Hello again, back-to-back editions of the Green Gazette this week as we’ve had to perform a little schedule juggling. Not to worry as I’m never at a loss for news relating to the environment - there’s always breaking news, great inventions and innovative ideas to read about so I’ll serve up more for you to peruse.

I had meant to write about this last week as I found it to be a fascinating story and also one for the ostrich community. You know who the Ostriches are, they’ll often say: global warming is unproven, these cycles have always occurred, what man does will not impact the environment, it was warmer in the 1100’s that it is now. I’m not one of those and I have always put my trust in science and armed with that knowledge I trust what science is reporting. Whether you want to assess the frequency of very violent storms, the growing level of extreme flood and droughts globally, reduced mountains snow run offs, the changes that are rapidly impacting the two poles and so much more. I feel that the ostriches tend to simply say “It’s colder than last winter - so much for global warming”. The scientific fact is that global warming creates so many measurable changes above and beyond actual temperature, many of which I’ve touched on above. More importantly as a global community we need to ask if our governments, corporations and even next door neighbours can slow the change - or perhaps reverse it. Those are the questions I’d like answered - those are the choices we all need to measure and hopefully make the right decision. I believe climate change is real - it won’t take East Anglia in England (where I grew up) and Holland needing to be under 8 feet of the North Sea (as predicted for later this century) to convince me that it is a legitimate issue. Perhaps ask the next ostrich that you meet what would it take for them to believe in climate change?

So what sparked me on this topic today? It was the icebergs heading on a trip North to New Zealand that made me write, if you haven’t followed this story it has been a 3 week odyssey for the giant masses of ice. Around Nov 12 several hundred large icebergs were spotted traveling North having broken off from the coast of Antarctica. Shipping alerts were posted through much of the region as many of the icebergs were huge (some over 500 yards wide, towering in excess of 100 feet above the waterline). During the middle weeks of the month the clusters of icebergs continued the journey North and came within 150 miles of New Zealand’s South Island. Icebergs this large have rarely been recorded that far North in modern science journals and the consensus of opinion was extreme climate change had caused such a large armada of ice to break off in such a short period of time. As it turned out strong winds drove the flotilla off course (not that they ‘had’ a course) and they are now melting to the East of New Zealand. A fascinating story and more to ponder - let’s hope for our Kiwi friends that this doesn’t become an annual issue!

Please read more about this story at the New York Times, ABC News and CNN. Or just play the video.

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Tags: antarctica, CNN, drought, flood, global warning, iceberg, New York Times, new zealand iceberg, ocean levels, planet forward, Planet Forward tips, rising sea levels

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