More Fun Global Warming News

I along with many others noted the milestone of CO2 atmospheric concentrations passing 400 ppm last month – but that’s not all the data are telling us.

I recently checked Mauna Loa (and global) CO2 for the first time since Mauna Loa crossed 400 ppm for a day. It appears that in the last week in May, it was above 400 ppm on average for a full week, and on one day it approached 400.5 ppm. For the month of May, Mauna Loa CO2 was nearly 400 ppm (399.77) and was approximately 3 ppm higher than last year. It appears that so far this year Mauna Loa and global CO2 are averaging close to 3 ppm above last year, which would be a figure well above all other years since 1998 (2.93 ML). Btw, last year's was the second largest increase on record (2.65).

My overall conclusion: I don't know if this will affect overall weather the way 1998’s record CO2 increase may have (the year of the global yearly temp record, which has not been surpassed in a major way since, although we're getting pretty darn close). But it does add a potential major temperature booster. It does seem to confirm that CO2 atmospheric concentration continues to increase exponentially rather than linearly. And it does present a bleak prospect for the next few years.

What do I mean?

Still “Business As Usual”

The usual phrase for following the CO2-emissions track we have been on for the last 160 years, and especially the last 35 years, is “business as usual”.  We see a lot of planning and some hopeful examples from nations like Germany and Sweden in trying to get away from this kind of inexorable percentage increase in emissions that results in exponentially increasing CO2 concentrations and leads to temperature increases from now on well above the 2 degrees C (actually, 2.6-2.8 C according to what I know of the latest credible research) that everyone seems to be trying not to surpass.  In fact, “business as usual” has been estimated to result in perhaps 9 degrees F of global average temperature increase and 16 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. Considering the fact that the models saying this are not nearly adequately factoring in permafrost melt that will lead to major additional CO2 releases to the atmosphere (and a few harder-to-estimate factors such as likely major increases in methane emissions), you should view the temperature figure as one that we will achieve only with extreme luck. Me, I’m guessing more like 12 degrees temperature rise and 20 feet sea level rise (plus 20 feet increase in storm surge).

What the Mauna Loa and global CO2 figures are telling us is that our present efforts are still not having a significant enough effect on “business as usual.”  This suggests, for example, that the US figures showing perhaps a 7% reduction through 2011 or 2012 (figures for 2012 represent a preliminary estimate that has been shown in the past to underestimate actual emissions) probably represent the US multinational companies exporting their emissions to countries like China and India.  They also suggest that the US switch to natural gas has far less effect on CO2 emissions than anticipated, and that announced Chinese efforts to reduce emissions have had a minor (if any) effect on what is now the world’s greatest CO2-emissions ramp-up.

A Call To Face Real Reality

It seems to me that much of the commentary about what to do about this simply does not comprehend the full dimensions of “business as usual” as we have been practicing it for the last few decades, including the ongoing efforts to do something about global warming.  So here’s my initial attempt to summarize the way I see it.

Roughly speaking, political reality breaks down across the globe into three groups:

1.       Climate deniers, or those who would effectively pursue policies that ramp up CO2 emissions further.

2.       Political and economic ameliorators, who would attempt to respond to their understanding of the scientific research while placing first and foremost no or little change in the political and economic strategies that are presently being pursued, especially the ones that involve government regulation.  That is, they seek to achieve what in the past has been change by achieving what is close to a positive-sum game for everyone.  By the way, even carbon taxation right now falls under this heading.

3.       The few (like me, unfortunately) who are calling for major changes now now now.

Responding adequately to this global warming crisis, it seems to me, requires that we face two unpalatable realities:

A.      Neither group 1 nor group 2 will likely avoid the catastrophes that will result from “business as usual.”  I’ll explain why in a minute.

B.      However, things can always get worse.  In other words, if we throw up our hands and say why bother to try if we can’t figure out how to do major changes, then, as in the case of handing matters over to the climate deniers, the catastrophes will be worse, and sooner.

Why do I say we can’t avoid catastrophes via group 2’s strategies?  Let’s think of Japan just after WW II – about as devastated economically as it was possible to be.  And yet, 30 years later, we found ourselves worrying if Japan was going to become the #1 economy in the world.  It’s a story we have seen repeated over and over, and it involves the fact that as long as there is an outside world to take a hand and as long as the economy can piggyback via investment on its core labor and resource assets (I’m including farming here) underlaid by government regulatory “rules of the game”, the body of understanding of how to run a modern economy and government allows springing back to somewhere where you were before catastrophe struck.

But global warming’s effects, it seems to me, for the first time in human history, make this an approach that will break down sooner or later.  In effect, in systems analysis terms, this is simultaneous strain on all key components of the system, increasing exponentially, that you respond to by fixing problems only after the fact and only to handle last year’s strain.  In other words, while you are handling last year’s disaster and spending money to buy levees to handle that unprecedented disaster, another exponentially greater disaster is on the way, on which you are going to have to spend more money than this year’s.  And this is happening on such a widespread scale across the world that all of the multinationals and all of the nations are facing these increasing strains simultaneously – and so their attempts to help each other are more and more limited. 

At a certain point, then, things begin to operate basically in reverse.  Political elites reflecting economic elites react to the rising costs by failing to serve greater and greater segments of the population in order to keep up the economy.  This creates unrest and government breakdowns, which add yet more economic stress.  This also means that governments and political elites will decrease efforts to cut emissions, continuing the emissions rise that counteracts to some extent the effects of the shrinking economy.  And, at a breaking point, there is a major downward economic shift that represents a major decrease in the global economy’s ability to handle the increasing catastrophes.

All this sounds theoretical.  I would suggest that the likely proximate cause of the breaking point will be agriculture – in other words, feeding ourselves.  I am not just talking the developing world here:  I am talking about the developed nations.  A projection of the world in 2050-2090 shows most temperate-zone areas in extreme drought.  Add to that drawdown of aquifers, loss of winter melt-off, and 55-odd feet of increased reach of salt water into today’s deltas and estuaries that comprise 1/3 of global food-growing, and we are talking about losing up to 90% of the world’s present growing areas, much of this occurring somewhere between 2050 and 2100.  For example, California’s growing areas east of San Francisco provide an amazing amount of the world’s food.  Presently proposed fixes to the dams that keep salt water out of this area, even if they ever get them done, are probably only going to be adequate to handle matters until 2050-2060.  And there’s no obvious comparable area to move that production to.

Is there really anything to be done about all this?  Lots.  But it all involves (a) being far more aggressive on emissions reduction (“mitigation”) and (b) spending much more money now to handle oncoming disasters much further into the future (“adaptation”).  (a) is our only hope for avoiding things being even worse than this; (b) is our hope for making things more tolerable in the horrible future world that we have already created for ourselves, and so increasing our chances of doing (a) well. Let’s be clear on this: even good adaptation won’t avoid the consequences of failure to mitigate.  Protection for our food sources will sooner or later have to face the fact that we will have perhaps 10-20% of the food sources we have now.  Whatever else we do, we need to mitigate first and foremost.

There is one known successful model for doing this: it’s called WW II in America.  We accepted drastic changes in the economy, decreases in food supply, and disruptions in life in order to win the war.  That is what the world could do, or what nations could do – except that this is a war of all against ourselves, in which we do not destroy the enemy unless the enemy effectively resists major changes in its economy and its peoples’ lives.

Failing that, I simply assert from long familial knowledge of politics and governments that there is far, far more that could be done about global warming under the covers than is being done now.  Fundamentally, the ameliorators don’t really believe that this is anything new in human history.  So they don’t take the political chances that they could get away with, and they don’t play dirty politics with the deniers. 

And that brings me back to facing reality.  For the ameliorators, for us all, a key part of the answer lies in facing the realities that I have outlined – and especially the part about the less you do, the worse things get, even beyond where they are now.  And so, my own personal response is simply to say, it ain’t so, rather than keep silent – while making it clear who is worse than whom, and why that matters.

How should we react to the continuing exponential rise in CO2 atmospheric concentration? I would suggest that we begin by facing the real reality of its effects and of our failure to deal with those effects.

 

The Arctic, Global Warming, and World Politics: And the Band Played On

Over the last two years, I have sometimes been afflicted by the feeling that most of the world around me is functionally insane – and then I tell myself that I’m being paranoid. It seems to me that there is a steady drumbeat of scientific research that says that our carbon emissions as evidenced in the world around us are leading to unprecedented (and I don’t use that term lightly) catastrophe – for the descendants of every single one of us. And I note almost no comparable sense of urgency from almost anyone in a position of public or business responsibility. And then I say to myself, well, the same information is available to them. Maybe I’m misperceiving.

The test case, for me, is sea ice in the Arctic. Over the last few years, “extent” and “area” data have apparently said one thing: less than 5 % ice cover at minimum (early Sept.) sometime between 2030 and 2100. The volume data have apparently said another thing: less than 5% ice cover between 2013 and 2015 (actually, for arcane reasons to do with variance around the mean, it’s more like between 2016 and 2020). Volume data is fuzzier than extent and area data, so conservative scientists have tended to project the 2030-2100 number. However, it has seemed to me (again, for arcane reasons) that the volume number is far more realistic. And we’ll know for sure in, at maximum, 3 ¼ years.

Think, just for a brief second, about what it would mean if I was right. In September 2018, a little over 5 years from now, it will be clear sailing, with no ice, except probably just north of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. Shipping need not go anywhere except straight across the top of the world. The sun will shine down on a massive new “heat bank”, warming the surface waters instead of reflecting the heat back to space, and delaying refreezing – and fueling ongoing processes that will result in much more methane and carbon dioxide being released from Arctic waters and nearby Canadian and Russian permafrost. The process will feed on itself, every year delaying the onset of refreezing even more and causing the melting to occur earlier in the year, until somewhere between 2040 and 2060, probably, the Arctic will stay unfrozen almost all year around.

That, in turn, will speed the melting of Greenland ice into the ocean – which at its end would add perhaps 30-60 feet to the world’s oceans. The additional warmth from Arctic unfreezing – added to “business as usual” warming to yield global warming estimated, too conservatively and without good regard to the effects of permafrost unfreezing, at 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 – will speed south to Antarctic ocean currents and atmosphere, speeding the melting of another 150-odd feet of ocean rise.

All of this will play out over 200-1000 years, say the scientists, but, again, it seems to me that the most likely figure is closer to 200. And if you then examine the rest of the effects of my “most likely” temperature and ocean rise, as predicted by scientists and then modified by my knowledge of politics and economics, it’s very hard for me not to panic.

And for some reason, I keep looking at the news, at political comments on the subject, and the rest of how people are spending their lives, and hearing no remotely comparable sense of urgency. They just keep on doing the same things, as if walking around with invisible headphones, listening to some music that drowns out what I hear and say. And I start hearing in my head for some reason an old song with an endless refrain, “something the girl with the strawberry curls/And the band played on.”

The Trigger

Over the last couple of years I’ve been lurking at a superb web site mediating between scientific findings and amateur assessors of the research such as myself: neven1.typepad.com. Do not pass Go, go directly to their daily graphs page, and look at the ones that show the yearly trend of volume and area. Sometime in the next 3 ½ years, if I am correct, we will see massive jumps downwards in area and extent during the melt period to correspond to the massive loss of volume at all times of the year we have seen between 1979 and now. And based on the last few days of area and extent data, I am wondering if it is beginning. Certainly, the predictors, scientific and otherwise, seem to sense a major downward movement (cf the SEARCH 2012 Sea Ice Outlook: June report blog post in the same location). Note the key sentence: “The 2012 June Outlook differs from all previous Outlooks in that there are no projections of extent [during September’s “minimum month] greater than 5.0.”

Now here’s what I see in politics: Canada’s Stephen Harper says it’ll be a boon to Canada because of the tolls for using the Northwest Passage. Excuse me? If in 10 years I’m going to be able to simply barrel past Alaska to the Pole and then pivot south around Greenland to get to both Western Europe and the Eastern US for August through September, why would I give two cents to Canada? Maybe I’d give a little to Russia for the Northeast Passage, but not much, considering my alternatives.

Then there’s all sorts of debate about “the mineral wealth of the Arctic” – mainly oil, isn’t it? Gee, what a good idea, let’s speed up global warming even faster! And let’s kill even more ocean life in the process – even though a scientific report to the UN says we may kill off just about everything important in the ocean but jellyfish by 2100 unless we mend our ways.

Meanwhile, back in the US, half of the population is pledged to a party committed to denying there’s any problem at all – instead, they want to get more oil, drill, my poor baby, drill. Over in China, as was predicted 3 years ago, attempts to get into solar while satisfying the populace with coal have been the primary cause of a record global rise in carbon emissions last year. And those are just the most important villains; the same in lesser degree could be said for most nations. I am not in the slightest minimizing what those like Australia’s Prime Minister are doing; it’s just that nobody seems to be talking about the fact that their efforts are having minimal impact compared to the scale of what it takes to avoid or even minimize the disaster.

And our beloved businesses, whose free-market prowess will lead us out of this mess: gee, it’s 35 years and counting, maybe 5 years since you noticed that there might possibly be an effect on your brand, and the US is just about the most “free-market” country around, and have we reduced our emissions via your superb technological innovations driven into the market by sheer entrepreneurial force? Or have we seen only a flattening over the last 3 years of deep recession and slow recovery, while the Koch brothers fund political denial after media denial, and your “just us business rich” attitude towards this type of blatant free-market distortion is to enable with your boards of directors and to excuse with your Chambers of Commerce and your Heartland Institutes?

And the band played on.

Imagining Horror

So let’s take a map of the world in 2060 (it may be 30-60 years later than that) showing the likely areas of epic drought or far too much rain – drought which, by the way, includes just about all of the US except the Northeast. Subtract areas in the tropics, as they will eventually be mostly too hot to support meaningful crops (think: Qatar). Now subtract maybe 100 miles inland from higher oceans, and maybe more than that if the continental shelves periodically produce bursts of acid, sulfuric air (Ward’s Medusa hypothesis). Where do you have left to grow food?

Well, there’s a long strip in Siberia where there’s permafrost now. There’s a shorter strip in upper Canada where there’s permafrost now. There’s a pretty short strip in north Argentina. Notice anything about these? No one’s growing food there now. All our present growing areas – 10 times or more the area we’re talking about – will be extraordinarily hard or impossible (perhaps a third of the world’s growing areas are around river deltas) to grow food on. And, by the way, all that permafrost is probably going to turn into peat bogs, complete with swamps and mosquitoes. Lovely places to live.

How much of the world’s present population can we support via farming there? There is no likely way now to support more than 20% of the present population (around 7 billion), at reasonable minimum daily calories, afaik; maybe only 10%. Let’s say, at a wild guess, 1 billion. So who are those 1 billion going to be?

Well, gee, do you really think Canada or Russia will welcome 1 billion people with open arms? Ah, but we’re rich (or some of us are); we can buy our way in. Except that who protects us from the 6 billion (or maybe 8 billion, by 2050) others? Not the government; that would require that the government take most of your money for your defense, and you wouldn’t like that, would you? Much better to hire mercenaries. Except that those mercenaries will, as mercenaries have always done, given the opportunity, turn around and demand they get the bulk of the loot. And they won’t have much use for more than the minimum number of rich after that. Yeah, you’ll buy survival – but probably not of over half your descendants. But who cares even about your own great-great-grandchildren, if you can live it up?

And I haven’t even touched on the litany of natural disasters, and very possibly wars, that will increasingly decrease our ability to either avoid (geoengineering on the cheap, anyone?) or adapt to this brave new world. And I haven’t touched on the impoverished ecosystems supporting this new farmland, or the fact we’ll have to move twice to get there, since it won’t even be fully melted 50-60 years from now when the stresses may really hit.

And it’s also, it appears to me, that there’s a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity. 45 years ago, when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House, minimal efforts over the last 45 years would have avoided it all. Now, some effects seem impossible to avoid and imminent – like the Arctic melting and a follow-on 15-foot-by-2100 Greenland sea rise and global warming up to 2 degrees Celsius. Major disruptions to our great-great-grandchildrens’ lives appear impossible to avoid unless we reduce emissions to about 10-20% of our present level within about 20-30 years.

That’s doable by a supreme effort. Is anyone talking about it? And it gets far harder to avoid the ultimate horror after that.

Or is it the ultimate horror? No, even I won’t go there today – although the way we’ve been handling things, it’s no longer effectively impossible.

And the band played on.

Envoi

So, as I understand Rachel Maddow says, talk me down. Although, over the last few years, I haven’t seen much talking-down going on. Maybe I’m over-reacting to the Arctic data. Maybe my understanding is flawed. I’d love it to be so. I would really like to just sit here and listen, as the horrible, wonderful human band plays on.

And by 2050, I fully anticipate being in my grave. Dreaming, I hope, of my own girl with the strawberry hair. Viewing that “Tomorrow,” as the old folk song says, “When the sun is at rise/No more sorrow, shall be found in mine eyes.” Even if I am right, I will never see the full consequences. Silly me, to worry about my great-great-grandchildren. Or anyone else’s.

But I do have one request, should it turn out, by some amazing chance, that I’m close to right. If some great-great-grandchild of someone survives and remembers, I’d like them to do one thing for me. No need to do it. It would just be nice.

If, in that strange future world, my gravestone survives, I’d like them to come back and carve a simple message on it. Five words.

And the band played on.