Antarctica rising as ice caps melt
ANTARCTICA is rising like a cheese soufflé: slowly but surely. Lost ice due to climate change and left-over momentum from the end of the last big ice age mean the buoyant continent is heaven-bound.
Donald Argus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and colleagues used 15 years of GPS data to show that parts of the Ellsworth mountains in west Antarctica are rising by around 5 millimetres a year (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2011gl048025). Elsewhere on the continent, the rise is slower.
A faster rise has been seen in Greenland, which is thought to be popping up by 4 centimetres a year.
Ongoing climate change could be partly to blame: Antarctica is losing about 200 gigatonnes of ice per year, and for Greenland the figure is 300 gigatonnes. Earth's continents sit on viscous magma, so the effect of this loss is like taking a load off a dense foam mattress.
But there is another possible contributor. "The Earth has a very long memory," says Argus. As a result, "there is also a viscous response to ice loss from around 5000 to 10,000 years ago going on".
Despite this effect, the known ice loss at both poles suggests that embedded in the local rises is a signal of current climate change - researchers just have to tease it out.
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OK, climate sceptics: here's the raw data you wanted
Have you killed a leopard in the past year? In South Africa the wrong reply could mean prison and a hefty fine, so it's tough to get honest answers from the nation's ranchers. But now conservation biologists have borrowed a trick from public health research to get closer to the truth without having to ask such touchy questions – which could help protect wildlife.
Getting honest answers about behaviour that is illegal or frowned-upon – such as taking drugs or visiting prostitutes – is notoriously difficult. But survey researchers have devised a neat way to get people comfortable with revealing their indiscretions.
Each time the researcher asks the respondent a question, the respondent throws dice before answering – crucially, the researcher cannot see what numbers come up. The rules of the game will be something like this: the respondent will always answer "yes" if they throw a six and "no" when a one comes up, but should tell the truth otherwise.
Because a "yes" doesn't necessarily mean that the respondent actually committed the undesirable behaviour, people seem to open up. The forced "yes" and "no" answers introduce some "noise" into the results, but overall this "randomised response technique" (RRT) gives better answers. For instance, RRT questions get much closer than conventional surveys to the actual incidence of drug use that is revealed by screening tests on hair samples.
Killing a leopard
Now researchers led by Freya St John and Julia Jones of Bangor University in the UK have used RRT to question ranchers in north-eastern South Africa about killing wild carnivores. The answers suggested that at least 19 per cent had killed a leopard in the previous 12 months – an estimate that Jones calls "quite shocking".
The researchers also asked straightforward questions about attitudes to carnivores, and whether the ranchers thought their peers were killing them. These answers tallied closely with the ranchers' answers to the RRT questions, with those who appeared to admit killing carnivores being more likely to have negative attitudes towards the animals and to believe that other ranchers were killing them.
That might sound obvious, but proving the relationship is important because it paves the way for future surveys that can explore who is killing carnivores by simply asking people innocuous questions about their attitudes and their views on the behaviour of others.
Smart answers
But won't people soon get wise to the actual intent and clam up again? Not if the results are used carefully, Jones argues. "It's not going to be used to criminalise people," she says. Instead, the results could be used to target conservation outreach efforts and compensation for livestock lost to predators on areas where ranchers are especially likely to kill carnivores.
Robin Naidoo, a conservation scientist with WWF-US, agrees that the method could be useful, given the widespread killing of wildlife even where species are legally protected. He does fieldwork in South Africa's neighbour Namibia, where earlier this month an entire pride of desert lions was poisoned.
Richard Yarnell of Nottingham Trent University, UK, who works in South Africa and was involved with the research, says the new estimates of leopard killing may also mean that CITES, which regulates trade in threatened species, may need to adjust the quotas it sets for trophy hunting of leopards in the country.
Still, Naidoo says that more research is needed to show that the technique works for other species and human populations – especially poor and marginalised people who are often at the sharp end of confrontations with wildlife. "We need more of these studies in a wider variety of contexts," he says.
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OK, climate sceptics: here's the raw data you wanted
Anyone can now view for themselves the raw data that was at the centre of last year's "climategate" scandal.
Temperature records going back 150 years from 5113 weather stations around the world were yesterday released to the public by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The only records missing are from 19 stations in Poland, which refused to allow them to be made public.
"We released [the dataset] to dispel the myths that the data have been inappropriately manipulated, and that we are being secretive," says Trevor Davies, the university's pro-vice-chancellor for research. "Some sceptics argue we must have something to hide, and we've released the data to pull the rug out from those who say there isn't evidence that the global temperature is increasing."
Hand it over
The university were ordered to release data by the UK Information Commissioner's Office, following a freedom-of-information request for the raw data from researchers Jonathan Jones of the University of Oxford and Don Keiller of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK.
Davies says that the university initially refused on the grounds that the data is not owned by the CRU but by the national meteorological organisations that collect the data and share it with the CRU.
When the CRU's refusal was overruled by the information commissioner, the UK Met Office was recruited to act as a go-between and obtain permission to release all the data.
Poland refused, and the information commissioner overruled Trinidad and Tobago's wish for the data it supplied on latitudes between 30 degrees north and 40 degrees south to be withheld, as it had been specifically requested by Jones and Keiller in their FOI request and previously shared with other academics.
The price
The end result is that all the records are there, except for Poland's. Davies's only worry is that the decision to release the Trinidad and Tobago data against its wishes may discourage the open sharing of data in the future. Other research organisations may from now on be reluctant to pool data they wish to be kept private.
Thomas Peterson, chief scientist at the National Climatic Data Center of the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and president of the Commission for Climatology at the World Meteorological Organization, agrees there might be a cost to releasing the data.
"I have historic temperature data from automatic weather stations on the Greenland ice sheet that I was able to obtain from Denmark only because I agreed not to release them," he says. "If countries come to expect that sharing of any data with anyone will eventually lead to strong pressure for them to fully release those data, will they be less willing to collaborate in the future?"
Davies is confident that genuine and proper analysis of the raw data will reproduce the same incontrovertible conclusion – that global temperatures are rising. "The conclusion is very robust," he says, explaining that the CRU's dataset of land temperatures tally with those from other independent research groups around the world, including those generated by the NOAA and NASA.
"Should people undertake analyses and come up with different conclusions, the way to present them is through publication in peer-reviewed journals, so we know it's been through scientific quality control," says Davies.
No convincing some people
Other mainstream researchers and defenders of the consensus are not so confident that the release will silence the sceptics. "One can hope this might put an end to the interminable discussion of the CRU temperatures, but the experience of GISTEMP – another database that's been available for years – is that the criticisms will continue because there are some people who are never going to be satisfied," says Gavin Schmidt of Columbia University in New York.
"Sadly, I think this will just lead to a new round of attacks on CRU and the Met Office," says Bob Ward, communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "Sceptics will pore through the data looking for ways to criticise the processing methodology in an attempt to persuade the public that there's doubt the world has warmed significantly."
The CRU and its leading scientist, Phil Jones, were at the centre of the so-called "climategate" storm in 2009 when the unit was accused of withholding and manipulating data. It was later cleared of the charge.
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Warming Arctic releases frozen organic air pollutants
Air pollutants emitted decades ago are coming back to haunt us. As the Arctic warms, persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, trapped in snow and ice are being re-released. This unwelcome return has been suspected for some time but is now confirmed by 16 years' worth of data.
POPs travel around the globe on winds, build up in food and water supplies, and accumulate in animal body fat. They have also been linked to serious human health problems, including cancer, and can be passed from mother to fetus. They have been banned under the Stockholm convention since 2004.
The new study looked at air concentrations of POPs up to 2009 in Svalbard, Norway, and in Canada's Nunavut province, and found an increase since 2000
