Habitat – part 2

Further reflections on runaway climate change

Seemorerocks

Since writing my essay Habitat last weekend I have received some excellent letters and feedback.

 In addition I have had a couple of letters that have given me cause to pause. These were critical of Guy McPherson and sceptical about claims about near-term extinction.

 Actually, they were darned dismissive.

What both correspondents bad in common was a concern with a paper published by Arctic News, written by Malcolm Light – one that Guy McPherson commonly refers to.

 The tone of the letters led me to look a bit more closely at the criticisms, especially an article written and provided to me by Alex Smith of Ecoshock.org.

The first thing that struck me on reading his essay was this passage:

"If a lot of methane is released in a decade or two, global mean temperature may rise more than 10 degrees Centigrade some say. It could be twice that in the Arctic. Could our complex industrial civilization could survive? It's unlikely agriculture could feed our current billions. Most current species would disappear in the 6th great extinction. Are humans immune to extinction?

“Is it happening already? Arctic sea ice is melting more each year. should we try to cool the Arctic, if not the world? That's the view of a small but growing group of scientists and concerned citizens. It's called geoengineering.”

Hang on!

This links the observation of methane releases and feedback mechanisms and the conclusion that this will likely lead to mass extinction with geoenineering

I know that members of the Arctic Emergency Group (and Light, in particular) are advocates of geoengineering, which is something that many of us (myself included) find abhorent.

 I certainly haven't heard it advocated amongst those that I'm in contact with.

Here's Clive Hamilton, author of , talking about geo-engineering.

Surely you can't work in reverse and say that because Malcolm Light and the Arctic Emergency Group are advocating geoengineering to cool the Arctic that that totally negates the conclusion of their research – which is that warming in the Arctic has given rise to the rapid melting of the ice shelf, which has led to the release of methane, both from the permafrost and the sea floor. giving rise to positive feedback mechanisms that in turn speed up the warming.

 They describe this as an emergency

As Guy McPherson says: “We've triggered 14 positive feedbacks. They are multiplicative, not additive.…..It's not a case of 1 + 2 + 4 …, rather it's a case of 1 x 2 x 4 ... and so on. ,,,,,,they interact w/ one another in a dire manner.”

Talking about Malcolm Light, Alex Smith dismisses his paper in these words:

“In what looks like a scientific paper, complete with complex graphs and charts...”

In this “pseudo-paper” Malcolm Light comes, as a result of calculations he has made that “"The absolute mean extinction time for the northern hemisphere is 2031.8 and for the southern hemisphere 2047.6 with a final mean extinction time for 3/4 of the earth's surface of 2039.6."

He then talks about Malcolm Light’s background with industry and his bias in favour of geoengineering. That seems to preclude Light ipso facto from serious consideration.

It reminds me of attempts to dismiss Peak Oil on the grounds that one of the major proponents, Matthew Simmons was an investment banker and close to the Bush administration.

Guilt by association.

Somehow out of all this Malcolm Light's paper ends up totally "discredited", so with that we are to believe all talk of "near-term extinction" is now unnecessary and we can rest assured with the knowledge that humans will inhabit this earth for a long time yet (sic)

Well, I don't think so.

Guy, who never, by the way adopted any fantasies about geoengineering does admit that this first attempt to analyse any of the 12 positive feedbacks that have been unleashed may have some errors in it.

Having summarily "dismissed" poor old Malcolm Light it still remains to take on the Arctic Emergency Group which has on it some fairly solid scientific representation.

 It's not to be taken that lightly.

Except that its members do, as I understand it, advocate geoengineering so I suppose that might provide grounds to dismiss them as well.

There is, amongst our friends, quite a lot of discussion of extinction and how hard it is for species (especially the human one presumably) to actually go extinct.

Now, we really have got into nitpicking!

For myself, I am not going to get too excited about a date (even if some retired scientist has come up with 2039.6 as the date). To me it doesn't really matter whether the date in 2039, 2050. It doesn't really matter if some small groups of humans are still able to scratch together a living around the north pole a century from now.

Essentially it comes down to one thing. We are already seeing a range of positive feedbacks that are producing conditions that are already making life difficult for people on different parts of the globe.

As already pointed out - the nature of feedbacks is that they are exponential - so what the computer projections see as a 4C increase will be much more than that.

So quick will these changes likely be that humans will be finding it uncomfortably hot long before the sea comes lapping at our door (with the exception of the Maldives and some Pacific islands).

Recent events in the Arctic seem to indicate that changes are occuring very fast - with 80-90F in the Canadian and Siberian arctic in June, whereas last years temperatures in the 50-60F range last year were already disturbing the habitat of the polar bear.

We don't hear much about the polar bear currently, Why's that?

In the southern summer we had temperatures in Australia so high that they had to find another colour, and just in the last few days it looks as if we might have hit a world record for recorded temperature.

Let's just finish off this section with the contributions of some of the foremost climate scientists and what they say about why Arctic ice matters.

While it is true that none of these scientists actually mentions near-term extinction, we have to bear in mind that scientists are professionals who stick to their specialities and don't often venture into the speculative sphere.

But you don't even have to ready between the lines to see how serious things are - and I would pay particular attention to the words of Russian scientist, Natalia Shakhova.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSsPHytEnJM

CONCLUSIONS

Several other things leap out at me in this critique.

The first major one is, when talking about the future of humanity the focus is entirely on anthropogenic climate change.

Anyone who has spent any time looking around this blog will be very aware that there are a whole range of crises facing humanity, such as:Further

400+ nuclear reactors that have paseed their use-by dates and threaten to melt down - especially given the downward march of the world economy, the expense and time needed to safely shut down each one of these behemoths

Peak Oil and energy decline

Population overshoot (7 billion mouths to feed)

Species and habitat destruction - such as the collapse in honey bee colonies that we require to pollinate our crops, fisheries collapse

Water shortages

Problems with producing food to feed 7 billion people

Earth changes such as volcanism

Disease and pestilence; modern medicine is headed for a cliff due to antibiotic resistance.

Any of these things (or all of them) will likely contribute to collapse of human civilisation and much of the non-human world.

 Will we be nuked, or will we die of heat and starvation?

 Underlying this is the assumption that Guy McPherson regularly points out, that most people are unwilling to give up their reliance on human civilisation. As he says if you believe your water comes from a tap you will do anything to protect that; if you believe that you depend on rivers for your water, you will do anything to protect that.

 Essentially it comes down to a difference in paradigm.

 If you believe in all the advantages of human civilisation then it becomes impossible to let go and the mind will come up with all sorts of rationalisation as to why there should be no end to it all.

 The person that comes to mind in this regard who challenges us to question all our assumptions with regard to human civilisation is Derrick Jensen in his book Endgame.

 Just some (not all) of his key points are:

Civilisation is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilisation 

Traditional cultures do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed 

Our way of living – industrial civilisation -is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent violence 

Civilisation is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilisation will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (cilisation, and probably the planet) collapses. 

The longer we wait for civilsation to crash – or the longer we wait beforewe ourselves bring it down – the messier the crash will be, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those that come after. 

The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system 

The culture as a whole and most of the members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life 

Those in power rule by force     

The culture's problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable    

From this point-of-view the collapse of the human, industrial civilisation is not a bad thing.

In fact, Guy McPherson (and I concur wholeheartedly) the only thing that will prevent a sixth extinction would be the rapid destruction of the economy.

The latest information that has come out in the last year has forced Guy to rethink this and to conclude that the extinction of life within a generation is, in his opinion, almost certain.

I pray not, but fear that will be the case.

REFERENCES

Here are some of the key articles and videos from recent times that cover events in the Arctic and Antarctic relating to methane release and positive feedback mechanisms