On November 26th 2012 Teignbridge District Council planning committee voted to refuse planning permission for Inazin Solar's application to construct a 13.5 Ha solar photovoltaic "farm" on land owned by the Fulford Estate near Gold's Cross Hill, between Tedburn St. Mary and Cheriton Bishop. I presume the fact that I objected to that application, at the second time of asking, explains why I have just received a letter from Teignbridge DC which says (amongst other things) that:

I write to inform you that Fulford Solar Park Ltd. has appealed to the Planning Inspectorate against the Council's decision. Any comments you made at application stage have been forwarded to the Planning Inspectorate. If you want to make any additional comments you must submit these direct to the Planning Inspectorate. Comments must be submitted by 30 May 2013.

Much like the first time around I do indeed want to make some additional comments. If you do too then you may wish to take a look at the latest entry on our interactive map and list of large scale solar PV projects in South West England, which includes links to both the Teignbridge and Planning Inspectorate paperwork concerning this most recent appeal.  Here's an extract from the "Grounds of Appeal" section of the appeal form:

The provision of energy from renewable sources is encouraged by national and local policies and it can be demonstrated that the development, the subject of this appeal will provide a valuable contribution towards meeting the targets of the District, which at present produces very little of its energy from renewable sources. It is considered that the benefits to be derived from the supply of renewable energy, which are becoming ever more important in the light of increasing uncertainty over the security of the UK's energy supply, outweigh any localised and limited harm to the AGLV.

Since the previous appeal so much new information has come to light that it's hard know where to start. Let's begin with climate change and food security shall we?  There's no mention of that topic in Fulford Solar Park Limited's paperwork so far, but presumably the "provision of energy from renewable sources is encouraged by national and local policies" because of a perceived need to "address climate change" in some way? As we reported very recently, the news on the climate change front certainly hasn't got any better since Inazin's first appeal. High level meetings of the world's best scientists have been arranged by the Met Office here in the UK and at The White House in the US to try and answer what the chief scientist at the Met Office describes as "a really urgent question".

Earlier this year I discussed with a variety of interested parties the topic of "Food Production Fears Over Devon Solar Farms". The conclusion from perspectives varying from renewable energy developers to Friends of the Earth to the National Farmer's Union was that "planning applications should only be submitted for low yield agricultural land."

All of which begs the obvious question which seems to me to be this: "Why on Earth are Inazin trying for the fourth time to get permission to build a solar park on agricultural land that is demonstrably more than capable of growing plenty of food for human consumption"

The Australian Climate Commission have just released two reports on climate change and the measures being taken around the world to address it. The first is entitled "The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather". Our headline covers the sort of extreme weather we're most familiar here in South West England, but the Climate Commission present a long list of other examples of recent extreme weather in Australia:

Heat: Extreme heat is increasing across Australia. There will still be record cold events, but hot records are now happening three times more often than cold records.

Bushfire weather: Extreme fire weather has increased in many parts of Australia, including southern New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and parts of South Australia, over the last 30 years.

Rainfall: Heavy rainfall has increased globally. Over the last three years Australia’s east coast has experienced several very heavy rainfall events, fuelled by record-high surface water temperatures in the adjacent seas.

Drought: A long-term drying trend is affecting the southwest corner of Western Australia, which has experienced a 15% drop in rainfall since the mid-1970s.

Sea-level rise: Sea level has already risen 20 cm. This means that storm surges ride on sea levels that are higher than they were a century ago, increasing the risk of flooding along Australia’s socially, economically and environmentally important coastlines.

The bullet points following that assessment read as follows:

• Climate change is making many extreme events worse in terms of their impacts on people, property, communities and the environment. This highlights the need to take rapid, effective action on climate change.
• The climate system has shifted, and is continuing to shift, changing the conditions for all weather, including extreme weather events.
• There is a high risk that extreme weather events like heatwaves, heavy rainfall, bushfires and cyclones will become even more intense in Australia over the coming decades.
• Only strong preventive action now and in the coming years can stabilise the climate and halt the trend of increasing extreme weather for our children and grandchildren.

The second report, entitled "The Critical Decade: Global Action Building on Climate Change", discusses what preventive action is being take around the world. The emphasis on China and the United States since, as we pointed out no so long ago, those two countries:

Are the world’s two largest economies and together produce approximately 37% of world emissions.

The bullet points this time around state that:

• The energy giants China and the United States are accelerating action.
• China’s efforts demonstrate accelerating global leadership in tackling climate change.
• The United States has made a new commitment to lead.
• Global momentum to tackle climate change is growing. Every major economy is tackling climate change, setting in place policies to drive down emissions and increase investment and capacity of renewable energy.
• Australia is a major player and is important in shaping the global response to climate change.
• This is the critical decade for action.

Whilst the United States may have made "a new commitment" I'm afraid I find it hard to discern enough in the way of "accelerating action" from over on that side of the Atlantic just yet. As the Climate Commission themselves put it:

While significant progress is being made, it is not enough. Globally emissions are continuing to rise strongly, posing serious risks for our society. This decade must set the foundations to reduce emissions rapidly to nearly zero by 2050. The earlier such action is under way the less disruptive and costly it will be.

All countries, particularly the major emitters like China, the United States and Australia, must move beyond their current commitments to reduce their emissions more deeply and swiftly. This is the critical decade to turn the global emissions trend downwards and to set the global foundations for accelerating reductions in decades to come.

One might easily conclude that in fact the previous decade would have been a much better time "to turn the global emissions trend downwards", but that didn't happen.  As if to make my point for me, the Australian Climate Commission have also produced a short animation to accompany those two hefty tomes. It's entitled "Climate Change Fuelling Wilder Weather", and here it is:

What can we do? Here's the conclusion of the Australian Climate Commission:

We need to prepare to live in a world with more intense, extreme weather. This is the critical decade. We are the critical people.

Why should we care about abrupt climate change in the Arctic? Because climate change in the Arctic leads to climate change outside the Arctic, and in particular here in South West England!

Here's a new video that shows one of the "abrupt changes" that's been taking place in the Arctic over the last few years:

You don't need to be a climate scientist to work out that the "Arctic summer sea ice cube" will have all but vanished soon. Once that has happened an even more significant "ice cube" will start melting in earnest instead: The Greenland Ice Sheet. The significance is that when sea ice melts sea levels remain much the same. When ice that's currently over land turns into water in the ocean then sea levels rise.

The already evident changes to our climate and the prospect of sea levels rising more quickly than previously have already prompted the head of the UK's Met Office to declare that "our climate is being disrupted by the warming of the Arctic" and to convene a panel of scientists to try and answer "a really urgent question".

Now comes news from over the soon to be rising pond that another panel of scientists is assembling in the White House to try and answer that question too. According to The West Australian:

In a room at the White House next week, an extraordinary meeting of the brightest minds will attempt to form a strategy to curb climate change's crippling effects on the Arctic.

Amid fears the top of the planet could be free of summer ice within two years, the meeting has been organised by a US brains trust on the Arctic that includes NASA's chief scientist, the director of the US National Science Foundation, representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. Joining them in Washington will be Professor Carlos Duarte, a marine scientist from Perth, who is one of 10 researchers from around the world called on to help protect the Arctic.

Professor Duarte recently published his latest research into the effects of a warming Arctic on plankton. According to news from the University of Western Australia:

This research revealed that the two-week spring algal bloom occurring in April as the Arctic emerges from its winter darkness and the sea-ice starts to thin is so productive it can fuel the food web for the entire year and remove significant amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere on an annual basis.

That sounds like it might be good news, but there is more:

Experiments involving temperature manipulations conducted in the Svalbard Islands indicated that the plankton community switches from acting as a sink to acting as a source of CO2 to the atmosphere at seawater temperatures in excess of 5 C. The researchers noted that this temperature will be regularly observed in the European Sector of the Arctic Ocean over the coming decades.

all of which:

Led an international team of researchers to issue a stark warning about the perils the world faces in the near future.

Here's Carlos Duarte's public lecture mentioned in that article, in which he covers a wide range of changes caused by the increase in the Arctic Ocean temperature apart from just those to the spring algal bloom. He also discusses the abrupt onset of melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet last summer for example:

In conclusion, here's what the Greenland Ice Sheet melting map looks like at the moment:

The NSIDC Greenland Daily Melt Map for April 26th 2013

I wonder what solutions to the "urgent problem" of "abrupt climate change" those two "brains trusts" will come up with?

Following a suggestion by "arcticio" on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum we've just constructed a small cluster of Raspberry Pi single board computers and set it to work simulating the climate of Planet Earth. Consider it as the econnexus.org contribution to Earth Day 2013!

The econnexus.org Raspberry Pi Planet Simulator cluster

The open source software package we're using is the "Planet Simulator" from the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg. According to arcticio it's:

A [climate] model with a medium complexity and resolution. Simple simulations run really fast. Also it is easy to design experiments, no sea ice, no Himalayas, bigger earth, another orbit, etc.

To get the individual members of our small cluster of Raspberry Pis communicating with each other we referred to the instructions on how to make a "Raspberry Pi Supercomputer" provided by Prof. Simon Cox of the University of Southampton. If you'd like to construct something similar yourself explicit instructions on how to go about it are available as part of our Distributed Arctic Sea Ice Model project. Here's a snapshot of the end result, after the Pi Planet Simulator Cluster was left running overnight:

One simulation of the climate of Planet Earth

The Planet Simulator also built and ran just fine for us on Scientific Linux and Mac OS X. We'll leave experimenting with it on Windows to another day! In the meantime there a multitude of other uses that the Planet Simulator could be put to.

Does anyone have any bright ideas?

The set of cracks in the Arctic sea ice across the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas that we showed three days ago have now refrozen, and some new ones have opened up nearer the north coast of Alaska. However whilst that has been going on another set of "cracks" over on the Russian side of the Arctic have been growing ever wider. Here's how the Laptev Sea looks from space this morning:

Satellite view of the Laptev Sea on April 21st 2013, courtesy of NASA Worldview

You will note that this image looks a lot redder than the ones we showed you of the Beaufort Sea. That's because this one uses the Terra / MODIS bands 3-6-7 base layer instead of the true colour base layer used in those previous images. According to NASA's MODIS layer information:

The 3-6-7 composite assigns Bands 3, 6, and 7 to the red, green, and blue components of a digital image. This combination is good for revealing snow and ice because they are very reflective in the visible part of the spectrum, and very absorbent in Bands 6 and 7, which are a part of the spectrum called the short-wave infrared, or SWIR.

Since the only visible light used in these images (Band 3) is assigned to red, snow and ice appear bright red. The more ice, the stronger the absorption in the SWIR bands, and the more red the color. Thick ice and snow appear vivid red (or red-orange), while small ice crystals in high-level clouds will appear reddish-orange or peach.

Liquid water on the ground will be very dark since it absorbs in the red and the SWIR, but small liquid water drops in clouds scatter light equally in both the visible and the SWIR, and will therefore appear white. Sediments in water appear dark red.

It certainly looks as though there are some large expanses of open water in the area at the moment, and this is not a wholly unprecedented occurrence. In a recent academic paper entitled "Variability and trends in Laptev Sea ice outflow between 1992–2011"  Krumpen et. al. point out that:

The pack ice drift is dominated by persistent offshore winds leading to a continuous export of  ice out of the Laptev Sea. Between pack ice and fast ice edge, flaw polynyas are formed: the New Siberian polynya, the Western New Siberian polynya, the Anabar-Lena polynya, the Taymyr polynya and the Northeastern Taymyr polynya.

If you want to work out which one is which there's a diagram in the full paper. For a second opinion on whether there's currently open water in those polynyas let's now take a look at a different image, this time recorded by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2 for short) aboard the Japanese SHIZUKU satellite:

JAXA AMSR2 false colour image of the Arctic on April 21st 2013

If you look slightly left of centre you can see that there is a dark brown border along the edge of the Laptev Sea. It seems that both microwaves and short-wave infrared are agreed that there is open water in that area just at the moment.  JAXA hadn't even launched the SHIZUKU satellite this time last year, but here's an image from a different satellite from exactly one year ago for comparison purposes:

WindSat Arctic sea ice concentration image from April 21st 2012

Can you spot the difference in the areas of open water?

The ice covering the Beaufort Sea has already found itself split by fractures many hundreds of miles long more than once this year. Now it is cracking at the seams once again, as this picture taken by the Terra satellite yesterday reveals:

Satellite view of the Beaufort Sea on April 17th 2013, courtesy of NASA Worldview

You can still make out the tracery of refrozen cracks from the previous fracturing events "underneath" the latest set. The question now is whether these new fissures will freeze over too, or whether this heralds the early onset of the "real" melting season in the area.

For comparison purposes, this is how the same area looked on May 8th last year, which is as far back as the images available through NASA's EOSDIS Worldview web site go:

Satellite view of the Beaufort Sea on May 8th 2012, courtesy of NASA Worldview

This animation created from Worldview images by "A-Team" for the Arctic Sea Ice blog reveals what happened next last year:

The Beaufort Sea Ice Melting in May 2012

Something similar will happen again this year. The 64 trillion dollar question is "When?"

[Addendum] A-Team points out that "For cracks, infrared is far better than MODIS visible", so here's a slightly cloudy AVHRR image courtesy of Environment Canada. It shows a smaller area of the Beaufort Sea on the same day, albeit with the image rotated compared to the visible light ones above. The different shades of grey represent different temperatures. It allows you to better visualise the new cracks superimposed on the older ones, and also allows easier comparison with the February images linked to above:

The ice in the Beaufort Sea coming apart at the seams again, at 5:18 GMT on April 17th 2013

NASA have recently been flying low over the sea ice in the Arctic on their latest IceBridge mission, measuring its thickness and recording a variety of images too, amongst other things.  In our All Fools' Day quiz here on econnexus.org we took a close look at the sea ice around the Disko Bay area of Western Greenland. One reason for doing that was because, as Julia Slingo who is chief scientist at the UK's Met Office pointed out only yesterday:

The Arctic is intimately linked with the North Atlantic and we know there are links, for example, in the ocean temperatures that run down the west coast of Greenland. They are very warm at the moment. Exceptionally warm!

Another reason is that below centre of those satellite images of Disko lies a glacier that goes by a variety of different names in a variety of different languages.  Whether you prefer to call it Sermeq Kujalleq, Jakobshavn Isbræ or even Jakobshavn Glacier this month both we and NASA have been zooming in and taking a much closer look at the Ilulissat Icefjord and the glacier that lies at its head. According to Wikipedia Sermeq Kujalleq:

Drains 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet and produces around 10% of all Greenland icebergs. Some 35 billion tonnes of icebergs calve off and pass out of the fjord every year. Icebergs breaking from the glacier are often so large (up to a kilometer in height) that they are too tall to float down the fjord and lie stuck on the bottom of its shallower areas, sometimes for years, until they are broken up by the force of the glacier and icebergs further up the fjord. Studied for over 250 years, Jakobshavn Glacier has helped develop our understanding of climate change and icecap glaciology.

Already this year a lot more icebergs have broken from the glacier. I first found out about the most recent of these events over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum, where it was reported by "Yuha" on April 7th that:

The calving front is visibly retreating as seen by comparing Terra images from days 94 and 96

After that "Werther" swiftly produced this CAD image revealing the precise dimensions of a variety of such calving events over recent years, along with some intriguing insights into the earliest days of the 2013 Greenland ice sheet melting season:

Sermeq Kujalleq calving events and melting zones

According to Werther:

I marked a ‘melt zone/bare ice’-line and two remarkable features high up (900 m +SL). One of them is a regular melt lake that usually shows up in May. The melt zone-line nicely shows the thinning basin surrounding the glacier. There’s enough going on to fear another ravaging summer for the GIS….

As luck would have it NASA have also been monitoring the very same calving event using their P3-B "airborne laboratory". Here's their explanation of why they've been doing that:

and here's a preliminary LIDAR image from that mission, revealing that the calving front of the Jakobshavn Glacier retreated by about 200 metres between April 4th and April 10th 2013:

LIDAR image courtesy of NASA IceBridge 2013

To give you a feel for what NASA's P3-B pilot saw on those Jakobshavn Glacier missions, here's the view from the cockpit recorded on April 9th. This video is of a different glacier though, this time in South East Grrenland.

Finally, for the moment at least, here is what a somewhat larger calving event at the head of the Ilulissat Icefjord in 2008 looked and sounded like:

According to ITV News this evening:

The Met Office is calling a meeting of top scientists to look at the "urgent" question of whether the warming of the Arctic is affecting UK weather.

In an interview with ITV Professor Julia Slingo OBE, chief scientist at the United Kingdom's Met Office has been commenting on the evident changes in the Great British Climate over the last few years. Julia told ITV (amongst other things) that:

It's not proven yet, we've a lot more research to do, but if you look at the way in which weather patterns have behaved over say the last four or five years, we're beginning to think that there is something happening, that in a sense our climate is being disrupted by the warming of the Arctic that we've observed very dramatically since 2007.

The early evidence from the work we've done suggests that in winter and spring the warmth of the Arctic is tending to set up cold, easterly, dry winters. The sorts of things we've seen certainly this year, and of course in 2010. In summer the case is not proven at all.

When asked:

What do you feel in your bones, so to speak.

Julia replied that:

It's hard to believe that the changes that are going on in the Arctic so dramatically since 2007 aren't going to affect our weather patterns. My gut feeling is that it's very likely that what's happening in the Arctic will affect our climate.

We need to get to grips with it, and quickly, because if this is how climate change could manifest itself then we need to understand that as a matter of urgency, which is why I believe we should pull together the best scientists to really see how do we detect an influence of the Arctic on the jet stream and on our weather patterns around the world. It's a really urgent question.

ITV News also interviewed Professor Jennifer Francis of the Institute of Coastal and Marine Science at Rutgers University. Jennifer told ITV (amongst other things) that:

This change in the Arctic is something that the system hasn't seen, certainly in recent history. I have to believe that it's very likely that the changes in the Arctic are affecting the large scale circulation patterns in the Northern Hemisphere.

You can watch a recording of those conversations via the link to the ITV News web site at the top of this article, which also includes a report from the Barneo ice camp near the North Pole.

It was a nice sunny day today in South Devon, for the first time in a very long time. Here's some proof:

Blue skies and still waters at The Turf Locks on April 6th 2013

Over one month early the Daily Mail announced on March 1st 2013 that:

Spring has sprung: Milder weather, blossoming flowers and the season's first lamb herald an end to wintry conditions.

In common with some of their more recent pronouncements on the great British climate, the Mail got that one wrong. In fact, according to the Met Office rather than The Mail:

Provisional full-month Met Office figures for March confirm it has been an exceptionally cold month, with a UK mean temperature of 2.2 °C.

This is 3.3 °C below the 1981-2010 long-term average for the month, and ranks this March as joint second coldest (with 1947) in our records dating back to 1910. Only March 1962 was colder, with a record-breaking month mean temperature of 1.9 °C.

In an unusual turn of events, this March was also colder than the preceding winter months of December (3.8 °C), January (3.3 °C) and February (2.8 °C). This last happened in 1975.

Not only was March 2013 cold, it was also rather damp at times, down here in Devon at least. According to the table in another Met Office blog post from a few days earlier this is what was happening weather wise in Devon in March:

which made us the wettest county in England over the month. Added to all the previous precipitation in these parts over the previous 12 months, here's some related recent news. The BBC reported two days ago that a Landslip at Oddicombe beach turns sea red:

A landslip at a beach in south Devon has turned the sea in the area red and caused an already partially collapsed empty house to be further damaged. Thousands of tonnes of earth and stone were estimated to have fallen at Oddicombe beach on Tuesday night, Torbay Council said. A section of the beach has been closed as a result.

A bit further down the coast Torbay Council were busy trying to solve another problem. According to the BBC once again Torquay sewer-collapse threat forces raw waste into sea:

Raw sewage is having to be pumped into the sea at a Devon holiday resort in a bid to stop a main sewer collapsing. A breach in the sea wall at Livermead in Torquay caused part of the road to collapse, undermining the sewer. South West Water (SWW) has had to divert flows away from the sewer as a result, forcing it to pump the raw waste into the sea at Hope's Nose.

Campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) said pumping raw sewage into the sea was "a return to the bad old days". People have been been warned not to swim at Beacon Cove, Torre Abbey and Hollacombe and warning signs have been put up. South West Water said there was also an increased risk of pollution at Shoalstone, Broadsands, Goodrington, Paignton Sands, Preston Sands, Meadfoot, Anstey's, Babbacombe, Oddicombe, Watcombe and Maidencombe.

Heading a bit further afield in Devon now, New Scientist reports this weekend that:

Atmospheric rivers are vast, unbroken streams of water-laden air that can snake thousands of kilometres through the sky. Only recently identified and named, they are huge not just in geographical extent. "In terms of the water they dump as precipitation, atmospheric rivers are every bit as big and bad as hurricanes," says Michael Dettinger of the United States Geological Survey in La Jolla, California.

In the five days leading up to Christmas, the seaside city of Plymouth got more rain than it usually gets in the whole of December. In Braunton, 80 kilometres to the north, the river Caen overwhelmed a recently completed flood-control project, inundating the town with water instead of shoppers. The main rail link connecting the region to the rest of the UK was cut off for six days.

Expanding our focus to include the weird weather across the nation over the last year, the National Farmer's Union is worried that "we're running out of wheat". According to The Independent:

Britain will be forced to become a net importer of wheat for the first time in a decade this year, after the recent bitter weather devastated crops. A disastrous 12-month cycle of poor weather has ruined harvests across the UK, costing farmers an estimated £500m, the chief economist of the National Farmers Union (NFU) warned. The conditions mean Britain – traditionally a significant net exporter of wheat – will have to boost imports by more than a million tonnes.

Nor is wheat the only crop crop affected. Potato plantings stood at just 4,000 hectares at the end of March, barely a 10th of the 30,000 hectare area that had been planted this time last year, implying a jump in potato imports next crop year.

Expanding our focus even further to include the northernmost parts of the Northern Hemisphere, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that:

Spring has sprung in the Arctic. Arctic sea ice has passed its annual maximum extent and is beginning its seasonal decline through the spring and summer. The circulation pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation (AO) reached an extreme negative phase in the second half of the month, associated with unusually high sea level pressure covering nearly the entire Arctic Ocean.

The month was also notable for continued fracturing of the ice cover in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas north of Alaska. This is consistent with wind patterns associated with the strong negative pattern of the AO.

Here's an animation from "A-Team" on the Arctic Sea Ice blog, which reveals that fracturing taking place:

Arctic Sea Ice "On The Move" over the Beaufort Sea in February and March 2013

NASA had a slightly different take on the extreme negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation during March. They show this picture of anomalous temperatures across the globe:

Global land surface temperature anomalies between March 14–20, 2013, courtesy of NASA

and report that:

While a high-pressure weather system brought warmer than normal temperatures to Greenland and northern Canada in March 2013, much of North America, Europe, and Asia shivered through weeks of unseasonably cool temperatures. The contrasting temperatures are no coincidence: the same unusual pressure pattern in the upper atmosphere caused both events.

Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it would be prudent for the powers that be to start considering what happened to the Arctic sea ice?

Today is April 1st, Easter Monday 2013. However this tale is no joke. Before we get on to more serious matters would you care to join me in some festive fun? Let's play "spot the difference"! To get some images free from clouds I've gone back in time a couple of days into March. Having done that here's a bird's eye view of the Disko Bay area of western Greenland, taken on March 28th 2013:

The Disko Bay area of western Greenland on March 28th 2013

Now here's one taken a year earlier, on March 28th 2012:

The Disko Bay area of western Greenland on March 28th 2012

Do you notice any difference?

Whilst you ponder that question I'll endeavour to explain the relevance of the econnexus Easter quiz to the title of today's post. Fresh from enjoying the experience of having my constructive climate change comments deleted by the "Mail Online" a couple of weekends ago, I now bring you the fruits of my experience over the weekend on the The Economist web site. Just in case you're wondering, The Economist "online" does allow relevant links, and doesn't seem to delete relevant comments.

In their latest print edition The Economist includes a leader entitled "Apocalypse perhaps a little later" which says (amongst other things) that:

It is not clear why climate change has "plateaued" (see pages 81-83)

Frankly it is astonishing news to me to read that "climate change has plateaued" and for reasons I will explain shortly it ought to be astonishing to The Economist's leader writer also. Turning eagerly to page 81 I discovered an article in the "Science and technology" section, which begins as follows:

Climate science
A sensitive matter

The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away.

Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar.

Perhaps the Economist's leader writer is confusing "climate change" with the Economist's Science and Technology writer's "air temperatures at the Earth’s surface"? At least the leader writer gives the impression that they may recall having read James Astill's Economist Special Report entitled "The melting north" from June 16th 2012, in which he said (amongst other things) that:

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet.

The area of Arctic land covered by snow in early summer has shrunk by almost a fifth since 1966. But it is the Arctic Ocean that is most changed.

Scientists, scrambling to explain this, found that in 2007 every natural variation, including warm weather, clear skies and warm currents, had lined up to reinforce the seasonal melt. But last year [i.e. 2011] there was no such remarkable coincidence: it was as normal as the Arctic gets these days. And the sea ice still shrank to almost the same extent.

Of course since those words were written the Arctic has experienced the record shattering melting of sea ice during the summer of 2012. Mr. Astill went on to write:

There is no serious doubt about the basic cause of the warming. It is, in the Arctic as everywhere, the result of an increase in heat-trapping atmospheric gases, mainly carbon dioxide released when fossil fuels are burned. Because the atmosphere is shedding less solar heat, it is warming—a physical effect predicted back in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist. But why is the Arctic warming faster than other places?

In partial answer to that question he goes on to explain that:

The main reason for Arctic amplification is the warming effect of replacing light-coloured snow and ice with darker-coloured land or water. Because dark surfaces absorb more heat than light ones, this causes local warming, which melts more snow and ice, revealing more dark land or water, and so on. Known as the albedo effect, this turns out to be a more powerful positive feedback than most researchers had expected. Most climate models predicted that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by the end of this century.

Are you beginning to see the connection with our Easter 2013 quiz question yet?  Returning to the present day from early summer 2012, the writer of "Climate science – A sensitive matter" seems to be unaware of any of this, since in their three page article they do mention "feedbacks", but the words "albedo" and "Arctic" are conspicuous only by their total absence. This is all the more surprising, to your humble scribe at least, since less than three weeks ago I attended The Economist's very own "Arctic Summit" in Oslo. The Economist invited a panel of scientists, who one must assume were considered by that august journal to be eminent in their respective fields, to briefly address the assembled throng. First to speak was Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University, who gave an overview of his recently published scientific paper "Quasiresonant amplification of planetary waves and recent Northern Hemisphere weather extremes", which concludes (amongst other things) that:

The data and results we present suggest that atmospheric conditions already might have changed to the extent that the considered quasiresonant wave amplification may occur rather frequently. The most recent example might be the destructive heat waves in the United States and southern Europe accompanied by catastrophic floods in China and Japan in June–July 2012.

Stefan himself concluded his remarks in Oslo by saying that:

We know there is enough ice in Greenland to raise global sea level by 7 metres. We also know that the Greenland Ice Sheet has a critical warming threshold beyond which it will decay due to some kind of "vicious circle", so I think we should all care about the Arctic, and about stopping global warming as fast as we can.

With that message possibly still ringing in his ears the very same James Astill eventually concluded the session, which the event agenda described as "Assessing the risks of a melting Arctic", by asking the four panellists to take part in "a little quiz" with "reputations on the line". He asked:

What is your prediction for when we're going to get a largely ice free summer Arctic?

Stefan answered without hesitation "2040". James next asked Rear Admiral Jonathan White of the United States' Navy, who said:

I got asked this same question by an Admiral in the Navy a couple of months ago, but it was "when are we going to see one month of ice free conditions in the Arctic", ice free being defined as 15% or less ice coverage area wise. I said I think it's happening faster than we thought before. My predecessor said around 2030, and I'm saying 2023. About ten years, and that's pretty aggressive.

Having spoken to him a couple of times in Oslo, I can assure you that Rear Admiral White does not come across as the stereotypical loony left tree hugging environmental activist. All of which raises a big question, in my mind at least, which is:

What on Earth were The Economist thinking of when they printed the words "Apocalypse perhaps a little later" above their weekend leader? They surely can't have meant a little later than 2100 or even 2050. Did they actually mean a little later than The Day After Tomorrow?

In conclusion, for the moment at least, please note that according to their contents page, The Economist was:

First published in September 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."

Need I say more? Perhaps only to ask what your own answer to my little festive quiz might be, and also your answer to James Astill's slightly earlier one should you be in a particularly festive mood today?