Operation Nanook will be staged on Ellesmere Island and Baffin Island, part of the territory in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Bar-tailed Godwit (image: US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Today’s Geo Quiz is for the birds. The Great Backyard Bird Count gets under way this weekend. Thousands of people across the US and Canada plan to pitch in. The idea is to report on what’s on view in your backyard wherever that may be. The data helps produce online maps showing which species are on the move, and where others are flocking.

Take the Common Redpoll. This bird occasionally shows up at backyard feeders across the northern US but its main habitat is the wide band of northern forest that spans Canada.

That forest extends from Newfoundland and Labrador all the way to the far northern Yukon. So what’s the name of this Canadian forest that lies mostly above 50 degrees north?

The answer is Canada’s boreal or “northern” forest. It spans the country from the Yukon Territory to Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s also habitat to hundreds of bird species including the Common Redpole,  one of the many species that is expected to show up in this weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count.  Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Miyoko Chu of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who explains why counting birds such as the Common Redpole and the Bar-tailed Godwit (pictured)  is important to scientists.

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But who it belongs to, well. that’s a matter of dispute. The foreign ministers of Russia and Canada were talking about it today in Moscow. Both nations claim the ridge under the Arctic as an extension of their respective continental shelves. Denmark too wants a piece of it.

We don ‘t want you to settle that dispute but we would like you to name the ridge itself.

The answer is the Lomonosov Ridge, it plays a key role in the scramble to claim sovereignty over the Arctic Ocean. Anchor Lisa Mullins finds out more from Klaus Dodds, an authority on the Geopolitics of the Arctic.
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St Jude's Cathedral in 1995 (Photo: Ansgar Walk)

In the 1950s, hundreds of people moved there to build the Distant Early Warning line, a system of radar stations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

These days, the community is busy rebuilding a church, actually an Anglican cathedral, that burned down five years ago. The cathedral is shaped like an igloo crowned by a spire and cross. So was the church that burned down. But this time the building materials are a bit more fire-proof.

Still guessing?

Well, the answer is Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut in Canada. That’s where an Anglican cathedral is being rebuilt in the shape of in igloo. Andrew Ataguttaaluk is the bishop in Nunavut. Jeb Sharp talks with him.
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Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland (left image July 28; right image August 5)

A massive iceberg broke off Greenland this week. It’s the largest break in Greenland in 50 years, setting off alarm bells among climate watchers. Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with Dr. Robert Bindschadler, one of NASA’s leading climate scientists, about the break.
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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: The death toll has topped 1,100 today from flooding and landslides in China. The grim milestone comes amid reports of continuing floods in Pakistan, and an unrelenting heat wave in Russia. Scientists say none of this extreme weather can be directly linked to global warming. But they say it all does fit into the models of what a warmer future might look like. Meanwhile there’s another bit of news raising climate-related alarms. The break-off this week of a massive iceberg from Greenland. Robert Bindschadler is a glaciologist with NASA. He says the location of the ice collapse makes it especially troubling.

ROBERT BINDSCHADLER:  This is happening right at the northern tip of Greenland, so what it tells us is that these dramatic events have extended from the southern part of Greenland where we’ve seen them before all the way to the northern limits. So all of the Greenland ice sheet is now involved in this dynamic.

SHARP:  One of the concerns often about these kinds of events is rising sea levels. Is there any reason to think this one iceberg could contribute significantly to rising sea levels?

BINDSCHADLER: It likely will in a fairly small way and the way it will is that before it calved it was part of an ice shelf. A floating ice tongue connected to the ice sheet and because it’s been removed, there’s less resistance to the flow of the ice sheet into the ocean, so as a glaciologist I would expect the glacier to speed up a little bit and that will contribute a modest increase to sea level rise.

SHARP: And in terms of other impacts I think one of the things that really scares people is the idea that this huge chunk of ice could hit ships or oil rigs.

BINDSCHADLER: It doesn’t move too fast, but you don’t want to get in its way. It’s likely to get caught up in the circulation in the Arctic Ocean and move around for many years.

SHARP: How do you think of the future of the arctic when you think about it? If there’s more ice melts and that means more human activity up there in terms of exploration, numbers of boats. Do you have a kind of nightmarish picture of too much stuff all going different directions and one bumping into the next?

BINDSCHADLER: Yes, I would say it’s disturbing to think about what the near-term future is of the arctic because it’s really chaotic up there. So everybody in the world should kind of keep an eye out on how disruptive climate change is to the northern societies because that’s a harbinger of things to come for everybody on the planet.

SHARP: Dr. Robert Bindschadler is a senior fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Scientists know of serious threats to frog species across the globe.  They’re vanishing from many areas, though the exact cause is in question.  It could be disease or habitat destruction.  Now a study published by the Journal of Science suggests the world’s lizards are in peril because of climate change.  The World’s Science Correspondent, Rhitu Chatterjee has the story.

RHITU CHATTERJEE:  The European common lizard is a slender creature with a brown back and brightly colored belly.  And as its name implies, it’s found across Europe.  In the 1980′s scientists had documented the lizards in many parts of the Pyrenees mountain range in France.  But when ecologist Barry Sinervo of UC Santa Cruz went back to those locations in the 1990′s, he was surprised by what he found.

BARRY SINERVO:  I was in fact shocked.  They were extinct at many locations.

CHATTERJEE: Sinervo couldn’t find an obvious reason why the lizards had vanished from these areas.  The lizards do still live in some parts of the Pyrenees and the sites where they went extinct were pristine; undisturbed by development.  But there was something different about the areas that had lost their lizards.

SINERVO: They were all concentrated in the southern part of the range and at low elevation.

CHATTERJEE: In other words, these were relatively warm areas at the edge of the species range.  Maybe these areas were getting too warm.  Sinervo wondered if these lizards were dying off due to global warming.

SINERVO: So I thought well that’s interesting but it’s not like a global pattern.

CHATTERJEE: Then in 2006 Sinervo went to Mexico.  And he found the same pattern of local extinctions.  Mountain dwelling lizards were disappearing from the warmer edges of their ranges.  But was it really the heat that was killing them off?  Biologist Donald Miles of Ohio University examined that question.  He measured the air temperature of the sites where the lizards had vanished.  And indeed, for part of the year, these places were too hot for the lizards to survive.

DONALD MILES:  The extinct sites were thermally inhospitable so we got the smoking gun.

CHATTERJEE: Miles, Sinervo and their team wondered what these findings meant for lizards worldwide.  They scoured the literature for data on other lizards.  They applied what they had learned in Mexico and combined it with projections of future temperature increases.  And from that they made some predictions.  If nothing is done to curb global warming, nearly a fifth of all lizard species may go extinct by 2080.  Raymond Huey is a herpetologist at the University of Washington.  He calls the new study solid and important.

RAYMOND HUEY:  This is the first major paper to show that extinctions of lizards are not just for the future, but they’re here now.  I don’t think anyone had an appreciation of that on a global scale.

CHATTERJEE: And scientists say that it’s not just the lizards that are in trouble.  The problem is many species live in mountain ranges.  And as the temperature warms, these animals will have to move higher and higher up the mountains to find a more comfortable climate.  And soon, they could be left with nowhere else to go.  Stuart Pimm is a conservation biologist at Duke University.  He says the planet could warm by two degrees Celsius or more in the coming decades and that could cause large scale extinctions.

STUART PIMM:  The very substantial fraction of species around the world, maybe 25%, live within two degrees of their nearest mountain top, and that means those species are going to be in very serious trouble and it’s a very significant fraction of the world’s biodiversity.

CHATTERJEE: For now, these are only projections.  The big unknown is what the world will do to control the emissions that scientists say are already threatening species and entire ecosystems.  For The World, I’m Rhitu Chatterjee.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

DAVID BARON: I’m David Baron, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. The secretary general of the United Nations has begun a review of the way the UN’s climate science panel works. The inter-governmental panel on climate, or IPCC is a collaboration of thousands of scientists from around the globe. It won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work. But recently some people have been questioning its credibility. The World’s Katy Clark has more.

KATY CLARK: The IPCC’s massive 2007 report has been hammered by critics in recent months. They’ve seized on a number of small errors to challenge the credibility of the entire agency. In announcing the review yesterday, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon made it clear he believes that the science behind climate change remains solid.

BAN KI-MOON: The threat posed by climate change is real. Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change. Nor does it diminish the unique importance of the IPCC work.

KATY CLARK: But the secretary general acknowledged a few errors that had undermined public confidence in the IPCC. For instance, the agency failed to pick up a mistake in its estimate of how quickly the Himalayan glaciers are melting. So Ban Ki-Moon is turning to an independent panel to evaluate the IPCCS’s operations in hopes of avoiding such mistakes in the future. IPCC chairman R.K. Pachauri says he welcomes the review.

R.K. PACHAURI: In recent months, we have seen some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that, and we are doing something about it.

KATY CLARK: The review will be led by the head of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Robbert Dijkgraaf.

ROBBER DIJKGRAAF: What we have been asked to look at is the general way in which the IPCC works. So it’s processes and procedures, and management structure, the way it deals with peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed literature. How it communicates. So, it’s actually a very broad task. And we also have been asked to see how the approaches towards errors, how they can be avoided. All in all it will be future looking review.

KATY CLARK: That all sounds good to Roger Pielke Junior.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: I guess I’m in the unique position of being one of researchers who publishes in the peer-reviewed literature who has seen his work misrepresented by the IPCC.

KATY CLARK: Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He says the IPCC’s last report came to erroneous conclusions on the links between rising temperatures and the costs of natural disasters. Pielke doesn’t want to speculate why the IPCC didn’t correct its mistake.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: The reasons for the breakdowns in process don’t matter so much as that they’re recognized and changes are made to the policies and procedures of the institution, so they don’t happen again. It’s inevitable that there will be mistakes in a report as massive and as ambitious as the IPCC, but if the institution’s incapable of responding in an effective manner, then institution has some credibility problems.

KATY CLARK: Pielke says he’s cautiously optimistic that the review will address those problems. Oceanographer Katherine Richardson is a climate advisor to the Danish government. She’s also happy that a third party will be reviewing the IPCC’s work. But she harbors no illusions that the review will satisfy people who believe climate change isn’t real.

KATHERINE RICHARDSON: There’s still people saying same thing about evolution. So it would be naïve to believe that this discussion is going to go away simply because we do look at the way IPCC works.

KATY CLARK: The review panel will try to finish its work by August. That would give the IPCC time to implement any recommendations before it begins work on its next report. For The World, this is Katy Clark.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

In Dhaka the best form of transportation is often a bicycle rickshaw.

Grossman: Bangladesh is crowded. It has a population greater than Russia’s crammed into a space the size of Louisiana. And water is never far away here. The nation sits on a broad coastal plain that’s just above sea level. Civil engineer Ainun Nishat says the country’s geography puts the dense population at risk.

Ainun Nishat: “Bangladesh is nature’s laboratory on natural disaster. We have floods, we have droughts, we have heat waves, we have river bank erosion, we have storm surges, we have cyclones. “

Grossman: And global warming will make things worse, he says. Sea level is expected to rise two or three feet this century. To complicate matters, while the sea is rising, the land is sinking. You see Bangladesh sits on a big delta. This land was built up over thousands of years by sediment washing down the region’s major rivers to their mouths at the Bay of Bengal. But those rivers don’t deposit the sediment on land as they used to. They’ve been constrained by earthen embankments that force the sediment, about a billion tons a year, directly to the sea. Geographer Maminul Haque Sarker says without fresh sediment building up on land, the soil is compacting – it’s sinking – and the country is becoming even more vulnerable to sea level rise.

Maminul Haque Sarker: “If you can manage the sediment better — better way, then it can mitigate some of your losses due to climate change.”

Grossman: That’s what some in Bangladesh are now trying to do… manage the sediment better.

Boats of all sizes and shapes are the used for transport and commerce throughout the waterlogged delta.

Grossman: A heavy-set man in pressed pants and a polo shirt is driving his car through the outskirts of Khulna, the third-largest city in Bangladesh. Shafiqul Islam is director of a small college, a former locally-elected official, and founder of the Pani or water-committee, a grassroots farmers’ rights group. He’s riding an a straight road on the crest of a dike along one of thousands of small rivers that criss-cross the delta. The water is murky, rich with soil washed down from the Himalayas.

Shafiqul Islam: “You need to understand, this is the river, and that is the farmland. Now you can see that the river is full of sediment.”

Grossman: The area around the river was once a mangrove forest. And though more than 50 miles from the sea, it’s so low and flat that the tide used to overflow the low banks of natural channels and flood nearly the entire region with mucky water. In the 1960′s, at the behest of the government, international aid organizations began constructing a system of dikes to create permanent river channels and stop the natural flooding. Islam says it was an attempt to protect farmers who grow rice here.

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul Islam: “Because in our country we always think that the Western countries’ manners are very good and they are very knowledgeable, they know everything. But we are very poor countries, we don’t have vast knowledge, we don’t have good engineers here and therefore we have to invite engineers from outside.”

Grossman: But channelizing the rivers robbed the surrounding land of fresh soil. In a matter of decades, once-productive rice paddies had sunk so low they could no longer be drained into the river, which is necessary to farm rice. So the paddies became stagnant and infertile. People had no food.

Shafiqul Islam and others proposed a radical idea: cut the dikes, and let silty water flow onto the farmland for a few years to replenish the depleted paddies. Water officials rebuffed their suggestion. So in 1997, a band of frustrated farmers defied the government and did just that – breached the embankment.

Shafiqul Islam: “There were many police and government officials present while we cut the channel. But thousands and thousands of people were there to help us, and we did it.”

Grossman: As an estimated 20,000 farmers watched, a team of men hacked a hole in the dike with shovels.

Shafiqul Islam: “A huge amount of water went to the wetland side with silt. After the high tide is in full, the water remains stagnant for about 15 or 20 minutes, and at this time, the silt is deposited in the wetland.”

Grossman: The plan to save the paddies outside the city of Khulna worked. In three years the land had collected four feet of new silt. Rice flourishes here once again. Government officials now agree that selectively opening dikes for a new dose of sediment is a good idea. They’ve done it themselves in other areas.

Ainun Nishat: “This is something which is working. And we are champion of it.”

Grossman: Civil engineer Ainun Nishat, who has advised Shafiqul Islam, says although the purpose of cutting the dike in 1997 was to improve agriculture, his country could use the same method to raise the level of the land and protect it from the slow advance of the sea.

Ainun Nishat: “We are pushing the government to do it more effectively. We find the government not doing it with the proper enthusiasm it should receive.

Grossman: Bangladesh does plan to breach more embankements. And other low-lying regions are also exploring this idea. Earlier this year the state of Louisiana announced that it will try restoring sinking wetlands by redirecting sediment from the Mississippi River. But Sheikh Nural Ala, an official with Bangladesh’s Water Development Board, says this technique alone won’t save his people from rising seas.

Sheikh Nural Ala

Grossman: A permanent solution, Ala says, will likely involve a mix of techniques – including selective flooding of some areas, and using accumulated sediment to build higher dikes. And a new study says such measures are urgently needed. The study found that most of the world’s major deltas are sinking… and as the sea rises, flooding in these areas could increase 50% this century – putting tens of millions of people at added risk.

For The World, I’m Daniel Grossman, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Daniel Grossman’s reporting in Bangladesh is part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s climate change initiative. It was supported by the Kendeda Fund, Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation, Barbara Smith Fund, Whole Systems Foundation and Abby Rockefeller & Lee Halprin and 7th Generation Incorporated.

Attention is likely to focus on Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is expected to unveil new steps to tackle emissions. The summit in Copenhagen is aimed at approving a global climate change treaty. Negotiators are trying to agree on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon emissions. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports

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