Tuesday 11 November 2014

Abrut climate change - evidence

One of the ways in which I have always learned is to make copious notes and and to rework material.  

That seems a useful exercise when Guy McPherson's essay is so voluminous and rich in documentation. 

 It remains the #1 place to go for up-to-date information.

Studies, articles and papers are coming out just about every day that are confirming our worst suspicions and it is hard (for me, at least) to keep up and maintain perspective - especially when it comes to attacks from the conservative side of climate science.

So, I am taking a pause to look at the evidence.


If there are any parts of the puzzle missing, please let me know in the comments or email me at - seemorerocks97@gmail.com.


Rapid climate change: summing up the evidence
Seemorerocks




Evidence is piling up suggesting that the situation with climate change is getting worse, even from the latest IPPC report which is based on a consensus of the world's scientists which needs to be agreed between the different countries of the UN.

Here is a summary of the long-term asessments:

Here are some of the evidence across the board that indicates that:
  • Climate change is not in the future, but NOW
  • It is producing dire effects through extreme weather already
  • It has gone beyond the linear and is changing rapidly and exponentially with unknown effects that are already being observed and measured
  • The mainstream projections are wildly optimistic and do not take into account already-observable positive feedbacks.
  • A temperature increase of 4C is already inevitable on the basis of past emissions (and their delayed effect)
  • With business-as-usual (and CO2 levels of 400 ppm – 480 ppm when other greenhouse gasses are taken into account, increases of up to 16C are possible
  • There is evidence that an increase of 4C us beyond the ability of animal and plant life to adapt, beyond the ability of humans to practise agriculture and feed themselves. Near-term extinction by 2050 is likely.

 GLOBAL WARMING

  • This warming has resulted in about 90% of overall global warming going into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically, according to a paper published in the March 2013 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
  • About 30% of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which is unprecedented over at least the past half century.
At the 11:20 mark of this video, climate scientist Paul Beckwith indicates Earth could warm by 6 C within a decade



 HUMAN EXTINCTION

A key piece cited by Guy McPherson is this piece by Oliver Tickell from the Guardian:
There's no 'adaptation' to such steep warming. We must stop pandering to special interests, and try a new, post-Kyoto strategy 

 On a planet 4 C hotter than baseline, all we can prepare for is human extinction (from Oliver Tickell’s 2008 synthesis in the Guardian). Tickell is taking a conservative approach, considering humans have not been present at 3.5 C above baseline (i.e., the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, commonly accepted as 1750). 

 But that is by no means the only indication of the significance of a 4C increase in temperature:

  • The 19th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 19), held in November 2013 in Warsaw, Poland, was warned by professor of climatology Mark Maslin: “We are already planning for a 4°C world because that is where we are heading. I do not know of any scientists who do not believe that.” 
  • Joining the too-little, too-late gang, the Geological Society of London points out on 10 December 2013 that Earth’s climate could be twice as sensitive to atmospheric carbon as previously believed


PILING UP THE EVIDENCE



  • New Scientist points in March 2014, that planetary warming is far more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration than indicated by past reports
  • David Wasdell’s scathing indictment of the vaunted Fifth Assessment is archived here.
  • Australian biologist Frank Fenner said in June 2010: “We’re going to become extinct,”  The eminent scientist says. “Whatever we do now is too late.” 
  • A report published this month indicates that infra-red light, which accounts for half of the energy emitted by earth could have a role in climate change and could modify climate models

This is  a piece from Truth Out  in 2013

The flats.
The flats on Padre Island National Seashore, Texas, are only inches above sea level. This year, sea level rise could have taken these flats, forever, in time frames that matter.
  • “Today we are operating on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from the 1970s. In the last 29 years we have emitted as many greenhouse gases as we emitted in the previous 236 years. Because of the great cooling effect of the oceans, we have not yet begun to see the warming that this recent doubling of greenhouse gases will bring.”

 ADAPTATION

If you think we’ll adapt, think again. The rate of evolution trails the rate of climate change by a factor of 10,000, according to a paper in the August 2013 issue of Ecology Letters. And it’s not as if extinction events haven’t happened on this planet, as explained in the BBC program, The Day the Earth Nearly Died.
James Hansen in a 15 April 2013 paper stated that  humans cannot survive a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C (95 F)

 One of the most convincing arguments from Guy McPherson is when he points out that the problem is not one of temperature, but of habitat.

 Already, with extreme weather conditions in the United States as a result of a meandering jetstream, centuries-old citrus trees in the southwest of the US are dying.  Increases of temperature will mean that plants are unable to adapt.

 Already levels of phytoplankton in the ocean, essential to the ocean food chain, are reducing.  See HERE and HERE

At higher temperatures proteins start to degrade, and food crops fail.

 This is what I wrote in an article from about a year ago:

See this interview by Guy McPherson with Doomstead Diner
We are already seeing loss of human habitat from processes such as desertification and from ecological disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico; from Fukushima. We are seeing acidification of the world's oceans and increases in dead (anoxic) zones.

Increases in temperatures that we are already seeing, and future increases from concentrations of 400+ ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere (actually much more, thanks to releases of methane from the permafrost and methane clathrates in the Arctic and Antarctic), mean that we will see huge changes in the range of temperatures.


Already we are seeing that in recent climatic events such as the heatwave in Alaska and Siberia, where temperatures went from freezing to 90F in the space of 50 hours.

What happens to humans and their habitat in these conditions, especially with energy collapse when we won't simply be able to turn on the air conditioning any more?

We will then have to live with the 'new abnormal'

Prolonged exposure to temperatures more than 95F and we lose our ability to thermoregulate. In the words of Guy McPherson 'in the short term we're dead'.

When the temperatures go from freezing to 100F in the space of 2 days how is our permaculture garden going to survive. At a certain temperature protein starts to denature.

In addition, James Hansen has said that human life is impossible at above 35C wet-bulb temperature. 

See the following articles:


Will Climate Change Cause Human Extinction?

 LATENT HEAT NEEDED TO MELT ICE

This article discusses the latent energy needed to melt ice. One the ice is melted that energy is available for warming.



"Anyone who does not know what Latent Heat is will have a false sense of security. It is not hard to understand if I do not use physics argon. 

Place on a hot stove a pot of cold water containing 1 kg of ice cubes. Stir the ice water with a long thermometer and take temperature readings. My question is: When will the thermometer begin to show a rise in temperature? Answer: After all the ice has melted. 

In other words, all the heat from the stove would first all go into melting the ice, without raising the water temperature. 

The amount of heat entering a system without raising the temperature of the system is called Latent Heat. It takes 80 calories of heat to melt one gram of ice. So in this case, the first 80,000 calories of heat from the stove went into melting the 1 kg of ice first. Only when the ice is all gone will the water temperature rise, and it will do so until it reaches 100C, when the water will begin to boil. 

Once again, Latent Heat comes into play, and the water temperature will stabilize at the boiling point – until all the water have changed from liquid to vapour, at which point the temperature of the dry pot will rise to the temperature of the flame itself. 

So how does this apply to Earth’s climate? 

Consider the Arctic Ocean to be a gigantic pot of ice water, and the sun as the stove. 

For as long as there is still sea ice to melt, the Arctic Ocean will remain relatively cool, in spite of the ever increasing solar heat entering the Arctic ocean due to ever decreasing ice cover. 

When the sea ice is gone in the summer, as early as the latter part of this decade, the Arctic Ocean’s temperature will steeply rise, and when it does, so will the global mean temperature, and all hell will break lose."


HONESTY BACK IN THE PAST



Back in 1990 the UN Advisory Group on Greenhosue gases said"

 “Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage” 
United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases in 1990,

We are at .85C of pre-industrial levels and already there are clear indications (with 39 positive feedbacks) that there are “rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that ... (are leading) extensive ecosystem damage”

 There is indication that back in 2009, at the time of COP-15 in Copenhagen there was a realisation on the part of the authoriites in the US and elsewhere, of the seriousness of things, that a decision to throw in the towel on climate change was taken by the Obama administration then.

 See this quote:

“THE LONG-TERM SEA LEVEL THAT CORRESPONDS TO CURRENT CO2 CONCENTRATION IS ABOUT 23 METERS ABOVE TODAY’S LEVELS, AND THE TEMPERATURES WILL BE 6 DEGREES C OR MORE HIGHER. THESE ESTIMATES ARE BASED ON REAL LONG TERM CLIMATE RECORDS, NOT ON MODELS.”

Efforts have been strengthened since then to pull the wool over people's eyes and to deny the worse effects of climate change while engaging in plunder and developing the police state.


POSITIVE FEEDBACKS

These are detailed in Guy's article, and HERE

These feedback loops are irreversible at a temporal scale relevant to our species. Once you pull the tab on the can of beer, there’s no keeping the carbon dioxide from bubbling up and out. These feedbacks are not additive, they are multiplicative: they not only reinforce within a feedback, the feedbacks also reinforce among themselves. Note- this link to the article no longer work



THE METHANE CLATHRATE GUN


There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that levels of methane clathrates at the bottom of the Arctic ocean are rapidly increasing, even if they haven’t reached the exponential level predicted by Malcolm Light.

This is where actual observational science as done by members of AMEG, like Prof Peter Wadhams, the Russian scientists, Natalia Shakhova, Igor Semiletov and most recently by the SWERUS expedition – departs from the computer models based on conservative and linear projections, part company.

The response has been unbelievable levels of denial by conventional scientists. This led to the exclusion of Russian scientists from a recent meeting of the Royal Society in Britain to discuss Arctic ice.

Here is Paul Beckwith discussing the issue recently:


The evidence is columinous and chronicled on my blog. But here are some fundamental background articles- 

Natalia Shakhova, Igor Semiletov at al


"The Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted a survey of 10,000 square miles of sea off the coast of eastern Siberia.

They made a terrifying discovery - huge plumes of methane bubbles rising to the surface from the seabed.

'We found more than 100 fountains, some more than a kilometre across,' said Dr Igor Semiletov, 'These are methane fields on a scale not seen before. The emissions went directly into the atmosphere.'


Sea of Okhotsk (June, 2013)
On May 29 and June 2, 2013, sudden peak levels of methane in the atmosphere were registered of respectively 2241 and 2238 ppb at an altitude of 33,647.8 ft (10,255.8 mi). Such very high levels are unusual, particularly at such a high altitude


(Nafeez Ahmed, the Guardian, 24 July, 2013)
Disappearance of Arctic sea ice could trigger devastating methane release costing the world's entire GDP

(Nafeez Ahmed, the Guardian, 5 August, 2013)
Dismissals of catastrophic methane danger ignore robust science in favour of outdated mythology of climate safety


"Since the area of geological disjunctives (fault zones, tectonically and seismically active areas) within the Siberian Arctic shelf composes not less than 1-2% of the total area and area of open taliks (area of melt through permafrost), acting as a pathway for methane escape within the Siberian Arctic shelf reaches up to 5-10% of the total area, we consider release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time".



Discusses the methane emergency in relation to the IPCC report.



CARVE Finds 150 Mile Wide Methane Plumes



Sea ice is very thin, as the Naval Research Laboratory animation below shows; large areas with a thickness of 1 meter to zero persist close to the North Pole, as discussed in an earlier post; the animation further shows the retreat of sea ice from the Kara Sea, north of Siberia, over the past 30 days (18 July)


Methane hydrates can become destabilized due to changes in temperature or pressure, as a result of earthquakes and shockwaves accompanying them, severe storms, volcanic activity, coastal collapse and landslides. Such events can be both primed and triggered by global warming


Mean Methane Levels reach 1800 ppb




 Not to be outdone, methane levels reached an average mean of 1800 parts per billion (ppb) on the morning of 16 June 2013

This figure is 1100 ppb higher than pre-industrial peak levels


Tacking on a few of the additional greenhouse gases contributing to climate change and taking a conservative approach jacks up the carbon dioxide equivalent to 480 ppm. Seeps are appearing in numerous locations off the eastern coast of the United States, leading to rapid destabilization of methane hydrates (according to the 25 October 2013 issue of Nature)


A paper in the 27 March 2014 issue of Nature articulates the strong interconnection between methane release and temperature rise: “For each degree that Earth’s temperature rises, the amount of methane entering the atmosphere … will increase several times. As temperatures rise, the relative increase of methane emissions will outpace that of carbon dioxide.”

From recently - 


The first seawater samples are taken onboard the Oden. Around 20 chemical parameters are measured in the water samples to study among other things, the carboncycle and the levels of various gases like methane on this spot. Many of the analyzes are done onboard. Photo: Jorien Vonk
The first seawater samples are taken onboard the Oden. Around 20 chemical parameters are measured in the water samples to study among other things, the carboncycle and the levels of various gases like methane on this spot. Many of the analyzes are done onboard. Photo: Jorien Vonk


CONCEALING THE TRUTH

  • Scientists and officials are not telling the public the awful truth: we are hurtling toward catastrophic climate change. A review, summary and critique of an earth-breaking speech by Prof. Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre in Britain - Listen to the podcast HERE 
  • Never mind David Wasdell pointed out in 2008 that we must have a period of negative radiative forcing merely to end up with a stable, non-catastrophic climate system
David Wasdell uses an Apollo-Gaia parable to explain how climate modelling can lead to results that are completely misleading






APOCALYPSE NOW


ANTARCTIC

As reported in a June 2013 issue of Science, the Antarctic’s ice shelves are melting from below

 The Pine Island Glacier is melting from below as a result of warming seawater.


The massive glacier was melting irreversibly, according to a paper in the 12 January 2014 issue of Nature Climate Change 

 Robert Scribbler provides an overview of the latter phenomenon).


Large Methane Reservoirs Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet, Study Suggests
Potential methane reservoirs beneath Antarctica
"The Antarctic Ice Sheet could be an overlooked but important source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, according to a report in the August 30 issue of Nature by an international team of scientists."
This report from the Arctic Methane Group provided the main confirmation of methane releases in the Antarctic


Methane levels in the atmosphere above Antarctica peaked at 2249 parts per billion on May 9, 2013

Summer ice in the Antarctic is melting 10 times quicker than it was 600 years ago, with the most rapid melt occurring in the last 50 years (Nature Geoscience, April 2013)


The summer ice melt in parts of Antarctica is at its highest level in 1,000 years, Australian and British researchers reported on Monday, adding new evidence of the impact of global warming on sensitive Antarctic glaciers and ice shelves.

Researchers from the Australian National University and the British Antarctic Survey found data taken from an ice core also shows the summer ice melt has been 10 times more intense over the past 50 years compared with 600 years ago.

"It's definitely evidence that the climate and the environment is changing in this part of Antarctica," lead researcher Nerilie Abram said.



"A new 1,000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid-20th century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers.

The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required to understand the causes of environmental change in Antarctica and to make more accurate projections about the direct and indirect contribution of Antarctica's ice shelves and glaciers to global sea level rise."




THE ARCTIC MELT
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic — it’s the planet’s air conditioner. In fact, as pointed out 10 June 2013 by research scientist Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “Climate change is already happening in the Arctic, faster than its ecosystems can adapt. Looking at the Arctic is like looking at the canary in the coal mine for the entire Earth system.”


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).


OCEAN ACIDIFICATION

great barrier reef, health, damage, changes


TOWARDS 2C?



The ultra-conservative International Energy Agency concludes that, “coal will nearly overtake oil as the dominant energy source by 2017 … without a major shift away from coal, average global temperatures could rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, leading to devastating climate change.”
A 40 YEAR DELAY IN WARMING
The present degree of warming on the planet is  due to emissions released 40 years ago when I was growing up. 

This is due to a 40 year lag between emissions and temperature rise.

I don't feel so personally responsible as I might have otherwise.


"Due to the four-decade lag between emissions and temperature rise, the inconvenient fact that the world has emitted more than twice the industrial carbon dioxide emissions since 1970 as we did from the start of the Industrial Revolution through 1970, and also due to the feedback loops described below, I strongly suspect it’s too late for economic collapse to extend the run of our species".

 Indeed, as pointed out by Bruce Melton at Truth-out in a 26 December 2013 piece featuring climate scientist Wallace Broeker: “today we are operating on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from the 1970s. In the last 29 years we have emitted as many greenhouse gases as we emitted in the previous 236 years. Because of the great cooling effect of the oceans, we have not yet begun to see the warming that this recent doubling of greenhouse gases will bring.”


Greenhouse gas emissions continue to accelerate even as the world’s industrial economy slows to a halt: Emissions grew nearly twice as fast during the first decade of the new millennium as in the previous 30 years, as

The 40-year has been evident since at least 1938, when Guy Callendar pointed out influence of rising carbon dioxide on temperature in a paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. The hand-drawn figure from the paper shown below clearly illustrates a rise in global-average temperature beginning about 1915, roughly 40 years after the consumption of fossil fuels increased substantially. Callendar’s work was used by J.S. Sawyer in a 1972 paper published inNature to predict an “increase of 25% CO2 expected by the end of the century … [and] … an increase of 0.6°C in the world temperature” with stunning accuracy.

Callendar 1938 figure
ONLY COLLAPSE COULD AVERT RUNAWAY GLOBAL WARMING

The key document in support of his contention that only immediate collapse of indistrial society could avert runaway global warming comes from a http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/is-global-warming-unstoppable, published online by Climatic Change in November 2009 (outcry from civilized scientists delayed formal publication until February 2011).

The paper remains largely ignored by the scientific community, having been cited fewer than thirty times since its publication.

Another aspect of this that was, as far I can see, identified in the BBC documentary, Global Dimming, is that the removal of particulates from the air caused by cessation of industrial activity woud lead to an immmediate increase in temperature

Smog over Beijing, China. Photo / Thinkstock







An increasing number of scientists agree that warming of 4 to 6 C causes a dead planet. And, they go on to say, we’ll be there much sooner than most people realize. Clive Hamilton concludes in his April 2013 book Earthmasters that “without [atmospheric sulfates associated with industrial activity] … Earth would be an extra 1.1 C warmer.”

This estimate matches that of James Hansen and colleagues, who conclude 1.2 C cooling (plus or minus 0.2 C) as a result of atmospheric particulates (full paper in the 22 December 2011 issue of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics is here.


Both estimates are conservative relative to a paper in the 27 May 2013 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, which reports ~1 C temperature rise resulting from a 35-80% reduction in anthropogenic aerosols.

 In other words, collapse takes us directly to 2 C within a matter of weeks. ... as well as to the simultaneous meltdown of 300+ nuclear power stations


Here is a good, basic introduction to the science from Guy - Climate Change 101

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