Hopefully, any readers are aware of the likely
climate-change implications of the election of Donald Trump to the US
Presidency. These include disengagement
from international efforts to slow climate change, making government-driven
change much more difficult; deregulation of “carbon pollution”, with
predictable effects on the ability of wind and solar to replace rather than
supplement oil; and effective barriers to any use of incentives (“carbon tax”
or “carbon market”) to drive carbon-emissions reduction. The effect on climate-change efforts is that
China (hopefully) and Europe will have to drive them; which is a bit like
trying to pedal a tricycle with one wheel gone.
And that doesn’t even include the likely effects of the new
administration’s cuts in funding to NOAA, on whose metrics much of the world
depends. We have seen this before, in
miniature, during the HW Bush years.
But there is more sad news – much more – some of which I
have learned very recently. It concerns –
well, let’s just go into the details.
Sea-Level Rise By Century’s End: 3 Feet and Rising
One recent factoid published, iirc, in thinkprogress.org/tagged/climate,
is that in the period from late 2014 to early 2016, oceanic water levels rose
by 15 mm, i.e., at an annual rate of 10 mm – up from 3 mm per year before
that. Very little of that rise is due to
el Nino, which began around Dec.-Jan. of this year and ended around
April-May. Instead, there is a clear
connection to the sharp rise in global temperature which began in 2014.
So let’s put this number (10 mm/year) in perspective. If we guesstimate the first 14 years of the
21st century at 3 mm/year, then 42 mm are already banked. To get to 909 mm (3 feet) will therefore
require 86.7 years. There are 86 years
from 2015 to 2100. So at today’s rates,
we will reach 3 feet of sea level rise by some time in the year 2101.
In other words, 3 feet of sea level rise by 2100 – the prediction
widely disseminated as late as a year ago – is already “baked in”. And what reason do we have for thinking that
matters will stop here? There is no
reason to expect global temperatures to decrease over the medium term, and good
reason (atmospheric carbon increases) to expect them to continue to increase. So we are talking sea level rise of over a
foot by 2050, at the very least, and we are wondering if the new “more
realistic” estimate of 6-9 feet of sea level rise may be too optimistic.
The Faster Rise of Atmospheric CO2 Isn’t Going Away – and Other Greenhouse Gases Are Following
Let’s start with the CO2 rise that I have been following
since early this year. The “baked in”
(yearly average) amount of CO2 has reached, effectively, 405 ppm, as of October’s
results about 1 ½ years after it passed 400 ppm permanently. More alarmingly, the surge caused at least
partly by el Nino is not going away. I
have been following CO2 measurements from Mauna Loa for about 5 years, and
always before this year the 10-year rate of increase has been a little more
than 1.0 ppm per year. The el Nino and
follow-on has added almost 3 ppm to that rate, making a rate of almost 1.1 ppm
per year. And the new rate of increase
shows little signs of stopping, so that we can project a rate of 1.2 ppm within
the next 5 years -- a 20 percent increase.
Global Warming Appears to Follow – Right Now
A second measurement of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere –
this one including all greenhouse gases, e.g., methane – has recently been
discussed in neven1.typepad.com. It now
stands at over 483 ppm. Some caution
must be used in assessing this figure, since we have no figure for 1850 and the
years following. However, we can make a
rough guesstimate, based on the facts that natural methane production would then
have been lower than now, man-made methane production almost non-existent, and
as of the early 2010s human methane production was approximately equivalent to
natural methane production.
This suggests that at least 2/3 of the gap between 400-405
ppm of carbon and 483 ppm of greenhouse gases as a whole is due to increases in
human-caused non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions.
To put it another way, human activities that have caused the 145-odd ppm
increases in CO2 have also caused at least 2/3 of the 80-odd ppm difference
between today’s CO2 atmospheric ppm and today’s total greenhouse gas
atmospheric ppm.
This is consistent with Hansen’s thesis that a doubling of
carbon ppm in the atmosphere would lead to 4 degrees C global warming, not 2
degrees – the additional warming comes partly from the aforementioned non-CO2
greenhouse gases, and partly from the additional “stored heat” at the Earth’s
surface due to changed albedo as snow melts.
The reason for the difference between the two estimates, afaik, is that
no one knew just how fast this additional warming would occur, since there is
(and was, 55 million and 250 million years ago) clearly a lag time between large
atmospheric carbon rises and increased non-CO2 greenhouse gases and “stored
heat”.
In summary, not only is the rise of atmospheric CO2 speeding
up, but the effect that appears to have a much shorter lag time than we thought. And so, there is real reason to fear that the
global warming we are afraid of (presently estimated at 1.2-1.3 ppm above 1850
already) will in the near and intermediate term increase faster than we
thought.
The Arctic Sea Melt Resumes
As late as a month ago, it was possible to argue that the
ongoing melting away of Arctic sea ice was still on the “pause” it had been on
since 2012. And then, surprisingly, the
usual refreezing occurring during October stopped. It stopped for several weeks. As a result, the average Arctic sea ice
volume year-round reached a record low, and kept going. And going.
As of the beginning of November, the average is now far below all
previous years.
What caused this sudden stoppage? Apparently, primarily unprecedented October
oceanic and atmospheric heat in the areas where refreeze typically occurs in
late October. This is apparently much
the same reason that minimum Arctic volume by some measures reached a new low
in late September, despite a melting season with weather that in all previous
years had resulted in much less melt than usual.
And what will prevent this from happening next year, and the
year after? Nothing, apparently (note
that the 2016 el Nino had little or no effect on Arctic sea ice melt). It now appears that we are still facing a
September “melt-out” by the mid-2030s, at best.
I am happy that the direst predictions (2018 and thereabouts) are almost
certainly not going to happen; and yet the scientific consensus has gone from “melt-out
at 2100 only if we continue business as usual” to “melt-out around 2035 with
much less chance of avoidance” in the last 5 years, and I hope against hope,
given everything else that’s happening, that the forecast doesn’t slip again.
The Bottom Line: Agility, Not Flexibility
I find, at the end, that I need to re-emphasize my concern,
not just about the first 4 degrees C of temperature rise, but even more so the
next, and the next. And the next after
that, the final rise.
I find that that a lot of people discount scientific
warnings about loss of food production and so on, reasoning that the global
market can, as it has done in the past, adapt to these problems at little cost,
by using less water-intensive methods of farming, shifting farming production
allocations north (and south) as the temperature increases, and handling
disaster costs as usual while doing quick fixes on existing facilities to
adapt. In other words, our system is
highly flexible; flexible enough to get us through the next 40-50 years, I
think, while providing food for the developed world and probably the large
majority of humanity.
But, as a systems analyst will tell you, such a flexible
system tends to make the inevitable crash far worse. Patching existing processes (in climate
change terms, adaptation) rather than fixing the problem at its root (in
climate change terms, mitigation) causes over-investment in the present system
that makes changing to a new, needed one far more costly – and therefore, far
more likely to deep-six the company, or, in this case, the global market.
At a certain point, the average of national markets going
south passes the average of global markets still growing, and then the cycle
starts running in reverse: smaller and
smaller markets that can be serviced at higher and higher costs, with food
scarcer and scarcer. The only way to
avoid total collapse into a system with inefficient production of the 1/10 of
the food necessary for the survival of 9 billion people is mitigation; but the
cost to do that is 10 times, 100 times what it was. The result is brutal military dictatorships
where the commander is the main rich person, as has happened so often
throughout history. Today’s rich will
suffer less, because they make accommodations with the military; but they will
on average suffer severely, by famine and disease.
An agile system (here I am speaking about the ideal, not
today’s usually far-from-agile companies) anticipates this eventuality, and moves
far more rapidly towards fundamental change.
It can be done. But, as of now,
we are headed in the opposite direction.
