The Expected Unexpected

Viewing from Down-Under

Seemorerocks

Down here in New Zealand we are enjoying unusually stable summer weather. The days are warm and the skies uncharacteristically clear.  Overall the summer here in Wellington has been cool - very cool - so much so that some of the summer vegetables have not done well.

Contrast that with the climate dramas in Australia.

They have seen more record heat over the summer, terrible ongoing bushfires (with one fire in a coal mine still ongoing, as far as I know.  Adelaide in South Australia has seen record temperatures and then a sudden flip from 40C temperatures to sudden floods and then tempestuous winds which brought down trees.  Melbourne has flipped from extreme heat to cold, and is expecting snow.

New Zealand in the meantime has been in the 'shadow' of Australia and, if you look at the Jet Stream seeing a completely different wind pattern from its neighbour.

Welcome to the world of climate chaos.

I have had a few revelations these few days that, although not ground-shattering have been on my mind for a few days.

Listening to an interview Guy McPherson gave to UK Collapse radio the other day, something that he said, that I'm sure I've heard him say before came as a sudden revelation.

There is a 40 year lag before greenhouse emissions released into the atmosphere manifest as temperature rise.

What that means, if I'm correct, is that the 8C warming with the methane clathrate gun and the other positive feedbacks that have been released - all this is the result of things we did 40 years ago, in 1974 when I started at university, and well before many people were even born.

Back in '74 there was no concept of climate change, let alone catastrophic climate change

It's difficult to get people to see the consequences of their actions, especially when they're only evident looking in the rear-vision mirror.

Doesn't that give the lie to the idea that somehow (as claimed by 350.org and others) that, if by some miracle we were able to wave the magic wand and cut back emissions that the earth's atmosphere would revert to 350 ppm and human civilisation would be saved to continue its destructive path?

Indications are that the changes we are just beginning to see are locked in.

The other thing that struck me this week is the thought - just how quickly things (that are already changing in realtime, before our very eyes) will change once we see the first ice-free Arctic minimum.

Take this insight from Guy McPherson:

"Whereas nearly 80 calories are required to melt a gram of ice at 0 C, adding 80 calories to the same gram of water at 0 C increases its temperature to 80 C. Anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions add more than 2.5 trillion calories to Earth’s surface every hour (ca. 3 watts per square meter, continuously)."

Put another way, try an experiment. Put a large piece of ice in a pot of water and then start heating it on the stove. While the ice is melting the surrounding water remains cold until the last of the ice has melted. Then the water starts to get hot quickly and is boiling before we know it.

So it is with Arctic ice.

Already we have received the ominous news that Arctic heat has pushed sea ice into a new minimum this month. Instead of the ice growing in extent and thickness, as you would expect in the middle of winter, it has stopped expanding.

When I looked at the graphics for the first time the other day I was able to confirm to myself for the first time the fact that, the North Pole (not Alaska or Greenland) was experiencing twice the degree of departure from the norm (temperature anomaly) - 20C than most parts of the United States, which was experiencing temperatures 10C and more higher than the average temperature between 1979 and 2000.

In terms of sea temperature anomalies, the North Pole was 4C warmer than average, while there were large areas of warm water (about 2C) in the north Pacific and Atlantic.

These are momentous and sudden changes that might be hard to imagine for young people who were born at time when changes to the climate were already under way.  Some of us (most people cannot remember back further than yesterday) - can recall a time when weather was more benign and more predictable.

Personally, I feel all this very acutely and I feel for everyone who is (whether they know it or not) experiencing the effects of abrupt climate change.

For me, perhaps the raw emotion of uncontrollable grief will come later.


PS. Here is a presentation by Paul Beckwith on climate changes in the Southern Hemisphere -