Some early morning doom to ease into the day...

Climate change 'sinking Pacific nation'
September 28, 2008, 5:30 pm

An immigrant from a tiny Pacific Ocean nation is appealing to the Australian government to assist in evacuations because she says her homeland is sinking under rising sea levels.

Currently bedridden with pneumonia, Kiribati Australia Association member Wanita Limpus in a statement told the Climate Emergency Week rally outside Queensland's Parliament House how climate change was destroying her home nation.

Ms Limpus said since she left Kiribati in 1976 to marry her Australian husband, she had returned to see clear signs of rising sea levels in 1991, 2004 and 2005.

"In 1991 I was having breakfast in my sister's home one morning when there happened to be a king tide and waves crashed over a retaining wall and swept into the house and we found ourselves up to our ankles in sea water in the kitchen," she said.

"I was shocked at this, but my sisters were laughing ... they were used to it.

"In 2004, when I returned I had to move my grandfather's grave from its resting place, and bury him more inland."

Mrs Limpus called on the Australian government to help Kiribati begin the evacuation process, saying the land would become uninhabitable long before it was submerged.

"Salt water is mixing with the groundwater and contaminating wells. Soon vital food providing plants and trees are going to die.

"Our people are inevitably going to have to abandon their land. They will be scattered, families will be split.

"(We need) to prepare the evacuation in a way which is the least traumatic for both them and the countries that will receive them."

"Kiribati, pronounced Kiribas, is a small nation of just over 100,000 people scattered across 33 coral atolls in the Central Pacific Ocean," she said.

"The coral atolls of which Kiribati consists, are flat, just a few hundred metres wide and no more than a metre above sea level."

She said Kiribati was the place of origin of the Hawaiian skirt and was the scene of the Battle of Tarawa, a major World War II battle between the United States and Japan .

Her husband Leonard Limpus said while Kiribati still had a few decades left, things like education had to be altered to make integration easier.

"But you can't put a timetable on it because things seem to be happening a lot faster than they are being forecasted for," he said.

Climate Emergency Week organiser Paul Benedek said the Kiribati people were just one of many being affected by climate change and more needed to be done than "weak" emissions cut talks.

"We have heard those in positions of power calmly talking of giving up on the Great Barrier Reef ; we see growing evidence of our major river systems dying and permanent drought; and Arctic ice is near its lowest level on record," Mr Benedek said.

"We are rallying to demand a massive shift to renewable energy, to public transport and to sustainability."

Yes, more of those hornbags.....

Local hornbags, at work, play, and er, whatever goes on in hornbaggeryland lah...

Huge ice sheet breaks loose in Canadian arctic

'Shocking event' another sign of warming in polar frontier, say scientists.....
Above...Large pieces of ice float off after separating from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf July 29. That shelf has lost about eight square miles and the Serson shelf 47 square miles as the Markham Ice Shelf has separated and gone adrift.
TORONTO - A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic, another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing the polar frontier, scientists said Wednesday.
Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario, told The Associated Press that the 4,500-year-old Markham Ice Shelf separated in early August and the 19-square-mile shelf is now adrift in the Arctic Ocean.
"The Markham Ice Shelf was a big surprise because it suddenly disappeared. We went under cloud for a bit during our research and when the weather cleared up, all of a sudden there was no more ice shelf. It was a shocking event that underscores the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Mueller.
Mueller also said that two large sections of ice detached from the Serson Ice Shelf, shrinking that ice feature by 47 square miles — or 60 percent — and that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has also continued to break up, losing an additional eight square miles.
Mueller reported last month that seven square miles of the 170-square-mile and 130-feet-thick Ward Hunt shelf had broken off.
Greenland glacier also threatened.......
This comes on the heels of unusual cracks in a northern Greenland glacier, rapid melting of a southern Greenland glacier, and a near record loss for Arctic sea ice this summer. And earlier this year a 160-square mile chunk of an Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated.
"Reduced sea ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer," said Luke Copland, director of the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa. "And extensive new cracks across remaining parts of the largest remaining ice shelf, the Ward Hunt, mean that it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years."
Formed by accumulating snow and freezing meltwater, ice shelves are large platforms of thick, ancient sea ice that float on the ocean's surface but are connected to land.
Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s. All that is left today are the four much smaller shelves that together cover little more than 299 square miles.
Martin Jeffries of the U.S. National Science Foundation and University of Alaska Fairbanks said in a statement Tuesday that the summer's ice shelf loss is equivalent to over three times the area of Manhattan, totaling 82 square miles — losses that have reduced Arctic Ocean ice cover to its second-biggest retreat since satellite measurements began 30 years ago.
"These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present," said Mueller.
During the last century, when ice shelves would break off, thick sea ice would eventually reform in their place.
'Scary scenario'"........
But today, warmer temperatures and a changing climate means there's no hope for regrowth. A scary scenario," said Mueller.
The loss of these ice shelves means that rare ecosystems that depend on them are on the brink of extinction, said Warwick Vincent, director of Laval University's Centre for Northern Studies and a researcher in the program ArcticNet.
"The Markham Ice Shelf had half the biomass for the entire Canadian Arctic Ice Shelf ecosystem as a habitat for cold, tolerant microbial life; algae that sit on top of the ice shelf and photosynthesis like plants would. Now that it's disappeared, we're looking at ecosystems on the verge of distinction,' said Mueller.
Along with decimating ecosystems, drifting ice shelves and warmer temperatures that will cause further melting ice pose a hazard to populated shipping routes in the Arctic region — a phenomenon that Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper seems to welcome.
Harper announced last week that he plans to expand exploration of the region's known oil and mineral deposits, a possibility that has become more evident as a result of melting sea ice. It is the burning of oil and other fossil fuels that scientists say is the chief cause of manmade warming and melting ice.
Harper also said Canada would toughen reporting requirements for ships entering its waters in the Far North, where some of those territorial claims are disputed by the United States and other countries.

Hornbags in abundance!

Lots of random net hornbags, found, located, examined, and generally got a little bit worked up over.

Today's doom for you...Time is running out lah.

Voyage into the Arctic as summer ice vanishes...


THE vast Arctic sea ice which spreads across the North Pole could disappear during the summer within a decade or two - or even by 2013 - leading scientists are warning.
The Canadian Coast Guard's strongest icebreaker, the Louis S. St Laurent, took the Herald and an ABC Four Corners crew with a team of scientists going to the Arctic at the beginning of this summer's melt in July to explore the extraordinary changes there first hand.
Only a few years ago, climate modellers predicted the sea ice would not disappear in summer until at least the end of the century.
"Then they said 2070, and then they said 2050 and then they said 2030," said Robie Macdonald, a leading Canadian oceanographer on board the Louis.
"Not only do I see the change, but it's like they're moving the goalposts toward me and it's an amazing thing," he said.
The team on board the Louis are some of the thousands of scientists from 60 nations working to draw attention to the rapid changes in the Arctic and Antarctic during International Polar Year.
The icebreaker's route took us through thick sea ice at the entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage where over the centuries many navigators perished, most famously Sir John Franklin, a former governor of Tasmania.
Last year the Northwest Passage was virtually ice free for the first time in memory when the Arctic sea ice shrank to its lowest level since satellite observations began.
The US Interior Secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, announced in May the drastic loss of Arctic sea ice had forced him to list the polar bear as an endangered species because their populations could collapse within a few decades.
Hopes the sea ice would return to robust levels after last year's record low are unlikely to be realised, according to the latest figures from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre. While this year's melt is not expected to shatter last year's record, the sea ice is already significantly below average as the melt season peaks.
"We might see an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2030 - within some of our lifetimes," said Mark Serreze, a geographer at the snow and ice data centre.
"There are some scientists out there who think that even might be optimistic."
The loss of the sea ice in summer would be unprecedented in human history, said Don Perovich a geophysicist with the US Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory.
"As near as we can tell looking at the historical record, there's been ice in the Arctic in the summer for at least 16 million years," he said.

"There's a group that makes a very strong case that in 2012 or 2013 we'll have an ice-free [summer] Arctic - as soon as that. It's astounding what's happened," said Dr Ted Scambos, a glaciologist from the snow and ice data centre.
The melt is leading Arctic nations, including Canada, Russia and the US, to seriously examine new shipping routes through the Arctic - including the Northwest Passage - and the potential expansion of huge oil and gas fields.
"As the ice recedes, it's opening up not only the Arctic passage but all the resources in the Arctic Ocean," said Scott Borgerson, from the US Council on Foreign Relations.
Last year's melt was produced by a "perfect storm" of natural weather patterns and rising temperatures in the Arctic caused by global warming. The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet and the sea ice is considered by many scientists to be crucial for monitoring the speed of global climate change.
The more the bright white sea ice melts, the more the dark Arctic Ocean absorbs sunlight, in turn melting more sea ice and feeding back into global warming.
The disappearance of the sea ice could have serious ramifications for the earth's climate and weather patterns, scientists say, explaining it would be like leaving the refrigerator door open on the planet.
"We could think of the Arctic as the refrigerator of the northern hemisphere climate system," Dr Serreze said.
"What we're doing by getting rid of that sea ice is radically changing the nature of that refrigerator. We're making it much less efficient. But everything is connected together so what happens up there eventually influences what happens in other parts of the globe."
Scientists are rapidly working to understand how much the loss of the summer sea ice might change weather patterns amid fears it will cause extreme storms and rainfall in some regions and prolong drought in others.
"The Arctic really can feed back into the global climate system," said Dr Macdonald, who has worked with the UN's peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "You know what happens when you get feedbacks - you get surprises and we don't like surprises."
The Louis' ice specialist, Erin Clark, explained that much of the ice at the entrance to the Northwest Passage this July was "first-year ice", frozen over just last year, and it would be prone to melting. The extent of this year's melt will not be known until September and scientists are worried that with six weeks still left in the melt season, this thin first-year ice could be vulnerable to rapid loss.

"A race has developed between the waning sunlight and the weakened ice," the report of the national snow and ice data centre for the end of July explains.
Despite a colder winter in parts of the Arctic and cooler temperatures in late July, the size of the sea ice is expected to shrink to levels close to the second or third lowest on record by September, according to the centre.
Researchers are trying to understand how much of the melting is due to the extreme natural variability in the northern polar climate system and how much is due to global warming caused by humans. The Arctic Oscillation climate pattern, which plays a big part in the weather patterns in the northern hemisphere, has been in "positive" mode in recent decades bringing higher temperatures to the Arctic.
Dr Igor Polyakov, an oceanographer from the International Arctic Research Centre in Fairbanks, Alaska, explained that natural variability as well as global warming is crucial to understanding the ice melt. "A combination of these two forces led to what we observe now and we should not ignore either forces" he said.
The consensus among scientists is that while the natural variability in the Arctic is an important contributor to climate change there, the climate models cannot explain the rapid loss of sea ice without including "human-induced" global warming. This means human activity such as burning fossil fuels and land clearing which are releasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
"There have been numerous models run that have looked at that and basically they can't reproduce the ice loss we've had with natural variability," said Dr Perovich. "You have to add a carbon dioxide warming component to it."
As the sea ice fails to recover, there are concerns it will become one of the "tipping points" pushing the planet to faster climate change.
A number of scientific papers are raising concerns that global warming, especially in the Arctic, will begin to thaw some of the vast areas of permafrost in the Arctic regions, especially in Siberia and Alaska.
If that happens infrastructure including roads, railways, bridges and pipelines could begin to collapse. More importantly, scientists say, it's possible that large amounts of the carbon dioxide and methane that are trapped in the permafrost will be released into the atmosphere, producing another feedback that will increase global warming.
The Arctic is a sentinel of change, Dr Macdonald explained on board the Louis, and urged everyone to take notice. "We should care in the sense that what happens here is coming to us and sometimes, you know, a warning is a helpful thing to mobilise people," he said.
"If it takes the iconic polar bear for people to say maybe we need to do something, that's a good thing

Somewhat attractive Virgins, in a most pleasing way..

Yes besides enjoying the delights of these lovely ladies, if one was convinced enough to partake of a "Virgin mobile"...not sure if that means a phone, or one of these roller skating lovelies, apparently you could also eat as many pies as you wanted, at Harrys pie shop next door.

With appetites enlarged by all the pleasing scenery, a good feed is allways in order.

Sexpo 2008...

A few pictures from this, er, fascinating event, forthwith.

Thankfully we also had a few hornbags in attendance of our own, that were somewhat shocked at times on what was on offer.....

Considering the normal saucy things that are purveyed by these fine ladies, we were somewhat amused by their sudden shyness in the presence of so much joyful smut and sexiness.

Just shows that life can still hold some surprises...