A group of scientists will meet in Bristol this week to discuss the key factors affecting melting of the ice sheets in the Arctic, and other issues related to climate change.
The meeting, the first of its kind, will focus on the Arctic because global warming is having a more direct impact there than on any other part of the planet.
Called 1ACE (Arctic Climates and Environments), the initiative will deepen our understanding of changes in the Earth’s biosphere and climate. The meeting will discuss research in this field being done at institutions belonging to the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) – which has five members in the US, six in the UK, two in China and three in Europe – as well as other centres of excellence.
The results of the project will be reported to the 2006/07 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The panel, established in 1998, provides key information to world leaders, on which politicians can then base decisions.
Dr Sandy Harrison from Bristol University, the 1ACE coordinator, said: “This project should clarify the stark choice before governments: either make comparatively modest shifts in behaviour to cut CO² emissions now, or commit future generations to huge economic and environmental damage prompted by climate change.”
Professor Paul Valdes, also from Bristol University and a key figure in the project said: “Recent research has shown that chemical emissions from snow can have a substantial impact on atmospheric chemistry, which can impact on global warming, but such processes are not well understood and are not included in current state-of-the-art Earth System models. One of the aims of this project is to provide improved understanding and ability to model, on a global scale, the physics and biogeochemistry of snow.”
The Arctic may be remote, but climate change there is an issue for the whole world, not least because of its potential impact on ocean circulation systems. Large volumes of water from melting ice caps could disrupt the thermohaline circulation, which starts in the North Atlantic. The effects would be widespread and could include a marked cooling across Europe.
The evidence is already powerful:
- a 0.6C temperature increase every ten years since the 1960s in the high northern latitudes;
- a 40 per cent thinning of the Arctic sea ice between the 1950s and 1990s;
- a reduction in the surface area of the ice of about four per cent each decade.
1ACE will help disentangle man-made climate change from the different cyclical variations that occur naturally over geological and shorter timescales.
When not meeting face-to-face, the WUN partners use a state-of-the-art international computer grid that allows huge computational tasks to be shared and massive data collections to be readily accessed and moved around the world. In addition, the quality of video conferencing is so high, it is almost like a face-to-face meeting.