Arctic sea ice area for June in recent years. Source: Cryosphere Today

By Neven Acropolis

If you want to mislead people into thinking that there is nothing weird going on in the Arctic, you have to do it during winter. In winter things almost look normal on some graphs, with gaps between trend lines and long-term averages not as ridiculously big as during spring and summer.

If you’re lucky, anomalous weather patterns can make those trend lines come real close to the long-term average, and you’ll have a couple of weeks of shouting ‘recovery’, ridiculing scientists and suggesting graphs are being cooked. It’s an annual ritual on pseudo-skeptic blogs, which is only logical. The Arctic is becoming ever more problematic for their life work, ie denying AGW could ever be a problem and thus delaying any meaningful action on mitigating the consequences of AGW. Thank God water still freezes in winter.

Sea ice extent maximum on the left and how it looks now on the right (source: NSIDC)

But what happens in winter is only interesting in so far as it influences the melting season that comes after it. The fact that this year saw a late finish to the freezing season, with an extreme expansion of sea ice into the Bering Sea, was far from irrelevant, but it didn’t tell the whole story either. Another part of that story was covered in a guest blog on ClimateProgress in February (Arctic Sea Ice Update: Spectacular and Ominous), and the whole story as I saw it was told in the 2011/2012 Winter Analysis on the Arctic Sea Ice blog. It quite simply came down to this: “Sea ice on the Atlantic side of the Arctic looks vulnerable, sea ice on the Pacific side should be thicker.”

The melting season is well underway now and in the last two weeks sea ice has been disappearing so fast that 2012 is leading all other years on practically all sea ice extent and area graphs. Take for instance the top graph I’ve made, based on Cryosphere Today sea ice area data.

That looks pretty spectacular, doesn’t it? Sea ice area has never been so low for this date in the satellite record, not even close to it. 2012 has over half a million of square kilometres less ice than record minimum years 2007 and 2011.

There was a distinct possibility this would happen, although I didn’t expect it to happen quite this early. But now that it has happened, it’s not difficult to see what the causes are. First of all, the extra ice in the Bering Sea that caused the late maximum, was wafer-thin and so has now virtually disappeared (I compared this year’s situation with previous years in this post on the ASI blog). All the easy ice is as gone as the easy oil.

Second, that vulnerability on the Siberian side of the Arctic is becoming ever more visible, with the Northern Sea Route possibly opening up for commercial shipping very early this year. Here’s a comparison to previous years for the western part of the Northern Sea Route (the eastern side doesn’t look so great either):

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The New York Times editorial board has a scathing piece today, on Mitt Romney, “Energy Etch A Sketch.” In particular, they point out that after erasing all of his sensible  energy and climate policies as governor of Massachusetts, today, “the policies he espouses would be devastating for the country and the planet.”

Here’s an annotated version of the piece:

As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney endorsed an aggressive program to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, pushed to close old coal-fired power plants and embraced wind and solar power. Then came his bids for the Republican presidential nomination, first in 2008 and now in 2012. On climate change as on other issues, he has transformed himself, bit by reactionary bit.

Today he is a proclaimed skeptic on global warming, a champion of oil and other fossil fuels, a critic of federal efforts to develop cleaner energy sources and a sworn enemy of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He’s so extreme now that he has actually pledged to kill existing fuel economy standards.

Mr. Romney has plainly decided that satisfying his party’s antiregulatory base is essential to his political future. But the policies he espouses would be devastating for the country and the planet. If there are doubts on that point, the most recent findings from the International Energy Agency should dispel them: The agency reports an alarming one-year increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of increasing coal use around the world.

The agency also said that keeping global temperatures below a dangerous threshold is “still within reach” if nations aggressively reduce fossil-fuel consumption while nurturing low-carbon alternatives. And where is Mr. Romney on that? Nowhere.

For details on the new IEA report, see “IEA Report: Natural Gas Is Not The Answer To Climate Problem, Existing Cleantech Is — And It Could Save $100 Trillion By 2050.”

The man who once worried about climate-driven sea-level rise in poor countries like Bangladesh now says things like “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” as if mainstream science were wrong and humans had nothing to do with it.

See “Romney IS a Member of a Cult,” embraces climate science denial.

On coal, the governor who once stood in front of a Massachusetts coal-fired power plant and said, “that plant kills people,” recently whirled through Craig, Colo., talking up coal and accusing President Obama of making it “harder to get coal out of the ground.”

Here’s the video of Romney denouncing coal jobs:

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by Jesse Prentice-Dunn, via The Sierra Club

If some House Republican negotiators get their way, safe biking and walking could be increasingly hard to find. More and more, Americans are biking and walking to work, on errands, and for fun. Just last year, cyclists saved $4.6 billion by biking instead of driving. Nationwide, biking and walking account for almost 12% of all trips, yet biking and walking infrastructure receives less than 2% of all federal transportation funding.

What we aren’t paying for in safe biking and walking infrastructure, we are paying for in lives. According to a recent study by Transportation for America, from 2000-2009, more than 47,700 pedestrians were killed and another 688,000 were injured. However, seeing how biking and walking can make communities more vibrant and strengthen local economies, cities and towns are increasingly investing in sidewalks, crosswalks and bike paths.

But as Senate and House negotiators enter the final three weeks of negotiations over a transportation bill, House Republicans are demanding that the Senate drop provisions that will make biking and walking safer across the country.

For some context, with a broad bipartisan majority, the Senate passed a bill that would fund our nation’s roads, bridges and transit systems at current levels through 2013. This comprehensive bill would preserve 1.9 million jobs throughout the country and create another one million jobs through innovative financing.

Unable to pass a comprehensive transportation bill, the House of Representatives instead passed a three-month extension of current law and then tacked on three anti-environmental poison pills – automatically permitting the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, preempting EPA from requiring the safe disposal of toxic coal ash, and gutting our nation’s environmental review process which ensures the public has a say in large transportation projects. Notably, the House of Representatives passed absolutely nothing relating to biking and walking. Now negotiators for the House and Senate are exchanging proposals in order to pass a bill before current law expires on June 30.

One particularly egregious demand from House Republican negotiators is that the Senate eliminate the Safe Routes to School program. Established by the 2005 transportation bill, this program provides grants to programs that help children around the country safely walk to school. Talk about a case of throwing our nation’s school kids under the bus .

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by David Biello, via OnEarth

Deep within a frozen mountainside, Norwegian engineers are hoping to create a fortress for data. Chilled by seawater drawn from the Nordfjord, about 230 miles northwest of Oslo, and bathed in ambient temperatures that remain at a constant 46 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, thousands of the giant computers that keep the Internet humming, each throwing off large amounts of heat, could remain permanently cool in the disused Lefdal mine, near the town of Måløy.

Norway has a reputation as a world leader in clean energy, and tiny Måløy, with a population of only 3,000, takes pride in its own recent emergence as a hub of green-tech development. The town is a pioneer in both onshore and offshore wind energy. One local company is building a power plant that will run on domestic and industrial waste and another that uses forest biomass. Other companies specialize in sustainable fisheries, wave-power technology, and energy-efficient windows and building materials. But the most ambitious of all these projects is the Lefdal mine, which its designers, LocalHost, promise will be the largest and greenest server farm in the world.

The Lefdal mine once produced olivine — an olive-green mineral that is used in the aluminum and steel industries and also supplies ballast for the foundations of offshore wind farms. (Perhaps the mineral’s most intriguing trick is its ability to soak up carbon dioxide from the air and bind it into rock.) The facility is vast. Lying next to the long, deep Nordfjord, it consists of five levels (with the potential to expand to 14), sprawling over some 1.3 million square feet of “white space” that can be used for storage, connected by a paved road that descends in a spiral through tunnels 45 feet wide and almost 30 feet high. Just one of those five levels, says Mats Andersson, the chief marketing officer for the data center project, “could host all the servers in Norway.”

The ethereal world of the Web has a very real physical presence. Behind every Google search, Facebook update, or Twitter tweet lies a gigantic computing infrastructure, at the heart of which sit massive server farms that collectively account for some 230 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually — more than emitted by the entire country of Argentina. Air-conditioning can consume as much as half the total power that digital giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM need to run their huge server facilities, and these are growing rapidly.

One solution is to move to a place that’s already cold. Naturally cold air and, better yet, cold water, can result in significant energy savings. Locations for server farms are being explored across the far north, from Alaska to Iceland. Google is operating a site in the Finnish town of Hamina. Facebook is building a server farm in Luleå, Sweden, just south of the Arctic Circle. Lefdal, which offers an abundance of clean, renewable energy from nearby hydroelectric dams and wind farms, as well as a unique cooling system that will pump icy cold water from about 650 feet below sea level, is expecting its first tenant to be IBM Norway. Andersson says that construction of the Lefdal data center will begin this fall and that “we will be in operation before summer 2013.”

Still, not all the world’s computing needs can find a home in the Arctic (or Antarctic), and that means other solutions will also be needed. In fact, companies that make the equipment for these server farms, such as Intel, have been focusing on a shift to operating at higher temperatures, so their data centers won’t have to migrate to frigid realms. “It’s not all about cooling,” notes Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, who analyzes the industry. “You can also redesign servers to take hotter temperatures or find different ways to deliver the same computing service.” Read more