Tag: global warming

Accessibility by sea will increase Global warming will have a devastating effect on roads in the Arctic but open up tantalising routes for shipping, according to a study published on Sunday in the specialist journal Nature Climate Change."As sea ice continues to melt, accessibility by sea will increase, but the viability of an important network of roads that depend on freezing temperatures is threatened by a warming climate," said Scott Stephenson of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).Previous research has already pinpointed the Arctic as one of the world's most climate-sensitive areas.Four consecutive years of shrinking summer sea ice have fired talk of new, cost-saving ocean links between Europe and Asia and prospects of a scramble to exploit the region's wealth of oil, gas and precious minerals.The new study is the first to look in detail at the implications of this for transporters.Stephenson's team devised a computer model about accessibility to the Arctic and combined it with climate simulations used by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).The simulations are based on expected temperature increases of 2.0-3.4 degrees Celsius (3.6-6.2 degrees Fahrenheit) overall in the Arctic by 2050, with an even greater rise in winter of 4-6 C ...

Resource wars are possible as global warming melts polar ice It is considered the final frontier for oil and gas exploitation, and secret US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks confirm that nations are battling to "carve up" the Arctic's vast resources."The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources," Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. "Russia should not be defeated in this fight."Along with exposing an estimated 22 per cent of the world's oil, ice meltingdue to global warmingwill open new shipping lanes, the arteries of global commerce, which nations are competing to control. And Russia certainly is not the only country eyeing the frozen prize.Per Stig Moller, then Danish foreign minister, mused in a 2009 cable that "new shipping routes and natural resource discoveries would eventually place the region at the centre of world politics".Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps even China, have competing claims to the Arctic, a region about the size of Africa, comprising some six per cent of the Earth's surface.'Resource wars'"The WikiLeaks cables show us realpolitik in its rarest form," says Paul Wapner, director of the global environmental politics programme at American University in Washington. ...