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Brooklin, Canada - With 2005 the warmest year in modern times and new research confirming scientists' worst fears, most experts agree that urgent and innovative international action on climate change is needed.
But neither action nor urgency was in evidence earlier this month in Montreal, Canada when 189 nations spent two weeks attempting to deal with climate change. Although the United Nations sponsored-talks were widely seen as an international success, they accomplished little beyond supporting the Kyoto Protocol and an agreement for more talks.
"As usual, national self-interest dominated, but at least the whole process wasn't derailed," said Dale Marshall, a climate change policy analyst with David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental NGO, who attended the meetings.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect in February, industrialised nations are legally bound to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of five percent from 1990 levels each year between 2008 and 2012.
Long-time climate watchers were gleeful about getting all nations, including the United States, to agree to hold more talks, Marshall told IPS.
"But that's a very, very small step forward towards the deep emissions cuts that are needed," he added.
Meanwhile, several climate research studies released in December show that the impacts of climate change are coming faster than predicted. This suggests that the worst case disaster scenarios may be the most likely unless there is concerted global action to reduce emissions.
Satellite photos taken this year revealed that there was 20 percent less Arctic sea ice compared to the first pictures taken in 1978, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.
The loss of ice is not too surprising given the four degrees C rise in average winter temperatures in the Arctic. However, the extent and speed with which the Arctic ice is melting is unprecedented.
And that's not just bad news for polar bears and native people of the North.
"The Arctic is a major driver for Earth's weather cycle. [The melting] we see is going to be very profound in terms of global weather change," said Ted Scambos, a research scientist at the NSIDC.
Those changes are impossible to predict with precision, but Scambos believes that the sea ice will continue to melt. The loss of sea ice appears to have triggered a major feedback loop because there is less ice and snow to reflect the sun's energy, making the region ever warmer.
"We think that these feedbacks are starting to take hold and that we're going to see an accelerated decline in sea ice," Scambos said in a release.
Warmer temperatures are also thawing the top three metres of permafrost beneath the western Siberian peatlands, creating giant lakes and swelling rivers. Permafrost is also melting in Alaska and northern Canada. A new study predicts
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