by Neven Acropolis via Arctic Sea Ice blog

I’m starting this blog post off with a conclusion that was reached a while back already: Sea ice on the Atlantic side of the Arctic looks vulnerable, sea ice on the Pacific side should be thicker.

Right, with that out of the way we can now look at various aspects of the 2011/2012 freezing season, and compare them to previous years, to be precise the previous freezing season of 2010/2011, and the freezing seasons leading up to and following that other record year: 2006/2007 and 2007/2008. Simply put: I’ll be comparing 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2012 before their respective start of the melting season.

I’ll try not to use too many words, but I’ll be using a lot of images. Click on them images if you want a bigger version.

Ice age

I’ll start with the AARI ice age maps. These images are for the end of April, and they look upside down, because it’s from the perspective of the Russians who produced them:

This year, at the end of April, the Arctic seems to hold less of the brown ‘old ice’ than last year and 2007 (older version), and a tad more than 2008, that had relatively little multi-year ice (MYI) after the 2007 melting season/massacre.

Another source that was already mentioned in the A first clue blog post, were these images based on data compiled by NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso from NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio). The images show the amount of MYI at its maximum, I presume:

These images look similar to the ones from AARI, with 2012 showing less old ice/MYI than 2007 and 2011, and a bit more than 2008 (look at the graph in the bottom right image). However, at the time a flag was raised by Spanish blogger Diablobanquiso on his excellent blog, maintaining there was more MYI than AARI and Comiso indicated. He based himself on ASCAT radar images, where slightly brighter white represents older ice. The following image shows March 16th 2011 and March 15th 2012 side by side (unfortunately there are no radar images available from 2007 and 2008), with 2012 merging into an imagemade by Diablobanquisa, showing what part was missing from AARI and Comiso:

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by Michelle Nijhuis, via OnEarth

Actor Robert Redford has always loved the landscapes of the West, and his classic roles as the outlaw Sundance Kid and mountain man Jeremiah Johnson are now part of Western lore. As executive producer and narrator of a new documentary, Watershed, Redford takes a close look at the greatest Western icon of all: the Colorado River, which flows almost 1,500 miles from its source in the Rocky Mountains to its delta at the Gulf of California. The river’s water, notoriously dammed and diverted in order to meet the region’s growing thirst, now rarely reaches the sea.

Watershed profiles several people who are trying to change the region’s relationship with the river, including a Los Angeles bicycle activist, a Navajo Nation councilwoman, a Colorado fly-fishing guide, and a restoration ecologist in Mexico. In short interludes, a crew of animators illustrates the fiendishly complex politics of the river, the mechanics of hydraulic fracturing, and other issues facing the Colorado Basin. The documentary, written and directed by Mark Decena, was co-produced by Redford’s son James, who also produced the HBO documentary Mann v. Ford and directed the new film The D Word: Understanding Dyslexia. (James is 50, but as you’ll see, his 76-year-old dad still calls him a “good kid.”)

The new film screens at the Sausalito Film Festival on May 13 and is available through the Whole Foods-sponsored Do Something Reel online film festival this month. Robert Redford spoke about it with OnEarth contributor and longtime Western journalist Michelle Nijhuis. (Disclosure: Barry Nelson, a senior water policy analyst at NRDC, which publishes OnEarth, was an advisor on the film, and Redford is an NRDC trustee.)

Do you recall your first encounter with the Colorado River?

Well, I’ve had a lot of experiences on both the Colorado and the Green rivers — fishing for golden trout in the high mountains, filming Jeremiah Johnson, floating the Green River, and having a boat on Lake Powell for 30-odd years.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and after the Second World War, people flooded in there like it was gold-rush time. Suddenly, the place turned into concrete and smog and pollution. That made a huge impact on me.

I retreated into the Sierras and then into the deserts, the Mojave and so on. When that retreat began, I became aware of the value of the natural environment. So all those experiences — working in Yosemite, floating the rivers, raising my kids on the rivers — gave me a pretty good perspective on water in the West. I became acutely aware of the demand for water exceeding its supply.

What made you think that now is the time for a movie about the Colorado?

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A penny for your cyber-thoughts.

A scramble to buy African land is threatening the continent’s sustainable development, according to reports launched today at the Royal Society in London.

Of the 203 million hectares of land deals reported worldwide between 2000 and 2010, two-thirds were in Africa. The acquisitions are dispossessing millions of Africans of their land, to make way for expansive forestry and mineral projects and plantations, say a series of briefs and a report published by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI)….

“The global report shows the scale of the issue as never before: three-quarters of Africa’s population and two-thirds of the landscape are at risk,” says Andy White, who coordinates the RRI.