The Maldives cabinet ministers are planning to hold a sub-aqua session to ratify a treaty calling on other nations to curb their greenhouse gas emissions. Some ministers are learning to dive for the first time for this special meeting and will be using hand signals and whiteboards to communicate underwater.

Maldivians only contributed 2.4 tonnes of greenhouse gases per capita in 2005 in comparison to Australia at 18.7 and the USA at 19.9 (source: World Resources Institute). Even considering their small contribution, Maldivians still aim to be a carbon neutral country in just 10 years – something our Australian politicians should consider as they play politics with our proposed Emissions Trading Scheme and Renewable Energy Target Bills that will only ratify a fraction of this effort. A rise in sea level between 18 and 59 centimeters will cause the Maldivians to look for refuge in neighbouring countries such as Sri Lanka, India or Australia.

Members of the Maldives cabinet pose with their scuba instructors near the capital Male training for a meeting 6 metres beneath the ocean surface.

Slightly old news, but I just came across this piece from Greenpeace featured on BBC News. US Artist Spencer Tunick encouraged 600 people to on the Aletsch Glacier in the Swiss Alps  in the name of climate change. Here is Greenpeace’s take on the event:

An emergency provokes extreme responses: human beings in danger will abandon social niceties, etiquette, and the norms of acceptable behaviour to raise an alarm any way they can when lives are in danger. Today, six hundred people shed their clothes on a glacier in the Swiss Alps to bodily cry out for help against a planetary emergency: global warming.
Without clothes, the human body is vulnerable, exposed, its life or death at the whim of the elements. Global warming is stripping away our glaciers and leaving our entire planet vulnerable to extreme weather, floods, sea-level rise, global decreases in carrying capacity and agricultural production, fresh water shortages, disease and mass human dislocations.

If global warming continues at its current rate, most glaciers in Switzerland will completely disappear by 2080, leaving nothing but valleys and slopes strewn with rock debris. Over the last 150 years, alpine glaciers have reduced in size by approximately one third of their surface and half of their mass, and this melting is accelerating. The Aletsch Glacier retreated 115 meters (377 feet) in a single year from 2005 to 2006.

Read more here (or check out a whole bunch more pictures here), and be sure to take a look at the French Greenpeace take on nudist vineyards (“Saving the wines of France from climate change“)

Across the entire Eastern coastline of Australia, from Sydney to Brisbane, has been blanketed the entire morning with a red haze of desert dust. So big is the storm that apparently even the NY Times has picked up on it. The news is reporting that the air pollution levels are reaching 1500 times the normal record – an estimated 5 million tonnes of soil blown across the country. The question everyone seems to be asking is if the dust storms are related to climate change. There’s no simple answer to this (other than weather shouldn’t be mistaken for climate), and that dust storms have been around for a long, long time. Having said that, the reduced rainfall in the drought-hit regions in Southern Australia and Victoria (in particular the Murray-Darling region) provide a source for the dust, and reduced rainfall in those regions (projected under climate change scenarios) suggests that frequent dust storms will be increasingly common. Below are pictures of the University of Queensland from yesterday morning blanketed under thick dust – see here and here for some incredible photographs across Queensland and New South Wales.

Fifteen of Australia’s top climate experts explain how we know humans are altering the atmosphere and why we must act now.

1. The global average temperature has increased by about 0.8 degrees since 1850, with most of the increase occurring since 1950. The warming varies among decades because of natural fluctuations but the overall trend has been inexorably upward.
2. The dominant cause of the warming since about 1950 is the increase in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases released by human activities, of which carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important.
3. Warming will increase in future, if emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases maintain their present paths. “Business as usual” scenarios for future emissions lead to likely global temperature increases of up to six degrees above present temperatures by 2100.
4. Climate change cannot be reversed for many centuries, because of the massive heat stores in the world’s oceans. Even if CO2 and other greenhouse gas concentrations were stabilised today at their present levels, a further warming of at least 0.6 degrees would inevitably follow (on top of the 0.8 degrees observed since 1850) and sea-level rise would continue for centuries to millenniums.

These four conclusions have been known and agreed among thousands of independent climate scientists for more than a decade. However, new findings suggest that the situation is, if anything, more serious than the assessment of just a few years ago.

Click here to read the full article titled “Climate change poised to feed on itself” published in the Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Raupach and John Church, CSIRO; David Griggs, Amanda Lynch and Neville Nicholls, Monash University; Nathan Bindoff, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre; Matthew England and Andy Pitman, University of NSW; Ann Henderson-Sellers and Lesley Hughes, Macquarie University; Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, University of Queensland; Roger Jones, Victoria University; David Karoly, University of Melbourne; and Tony McMichael and Will Steffen, Australian National University.

I read a fascinating story about noctilucent clouds on EcoWorldy blog. Apparently, certain cloud formations have been appearing where they shouldn’t be:

My boss was in France on Bastille Day last week where the big event of the night actually became the sight of these strange glowing clouds – – like polar noctilucent clouds except they were not over the North Pole – but over Paris.

The story gets more interesting:

Over the last week, photographers in many places around the world outside the Arctic regions, have run outside to get photos of these strange Noctilucent (Night Glowing) clouds showing up this week from Poland to North Dakota:

So what does all this mean?

Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high that they remain lit by the sun even after our star is below the horizon.

Noctilucent clouds are a fundamentally new phenomenon in the temperate mid-latitude sky, and it’s not clear why they’ve migrated down from the poles. Or why, over the last 25 years, more of them are appearing in the polar regions, too, and shining more brightly.

“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?”

Is this strange change in the weather a sign of global change due to human causes? The EcoWorldy article does a great job in discussing the pros and cons, and Quite a few people seem to think so – particularly as these clouds were first observed only after the Krakatoa eruption in 1885:

… climate models have predicted that higher greenhouse gas emissions would cause mesosphere cooling, resulting in more frequent and widespread occurrences of noctilucent clouds.

But a competing theory is that larger methane emissions from intensive farming activities are producing more water vapour in the upper atmosphere where methane concentrations have more than doubled in the past 100 years.