Lately, I've started to realize that the dull roar of the media tends to make us numb to what's
really going on.
This diary is about what made me start thinking about global climate change.
This summer, we were flying back to the U.S. from the Netherlands. When we flew over Greenland, I looked out the window, and I took these two pictures:
Notice anything? That's right. There's a brown cloud over Greenland.
I sent the pictures to the environmental chemist from whom I took a course, and asked him what was up.
His answer, and some research I dug up on the Arctic ozone layer, are below the fold.
Note: don't worry, this isn't going to be a hardcore Slashdot nerd diary. The purpose of this diary is simply to alert everyone to what's going on in the Arctic, and what the consequences are.
My professor is an extremely bright man; although he isn't an atmospheric scientist, he has a good breadth of knowlege about many environmental issues.
Here's his answer to my e-mail, in which I asked him what the "brown cloud" was (yes, it's a little technical, but bear with me):
Re: the brown cloud. No, it is not smog, not in the conventional hydrocarbon/NOx/ozone sense. It is recent (last 10-15 years?) phenomenon, still poorly understood, which seems somewhat analogous to the Antarctic ozone hole (seasonal, anthropogenic, large scale) except that a) it is tropospheric rather than stratospheric, b) it occurs at higher temperatures (obviously) and c) Br, rather than Cl, seems to be the key reactive halogen. I believe Science and Nature have published a number of observational reports from Arctic field stations, but I am 'out of the loop' in this area and last I looked no reasonable chemical models had been proposed.
The bold emphasis is mine.
Basically, what he is saying is that there are chemicals in that layer of air that result in the breakdown of ozone over the Arctic (nerd explanations here and here).
This isn't good news, folks. It's old news, but I didn't know about it.
A Greenpreace press release from 1996 sums it up. An excerpt:
Latest figures showing record ozone depletion over the Arctic come as no surprise as the world continues to sanction the production of ozone killing chemicals, Greenpeace said today.
The statistics, released by the World Meterological Organisation, show extremely low ozone levels of up to 45% depletion from Greenland to Scandinavia to Western Siberia.
Despite the annual warnings from scientists, Governments continue to weaken key aspects of the international ozone agreement, the Montreal Protocol.
And a BBC News story from April 2000 also describes this ozone depletion:
Ozone levels over the Arctic have fallen dramatically this winter, say scientists.
An international group of researchers found cumulative ozone losses of more than 60% at around 18 kilometres (11 miles) above the polar region between January and March.
"These are among the largest chemical losses at this altitude observed during the last 10 years," said the European Commission, a main sponsor of the research, in a statement.
What does all this have to do with global warming, you ask?
Well, as greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere (thank you Dubya), they warm the lower atmosphere; this prevents heat from rising into the upper atmosphere. What will happen: lower stratospheric temperatures over the Arctic will accelerate ozone depletion and delay any recovery. (D.T. Shindell, D. Rind, and P. Lonergan, Nature, vol. 392, pp. 589-592, 1998)
Finally, the BBC News website has some really great articles on climate change in the Arctic.
The following article sums up this diary:
Arctic heads into warmer future
The Arctic is undergoing rapid and possibly irreversible change, according to a new report prepared for the eight nations which rim the region.
The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) endorses recent warnings about melting ice, with perhaps all ocean ice disappearing in summers by 2060-2100.
[snip]
"The starting point for the assessment was the recognition that the Arctic was vulnerable in many different ways to climate change, and also that the Arctic played a fundamental role in regulating the Earth's climate," said Professor Terry Callaghan, an Arctic ecologist who helped produce the assessment.
"What happens there is not just an isolated factor of local interest. What happens there has important consequences for the rest of the world," ...
More information: