacier. The trail is often crowded, but that scarcely registers in these surroundings. Hikers stop to catch a breath and find it taken again by the view out over the string of lakes, far below, fed by Grinnell’s meltwater. Connected by cascades, each lake is a deeper blue than the one above.

After three hours of steady ascent and a final quarter-mile of hard climbing, the trail ends at the foot of the glacier and an iceberg-studded, expanding lake. The lake does not appear on old maps, according to the ranger. It is a byproduct of the fact that Grinnell’s surface is 40 percent smaller than a half-century ago.

Above the lake, the glacier is a wide, tilted skirt of ice whose hem you can almost touch, brilliant under the sun even when it’s dirty with wind-blown grit by the end of the season. It seems immense, too big to disappear, and nearly crowds everything else from consciousness. The ranger said that until a few seasons back you could walk out onto the lower edge of it, which is too thin now to bear human weight safely.

Seaweed-like stromatolite fossils embossed in the cracked rocks along the trail supply a Precambrian perspective of perhaps a couple of billion years. But it is the view out over this lake of meltwater that grabs the imagination far more urgently.

A question hangs up there with the remnant glacier, which may soon be converted to a few patches of ice: what comes next?

Hikes and Huckleberries

GETTING THERE AND AROUND

You can reach Glacier by flying into Kalispell, Mont., and driving half an hour to the west side of the park, or flying into Great Falls and driving two and a half hours to reach the eastern entry point. You can also take Amtrak’s Empire Builder from Chicago, Seattle or Tacoma, and disembark at either East Glacier Park, Essex or West Glacier. The Going-to-the-Sun Road has been under repair since last year, which means that traffic is often rerouted to a single lane. This results in stops that can add 30 or 40 minutes to the usual one- or two-hour trip.

The Logan Pass parking lot and visitor center is usually posted “Full” by midmorning all summer, according to park staff members. A shuttle bus system along the Going-to-the-Sun Road ferries hikers and sightseers to and from Logan Pass and a series of trailheads.

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT

At East Glacier Park:

Both the Glacier Park Lodge and, to the north, Many Glacier Hotel (for both 406-892-2525; glacierparkinc.com/reservations.php; both from $140 a night for two in high season) are concessioner “legacy” railroad hotels — gracious dowager empresses that can’t help but show their age.

The Backpacker’s Inn, right behind Serrano’s Mexican Restaurant (29 Dawson Avenue; 406-226-9392; serranosmexican.com) and under the same ownership, is $30 a night for a single room, $12 a night for the gender-segregated hostel. Clean, quiet, spartan. Serrano’s has benches on the porch for its surplus of patrons — a mix of locals, tourists and backpackers who line up for the chimichangas and carne Tampico. The super-smoky habanero sauce is sold at the cash register.

At West Glacier:

The Silver Wolf Log Chalets (406-387-4448; silverwolfchalets.com; from $176) are cabins with interior décor that is almost exclusively logs, twigs and sticks, quiet and nicely appointed, 10 minutes from the park.

The Belton Chalet (406-888-5000; beltonchalet.com; from $155) is a lovely old hotel with predictable advantages and limitations. Keep in mind that a railroad line is close at hand. The restaurant is one of the best at this edge of the park.

In the park:

There are 13 national park campgrounds, many with views of lakes and peaks, including those at Apgar Lake, Medicine Lake or Swiftcurrent Lake. Cook a porterhouse or two over the iron grill, bring in a bottle of malbec and observe all bear precautions.

A NOTE ABOUT WATER

East Glacier Park, Mont., is a small tourist town whose water system is not reliably safe, according to state and federal authorities. Motels connected to that system are required to post a “boil order” warning, but some don’t, which could mean trouble if you’re unaware and brush your teeth or drink water from the tap in your room. (Boiling kills giardia, E. coli, cryptosporidium and other potentially illness-producing microorganisms not reliably filtered out by the current water operation, said Shelley Nolan of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.)

A few places, including the big Glacier Park Lodge, have their own wells or water filtration, so the water is safe to use without boiling. Restaurants should use bottled water. So ask.

A new water treatment plant is set to begin operation soon, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, but as of this writing, it’s not certain that will occur in 2011.


STEPHEN P. NASH is the author of “Millipedes and Moon Tigers: Science and Policy in the Age of Extinction.” He teaches journalism and environmental studies at the University of Richmond.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 31, 2011, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Twilight of the Glaciers.

STUDY SHOWS THAT IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO REVERSE CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH REFORESTATION...

Reforestation's cooling influence a result of farmer's past choices



by Staff Writers
Palo Alto, CA (SPX) Aug 02, 2011


Regrowing forest on these productive lands can take up a lot of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and therefore have a strong cooling influence. Because these lands are not very snowy, regrowing forests would not absorb very much additional sunlight.





Decisions by farmers to plant on productive land with little snow enhances the potential for reforestation to counteract global warming, concludes new research from Carnegie's Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira.




Previous research has led scientists and politicians to believe that regrowing forests on Northern lands that were cleared in order to grow crops would not decrease global warming.






 But these studies did not consider the importance of the choices made by farmers in the historical past.






The work, with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the University of Hamburg, will be published August 2 by Geophysical Research Letters.






The Earth has been getting warmer over at least the past several decades, primarily as a result of the emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil, and gas, as well as the clearing of forests.






One strategy for slowing or reversing the increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide is to regrow forests on abandoned agricultural land. 






But the proposal has been difficult to evaluate, because forests can either cool or warm the climate. The cooling effects come from carbon dioxide uptake.






When forests grow, they absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and store the carbon in plant biomass and litter in branches, trunks, roots, and soils. This carbon dioxide absorption has a cooling influence on our planet's temperature.






The warming effect comes from the absorption of solar radiation.






 Forests are often darker than agricultural lands because they absorb more solar radiation. More importantly, forests in the spring often have snow-free and highly absorbing trees, at a time when fields and pastures are still snow-covered and reflective.






As a result, forests generally absorb more sunlight than fields or pasture, and this increased absorption of sunlight has a warming influence, with this effect felt most strongly in the snowy areas of the world.






Previous studies that have attempted to understand the balance between cooling and warming from regrowing a forest considered unrealistic and highly idealized scenarios. 






The study by Pongratz and colleagues for the first time evaluated the climate cooling potential of reforestation taking historical patterns of land-use conversion into consideration.






Pongratz and colleagues found that farmers generally chose to use land that was more productive than average, and therefore richer in carbon. Furthermore, farmers generally chose to use land that was less snowy than average. While this result is not in itself surprising, its implications for the cooling potential of reforestation previously had been ignored.






Regrowing forest on these productive lands can take up a lot of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and therefore have a strong cooling influence. Because these lands are not very snowy, regrowing forests would not absorb very much additional sunlight.




The net effect of the historical preference for productive snow-free land was to increase the climate cooling potential for reforestation on this land.






"Taking historical factors into account, we believe that we have shown that reforestation has more climate cooling potential than previously recognized," Pongratz said.






"We are still not yet at the point where we can say whether any particular proposed reforestation project would have an overall cooling or warming influence. Nevertheless, broad trends are becoming apparent. The cooling effect of reforestation is enhanced because farmers in the past chose to use productive lands that are largely snow free."