Tag: Global warming

Sanity out of insanity

Dogs are such a great metaphor!

There’s no question that when one stays very still and closely watches a dog’s behaviour you see an amazing level of awareness.  Even when they appear to be deeply asleep anything sensed by their ‘being’ is registered immediately.  A small tale, by way of example.  Many years ago when Pharaoh and I lived in the Devon village of Harberton, we  frequently shopped in the town of Totnes, just 3 miles away.  Many times, I would be walking up the High Street with Pharaoh nicely to heel being passed by many people walking the opposite way on the same pavement.

Totnes High Street

Every once in a while, during the fraction of time that it took for someone to pass us by, Pharaoh would utter a low, throatal growl without even slowing his pace.  I always presumed that something, way beyond my level of consciousness, had disturbed Pharaoh during that instant of time.

Real awareness, or if you prefer, consciousness is not some touchy/feely concept but a true understanding about just what the heck is going on.

So do watch the following video of Peter Russell discussing Rediscovering Ourselves; it’s very relevant.

Then have a read of a couple of items on Peter’s website.  The first is about runaway climate change, and here’s an extract,

Runaway Climate Change

The most dangerous aspect of global warming.

Global Warming is bad enough. Over the last hundred years, average global temperatures have increased by 0.75°C, one third of that rise occurring in the last twenty years. The 2007 report by The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that, by 2090, temperatures will have risen between 2 and 6 degrees.

Even a two degree rise in temperature would be disastrous. Changes in climate will lead to more intense storms, longer periods of drought, crop failures in many developing countries, the destruction of nearly all the coral reefs, the melting of much of the polar ice, the flooding of many low-lying urban areas, the possible collapse of the Amazonian rain forest, and the extinction of 20-30% of the planet’s species. The IPCC projects that this could happen by 2050.

If the temperature were to rise by six degrees, the prognosis is extremely bleak. At this temperature, the entire planet will be ice-free. Sea levels will rise by 70 meters. Many species of tiny plankton will cease to exist, and the problem would echo up the food chain, bringing the extinction of many fish, sea mammals, and the largest whales. Much of the land will now be desert. Hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity will bring widespread ecological devastation. If, as is possible, the ozone layer were destroyed, the burning ultraviolet light could make life on land impossible. Evolution would have been set back a billion years. It would be a planetary catastrophe.

Read the rest of that essay here.  Now on to the next extract, from here,

The Under-rated Approach to Carbon Reduction

As critical as it is to reduce future carbon emissions, it is equally critical, perhaps even more critical, to get much of the CO2 that as already been released—and which is responsible for the current warming—out of the atmosphere and back into the ground where it belongs.

This approach, known as carbon capture and sequestration, has until now been largely ignored, and for several reasons. The atmosphere is so huge, it would seem to be an impossible task. There are possible technologies, but they are not nearly so well-developed as alternative energy sources. Many are still only ideas on paper. Where technologies of carbon capture have been developed they are mostly for capturing CO2 from smokestacks. Valuable as this may be, it is still dealing with the problem of future carbon emissions. What we need are technologies that will remove from the atmosphere the carbon that we already emitted, and then sequestrate it (put it away) in a stable form.

It is to this end that Sir Richard Branson announced his $25 million prize (Virgin Earth Challenge) for technologies that could capture a billion tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere (about one tenth of what we now release each year). Nor is it just Richard Branson who believes we must make this an equally important approach to the problem. His team includes Al Gore, James Lovelock, Sir Crispin Tickell (former UK ambassador to the UN), and James Hansen, the head climate scientist at NASA).

Again, the full article, a ‘must-read, in my opinion, is here.

It is really about awareness!  Dogs have so much to teach us!

Global climate confusion, ongoing

Herman Daly, Ph.D, makes some very powerful points at his keynote address to the AMS workshop on Federal Climate Policy, 13th November, 2007.

Note: This video is only the first 8 minutes from what is clearly a longer address.  I have struggled to find the subsequent parts of this address, although there appear to be other versions of the address on YouTube.  However, the points raised in these first few minutes are compelling,

  • Complexity stifles policy
  • The danger of overwhelming the decision of what to do now
  • Leave it until it’s perfectly clear and the likelihood is that it will be too late
Enjoy this most stimulating speech.
If you are stimulated to dig a little deeper into Hermon E. Daly here are some snippets I came across.

Herman Daly’s Ecological Economics – An Introductory Note

By John Attarian

Mainstream opinion has it that economic growth, the democratization of affluence, and ever-increasing consumption are the formula for individual and social happiness. A thoughtful and well-informed minority emphatically disagrees. Few have contributed more to this dissent than Herman E. Daly, widely regarded as the founding father of ecological economics.

Born in 1938, Daly earned his B.A. at Rice University (1960) and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University (1967). From 1968 to 1988 he taught economics at Louisiana State University. Then he served as Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Environmental Department until 1994, when he became a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs, his current position.

As a graduate student, Daly believed that growth would solve mankind’s problems, but three experiences radically transformed his outlook. He studied under the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994), whose book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) explained the decisive economic importance of the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law) in a closed system, the availability of useful energy always declines. Georgescu-Roegen argued that the economic process transforms natural resources into waste — that is, transforms matter-energy from a state of low entropy into a state of high entropy. Georgescu-Roegen’s great contribution, Daly observes, was “reuniting economics with its biophysical foundations.” Teaching in Brazil in the late 1960s, Daly observed explosive population growth firsthand. Reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was also influential.

Wrong to publish more but if this catches your eye, then the full article is here.  Oh, perhaps I can just include the last two paragraphs of John Attarian’s fine piece ….

Daly co-founded the scholarly journal Ecological Economics in 1989 and still serves as an associate editor. His thought is slowly attracting appreciative notice, and some honors have come his way. For the Common Good won the 1991 Grawenmeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and in 1996 Daly received the Honorary Right Livelihood Award and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Heineken Prize for Environmental Science.

Integrating theology, ethics, science, and economics, Daly’s ecological economics is the kind of comprehensive vision we too seldom see, and one of the most important and promising intellectual developments of our time. Our selection of Daly’s works is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to his thought. May he find the audience he deserves.

Global climate confusion, part two.

More on the many and varied approaches to this complex subject.  Again, a long piece which, dear reader, I hope you will stay with.

As I wrote in response to Per Kurowski’s comment on yesterday’s Part One of this article, ” I am reminded of the saying that in war the first casualty is truth. It ‘feels’a lot like that in this scenario.”

Part Two isn’t attempting to indicate the truth, just the many opinions out there.

First, let me quote an email that Patrice sent to me late last night,

Hi Paul!

I think that the propaganda from the fossil fuel and other feudal plutocracies have confused the issue. The primary problem is not “climate change” (aka planetary heating/broiling).I am not confused, because it’s NOT about climate change. Climate change is a second order effect. It may, or may not happen, short term.

The gist of my essay is that climate change will NOT happen, short term, if the sun cools down spectacularly, as it did TWICE in the last five centuries (~ Little Ice Age).

The way to look at things correctly, thus, is CO2 POISONING. Even if the sun cooled down spectacularly, as I emphasized, the ACIDIFICATION of the oceans would proceed unabated. After killing the oceans, if the sun goes back to normal, the greenhouse would rebound enormously.

Although I did not speak of it in that particular essay, we now know the rate of CO2 in the atmosphere, through shell formation in the ocean, for at least 20 million years (and soon at least 100 million; the method should work for half a billion years!). Thus we know the level of CO2 equivalent is the highest in 20 million years (although some have claimed that transitory fluxes much higher than that have occured, from volcanoes; that would not be a problem, as a high flux does not allow storage in the oceans!)

Feel free to quote from this, I just thought of this formulation now, and it may help clarify matters (and it is clearly the idea of the essay).  BTW, let me emphasize that my essay explains why FLOODING, by no means certain on a proxymal massive scale, is, however a clear possibility. London under water seems even a near certainty on the scale of a century (but for enormous works, requiring huge energy!)

Patrice

OK, a useful footnote to yesterday’s piece.  But then if one goes back to Patrice’s original article on his Blog on 31st May, 2009 and reads the comments, you find this, (and I’m going to quote entirely from Mr Day’s comments).

Barry Day says

(QUOTE)What does this mean? We should be cooling down, because the sun’s output has been going down as much as an astounding 6% in some frequencies. But, nevertheless, the lower troposphere has been warming up (END QUOTE)

Ever heard of lag?

“New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.”

“This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.”  From Pysorg.com of November 10th, 2009.

Then Barry Day looks at earthquakes,

From EARTHQUAKES – WHAT ARE THE LONG TERM TRENDS?

“Apart from the “long-term” trends shown above, which show an ongoing persistent increase, it is perhaps more stark to record that earthquakes across the planet show a marked increase in activity since 1997. There are more major earthquakes occurring now, and this on an ever more frequent basis.”

From Worldwide Earthquakes [Magnitude 6 to 9.9] have increased by 47 percent in under 3 decades

“A total of  1,085 earthquakes measuring magnitude 6 or greater occurred between 1980 to 1989, averaging 109 per year over the decade. In the 1990s the decadal total increased to 1,492 averaging at 149 major earthquake  per year over the period.

Since January 1, 2000 [ see table below for the date and time] a total of 1,438 major earthquakes have so far occurred worldwide raising the annual total over the last 9 years to 160 with more than 12 and a half months to go to the decade’s end.

The increase from 109 to 160 major earthquakes per year in the 1980 to 2008 period translates to a rise  of 47 percent in just under three decades.” [This reference is dated December 13th, 2008, before the Japanese earthquake, Ed.]

The Barry Day goes on to highlight these references,

From MISTAKES IN IPCC GLOBAL WARMING CALCULATIONS

Abstract
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007. Here we show that the accurate value for climate sensitivity is 0.277 K/(W/m^2), which is 3 times smaller than the generally accepted value of 0.8 K/(W/m^2). Thus the climate change on doubling CO2 from 300 ppm to 600 ppm will be 1.0 degree, not 3 degrees. Because the IPCC data show that doubling CO2 will not double absorption of infrared radiation, the Beer-Lambert law is not being followed, because of diminishing returns after more-than-50% absorption.

[This is an extremely difficult essay for a non-scientist to follow.  All I can do is to include the source of the article, as below, Ed.]

This article by Roger Taguchi, 234 Knox Crescent, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 0K8, e-mail address rtaguchi@sympatico.ca, was posted on Monday Aug. 31, 2009.

Then just a small selection from other items posted by Barry (to see the full extent of Barry’s comments, do go to Patrice’s original post here).

Scientists stumble across huge underwater mountain 29 May 09 – Marine scientists have discovered a massive underwater volcano off Indonesia’s western coast. The 4,600m (15,000ft) mountain spans 30 miles at its base, with its summit some 1,300 meters below the surface. Its discovery was “completely unexpected.”
————–
Galapagos volcano erupts – lava flowing into the ocean 12 Apr 09 – Again, we have 2,150-degree lava pouring into the ocean – ten times the boiling point – and we keep blaming humans for heating the seas.
————–
Underwater volcano building new mountain 7 May 09 – “An active underwater volcano near the island of Guam erupts so frequently that it has built a new cone 131ft high (13 stories) and 984ft wide in just three years.
————–
Undersea volcanic eruption in Tonga heating the water? 19 Mar 09 – Sea Surface Temperature (SST) maps show a warm anomaly in the Tonga that extends off to the east. Is that a result of the underwater volcano, or just a coincidence?
————–
Underwater volcano erupts off Tonga 19 Mar 09 – Spectacular columns of steam and smoke spewed out of the seaabout 6 miles (10 km) from the main island of Tongatapu – an area where up to36 undersea volcanoes are clustered. Large
amounts of pumice from the volcanowill likely clog beaches on the southern coast of nearby Fiji islands shortly.
————–
Global warming may be caused by underwater volcanoes (Which I’ve been saying for years) 8 Dec 08 – A new study shows that the rise in land temperatures can be tied directly to increased heat and humidity coming from warmer oceans, which in turn may be caused solely by natural forces, including underwater volcanoes.
————–
Ocean Floor Geysers Warming The Seas (And we wonder why the oceans are warming) 22 Sep 08 – “It’s like finding Old Faithful in Illinois. When we went out to try to get a feel for how much heat was coming from the ocean floor and
how much sea water might be moving through it, we found that there was much more heat than we expected at the outcrops.”
————–
Geothermal heat may be melting the Greenland glaciers Nov 2007 – “Hansen’s model is wrong! In reality, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point.
————–
World’s deepest chain of undersea volcanoes to be explored 1 Sep 08 — Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre are set to explore the world’s deepest undersea volcanoes five kilometers beneath the Caribbean.
————–
‘Black smokers’ found in Arctic Ocean 4 Aug 08 – Jets of searingly hot water spewing up from the sea floor have been discovered in a far-northern zone of the Arctic Ocean, Swiss-based scientists announced Monday.
————–
Boiling Hot Water Found in Frigid Arctic Sea 24 Jul 08 – “Many miles inside the Arctic Circle, scientists have found
vents of scalding liquid rising out of the seafloor at temperatures that are more than twice the boiling point of water.
————–
Undersea volcanic activity blamed for mass extinction 93 million years ago 16 Jul 08 – Researchers from the University of Alberta, Canada, find evidence of underwater volcanism in rocks dating to a mass extinction 93 million years ago.
————–
Huge Underwater Volcanoes in the Arctic Ocean, but scientists see no significant connection to melting ice? 27 Jun 08 – The eruptions discharge large amounts of carbon dioxide, helium, trace metals and heat into the water over long distances, but scientists see no significant connection to melting ice.
————–
Giant Undersea Volcano Found Off Iceland (And we wonder why the oceans are warming) 22 Apr 08 – It’s an active volcano that rises about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) above the surrounding sections, coming within 1,300 feet (400 meters) of the surface.
————–
Hawaiian volcano pumping more lava than usual into the ocean 5 Jul 08 – The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said Saturday that Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano is pumping more lava than usual into the ocean.
————–
Magma May Be Melting Greenland Ice
18 Dec 07 – I added another article to this posting
13 Dec 07 – Scientists have found at least one natural-magma hotspot under the Greenland Ice Sheet where heat from Earth’s insides could seep through,
————–
Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing volcanoes 25 Jun 08 – Red-hot magma has been rising from deep inside the earth
and blown the tops off dozens of submarine volcanoes, four kilometers below the ice. And we wonder what is melting the ice.
————–
Underwater Volcanic Eruptions, Not Meteor, May Have Killed Dinosaurs New discovery validates theories in Not by Fire but by Ice 30 Oct 07 – “A series of monumental volcanic eruptions in India may have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, not a meteor impact in the Gulf of Mexico.

Then Barry adds another comment,

We’ve forgotten that this isn’t the first time our seas have warmed. Sea temperatures also shot upward 10º to 18ºF just prior to the last ice age.

As the oceans warmed, evaporation increased. The excess moisture then fell to the ground as giant blizzards, giant storms and floods (Noah’s Deluge type floods), and a new ice age began.

The same thing is happening today.

It’s not global warming, it’s ocean warming, and humans have nothing to do with it. Our seas are being heated, I believe, by underwater volcanism. Here’s why:

We are living in a period of vastly increased volcanism, said Dixy Lee Ray in her 1993 book Environmental Overkill, the greatest in 500 years. Eighty percent of all volcanism (say experts at NOAA) occurs underwater. Therefore, underwater volcanism should also be the greatest in 500 years.

Our seas, heated by underwater volcanism, are leading us directly into the next ice age . . . and we don’t even know it.
That’s what El Niño is all about. Warmer seas send excess moisture into the sky, leading to increased precipitation.
Worldwide flood activity is the worst since before Christopher Columbus. In Poland, it’s the worst in several thousand years. In the U.S., precipitation has increased 20 percent just since 1970. This is no coincidence.

When that precipitation begins falling in the winter, you have the makings of an ice age.

Here are some further references,

From the Nature website of 29th March, 2001,

South America’s oldest trees give up the ghost of climate past.

They’ve been dead for over 50,000 years, but South America’s longest-living trees still have a few tales to tell. A new study of the growth rings of partially fossilized trees in southern Chile hints that the global climate before the last ice age was rather like today’s.

Barry mentions Kavachi Island and I did a quick search and came up with this.

From Wikipedia,

Kavachi is one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the south-west Pacific Ocean. Located south of Vangunu Island in the Solomon Islands, it is named after a sea god of the New Georgia Group islanders, and is also referred to locally as Rejo te Kavachi (“Kavachi’s oven’). The volcano has become emergent and then been eroded back into the sea at least eight times since its first recorded eruption in 1939.

In May 2000, an international research team aboard the CSIRO research vessel FRANKLIN fixed the position of the volcano at 8° 59.65’S, 157° 58.23’E. At that time the vent of the volcano was below sea level, however frequent eruptions were ejecting molten lava up to 70m above sea level, and sulfurous steam plumes up to 500m. The team mapped a roughly conical feature rising from 1,100 m water depth, with the volcano having a basal diameter of about 8 km.

When the volcano erupted in 2003, a 15-meter-high island formed above the surface, but it disappeared soon after. Additional eruptive activity was observed and reported in March 2004 and April 2007.

Kavachi erupting May 14th, 2000.

Barry then looks as CO2 levels, he writes,

Carbon dioxide
If today’s rising carbon dioxide are caused by humans, what caused the dramatic rise in CO2 levels at the dinosaur extinction?

It was a matter of a moment’s search to find this, from Ice Age Now, Home Page here

If today’s rising carbon dioxide are caused by humans, then what caused the dramatic rise in CO2 levels at the dinosaur extinction? 

Research shows that there was “a sudden and dramatic rise” in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere at the dinosaur extinction of 65 million years ago. A recent report attributes the rise in CO2 levels to an asteroid impact.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2038599.stm

I disagree. I think today’s rise in CO2 levels can be attributed to our warming oceans. After all, the oceans are known as a carbon dioxide “sink,” especially when the water is cold. 

But as the water warms up, it releases CO2 into the atmosphere. This happens in much the same way that a warm bottle of home-brewed root beer will release CO2. And if you give that CO2 no way to escape, the bottle will explode.

We’ve got it backwards. We’ve got cause and effect in reverse.

The CO2 is not causing global warming. Instead, our warming oceans are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.

It’s not global warming, it’s ocean warming, and it’s leading us into an ice age.

Finally, Barry offers this,

No Global Warming
“Even with needed corrections, data still don’t show the expected signature of global warming,” says Dr. Roy Spencer, Senior Scientist for Climate Studies NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.

Unfortunately, the URL that Barry included didn’t function.  But a quick search on the NASA website came up with this,

Contrary Thermometers

Scientists are working to understand why the lower atmosphere isn’t heating up as fast as some global warming models predict.

July 21, 2000 — The question sounds like a Zen koan: How could the globe be warming and not warming at the same time?

That’s the riddle posed to climatologists by satellite and radiosonde data which show that while the Earth’s surface has been warming over the past decades, the lowest layer of the atmosphere shows a weaker warming trend.

The measurements are surprising, because computer simulations of the world’s climate predict that the two lowest layers of the atmosphere — which together form the “troposphere” — should be warming faster than the Earth’s surface.

Read the full article here.  It’s well worth reading and concludes with these closing paragraphs,

Current models suffer from several shortcomings.

For example, clouds are not well represented by the models. The resolution of current models is too coarse for features as small as clouds, Spencer said. Yet clouds clearly play a crucial role in climate due to their influence on humidity, precipitation and albedo (the percentage of solar energy reflected back into space as light).

“The role of clouds is still regarded as one of the biggest uncertainties in global warming predictions,” Spencer said.

The ability of plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the role of soils have only recently been added to the models, and scientists aren’t confident yet of how the models portray these factors, Spencer said.

“While we know that vegetation takes up some of the carbon dioxide we generate from burning of fossil fuels, how that sink of carbon will change in the future is still pretty uncertain,” Spencer said.

Climate models are also limited by the computing power available.

“The global models would be much better if computers were much faster,” Spencer said. “Instead, a lot of approximations are made to make the models simple enough to do climate simulations over the whole globe.

“Unfortunately,” Spencer continued, “we know that many of the processes that are crudely represented are quite non-linear, and so have the potential to respond in unexpected ways.”

The Global Hydrology and Climate Center is a joint venture between government and academia to study the global water cycle and its effect on Earth’s climate. Jointly funded by NASA and its academic partners, and jointly operated by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the Center conducts research in a number of critical areas.

Web Links

Global Hydrology and Climate Center — a joint venture between government and academia to study the global water cycle and its effect on Earth’s climate

Measuring the Temperature of Earth From SpaceEven with needed corrections, data still don’t show the expected signature of global warming

December 1997 is Coldest Month on Record in the Stratosphere

Is Earth’s Temperature Up or Down or Both?Scientist’s investigate reasons for temperature trend “disagreements” between layers of the atmosphere

schematic of layers of Earth’s atmosphere

Java tool for global atmospheric temperature mapsexamine atmospheric temperature features

The Global Hydrology and Climate Center

OK, that’s enough from me for today.  Clearly it would take a great time for a layman, such as yours truly, to go through all this material, and more, to determine the truth of it all, to the very best abilities of science.  For the verdict on whether man’s increased generation of CO2 in the atmosphere is having a global effect on the global climate should be in the hands of scientists.

Once science has shown cause and effect then, and only then, should politicians endeavour to offer the way forward for society.

Having said that, there is no reason at all for mankind to maintain the present disconnect from Planet Earth.  Even if the jury is still well and truly out in terms of the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere, the number of other issues that are just as important for our long-term survival are still prodigious.  There’s an old saying in aviation, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt.”

Global climate confusion, part one

This is a long theme that is being broken down into two posts.  Hope you can stay with it because it seems to me to represent how difficult it can be, when the topic is complex with significant implications for society, to determine the truth of an issue.

To set my own position clear, I have for many years taken it more or less for granted that mankind, through the mechanisms of increased population, increased standards of living and increased use of carbon-based fuels must be having a deleterious effect on the planet’s atmosphere.

Indeed, there have been a number of articles on Learning from Dogs that support that position of mine.  However, my dear friend Dan Gomez sent me a piece that I published on the 16th. June under the heading of Always two sides.  Frankly, I was still a little sceptical.

Then on the 22nd June, I published an account about the increasing quietness of the sun which, at the end, included a quotation from Dr Frank Hill,  “It is unfortunate that the global warming/cooling studies have become so politically polarizing.” H’mm, I thought, what is it that Dr. Hill sees that causes him to write this way?

Then another good friend of Learning from Dogs, Patrice Ayme, reminded me that he had written a comprehensive article on his own Blog about the apparent enigma of the sun cooling while at the same time the ice caps were melting.  Ah ha, I thought, a thoughtful and erudite explanation that while it was complex we are still in a phase of climate change (i.e. warming) most likely caused by man.  Patrice gave me permission to reproduce his essay in full, which I so do below.

But then reading the comments sent in to Patrice’s original essay on the 31st May, 2009, I was set right back to the position of being very, very confused.  More about the confusion that exists tomorrow, but now here’s Patrice’s original essay.

SUN COOLING, ICE MELTING…

By Patrice Ayme

TWENTY FIVE  METERS SEA LEVEL RISE ALL TOO SOON FROM MELTING OF ANTARCTICA’S ICE BASINS?

How to enlighten the conversation with one picture worth 10,000 words. Watch the red line below, and how much it dips lately:

Synopsis: More than 98% of scientific papers considering the subject opine that recent human activities have warmed up the climate. But the percentage of the public who believe that is only around 55% … in the USA. This disbelief, far from being healthy, is related to the propaganda of big polluters, allowing the latter to avoid making the economy of the USA efficient (so they have less to do, avoid public inquiry, and make greater profits, while being beyond any suspicion).

One recent tactic of these sneaky types has been to talk about the sun and planets. The main argument they make is that the sun is acting up, thus allegedly causing the warming. Fair enough. Considering the sun is a must, indeed: there is plenty of evidence that the recent Little Ice Age was caused by a sort of Solar Winter. So let’s look at the sun: as the graph above shows, it is COOLING. The sun is cooling. The warming would have been much greater, had the sun not been so kind. Ooopss.

Other climate deniers made some noise about a recent cover article in Science that computed that the collapse of the WAIS (West Antarctica Ice Shield) would rise sea level by only 3.30 meters. But this article sort of cheats: reading its fine print shows that the rise would be rather be 3.80 meters, and it brazenly ignores all possible melting of part of the Antarctica Peninsula (contriving to do so by the not so subtle artifice that said peninsula is not  semantically part of the WAIS; however, the peninsula is more north and warmer, so, one ought to suspect, it would melt even more, as it has actually started to do!).

The authors in Science also ignore other mountainous regions of the WAIS itself, using, once again the artifice that being on land does not make them part of the WAIS, formally speaking,  since the WAIS is a shield, and nothing inclined is, although, of course, having deep blue sea all around the present mountainous areas of the WAIS would warm them up.

I then turn this argument around. Looking towards the east, and I ponder what could happen with East Antarctica. Answer: very serious trouble.

By the way, the expression “climate change” is misleading. The biosphere is attacked in all ways by the rise in Greenhouse Gases, and not just by direct warming. It is losing the battle quickly. Changes that have happened before in millions of years are now happening in decades, so biological species cannot adapt through migration, and, or, biological evolution.

Half of the CO2 recently produced has sunk into the ocean, where it reacted with water to make carbonic acid. So millions of species of the plancton, many making oxygen, are dissolving in an acid prepared by the average American household and its refusal to endure a stiff carbon tax. Moreover entire zones within the oceans have warmed so much that they lost enough oxygen to support life as we know it (most sea species are highly sensitive to tiny temperature variations). And as evolution presently knows it. These gigantic zones are now dead: life does not have time to evolve species adapted to this new environment. What is going on is a BIOSPHERICAL CATASTROPHE, as a result of stuffing life’s environment with 400 million years of carbon deposits.

——————–

SOLAR INPUT:

No climate change discussion can be considered complete without considering the sun. This is one point greenhouse deniers have been making. It is indeed extremely correct.

Greenhouse deniers have been loudly proclaiming, that because some planets (Mars, Pluto) are warming (perhaps), then the sun has got to be warming. This argument can be put to rest: Mars and Pluto’s climates are dominated by astronomical and peculiar factors (see notes).

And, unfortunately for greenhouse deniers, the sun output has been slowing down, as the graph below shows.

What does this mean? We should be cooling down, because the sun’s output has been going down as much as an astounding 6% in some frequencies. But, nevertheless, the lower troposphere has been warming up (while the stratosphere, robbed of heat by the greenhouse blanket BELOW it, has been cooling, a predicted effect of the greenhouse; this warming at low elevation accompanied by a cooling higher up shows that the observed changes of temperatures are due to a greenhouse, not just a global change in solar output).

Thus the warming of recent times is indeed caused by greenhouse warming, as humans augmented greenhouse gases by more than fifty percent in 150 years. Notice that in the graph above that we are reaching a local minimum of solar output, and that solar output should soon increase again in the next 11 years cycle.

Another tactic has been for some greenhouse deniers to turn into outright friends of the greenhouse, and claim that we were spared a new ice age from the human induced greenhouse. (That many people living in the Arctic will love the considerable heating the poles will experience is only natural though.)

Indeed, some scientists have speculated that herding augmented the production of methane during the Neolithic, thus preventing the cooling that would otherwise have happened. Methane is a very strong greenhouse gas. Basically Neolithic man killed the carnivores, and reduced the forests, so the herbivores would have plenty to munch on, and the herbivores became more numerous. As they did, the worldwide density of methane went up significantly, durably warming up the lower atmosphere.

Maybe. But that is not the point. The point is that we are doing GEOENGINEERING on our own planet, haphazardly, driven by short term profit and hubris. In particular what would happen if Mr. Sun would wake up, and produce as much output as it used to a few decades ago? Well, the gentle warming up would turn into outright swift heating.

(This being said, a lot of people living in high latitudes can only be pleased by polar heating: an entire world is opening up, and many of the big polluters know there are significant fossil fuel reserves around the poles, piled up there in warmer eons past…)

LUBRICATION, OR HOW TO LOSE AN ICE CAP:

A few years back, only the fringes of Greenland were melting in summer. The ice cap flowed majestically to the sea, at a sedate pace, through enormous flowing glaciers entering the sea. Greenland’s ice cap towers more than 3000 meters above sea level and the possibility of its melting sounded like bad science fiction.

In recent summers, though, up to half of Greenland has been melting, and “icequakes” have gone from about five a year in 1996 to around 30. In a typical icequake, a glacier the size of Manhattan, and 500 meters thick, slips by say ten meters in one minute (icequakes release their Richter 6 energy with lower frequency waves than the most destructive tectonic earthquakes, so one needs special seismographs to pick them up; although about half of the energy of the tsunami quake of 2004 was released that way, making the waves two-thirds as high as they would have been otherwise; hence that tsunami quake is viewed as 9.1 Richter, or 9.3 Richter, depending whether one counts the low frequency waves, or not…).

The reason for icequakes is undoubtedly lubrication by water gushing below the glaciers, having ended down there by what is called a moulin (a giant waterfall chute, up to twenty meters across and 3 kilometers deep). On the margins of Greenland, where the slope is strong, the glaciers avalanche down. Before 2000, glaciers on the West coast of Greenland had never done so. Now they do.

Interestingly, something a bit similar is found down south. Hundreds of lakes have been found under the main ice shield in Antarctica. They are most probably caused by geothermal heating, but they communicate with each other, and can propel (by appropriate swelling of their liquid mass) the ice shield above. That ice shield can be up to 4,000 meters thick. My point? One could imagine the same formation of moulins occurring down south (although there, right now temperatures, even in summer, oscillate between minus 50 Celsius and minus ten, so there are no dangers of lakes forming on the surface yet, as they now happen on the Greenland ice cap; such lakes can vanish into a newly formed moulin in minutes).

WHY GLACIATIONS COME AND GO, AND WHY IT’S GOING TO BE WARM FOR 50,000 YEARS:

One thing to know about Antarctica is that it was long covered with the same forests found nowadays in Patagonia. Trees and even dinosaurs (!) had adapted to the long nights. Glaciers were only found in the numerous high mountain ranges of the polar continent. In the last four million years, after 70 million years of steady cooling, perhaps because of the closing of the bridge between North and South America, and the rise of mighty mountain ranges, plus the opening of a circumpolar ocean which insulated Antarctica from the rest of the planet thermally, earth’s climate became much cooler. The apparition of glaciated poles was, most certainly, itself an accelerating cause of cooling. Sea level dropped 135 meters below the present level, as water ice gathered in colossal ice shields. Glaciations oscillated, between the poles and the temperate zones, as the parameters of earth’s orbit varied.

Joseph Alphonse Adhemar (1797 – 1862), a French mathematician, was the first to suggest that glaciations occurred from astronomical dispositions, in his 1842 book “Revolutions of the Sea”. Then the self educated Scottish scientist Croll, using Leverrier’s precise math (which had allowed him to discover Neptune) revealed the relationship between ice, albedo (that is the measure of how much sunlight is reflected back to space), and the eccentricity of earth’s orbit.

Croll suggested the basic idea of orbitally forced insolation variations influencing terrestrial temperatures. This comes from a geographical oddity, the fact that the continents of Earth are gathered up in the North. That allows support of enormous ice shields.

The sea does not allow support of huge iceshields, kilometers thick, as it is too warm (except in Antartica). Why the sea stays warm is another miracle, related to CO2 and volcanoes. Basically ice shields all over, as in “Snow Ball Earth”, lock up in the atmosphere CO2, bringing a strong greenhouse, which, in turn, melts the iceshields. A “Snow Ball Earth” related to the rise of complex life, is suspected to have occured a few times around 700 to 600 million years ago. So CO2, life, volcanoes, plate tectonic, active geology and temperature of the biosphere are tightly connected.

So, if not enough sun falls on those northern continents during summer, the ice from the preceding winter will not melt, and the continents will gather ice, and the ice will spread south, if it can.

This lack of sun exposure in summer will happen from celestial mechanics interacting with the inclination of the rotation axis of the earth. Croll’s work was widely discussed, but by the end of the 19th century, the theory was generally disbelieved. Much later, the Serbian Milutin Milankovitch further developed the theory that eventually triumphed in 1976, in modified form.

The bottom line is that the present astronomical calculations show that 65° North summer insolation should increase gradually over the next 25,000 years, and that no declines in 65° North summer insolation sufficient to cause an ice age are expected in the next 50,000 to 100,000 years.

Hence Earth should warm up for the next 50,000 years, an exceptionally long interglacial. [Berger A, Loutre MF (2002). “Climate: An exceptionally long interglacial ahead?”. Science 297: 1287–1288]

A DAMOCLES ICICLE, READY TO CRUSH US ALL: THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHIELD (WAIS)

The West Antarctic Ice Shield (WAIS) looks all white and solid from space, with a few huge mountains ranges coming out. Those mountains are, in truth, massive islands coming out of a frozen mass of fresh water that stands in place of the ocean. The WAIS connects the Antarctic peninsula, which goes north towards Patagonia, to the main part of the polar continent. The WAIS is covered with ice, it is made of ice. The crucial point, though, is that most of the rock supporting the solid ice of the WAIS is below sea level. It is a giant ice cube resting on what ought to be the bottom of the ocean.

The sea is out there, lapping against the boundary of the WAIS, which rests so heavily on the continent, that it pushes it down. The rocky boundary has no ice pushing it down, except a bit on the side, so it is not as low. Thus the rock below the WAIS forms a bowl that would be under water, if it were not under ice. That bowl is glued on its margin by ice. The surface oceanic water is salty, and would be below freezing if it were not so salty, thus it glues efficiently the margin of the WAIS, since the WAIS is made of freshwater, and thus freezes solid below zero Celsius. This system sounds contrived, and it is indeed a rather unstable arrangement.

Water has the curious property that it is denser at 4 degree Celsius (8 degrees Fahrenheit above the freezing point of pure water). Hence the sub freezing salty ocean water is above relatively warmer ocean water. If at some point some warm water can come in contact with the boundary of the WAIS, it could suddenly melt the sweet water ice of the WAIS at the margin, and then flow below the WAIS, melting it from below, and organizing some sort of satanic Carnot thermal engine with a strong circulation squeaking below, and accelerating the whole thing (it maybe how and why the ice shelves dislocate so fast, by the way: sudden circulation forming a thermal engine underneath, I would suggest).

From previous studies, it was widely assumed that the WAIS would cause a sea level rise of 5 meters if it melted. But an article in Science, May 15, 2009, claiming more precise radar telemetry, revisits the threat: “Theory has suggested that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be INHERENTLY UNSTABLE. Recent observations lend weight to this hypothesis. We reassess the potential contribution to eustatic and regional sea level from a rapid collapse of the ice sheet and find that previous assessments have substantially overestimated its likely primary contribution. We obtain a value for the global, eustatic sea-level rise contribution of about 3.3 meters, with important regional variations.”

The important regional variations have mostly to do with the rise of the local shores in West Antarctica: as the ice goes away, the continent rebounds. The authors count ONLY regions of where the bedrock slope is opposite to the glacial flow, a pointless restriction, in my not so humble opinion. Counting all regions below sea level, as they should have, the same authors find a rise of 3.8 meters. The authors also ignore the melting in the colossal mountainous islands that would be left, some as large as medium size countries.

THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHIELD (WAIS) IS ALL SET TO BREAK UP:

Temperatures have increased enormously in the polar regions (up to 5 degrees Celsius in some regions such as the Antarctica peninsula, although the overall planetary warming is only 0.75 C, less than one degree Celsius; some say only 0.4 degree Celsius!). This comes from the poles being the planet’s heat sinks: all the heat is sent there, as the greenhouse effect proceeds apace (another why little is being done about it, as temperate areas, where the deciders live, have barely warmed up).

This warming up at the poles has a very practical effect: the surface waters in Antarctica are in danger of reaching zero degree Celsius, the temperature at which fresh water ice melts. That means that the margin of the WAIS could come unglued, and warm ocean water could flow below it. In other words, we are within an easy warming reach of a WAIS catastrophe. Something like this happened to the ice shield over Hudson Bay, which dislocated very fast a few thousands years ago, as warm ocean water slipped below it. (I just suggested a mechanism for this otherwise unexplainable speedy break-up.)

COULD THE EAST ANTARCTIC ICE BASINS DISSOLVE TOO?

As if this looming WAIS disaster was not enough, there is another Damocles icicle hanging above the carbon banquet. A mechanism is revealed with a new actor, that I am perversely pleased to introduce, the East Antarctic Ice Shield, allowing a sea level rise of 35 meters in one generation. I am not saying that it will happen, but that there is a mechanism that could make it happen, and political leaders who claim to be cautious will now to have to consider this.

I looked at the pretty pictures in the same article in Science trying to minimize the danger posed by the WAIS, and looked again. And then looked again, and looked on the side, where East Antarctica, most of Antarctica, is found; disbelief setting in ominously all over.

Incredible. How interesting. There I saw a positively enormous area where the ice cap bottom is LOWER than 200 METERS BELOW SEA LEVEL. Yes, 200 meters below! Imagine the disaster when warm water is going to slip below that… There are actually two areas, next to each other, the Wilkes Subglacial Basin and the Aurora Basin, and they obviously communicate below sea level, and moreover front hundreds of kilometers of Antarctic ocean below 200 meters below sea level. They do this nicely by a pleasant 67 degrees of southern latitude, just under the Antarctic Polar Circle, about as close to the pole as Fairbanks, Iceland, and further than the Lofoten islands or the city of Murmansk, or Europe’s North Cape. (All those areas are free of ice, and Fairbanks is not under the influence of the Gulf Stream!)

The ambiance of that article in Science was reassuring in this typically reserved way scientists affect, in the hope of being taken seriously: “Collapse is considered to be a low-probability, high-impact event with, for example, a 5% probability of the WAIS contributing 10 mm per year within 200 years.” Of course, this is pseudo science, because “is considered to be” is not science. Science is about events that can be repeated at will. It’s not about getting consideration in a social setting.

Hence, if anything, I found the conclusions of that article scarier than ever. I want to see an article evoking not just the WAIS, but all the potential flash flood in EASTERN ANTARCTICA. Now, methinks it’s got to be of the order of twenty meters of sea level rise, just looking at it the maps. So thank you science, thank you lord, and let’s get ready for real nomadism, running for the hills! A bad emotion (the melting of the iceshields can only be a multimillennial event) reinforced by a little bit of the wrong knowledge (speciously minimizing arguments on a fraction of the problem, namely the WAIS) often spells disaster.

Conclusion: HELL NOW?

If the poles melt, there is no coming back. The Earth’s albedo will be irreversibly reduced, the dark polar oceans and polar forests will absorb light and heat, instead of throwing it back to space. The planet will switch to its HOT REGIME. To its hot regime it is very familiar with. But the present biosphere is not. We would be back in a flash to Jurassic Park. But without the dinosaurs in Alaska (as they used to be!)

We used to have about 280 ppm of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases, 150 years ago. Now we are around 450 ppm, and increasing fast (3 ppm a year in CO2 rise alone, which is itself at 385 ppm). From long term geological records, we know that Antarctica covers itself with ice at 425 ppm. Even an American politician should be able to understand what this means; the southern polar icecap is now unstable.

At the most extreme, adding to the preceding tipping points the “clathrate gun” (massive eruptions of frozen methane stores, apparently greater than all the other fossil fuels combined), a hellish scenario seems possible where this would all happen WITHIN A CENTURY. Massive melting within much less than that is also possible: in 2007 frozen methane in the warmest Arctic ocean ever erupted a bit. In 2008, the ocean was a bit colder, and methane came out of the tundra instead. Before, for an entire decade, methane’s density had not augmented.

Methane, CH4 has 100 times the greenhouse capability of CO2; some fancy man-made gases have 10,000 times the greenhouse capability of CO2, hence the difference between 385 ppm of pure CO2, and the 450 ppm of warming by CO2 equivalent gases I evoked.

There is no doubt that at least 90% of mankind would die in the process (nuclear bombing of coal plants for ecological reasons may be an ironical twist, with a rare touch of ecological humor).

That of course, was the bad side of things. On the good side, carbon addicts will be able to burn coal like there is no tomorrow, for a few years more, thanks to the antics of Mr. Sun conveniently truly going to sleep, as CO2 build up. A self-fulfilling prophecy: there will be indeed no tomorrow, thanks to them.

Humankind, playing fast and loose with things it digs up from underground, where they have been buried for hundreds of millions of years, if not billions, burns those things in the atmosphere. The USA, apparently hoping to transmogrify itself through platitudes, is taking its sweet time to do nothing significant about climate change. Not only is the USA also culprit, indirectly, of a lot of Chinese emissions, but, as (still) the world number one industrial power, the USA, through competition of its products worldwide, has an unfair carbon advantage it is using to the hilt (most of the electricity of the USA comes from indigenous coal, cheap and plentiful).

Obama should have put a ten cents per gallon gas tax on his first day, but he found much safer to send more taxpayer money to Afghanistan, and his friends in high finance, so convenient, in truth, with financing him. At least, very short term, so it is: the sea has not reached the White House yet (when it does, it will be too late, as the greenhouse effect is highly non linear, as I described above).

Weirdly, and perniciously, Mr. Sun, which was supposed to be steady as a rock, has been cooperating with the polluters, in the last two decades. But we are at the bottom of the 11 year cycle, so this should be less of a factor for a while.

The Sun has slowed down for decades at least twice in the last millennium. This caused the Little Ice Age (which destroyed Viking Greenland). Should the Sun persists in cooling down in the coming decade, the catastrophe would be even greater than if it did not. Indeed, temperatures would not rise as much.  Thus polluters would be encouraged to stuff the atmosphere with even more CO2, perhaps even arguing that they are sparing us an ice age. However, the CO2 would keep on building up, and half of it dissolves in the ocean, where it reacts with water to make carbonic acid. Thus the oceans would die even faster.

Ultimately, when the Sun wakes up from its slumber, all the heat would return, and more. Moreover a lot of CO2 would come out of the oceans, thanks to the temperature rise.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot of knowledge is necessary to those who want to be morally right. Planetary engineering, as we are presently doing, without knowing enough, is the most terrible thing. When the hand of fate comes upon us, not only will the planet get hellish, but many of the vengeful ones in flooded countries will make sure that there is hell to pay.

Patrice Ayme
***

Notes: 1) Mars and Pluto’s climates are dominated by the enormous wobble for the former, and the amazing eccentricity of the second. Sometimes, Pluto is so far from the sun, its atmosphere snows down, and freezes on the ground. As it approaches the sun a century later, or so, the atmosphere goes back up, and puts a greenhouse around the planet, warming it up (right now Pluto is going away from the sun, but there is inertia to its greenhouse, so it keeps on warming).

Mars’ axis of rotation can be so inclined on the ecliptic plane (it oscillates between 10 and 45 degrees!) that then the poles get sun full on, once a year, and melt, and the Martian atmosphere is then thick with CO2 and H2O, two powerful greenhouse gases, so the planet warms up a lot (conversely, when the planet stands upright on its orbital plane, light grazes the poles, and the atmosphere freezes around the ice caps, the greenhouse effect goes way down, and the planet freezes.

2) The glory of SUBOCEANIC ANTARCTICA:

Fig. 1 Antarctic surface topography (gray shading) and bed topography (brown) defining the region of interest. For clarity, the ice shelves in West Antarctica are not shown. The brownish and yellow parts are the WAIS’ bed, and are all below sea level, and are why the WAIS will disintegrate.

Areas more than 200 meters BELOW SEA LEVEL in East Antarctica are indicated by blue shading. NOTICE THAT A LOT OF EAST ANTARCTICA, WHERE THE SUB SEA LEVEL BASINS ARE, HAVE THEIR MARGINS WELL NORTH OF 70 DEGREES (and actually just north of THE SOUTH POLAR CIRCLE).

AP, Antarctic Peninsula; EMIC, Ellsworth Mountain Ice Cap; ECR, Executive Committee Range; MBLIC, Marie Byrd Land Ice Cap; WM, Whitmoor Mountains; TR, Thiel Range; Ba, Bailey Glacier; SL, Slessor Ice Stream; Fo, Foundation Ice Stream; Re, Recovery Glacier; To, Totten Glacier; Au, AURORA BASIN; Me, Mertz Glacier; Ni, Ninnis Glacier; WSB, WILKES SUBGLACIAL BASIN; FR, Flood Range; a.s.l., above sea level.

(Illustrations from Bamber and al. Science May 15, 2009)

P/S 1: We are just coming out of a solar minimum so pronounced that cosmic rays, less deflected by the sun’s weakening magnetic field, have become a problem… Sunspots had nearly completely disappeared for the first half of 2009, before reappearing violently in July… There are mysterious strong correlations between sunspots and Earth’s temperature (mysterious, because, although very strong, they inverted in the 1970s;Vincent Courtillot, 2009).

P/S 2:  Thus, we have had a sort of solar winter in the last generation, and we seem to have reached its nadir right now, in the spring of 2009. (That would explain why the lowest icepack in the Arctic was in 2007, and the second lowest in 2008, with 2009 the third lowest ever recorded.)

Nothing says that the sun will not be even weaker in its next cycle. Maybe the greenhouse effect will save us!

Indeed… During the “Little Ice Age“, there was a considerable cooling, apparently originating from the sun’s reduced activity. After a slow start around 1300 CE which had, nevertheless, dramatic consequences in Europe (famines, and maybe a contribution to the massive war and plague that quickly followed; soon the Greenland Vikking colonies were decimated and had to be evacuated), the SOLAR cooling accelerated around 1600 CE. Galileo still saw some sun spots. But just a few. Soon they completely disappeared (the so called “Maunder minimum”). And they stayed disappeared for centuries. The glaciers in the Alps advanced dramatically, sometimes by several miles. In the late nineteenth century, sunspots reappeared, and the CO2 went up significantly, from industrialization (although warming itself extracts CO2 from sea and tundra). The result was an even faster retreat of the glaciers.

We cannot predict the sun (aside from its 11 year and 22 year, and an apparent 1,000 year cycles). We can only assume it will pick up, back up to what has been its normal activity over the last 5,000 years of civilized history. If it did, solar warming would combine with the greenhouse, and it is to be feared that the planet will switch SUDDENLY to the hot mode. It may be in a way even more violent than anything movies have imagined so far (because of the methane stores, and the dramatic changes their release would lead to: melting poles, CO2 bubbling out of the oceans). Good luck to us all…

A day off

Apologies to all but circumstances have conspired to steal any time today (Saturday) to put together a post for tomorrow (Sunday) or ‘today’ for you the reader, if you follow me!

But here’s a very interesting if scary website that I will return to in due course.

http://co2now.org/ which is introduced thus,

What the world needs to watch

Global warming is mainly the result of CO2 levels rising in the Earth’s atmosphere. Both atmospheric CO2 and climate change are accelerating. Climate scientists say we have years, not decades, to stabilize CO2 and other greenhouse gases. To help the world succeed, CO2Now.org makes it easy to see the most current CO2 level and what it means. So, use this site and keep an eye on CO2.  Invite others to do the same. Then we can do more to send CO2 in the right direction.

Once again that website is CO2Now. org.

eaarth, the book.

The latest edition of Bill McKibben’s book.

I’m about a third of the way through McKibben’s book eaarth.  To say that it is disturbing is an understatement.  I’ll tell you why.

eaarth

Most people when they think about it have, at the very least, feelings of guilt or denial in terms of what humans are doing to the planet’s environment that humans require for survival.  Many of us know in our hearts that it is probably not good news but maybe really thinking about it can be put off for a little longer!

It’s almost as though we know that those aches and pains are a sign of something potentially dangerous to our health but, hey ho, I’ll put off seeing the doctor for a little bit longer.

Then the day comes when one goes to the doctor and he confirms your worst fears; what you really knew deep in your heart.

Thus it is with the planet.  Most of us know that we have been treating the planet as an inexhaustible resource for the sole benefit of mankind and to hell with the future.  The you read a book such as eaarth from Bill McKibben and realise the extreme folly of denial, self-delusion, and the rest.  Here’s the preface of the book,

PREFACE

I’m writing these words on a gorgeous spring afternoon, perched on the bank of a brook high along the spine of the Green Mountains, a mile or so from my home in the Vermont mountain town of Ripton. The creek burbles along, the picture of a placid mountain stream, but a few feet away there’s a scene of real violence a deep gash through the woods where a flood last summer ripped away many cubic feet of tree and rock and soil and drove it downstream through the center of the village. Before the afternoon was out, the only paved road into town had been demolished by the rushing water, a string of bridges lay in ruins, and the governor was trying to reach the area by helicopter.

Twenty years ago, in 1989, I wrote the first book for a general audience about global warming, which in those days we called the “greenhouse effect.” That book, The End of Nature, was mainly a philosophical argument. It was too early to see the practical effects of climate change but not too early to feel them; in the most widely excerpted passage of the book, I described walking down a different river, near my then-home sixty miles away, in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Merely knowing that we’d begun to alter the climate meant that the water fl owing in that creek had a different, lesser meaning. “Instead of a world where rain had an independent and mysterious existence, the rain had become a subset of human activity,” I wrote. “The rain bore a brand; it was a steer, not a deer.”

Now, that sadness has turned into a sharper-edged fear. Walking along this river today, you don’t need to imagine a damned thing the evidence of destruction is all too obvious. Much more quickly than we would have guessed in the late 1980s, global warming has dramatically altered, among many other things, hydrological cycles. One of the key facts of the twenty- first century turns out to be that warm air holds more water vapor than cold: in arid areas this means increased evaporation and hence drought. And once that water is in the atmosphere, it will come down, which in moist areas like Vermont means increased deluge and flood. Total rainfall across our continent is up 7 percent,1 and that huge change is accelerating. Worse, more and more of it comes in downpours.2 Not gentle rain but damaging gully washers: across the planet, flood damage is increasing by 5 percent a year.3 Data show dramatic increases 20 percent or more in the most extreme weather events across the eastern United States, the kind of storms that drop many inches of rain in a single day.4Vermont saw three flood emergencies in the 1960s, two in the 1970s, three in the 1980s and ten in the 1990s and ten so far in the first decade of the new century.

In our Vermont town, in the summer of 2008, we had what may have been the two largest rainstorms in our history about six weeks apart. The second and worse storm, on the morning of August 6, dropped at least six inches of rain in three hours up on the steep slopes of the mountains. Those forests are mostly intact, with only light logging to disturb them but that was far too much water for the woods to absorb. One of my neighbors, Amy Sheldon, is a river researcher, and she was walking through the mountains with me one recent day, imagining the floods on that August morning. “You would have seen streams changing violently like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “A matter of minutes.” A year later the signs persisted: streambeds gouged down to bedrock, culverts obliterated, groves of trees laid to jackstraws.

Our town of barely more than five hundred people has been coping with the damage ever since. We passed a $400,000 bond to pay for our share of the damage to town roads and culverts. (The total cost was in the millions, most of it paid by the state and federal governments.) Now we’re paying more to line the creek with a seven-hundred-foot-long wall of huge boulders riprap, it’s called where it passes through the center of town, a scheme that may save a few houses for a few years, but which will speed up the water and cause even more erosion downstream. There’s a complicated equation for how wide a stream will be, given its grade and geology; Sheldon showed it to me as we reclined on rocks by the riverbank. It mathematically defines streams as we have known them, sets an upper limit to their size. You could use it to plan for the future, so you could know where to build and where to let well enough alone. But none of that planning works if it suddenly rains harder and faster than it has ever rained before, and that’s exactly what’s now happening. It’s raining harder and evaporating faster; seas are rising and ice is melting, melting far more quickly than we once expected. The first point of this book is simple: global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality. We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways. And these changes are far, far more evident in the toughest parts of the globe, where climate change is already wrecking thousands of lives daily. In July 2009, Oxfam released an epic report, “Suffering the Science,” which concluded that even if we now adapted “the smartest possible curbs” on carbon emissions, “the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of millions of people, most of them among the world’s poorest.”5

And so this book will be, by necessity, less philosophical than its predecessor. We need now to understand the world we’ve created, and consider urgently how to live in it. We can’t simply keep stacking boulders against the change that’s coming on every front; we’ll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations. There’s nothing airy or speculative about this conversation; it’s got to be uncomfortable, staccato, direct.

Which doesn’t mean that the change we must make or the world on the other side will be without its comforts or beauties. Reality always comes with beauty, sometimes more than fantasy, and the end of this book will suggest where those beauties lie. But hope has to be real. It can’t be a hope that the scientists will turn out to be wrong, or that President Barack Obama can somehow fix everything. Obama can help but precisely to the degree he’s willing to embrace reality, to understand that we live on the world we live on, not the one we might wish for. Maturity is not the opposite of hope; it’s what makes hope possible.

The need for that kind of maturity became painfully clear in the last days of 2009, as I was doing the final revisions for this book. Many people had invested great hope that the Copenhagen conference would mark a turning point in the climate change debate. If it did, it was a turning point for the worse, with the richest and most powerful countries making it abundantly clear that they weren’t going to take strong steps to address the crisis before us. They looked the poorest and most vulnerable nations straight in the eye, and then they looked away and concluded a face- saving accord with no targets or timetables. To see hope dashed is never pleasant. In the early morning hours after President Obama jetted back to Washington, a group of young protesters gathered at the metro station outside the conference hall in Copenhagen.It’s our future you decide, they chanted.

My only real fear is that the reality described in this book, and increasingly evident in the world around us, will be for some an excuse to give up. We need just the opposite increased engagement. Some of that engagement will be local: building the kind of communities and economies that can withstand what’s coming. And some of it must be global: we must step up the fight to keep climate change from getting even more powerfully out of control, and to try to protect those people most at risk, who are almost always those who have done the least to cause the problem. I’ve spent much of the last two de cades in that fight, most recently helping lead 350.org, a huge grassroots global effort to force dramatic action. It’s true that we’ve lost that fight, insofar as our goal was to preserve the world we were born into. That’s not the world we live on any longer, and there’s no use pretending otherwise.

But damage is always relative. So far we’ve increased global temperatures about a degree, and it’s caused the massive change chronicled in chapter 1. That’s not going to go away. But if we don’t stop pouring more carbon into the atmosphere, the temperature will simply keep rising, right past the point where any kind of adaptation will prove impossible. I have dedicated this book to my closest colleagues in this battle, my crew at 350.org, with the pledge that we’ll keep battling. We have no other choice.

Gondolas for New York?

Can we really make sense of the science of climate change?

Those that come to this Blog on a regular basis, and many thanks to you, by the way, will know that, overall, I take the stance that climate change, global warming, etc., etc. is real.  At the very least to me it is reasonably described by the saying that most pilots are familiar with, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt.”  In other words, if something is worrying you don’t hesitate to get your ‘arse’ on the ground.

The planet’s climate systems are incredibly complex and like processes and systems much less complex than the earth’s atmosphere getting to real hard evidence is challenging.  Please accept that my personal position is unchanged; for me there are sufficient signs to suggest that climatic changes may be more likely, than less likely, to substantially harm humankind’s existence on Planet Earth within the next generation.

However, Dan Gomez, my very good Californian friend of 40-plus years, is much more sceptical.  I respect his intellect greatly and, therefore, respect his opinions.  Dan recently sent me a number of documents that raise valid questions.  Over time I want to share these with you and invite anyone who wishes to comment on Learning for Dogs to do so, or even better submit a guest post.

But before going to the first of Dan’s documents, let me share something that was reported by BBC News recently.  It’s this.

New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea level rise in different regions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 2007 that sea levels would rise at least 28cm (1ft) by the year 2100.

But this is a global average; and now a Dutch team has made what appears to be the first attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations.

Other researchers say the IPCC’s figure is likely to be a huge under-estimate.

Whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be regional differences.

That IPCC report may be accessed here and the main website of the IPCC is here.  But even the BBC’s report shows that scientists are still learning more, as time goes on.

Ocean currents and differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater are among the factors that mean sea level currently varies by up a metre across the oceans – this does not include short-term changes due to tides or winds.

So if currents change with global warming, which is expected – and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea – the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.

“Everybody will still have the impact, and in many places they will get the average rise,” said Roderik van der Wal from the University of Utrecht, one of the team presenting their regional projections at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.

“But places like New York are going to have a larger contribution than the average – 20% more in this case – and Reykjavik will be better off.”

The news item also contains some fascinating evidence of the influence of gravity from the mass of the polar ice caps.  Read the full article here.

Gondola's for hire in a few year's time?

Now on to one of Dan’s documents.  It is from the website detailing the history of plant fossils of West Virginia.  The document refers to the climate of the carboniferous period.  Here’s how it starts.

West Virginia today is mostly an erosional plateau carved up into steep ridges and narrow valleys, but 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period, it was part of a vast equatorial coastal swamp extending many hundreds of miles and barely rising above sea level. This steamy, tropical quagmire served as the nursery for Earth’s first primitive forests, comprised of giant lycopods, ferns, and seed ferns.

North America was located along Earth’s equator then, courtesy of the forces of continental drift. The hot and humid climate of the Middle Carboniferous Period was accompanied by an explosion of terrestrial plant life. However by the Late Carboniferous Period Earth’s climate had become increasingly cooler and drier. By the beginning of the Permian Period average global temperatures declined by about 10° C.

Interestingly, the last half of the Carboniferous Period witnessed periods of significant ice cap formation over polar landmasses– particularly in the southern hemisphere. Alternating cool and warm periods during the ensuing Carboniferous Ice Age coincided with cycles of glacier expansion and retreat. Coastlines fluctuated, caused by a combination of both local basin subsidence and worldwide sea level changes. In West Virginia a complex system of meandering river deltas supported vast coal swamps that left repeating stratigraphic levels of peat bogs that later became coal, separated by layers of fluvial rocks like sandstone and shale when the deltas were building, and marine rocks like black shales and limestones when rising seas drowned coastlands. Accumulations of several thousand feet of these sediments over millions of years caused heat and pressure which transformed the soft sediments into rock and the peat layers into the 100 or so coal seams which today comprise the Great Bituminous Coalfields of the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe.

One needs to read the full article to properly understand this period of history of the planet.  But it includes revealing diagrams like this one.

Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time

Here’s how it concludes.

What will our climate be like in the future? That is the question scientists are asking and seeking answers to currently. The causes of “global warming” and climate change are today being popularly described in terms of human activities. However, climate change is something that happens constantly on its own. If humans are in fact altering Earth’s climate with our cars, electrical powerplants, and factories these changes must be larger than the natural climate variability in order to be measurable. So far the signal of a discernible human contribution to global climate change has not emerged from this natural variability or background noise.

Understanding Earth’s geologic and climate past is important for understanding why our present Earth is the way it is, and what Earth may look like in the future. The geologic information locked up in the rocks and coal seams of the Carboniferous Period are like a history book waiting to be opened. What we know so far, is merely an introduction. It falls on the next generation of geologists, climatologists, biologists, and curious others to continue the exploration and discovery of Earth’s dynamic history– a fascinating and surprising tale, written in stone.

 

Truth fears no questions.  ~Unknown

Head scratching stuff!

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

Galileo

Thus said Galileo Galilei.

Why do I start this Post in this fashion?

Simple! Discovering the truth is always the challenge.

But before I go any further, I want to say thanks to my son who drew my attention to the video that is linked to in the next paragraph.  (As a professional pilot he clearly takes a more than casual interest in the weather).

Here’s a link to that video by Joe Bastadi about the big changes to the planet’s weather.  The video is summarised thus, “Temperature is a measure of kinetic energy, and the dirty little secret of the whole AGW debate is that total kinteic energy of the Earth over the longer term is not changing, but is cyclical.”

Joe is a professionally trained forecaster (Penn State University) but also a controversial figure.  He is a member of the AccuWeather team.

Anyway, do watch that video – the link is here.  Bottom line is that global weather patterns and longer-term trends are hugely driven by the earth’s natural rhythms and the influence of mankind is minimal in comparison.

Please click the video link above because that is much more current than an earlier interview of Joe Bastardi on YouTube that follows.

OK?

Now go here – ClimateProgress.org.  It’s an important long article that concludes thus:

CONCLUSION:  Unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases threaten multiple catastrophes, any one of which justifies action.  Together, they represent the gravest threat to humanity imaginable.  The fact that the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media ignored the overwhelming majority of these studies and devoted a large fraction of its climate ‘ink’ in the last 12 months to what was essentially a non-story is arguably the single greatest failing of the science media this year.

So, if you are like me and so many others in wanting to understand the truth about our planet’s climatic future – this Post is going to disappoint you!

Professor James Lovelock, the way forward

Prof. Lovelock is a most amazing thinker.

This makes fascinating listening and thinking. I am referring to the BBC4 programme, Eureka Moment, first broadcast in March 2010.

Lovelock

Some frightening stuff to reflect on, however, he is a tremendously positive person. His level of thinking and orginality is breath taking. Painful and not pleasant, but a snapshot of a possible outcome.

Interesting from a David Hawkins point of view to measure his level of integrity on the scale of human consciousness that Hawkins developed.

I’m delighted to see that the BBC still has a huge amount available about Lovelock’s claims.  A small extract from here.

The man who achieved global fame for his theory that the whole earth is a single organism now believes that we can only hope that the earth will take care of itself in the face of completely unpredictable climate change.

Interviewed by Today presenter John Humphrys, videos of which you can see below, he said that while the earth’s future was utterly uncertain, mankind was not aware it had “pulled the trigger” on global warming as it built its civilizations.

Here’s a video, taken quite recently, of the Professor explaining his approach to his science.

But whatever, don’t lose heart. Keep the faith in a better future, as Paul wrote yesterday.

By Jon Lavin

The Role of Fear

Fear of the Known – thinking aloud about stuff

Jon Lavin wrote a Post on the 13th June, 2010 entitled, “Dealing with the fear of the known.” I’ve been thinking about that in recent weeks including the comment to Jon’s article from Per. Here’s how Jon closed that article:

If more of us got used to coming out of the mind before making an important decision, and simply sat with the question for a while, the answer would probably present itself.

This will probably raise more questions than it answers but that’s not a bad thing.<!–

And here’s the recent comment from Per: Great advice… but how do we remove the fear of what is known?

Presumably Per was implying that we shouldn’t fear the known. However, I beg to differ here; it is actually fear of the UNKNOWN that is rather pointless (I am not afraid of aliens), while fear of the KNOWN is CRUCIAL to our survival.

But like anything else, you can have too little or too much. Too little, and you survive a very short time. Too much, and you sit cowering in your cellar afraid to go out. As with EVERYTHING in life it is a question of BALANCE.

How do we know how much fear to deploy? Instinct, intelligence, knowledge and experience. If any of these are deficient, we may apply an inappropriate fear quotient.

Let’s take “Global Warming”! How afraid of it should I be? What are my marks out of 10 for the four fear-factors above?

Instinct = 8 – I instinctively fear a situation when my environment is getting hotter, as I don’t know what that will imply.
Intelligence = 8 – I am (just) intelligent enough to appreciate the dangers of a rise in temperature.
Knowledge = 4 – I have no real idea exactly what is going on or how far it will go; the messages are mixed and I see no real panic among governments.
Experience = 0

So, a score of just 20 out of 40, which means IGNORANCE and DOUBT and these add up to FEAR ….. so I am quite afraid.

Home grown vegetables

More apparently, than my leaders seem to be, who can’t even ban flying across the Atlantic at a cost of 60,000 tons of CO2 per day. The question is, will this considerable amount of fear push me into actually DOING something about GW? What is my inertia level and what is my tipping point? What would it take to get me to dig up my garden and plant potatoes? To sell my car and buy a horse? Sadly, humans are in general pretty inert …… it is much easier to do nothing or too little until it is (almost) too late.

So, “fear” is absolutely essential to our survival. If you’re a driver who doesn’t fear accidents then please keep out my my way until you very soon die in one.

Fear is also what pushes me to drive very carefully. People who greedily lent money to Madoff had no fear they would lose it, having lost all control of  whatever ration of commonsense and/or logic they might once have had. Perhaps now people will fear rather more about losing their money and therefore invest it more wisely.

To take another topical example, any company in the future (is there one?) drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico will fear the lash of Obama’s tongue and stick and this fear will push them to be a bloody sight more careful and to have an effective contingency plan. Actually, why more people don’t have a lot more fear is a mystery to me.

Right, having dealt with fear, we come to our response to it, which is of course the interesting bit. The world is changing so fast that almost all of us have limited control. Even the US President has limited control. This is not comfortable.

How then can we gain more control and become more comfortable? Jon has pointed the way; we must become more self-reliant. Jon will presumably now have much less fear of starving to death, since he is producing a proportion of his own grub. Anyone installing solar-panelled heating will be much less fearful about their electricity being cut off.

I would go further. Anyone owning a horse will or would have much less fear about running out of fuel and being immobile – or more to the point, of being unable to plough and sow his fields, without which we really are stuck. (Incidentally, I am predicting a big comeback for work horses. They are slower, yes, but you can’t breed a tractor (or indeed talk to it) or produce your own fuel, which is where the horse wins out. We’ll have to move more slowly, but then speed is vastly overrated.)

Now Jon with his chickens is a special case. Is there, I wonder, a small element of “fear” in his decision to keep chickens? Humans are complex …. Another major factor pushing Jon down this road could be (and in his case probably is) social responsibility.

It seems pretty clear that if EVERYONE became more self-reliant then vast, expensive, high-consuming centres  of production would be scaled down. Unfortunately, social responsibility is not exactly fasionable in today’s consumer world (or we wouldn’t use plastic bags for a start, just to take one small example). Like the vegetarians of 30 years ago, Jon might be seen as an exception if not crank; until of course the fear factor becomes higher and then everyone will try to grow their own potatoes.

So, fear of powerlessness drives us to take initiatives that will help to remove at least some of this fear; a circular but inevitable process.  Nothing new about it; the only sad thing is that humans seem to need to travel quite a long way down the path of doom before they really start to react.

This of course is why we did nothing when Hitler invaded the Rheinland in 1936; wait and see seemed easier at the time. It’s also why America totally ignored Jimmy Carter’s ideas of some decades ago about reducing America’s dependence on Arab oil. It was much easier to deride him and do the easy (but totally wrong) thing, especially of course as the oil companies have loads of money and can buy off people who otherwise might see the light.

Well, we’re well past “Wait-and-see” now …… we are now entering the “Do-it-or-else ….” period. And where Jon is of course achieving a double-whammy is that his increasing self-reliance is also GOOD FOR SOCIETY. If everyone were more self-reliant in every way a vast saving in energy and everything else could be achieved. Flying exotic fruits into Britain from South Africa is insane, yet so normal that it seems … errrmmmm … normal.

All this was obvious years if not millennia ago, but the current state of the world has increased the fear factor and is pushing people like Jon down this road. But it is an interesting road. Being self-reliant has multiple advantages, though it will be pretty hard on the rich, who may have to learn how to do things they usually pay underlings to do.

But Jon is in the vanguard of this movement; there is VAST scope for increasing self-reliance. It could and should be an adventure, though it will involve enormous change.  The latter of course can also be stressful, but less so when it is clearly a change for the better, as I believe it will be.

By Chris Snuggs