Global warming is melting snow and ice on the world’s highest mountain at an accelerating rate, researchers have claimed. A study by a team led by a Nepali scientist at the University of Milan has found that glaciers on or around Mount Everest have shrunk by 13% in the last 50 years with the snow line 180 metres higher than it was 50 years ago. The glaciers are disappearing faster every year, it says. The 60th anniversary of the first ascent of the 8,848 metre (29,028ft) peak by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay will be celebrated next week.

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When the history of humanity’s struggle to combat climate change is written, few characters will play as prominent a role as Charles David Keeling. A geochemist, Keeling developed an accurate method of measuring CO2 in the atmosphere, and in 1958 began recording background levels of the gas at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. That was the start of the famous Keeling Curve, which has tracked the steady rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Those levels have soared from 315 parts per million when Keeling began, to a grim milestone reached last week, as atmospheric concentrations exceeded 400 parts per million.

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Britain’s weather excelled itself last week. It produced an Easter Sunday that was the coldest on record in the UK. Temperatures stuck below zero in many regions; freezing conditions continued to disrupt transport; and experts warned of increasing threats to animals and birds already struggling to survive loss of habitat and climate change. The start of British Summer Time last Sunday night was marked in Braemar by temperatures that fell to –11C. For good measure, an unappetising April looks likely to follow this misery. The persistence of the spring’s grim weather is particularly striking for it comes after a series of other extreme meteorological events in recent years. Last winter, a severe drought triggered stern warnings by the Environment Agency that water rationing and hosepipe bans would soon have to be introduced – until several months of torrential rain produced widespread flooding.

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I spent an interesting hour last Friday morning having coffee with a neighbour, David Rose of the Mail on Sunday, talking about climate change. He was preoccupied by the apparent “lack of warming” over the past decade or so (more accurately, lack of surface warming), and wondered if it was leading me, as a climate scientist, to revise my expectations for the future.

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The chances of the world holding temperature rises to 2C – the level of global warming considered “safe” by scientists – appear to be fading fast with US scientists reporting the second–greatest annual rise in CO2 emissions in 2012. Carbon dioxide levels measured at at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii jumped by 2.67 parts per million (ppm) in 2012 to 395ppm, said Pieter Tans, who leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The record was an increase of 2.93ppm in 1998.

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 One of Ireland’s experts on climate change, Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth, has warned that time is running out to tackle the growing threat it poses for food production and low–lying coastal cities. 

Speaking last night at the Seamus Heaney lecture series at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, he said many countries – including Ireland – faced the equivalent of a “fiscal cliff” in environmental terms unless global warming was halted.

Prof Sweeney urged Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan to include real reduction targets for Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions in the Government’s Climate Change Bill, which is expected to be published today after it receives Cabinet approval. 

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James Hansen has been publicly speaking about climate change since 1988. The NASA climatologist testified to Congress that year and he’s been testifying ever since to crowds large and small, most recently to a small gathering of religious leaders outside the White House last week. The grandfatherly scientist has the long face of a man used to seeing bad news in the numbers and speaks with the thick, even cadence of the northern Midwest, where he grew up, a trait that also helps ensure that his sometimes convoluted science gets across. This cautious man has also been arrested multiple times.His acts of civil disobedience started in 2009, and he was first arrested in 2011 for protesting the development of Canada’s tar sands and, especially, the Keystone XL pipeline proposal that would serve to open the spigot for such oil even wider.

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Australia has started 2013 with a record–breaking heat wave that has lasted more than two weeks across many parts of the country. Temperatures have regularly gone above 48°C, with the highest recorded maximum of 49.6°C at Moomba in South Australia. The extreme conditions have been associated with a delayed onset of the Australian monsoon, and slow moving weather systems over the continent. Australia has always experienced heat waves, and they are a normal part of most summers. However, the current event affecting much of inland Australia has definitely not been typical. The most significant thing about the recent heat has been its coverage across the continent, and its persistence.

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 Climate change has shrunk Andean glaciers between 30 and 50% since the 1970s and could melt many of them away altogether in coming years, according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal The Cryosphere. Andean glaciers, a vital source of fresh water for tens of millions of South Americans, are retreating at their fastest rates in more than 300 years, according to the most comprehensive review of Andean ice loss so far.

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During 2012, there were 11 extreme weather and climate events in the US that reached the billion–dollar threshold in losses, according to figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Thursday. While the total number of billion–dollar natural disasters is down from 2011, when there were a record 14 events costing more than $60bn, the economic losses this year are expected to exceed last year’s tab, largely due to the massive economic toll caused by hurricane Sandy and the widespread drought. Some cost estimates for hurricane Sandy alone have approached $100bn, and the drought is likely to be nearly, if not more, expensive. The 11 billion–dollar events of 2012 include seven severe thunderstorm outbreaks, two hurricanes, the drought and wildfires. NOAA put the death toll from these events at 349.

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2012 was the second wettest year on record in the UK and the wettest ever in England, the Met Office announced on Thursday. The downpours that caused more than 8,000 homes and businesses to suffer flooding led to a total of 1,330.7mm of rain for the year, just 6.6mm short of the wettest UK year recorded in 2000 (1337.3mm). Analysis by the Met Office also suggests that the UK may be getting increasingly wetter as climate change causes warmer air to carry more water. Days of extreme rainfall – downpours expected once every 100 days – occurred every 70 days in 2012.

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A new analysis of temperature records indicates that the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is warming nearly twice as fast as previously thought.US researchers say they found the first evidence of warming during the southern hemisphere’s summer months. They are worried that the increased melting of ice as a result of warmer temperatures could contribute to sea–level rise. The study has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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The floods that have devastated Italy over the past week could become even more severe in the future, threatening food production and destroying the country’s natural beauty, experts warn. Storms have battered ancient towns and left large swaths of farmland in Tuscany under water, prompting a warning from the region’s governor, Enrico Rossi, that “climate change is making us get used to ever more violent flooding“.

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 Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP

Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP, according to a new study.

The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries, according to the research, where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather linked to climate change is contributing to deaths from malnutrition, poverty and their associated diseases.

Air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least 4.5m people a year, the report found.

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A new weather pattern that sends blasts of warm southern air into the Arctic each June has fueled the recent, dramatic decline of the region’s sea ice, according to a new government–funded study. But that is not all it has done, the analysis suggests, linking the shifting summer winds to record thaws of the Greenland ice sheet, unusually wet European summers and Rocky Mountain wildfires.Researchers say the switch from light, variable east–west winds to stronger, warmer blasts of southern air appears to have strengthened a climate feedback loop they call “Arctic amplification.”As the amount of ice that melts each summer increases, it opens larger and larger patches of dark Arctic Ocean waters that absorb more heat than the reflective ice they replace, a process that accelerates Arctic warming.

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He’s been called “America’s fiercest climate blogger.” And as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a former Clinton administration official on clean energy, and an MIT trained physicist, the subjects he covers are vast—ranging from energy policy to the role of rhetoric in communications, as discussed in his new book Language Intelligence. But there’s been a recurrent theme over the years at Joe Romm’s popular blog Climate Progress—the argument that political leaders, and perhaps most prominently President Obama, need to step up and explain to the public why global warming is such a dramatic threat to our livelihoods and future. Indeed, Romm has called Obama’s failure to speak out about global warming, loudly and often, his “biggest communications mistake.”

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A repeat of this year’s washout summer is the last thing most people want from the English weather – but more of the same could be on the way, and could become the norm, a new study has warned, thanks to human activities warming the climate. Ice melting in the Arctic has been linked to duller, wetter English summers in a much–anticipated study published online on Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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Minister says details bring focus to challenging targets

A REPORT by a Government research body on implementing climate policy over the next decade had brought a “clear focus” to the challenging targets Ireland faces up to 2020, Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan said yesterday. 

Mr Hogan welcomed Towards a National Climate Change Policy by the secretariat of the National Economic and Social Council as a comprehensive report that spelled out the policy to meet the targets and allow Ireland move to a lowcarbon future.

 “The Government will now be giving careful consideration to the report,” he said. 

The report’s main recommendation is that improving energy efficiency in the country’s building stock be the central focus of Government policy. It finds that the onerous 2020 targets set by the EU for greenhouse gas emissions can be reached but will require swift action and buy–in from government and wider society. 

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It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of what is currently unfolding in the Arctic region

THE TRUTH, as Winston Churchill put it, is incontrovertible. “Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” Scrape away the layers of denial, obfuscation and spin that cloud climate change and one unvarnished truth emerges: the Arctic ice cap is dying – and, with it, humanity’s best hopes for a prosperous, predictable future. 

In the most dramatic reconfiguration of the map of the world since the end of the last Ice Age, the Arctic ice cap is now committed to accelerated collapse. In 2007, the intergovernmental panel on climate change warned that, unless emissions were drastically curbed globally, the Arctic ocean could be clear of summer sea ice towards the end of this century. 

They were hopelessly optimistic.

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 Sea ice in the Arctic shrunk a dramatic 18% this year to a record low of 3.41m sq km, according to the official US monitoring organisation the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. Scientists and environment groups last night said the fall was unprecedented and the clearest signal yet of climate change. The data released showed the arctic sea beginning to refreeze again in the last few days after the most dramatic melt observed since satellite observations started in 1979.

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