Ice and Fire Around the world, glaciers and ice sheets have begun breaking apart and accelerating toward the oceans faster than ever imagined possible. This is really alarming.  Watch this PBS video and see how fast the ice sheets are breaking up and what scientists have learned about this in recent years.  You can’t watch this and remain unaffected.

New developments mask wild land's deadly threat To break the cycle of build and burn, those who create and approve subdivisions in Southern California must take site and climate into consideration. By Christopher Hawthorne Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 30, 2007 The enduring image of the Southern California hillside resident -- the one who braces for disaster every fall, just as the Santa Anas begin to blow -- is that of a self-reliant, latter-day homesteader who settled up among the trees because he finds solitude and freedom there. And maybe because he remains a bit suspicious of life in the city. It wasn't hard to find examples of the breed in news coverage of last week's devastating fires, guiding horses to safety or crustily refusing to evacuate. Yet the vast majority of the nearly 2,000 houses destroyed so far weren't outposts marking the last remaining frontiers of the American West. They were neatly lined up in subdivisions, on gently curving streets slotted into terraced hillsides. Many of the biggest fires grew by leaping from one cul-de-sac to the next, tearing through the territory that writer Mike Davis once called "Sloping Suburbia." Since the middle of the 20th century, this is how we have developed much of our new housing in the U.S., and particularly in Southern California: by pushing deep into canyons and deserts and onto flood plains. We build reassuringly familiar-looking subdivisions, decorated with vaguely Spanish or Mediterranean accents, in locations that by land-use standards -- and by common-sense standards -- are truly exotic. We build with the unstinting belief that growth is good and that progress in the form of various kinds of technology -- new building materials, military-style firefighting, a vast system of pumps and levees -- will continue to make it possible to construct new pockets of nostalgic architecture virtually anywhere. But maybe our nostalgia should extend beyond red-tile roofs to include earlier lessons about how and where it is safe to build. This country's culture as a whole is in the midst of a profound shift from the unshakable confidence that marked the so-called American Century to a new recognition of risk, conservation, even fragility. Green architecture, with its rather old-fashioned emphasis on paying attention to site and climate, is part of that shift. But those who build and approve new hillside developments -- "the lords of subdivision," as nature writer Richard Lillard called them, the "replanners of the Earth's surface" -- have barely acknowledged it. One of the success stories of the last week has been Stevenson Ranch near Santa Clarita, which narrowly averted destruction in part because its houses were built with concrete roof tiles and heat-resistant windows. But to celebrate this neighborhood as a model for escaping fire is itself a kind of escapism. The question is never, why am I building here on this hillside that predictably catches fire every few years in the fall (and maybe now in spring or summer too)? It is, instead, how can technology and new materials -- how can progress -- protect me from the dangers inherent in living where I have chosen to live? The aesthetic basis of a typical subdivision is reassurance and stability. Builders enforce those qualities with architecture, choosing from a well-worn catalog of residential styles, and with massive earthmoving operations, to flatten the streets and blur the topographical differences between one hillside and the next. The media pitch in too. Thursday night on CNN, Anderson Cooper and other anchors focused relentlessly on the news that an arsonist may have set the Santiago fire in eastern Orange County. The Santiago fire destroyed 14 houses -- a tiny fraction of the total this week. By contrast, the Witch fire that roared through suburban developments in northern San Diego County, consuming more than 1,000 houses, was caused by downed power lines. The emphasis on possible crime suggested that the disaster could be pinned on a few rogue evildoers. But the vast majority of destroyed houses burned as a direct result of choices made by home builders, homeowners, politicians and planners about where to put new development. The villain is us. The truth is that while houses near Lake Arrowhead and in certain canyons that burned this year are marked by real isolation, most Southern California residents who move into fire-threatened hillside neighborhoods are not adventurous souls hoping to thumb their noses at convention and urban mores and carve out a life surrounded by nature. They are merely looking for spacious single-family residences that feel attractively adjacent to, rather than in the heart of, the hills and mountain ranges that divide the region's coastline from its deserts. Adjacency to nature rather than full immersion in it has always been at the heart of the suburbs' appeal. The developers who create our version of it, particularly in the fastest-growing parts of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, have been highly successful at giving their projects the air of the familiar mixed with a touch of unspoiled landscape.

Experts: Wildfires only going to worsen Many blame threat on global warming By Mike Lee UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER October 30, 2007 Get used to it. That's what many climate experts are saying about catastrophic wildfires, including the dozen that have turned San Diego County into a disaster zone for the past week. They believe such blazes will become a regular part of life in Southern California because global warming is intensifying nature's cycles by lengthening fire seasons and prolonging droughts in parts of the West. The consequences would be more deaths, more houses consumed by flames and more budgets busted by firefighting costs. “The fires we just experienced are some of the first effects we are feeling from climate change,” said Walter Oechel, a biology professor at San Diego State University who had to evacuate his home in Jamul last week. “We now have a very graphic representation of what many of us have been saying for a long time. It's hitting me very directly and personally, as well as the county as a whole,” he said. Scientists and policy-makers said the threatened succession of massive wildfires is a powerful reason to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming. They also said smarter development policies and better fire-prevention plans can help reduce damage from future infernos. In recent years, many researchers have linked global warming to environmental changes such as hurricanes and polar ice melt. This has touched off a worldwide debate about climate science, what impact humans have on Earth's atmosphere and whether higher temperatures worsen natural disasters. Scientists are careful to note that they can't definitively link any specific event to climate change. “The connection between global warming, Santa Ana winds and extremely low Southern California precipitation last winter are not known with sufficient certainty to conclusively link global warming with this disaster,” said researchers at the University of California Merced and the University of Arizona in a statement released Friday. Not everyone is convinced that global warming explains the recent blazes. “I am a little skeptical,” said Thomas Wordell, an analyst with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. “The ecosystem (in Southern California) . . . has been very fire prone for a long time. We've had droughts . . . before anybody came up with the terminology of climate change.” Wordell's view aside, international, national and local groups of scientists are increasingly alarmed about the potentially devastating effects of climate change. These include the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work, the National Research Council and numerous University of California researchers. They generally contend that the connection between global warming and more destructive wildfires is too clear to ignore. The flames that have consumed much of San Diego County and Southern California “are consistent with what the latest modeling (studies) show,” said Ronald Neilson, a professor at Oregon State University and a bioclimatologist for the U.S. Forest Service. “This is exactly what we've been predicting to happen, both in . . . fire forecasts for this year and in longer-term patterns,” Neilson said. Five years ago, Neilson and other Oregon State University researchers predicted that periodic increases in rain and snowfall, combined with higher temperatures and rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, would spur vegetation growth. That would add to already extensive quantities of fuel caused by decades of fire suppression, in which blazes are not allowed to burn out of control and thereby eliminate dead or dying vegetation. A projection last year by several academic and government scientists said the failure to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions could lead to 55 percent more large wildfires in California by the end of the century. In addition, a 2006 study in Geophysical Research Letters, the publication of the American Geophysical Union, suggests that Santa Ana winds may occur more frequently in November and December as Southern California's climate becomes warmer. In turn, that would heighten the risk of deadly blazes. Other data show cause for concern as well. In the 1960s, wildfires burned roughly 4.5 million acres in the United States each year. Since 2000, the average annual total is more than 7 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Almost all of the country's largest fires in recent years have been in the West. “In the past two decades, wildfires have become larger, they have lasted longer and burned much more area than in the past,” said Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Va. Last year, scientists and land managers from the Association for Fire Ecology gathered in San Diego to discuss such trends. Their talks resulted in “The San Diego Declaration,” a document that looks eerily prescient in light of the past week's blazes. “Fire suppression costs may continue to increase, with decreasing effectiveness under extreme fire weather and fuel conditions,” the statement says. From 1997 through 1999, federal agencies spent about $400 million a year on fire suppression. Since then, the average has grown to more than three times that figure: It's about $1.4 billion this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. One unanswered question is whether permanent or temporary climate changes are causing the ongoing drought in the Southwest. Researchers connect the drought to the retreat of winter storms and the extension of high-pressure weather patterns into the Southwest, which reduces rainfall. They also discuss how global warming could be causing snowpacks to melt too early each year, creating water-supply shortages in the summer and fall. Other connections between fire and climate change are more complex. For example, large fires generate enormous volumes of carbon dioxide, which promotes additional warming and more fires. The amount of greenhouse gases emitted by last week's blazes in Southern California equal that of roughly 500,000 cars traveling on the road for one year, according to the state Air Resources Board. Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also promotes plant growth, particularly in places with limited water, said Oechel at SDSU. “We could have the unfortunate combination of more fuel and more severe fire weather coming together,” he said. To combat such problems, policy-makers and environmental groups said the latest fires should spur nationwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes and factories. “The first rule of getting out of a hole is to stop digging,” said Terry Tamminen, former chief of environmental protection for California and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington.