Joe Romm’s “Climate Change - What Everyone Needs to Know”, Second Edition: Maybe the Best CC Book Right Now

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.
Just a brief note after my previous post.  I have just finished “Climate Change”, and imho it may be the best book for the general reader trying to get up to speed with the latest science and what’s going on with climate change mitigation and adaptation. 

It’s in the format of posing questions and then answering them, which can clarify what you’re really discussing in a section, but can be a little confusing when you’re trying to follow the overall argument.  Not too confusing, tho’.

As can be seen from my previous post, the only really new things in it for me that mattered were around the latest findings on permafrost, methane, and the like.  But Room is surprisingly good on energy efficiency and hydrogen-powered vehicles (a wasted section, since it becomes clear early on in the section that they’re not worth considering in any real depth unless a technological breakthrough occurs).  Moreover, his cautionary notes on biofuels, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power go beyond the usual discussions.

It’s not light reading; but it’s not tough slogging, either.  I suggest giving it a try.

Putting an Upper Bound on Climate Change: Permafrost

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

When trying to figure out the most likely rate of global warming in our “business as usual” society, I always go back to that amusing quote from the movie version of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring:  “Are you scared?  Not scared enough!”  The reason I remember this is that up to now, all of our scientific models of how climate change will play out over the next 100 years or so have consistently underestimated the rate of warming, not to mention the rate at which weather extremes have become the “new abnormal”.  And the reasons for this underestimation in the scientific community, from what I can tell, are (a) conservatism (even though the modeler may know that an effect will add to global warming, until the effect can be bounded with 95% likelihood in a positive direction it is assumed to have neither positive nor negative effect) and (b) lack of knowledge (for example, for a long time, the effect of increased cloudiness on global warming was not clearly understood).

Over time, these certainties and uncertainties in models have tended to be sorted out into the categories of Donald Rumsfeld’s pernicious classification:  knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns:

1.       The knowns are now, effectively, all those direct effects (e.g., the direct effect of CO2 and methane on global warming) and feedback or “knock-on” effects (e.g., the effect of release of black carbon by wildfires on decreasing Arctic albedo, where global warming from CO2 increase causes increased wildfires, which causes black carbon to fall on snow and ice, decreasing Arctic albedo and hence causing more Arctic warming).

2.       The known unknowns are those effects that we know will play a role, but which are not incorporated in models because we don’t know the extent of the role they will play.  Of these, perhaps the largest ones are (i) melting permafrost and (ii) methane (CH4) releases other than from permafrost melting, including methane clathrates, release of methane locked in land and ocean repositories, and release of methane from human action, including cow emissions and natural-gas processing emissions.

3.       The unknown unknowns are, obviously, effects that we probably can’t anticipate until they happen.  We can, however, take a guess at them by looking at the relationship between CO2 atmospheric emissions and global temperature during the last two major rises in CO2 – 250 million years ago (mya) and 55 mya (the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, also known as “hell and high water”).  If known unknowns turn into knowns, then the difference between what our models tell us will happen and what past experience suggests is probably due to unknown unknowns.
  

If we can turn the known unknowns into knowns, there appears to be a reasonable prospect that the revised models will track with past PETM (and other) experience, which would mean that the unknown unknowns probably don’t have a significant impact on global warming one way or the other.  In fact, the only remaining known unknown upside to be accounted for might be the fact that we are accelerating carbon emissions at a far greater pace than they have ever increased before.  The usual thinking is that this may speed up the process of actual global temperature warming, (e.g., in our case, a doubling of atmospheric carbon since 1850 should lead to a 2-2.8 degree C temperature increase in the next 100 years, and a total 4 degrees C temperature increase over the next 1000 years, rather than a 1200-year gradual doubling leading to an increase of 1.3 degrees C by 100 years from now, but with the same total 4 degrees C increase at the end), although it is possible that our rush to emit carbon will trigger unknown unknowns that will lead to an even greater rise in temperature at the end of each doubling.  In a nutshell:  with permafrost and methane accounted for, we would begin to see a plausible upper bound for the amount of long-term global warming from increased atmospheric CO2 and related greenhouse-gas emissions.

In long-ago posts, I said that research seemed to suggest that increased methane emissions would not deliver a major boost to global warming.  Without going into horrendous detail, I saw the research as suggesting that if even if methane clathrates, sea-floor methane, and permafrost methane suddenly started rising into the atmosphere a very high rates over the next 100 years, it was still unlikely that methane would achieve “saturation” in the atmosphere, which would cause methane to stay in the atmosphere much longer and therefore have a much greater warming effect – perhaps as much as 1 degree F while it lasted.  Nothing in the second edition of Joe Romm’s “Climate Change:  What Everyone Needs to Know” (summarizing findings as of early 2018) suggests that this scientific consensus has changed.

And so, I would argue, getting at the likely effect of melting all the permafrost gives us a reasonable shot at an upper bound for the most likely effects from “business as usual” increases in carbon emissions.  Or, as I like to say, we may finally know how scared is scared enough.

New Findings on Permafrost

Only nine years ago, it wasn’t clear that permafrost melting was happening yet.  Now, it’s not only clear that it’s happening, it seems to be happening faster than anticipated.   So a plausible upper bound for global warming is increasingly seeming more like a “middle bound” – the most likely case – for business-as-usual global warming.

Here’s a back-of-the-envelope SWAG at the effects of full permafrost melt.  According to “Climate Change”, there are 1.5 trillion tons of carbon locked in the world’s permafrost.  Studies cited in CC also suggest that for each 90 tons of permafrost carbon released, atmospheric carbon goes up about 60-80 ppm.  Thus, total melt means about 1000-1333 ppm of added atmospheric carbon.
 
The effect on global warming then depends on how fast it happens and what else is going on.  More specifically, if melt is fast, then most of its effect falls within the first two doublings of atmospheric carbon.  Thus, very loosely, with a 2 degree C direct effect of non-permafrost added atmospheric carbon on temperatures, we are talking about somewhere around a 4 degree C direct effect of total permafrost melt.

But direct effects of carbon are not the only effects.  A significant proportion of the carbon in permafrost will almost certainly be emitted as methane (CH4), not carbon dioxide.  While much of this will eventually turn into CO2 in the atmosphere, the rise in per-decade atmospheric methane during quick permafrost melt can add up to another degree C to warming over centuries-to-millenia time periods, because methane can be up to 86 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.  And the lack of snow cover and increased vegetation associated with the peat bogs likely to be a result of permafrost melt mean a shift in albedo that, to my mind, should significantly up global warming as well.  In sum, aggressive total permafrost melt seems to me at first glance to result in an average 4-6 degrees C of global warming for at least the next 1000 years – and, considering the unknown unknowns, that may be conservative.

It should be pointed out that if we are effective in ending business-as-usual global warming in the near future, much less of the permafrost will ultimately melt.   At another SWAG, we may have locked in melt of 5% of permafrost already (the result of non-permafrost feedbacks adding 0.5 degrees C to the temperature henceforward plus the effects of additional heating from initial permafrost melt).  The rest is still in play.

Glimpses of an Upper Bound

What strikes me about this estimate (4-6 degrees C) is that it seems to fit in more nicely both with the experience of past catastrophic global warming and with recent Hansen papers trying to set an upper bound.  In the PETM, carbon ppm started at about 1000 and apparently went up to about 2000, but the temps seem to have gone up 6 degrees C in the process, 4 degrees more than direct atmospheric carbon effects can explain.  One recently raised suggestion is that elimination of stratocumulus clouds, which should thin out as air temps get warmer, can add 8 degrees C to global warming.   But this is not likely to take effect until well beyond the 1000 ppm level, below which aggressive permafrost melt plays its major role.

In trying to square the PETM with the likely direct effects of atmospheric carbon, Hansen conjectured, iirc, that each doubling of atmospheric carbon would lead, without human interference, to a little more than 2 degrees C of direct effects plus a little less than 2 degrees C of feedback effects, for a total of 4 degrees C.  But the feedback effects he identified only seemed applicable to the first doubling (to 550-odd ppm), and the temps in the PETM seemed too high, imho, for a 2000-ppm atmospheric carbon level.  Some combination of permafrost melt and cloud thinning, with permafrost melt playing its major role before 1000 ppm (at the time of the late Cretaceous global warming 11 million years before, with loss of sea ice and therefore probably loss of permafrost) and cloud thinning after, may therefore explain some of the PETM warming (whether it played a role in the global warming/mass extinction 250 mya, which involved a super-continent with no extreme north or south land, is not clear).

This also squares with another Hansen paper (iirc). In it, he argues that using up most of our present fossil fuel reserves will lead ultimately to 16 degrees C/30 degrees F average warming, or 30 degrees C/54 degrees F average warming in the Arctic and Antarctic.

All of the above statements contain large fudge factors, of course, and can be and are argued over.  However, I do now believe it is much more probable now that something like this upper bound is in store for us, if business as usual continues indefinitely. 

Implications for Armageddon

With all of the above in mind, I like to think of the worst as four stages – horrible, catastrophic, apocalyptic, and decimating, the first three corresponding to doublings of atmospheric carbon, and the last comprising only feedback effects.  Aggressive permafrost melt gives the second and third stages, which have yet to arrive, a similar warming effect over time to our first stage.  And that arbitrary classification leads to a couple of assertions:

1.       Each stage is much worse in its effects than the previous one; and

2.       Each stage becomes harder to prevent or ameliorate than the previous one.  In a sense, each stage adds momentum and size to the downward rolling snowball, because (a) new feedback effects are triggered, like permafrost melt and Arctic/Antarctic ice melt, (b) saturation effects start occurring, like inability of the ocean to store oxygen or saturation of atmospheric methane leading to longer stays in the air, and (c) our ability to mitigate is increasingly hindered by having to undo greater  amounts of now-inappropriate fossil-fuel infrastructure and optimized-for-the-wrong-temperature energy-inefficient dwellings.

      And that is why I disagree with both the optimists and pessimists.  Yes, failure to undo business as usual is rife in the air.  Yes, we may well have effectively crossed the boundary into Stage 2, with horrible effects of climate change already locked in.  Yes, the ultimate end of Stage 4 may well be the decimation of the human race and the rest of the natural world.  But until 100 or 200 years from now, we still have the ability to break utterly the cycle of business as usual, harder though it gets as time goes by.  And therefore every setback in our quest demands not despair but a fiercer effort, more confrontation of the guilty, and greater demands for even more to be done.

It’s like a crooked poker game.  Yes, right now it’s the only game in town, and yes, right now you can’t win or fold, just keep on losing.  But the game will end, and your job is to lose as little as possible, as the stakes go up and up, so that when the game is over you may have lost your heart’s desire but you will not be an indebted slave for life, or killed because you couldn’t pay your debt.  Or most of the effects may fall on your great-great-grandchildren; but they’re still the same shattering effects.  On everybody.

Oh, and one extremely small hopeful note:  it seems to me that to avoid business as usual resurfacing at any time over the next 1000 years, we will have to change fundamentally.  To sustainability.  To a method of living that almost certainly will not destroy the remainder of humanity.  Stage 4 will be as bad as it gets.

And so, hopefully, understanding the effects of permafrost and having a likely upper bound means you are scared enough.  Absolutely, totally scared stiff.  With decimation staring you in the face.  And so, said the psychiatrist in Portnoy’s Complaint, now ve may perhaps to begin, yes?

Climate Change 2018: That Was The Year That Wasn't

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

We begin our experience of climate change in 2018 with the legacy of 2017, a year that was in many ways the worst so far.  It began with a new US President committed to reversing the minor gains against carbon emissions that the “lead dog” US had already achieved, and with unprecedented off-season Arctic sea ice melting.  It ended with massive out-of-season climate-change-driven wildfires in California, four hurricanes together packing unprecedented force and causing thousands of deaths (Puerto Rico) and close-to-unprecedented physical damage (in dollars), apparent increases in US carbon emissions after 2 years of declines, and unprecedented Arctic warmth in December.  And those are just the lowlights.

In the year since I retired, I have had the chance to read extensively if capriciously in climate change literature, and I hope to share some of those books’ insights with readers in later posts.  Here, I want to briefly note some of the key initial climate change trends of 2018:

·         Atmospheric CO2 continues its relatively rapid pace of increase

·         Arctic sea ice is at a historic low for this time of year, and global sea ice at an all-time low

·         Solar energy cost gains are counteracted by inadequate country emissions pledges and US backsliding

CO2 Increases:  The Broken Record

The important thing to remember about atmospheric CO2 measurements is that they tell us how we are really doing.  You will see all sorts of encouraging (and discouraging) developments that should affect carbon emissions over the course of the year, especially the ones that claim to measure whether global emissions are up or down.  However, global emission measures are flawed by self-reporting and incomplete data, which may increasingly underestimate the emissions.  Atmospheric CO2, measured since 1959 at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, provides not only a measure of overall emissions but also a reality check as to whether our efforts at curbing human and human-related emissions are bearing fruit.

In February 2018, as it seems I have said many times before – so many times that I sound like a broken record – atmospheric CO2 continues to increase at an unprecedented pace, all things considered.  Initial indications are that 2017 CO2 increased by 2.11 ppm, less that the 3 ppm the previous two years.  However, this is a drop of about 0.9 ppm from 2 El Nino years, while the only comparable El Nino year in the past, 1998, saw a drop of about 2 ppm the next year.  Meanwhile, with February ¾ done, the increase for this month appears to be about 2.4 ppm.

The result is that it is almost certain that atmospheric CO2 is about 408 ppm, up 8-9 ppm since 2015.  While this is less than I feared 1 ½ years ago, it still suggests that we will reach 410 ppm some time around the end of this year and 420 ppm in 2022 – and we have already seen the drastic effects of breaching 400 ppm.

Arctic Sea Ice:  What Does Not Stay in the Arctic

For this, the best I can do is quote Joe Romm and Michael Mann (thinkprogress.org/record-arctic-temperatures-85b0c287a78b/):  “2018 has already set a string of records for lowest Arctic sea ice … [but] what happens in the Arctic doesn’t usually stay in the Arctic”  because this low Arctic sea ice weakens and moves the polar vertex (wintertime circular winds around the North Pole), driving relatively cold air south where it impacts both northern America as far south as Florida and northern Eurasia.  So what we are seeing is both extreme cold from this disruption, and extreme warmth when the disruption is not operating (as now, when I am seeing temperatures almost 40 degrees F above normal near Boston).

This is part of a year-round disruption of once-normal Arctic wind patterns leading to “acceleration” of “slowing down of ocean currents, … weather extremes like droughts, wildfires, floods, and superstorms …  [and] faster melting of the land-based Greenland ice sheet, which in turn drives the speed up in sea level rise that scientists reported last week.” 

Nor should we be complacent about Antarctic ice melting.  As noted, Antarctic land ice melt is the key to huge world sea level rise, and melting of Antarctic sea ice that plugs the glaciers conveying land ice to the sea for melting is therefore a prerequisite for huge world sea level rise.  The fact that global (Arctic plus Antarctic) sea ice has reached a record low in the last few weeks indicates that Antarctic sea ice is also at a low point, and last year’s Antarctic sea ice data backs that up.

Solar Vs. Fossil: One Step Forward, Two Half-Steps Back

There is no doubt in my mind that the major encouraging news of the past year has been the driving down of the cost of solar-power generation and installation, to a point well below that of oil, natural gas, and coal.  Moreover, increasingly, despite the lack of adequate solar-battery technology to guarantee no-blackout solar plus wind, the increased production of solar batteries and their lowered cost does make regional almost-no-blackout solar-plus-wind cost-effective for the majority of power in most world regions.  These technological improvements should continue unabated in 2018, and they are now empowered by NGOs, some governments, and entrepreneurs to a surprising extent.

However, a new UN publication assesses the emissions pledges of governments at or since the 2016 Paris conference, and finds that 2030 fossil-fuel emissions will be up in 2030 compared with 1990 if these pledges are fulfilled, while 2050 fossil-fuel emissions will be up in 2050 compared with 2030.   Combined with projected rising population until about 2050 that leads to rising non-fossil-fuel emissions (e.g., cows with methane, deforestation), this pattern of pledges may lock countries more firmly into efforts that are inadequate for a 2 degrees Centigrade goal.  Therefore, like Alice Through the Looking-Glass, we are failing to run fast enough to stay where we are, and have effectively taken a half-step back.

Another half-step, I believe, comes from the extensive efforts of the Trump administration to undo Obama-era (and previous) regulations, incentives, enforcement, and measurement related to climate change.  Over the past year, for example, enforcement actions have apparently gone down 44 %, solar incentives are rapidly moving from positive to negative, regulations on things like LED lightbulbs and Energy Star labelling are undercut, and satellites key to measurement of things like Arctic sea ice are under threat or under repair from underfunding, while communication of the data suffers from extreme removal of climate change considerations.  No wonder the US appears to have seen a rise in emissions in 2017 compared to a decline in the previous two years.  And this Trump-administration effort continues to grow in scope in 2018.

Conclusion:  That Was the Year That Wasn’t

Way back when (1962-1963), a TV show took a satirical look at the news of the week with the title, “That Was the Week That Was.”  It seems to me, taking a cynical look at 2017 and our efforts to deal with climate change, that that was the Year That Wasn’t – wasn’t in net terms a real break from the “business as usual” of 2010 and before – while at least 2016 saw a major shift in reporting on climate change, some people’s and governments’ attitudes, and at least somewhat of a shift in emissions themselves. 

Will 2018 be another Year That Wasn’t?  Too early to tell.  But we couldn’t afford 2017.  And, to a greater extent, we can’t afford another year like it.

Three Climate Change Numbers To Think About

As long as I’m posting on climate change, let me note three numbers that recently surfaced in that regard:

1. 1.       400 (ppm)
2. 2.       98.4 (%)
3. 3.       Minus 4.2 (%)

Each of these numbers moves the “center of probability” of how climate change is proceeding significantly – but each is really a confirmation of what we should have known already.

Number 1:  400 ppm

This one is perhaps the most widely known – it’s the time a couple of weeks ago when the Mauna Loa record of carbon in the atmosphere reached 400 ppm for the first time since ML started recording in 1950, and almost certainly for the first time in the last 3 million years – when carbon content in the atmosphere was headed in the opposite direction, i.e., down.

What is notable about this event is that had we been doing even a slightly improved job of dealing with carbon emissions, that event would have occurred in 2014 or even in 2015.  Because we did things like shift economic activity to places like China with lagging mitigation strategies, slight decreases in US and somewhat more substantial decreases in European emissions translated into much larger jumps in the last two years in overall emissions.  And so, what this number really tells us is that with the possible exception of Europe, “business as usual” translates into overall acceleration of carbon emissions and thus of climate change. 

Number 2:  98.4%

For years, the one survey on the subject said that 97% of published climate scientists find that human-caused climate change is real – which any good climate scientist should be able to conclude for themselves, without the need for “safety in numbers.”  That, in turn, raised the question:  what about the remaining 3%? 

Well, a follow-up survey is providing the answer to that.  Some of that 3% has been persuaded (which raises the question of why they needed persuading in the first place).  While the most widely quoted figure from the follow-on study says 97.1% now conclude human-caused climate change is what it’s all about, that represents an average over the years; in fact, 98.4% of published climate scientists now see climate change as real, significant, and effectively human-caused.  The 3% are going away.

I suppose this is good news, since some people seem to need convincing that reputable scientists do indeed see matters this way.  But to me, rather, it is simply some of that 3% finally acting like scientists; in which case the next step is for them to join the chorus saying this is serious. And as any shred of support for climate denial continues to shrink, politicians may find themselves more uncomfortable in their belief that issues are balls to play with.

Number 3:  -4.2 %

The sad fact about US emissions measurements is that (probably due to funding) incomplete measurements for a year that increasingly seem to understate them come out immediately, while the best estimates come out 1 ½ years later (in the case of 2011, in mid-2013).  And now we know that 2011, instead of representing a 7% drop from the 2007 booming-economy high, is actually a 4.2% drop.  Much of that, in turn, comes from a real drop in the economy – our actual use of carbon per unit of energy (i.e., a turn away from oil and gas) is only 3.2% down.

Again, this should have been understood – certainly, Joe Romm among others suggested this was going on.  But we may anticipate that 2013, with its housing rebound, is going to wind up as close to an increase in carbon emissions in the US.  And that means that there is no comfort in these US numbers, and no significant trend downwards as the economy recovers slightly.  We are still squarely in the middle of “business as usual”.  The urgency of doing something meaningful continues to increase.  The number of numbers that people can use to justify doing nothing continues to decrease.

Who knows what it will take to spur effective action?  Just know that excuses continue to get shabbier – even as the consequences of inaction that are already locked in get more dire.

The Sad Implications of Two 2012 Climate Change Surprises

In reading postings in one of my favorite blogs recently (Neven’s superlative Arctic Sea Ice blog), it occurred to me that I hadn’t tried to summarize in my mind the two major surprises that scientists recognized in climate change last year.  What follows is my take on these surprises:

1.      Arctic methane is venting much faster than expected; and
2.        The weather effects of global warming are stronger than expected.

What are the implications?  Let’s take them one at a time.

Arctic Sea Ice and Methane

It still amazes me that most people did not see the likelihood that Arctic sea ice was going to take a nosedive to near zero in the 2013-2016 period, because I only had to apply some basic math when I first took a look in 2009:  exponential and normal curves.

Until recently, there was only one serious attempt to assess the volume of Arctic sea ice:  Maslowski’s PIOMAS model.  As I understand it, people tended to dismiss the model because Maslowski said:  this is the way I model Arctic sea ice dynamics, and therefore the sea ice volume should change over time in this and this way; and because he asserted without proof in his model that Arctic Ocean water temperature changes had a major role in increased melting over time.  However, when I saw that this model was constantly reality-tested by on-the-site sampling, even though each sample was of a small part of the overall Arctic Ocean, I realized that the long-term trends there were likely to be true.  And what Maslowski’s model showed, at any time of the year, was an exponentially decreasing Arctic sea ice volume.

By the way, recent Cryosat observations have definitively shown that, if anything, Maslowski’s model has underestimated the rate of volume decrease.

So why, I asked myself, do I not see corresponding decreases in Arctic sea ice area and extent?  As I looked at the dynamics of Arctic sea ice, I realized that that could only happen if there was a uniform distribution of Arctic sea ice thickness from, say, zero to twice the average thickness (at any time of year).  But what was really going on was that a certain percentage of the sea ice survived between years to become second year ice, third, and so on; but cue to currents, the average age of Arctic sea ice back in 1980 was five years – sooner or later, ice frozen at one end of the Arctic would reach the other end and head south into warmer waters, there to inevitably unfreeze.  Instead, thickness (with a little adjustment for the age of the ice) had much more of a normal distribution around the average. And that, in turn, meant that accelerated volume losses at, say, minimum would only show up in area and extent when we reached the fat part of the curve – which, it is now apparent, occurred in 2012.

By the way, the same logic also says that volume and the rest will not go to zero somewhere around 2014 – 2015; we will have reached the other thin end of the distribution, and the exponential decrease in volume will flatten out, exponentially.  That’s why I fully expect to see around 1-5% of the ice remaining at minimum until sometime around 2016-2020.

So, as I’ve said, I expected that Arctic sea ice would begin to obviously disappear around now, and I expected the climate change implications of this – including the fact that Russian-Arctic-Continental-shelf methane “clathrates” would begin to release their methane.  What I (and apparently others) did not expect was the scale of that release.  A Russian sampling of methane bubbling to the surface found huge pockets of the stuff – hundreds of times more than research had suggested might be the case.

Before I go on to discuss this, let me cycle back to the (expected) implications of Arctic sea ice melt.  Today’s models simply do not include melt to near zero at minimum in the 2013-16 time period, and a likely follow-on melt to near zero at all times of the year between 2035 and 2045. This in turn, will not directly lead to more carbon emissions.  What it will do is decrease Arctic Ocean albedo (from off-white-reflection to dark-blue-absorption of heat from the sun during the spring-summer-fall), and therefore warm up the Arctic Ocean portion of global and ocean temperature.  This already is 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal during the summer; we are talking another 25-35 degrees by 2045, taking it to 20-25 degrees during the winter. 

The increased water and air temperature should therefore (a) accelerate methane clathrate melt, including that of the deeper waters nearer the North Pole, and (b) both cool and warm winter temperatures of more temperate zones – with the “warm” predominating over time.  How can (b) be?  Well, warmer Arctic air has more energy, and therefore pushes south against the “jet stream” more strongly, creating weather in which unusually cold Arctic air reaches further south periodically.  However, that same Arctic air is steadily warming over time, to the point where by 2050 it should be as warm as or warmer than southern winter air was in, say, 1980. 

Implications of the Methane Surprise

Part of the problem with assessing methane’s implications is that most if not all scientists have not factored in 2015-2045 Arctic sea ice melt’s implications for temperatures just a bit further south.  Because methane clathrate melt should be understood as part of a “double whammy” for methane – Arctic methane melt at the same time as permafrost melt.

Since (up to a point) methane has a very short half-life in the atmosphere (say, 8-10 years), you need a much greater rate of methane release into the atmosphere than carbon (all right, methane includes carbon too, but methane has a much greater effect on global warming per ppm than carbon dioxide) to achieve a comparable warming effect over time. And yet, studies of 55 million years ago, when the rate of warming was much less, indicates that methane had a major role in causing what Joe Romm at www.climateprogress.com calls “Hell and High Water”, with 90% of species wiped out.

Scientists have made a persuasive case for the idea that, even if methane clathrates are starting to melt and permafrost at the same time (i.e., even if we factor in Arctic sea ice melt), methane emissions will not reach a “danger point” where their effects in the atmosphere will rival that of carbon emissions any time soon – and therefore will avoid the main danger time of carbon emissions, before the lack of fossil-fuel reserves begins to decrease those emissions on its own). The problem is that the Russian observations indicate that those reassurances are based on assumptions about the rate of methane clathrate “bubble” occurrence that far underestimate their rate and/or amount.

So what, then, are the likely implications of this methane surprise?  As far as I can see, there are no “likely” implications, because the range of possible methane “bubble” rates, and therefore emission rates, over the next 40 years is so wide.   Nor is it clear to me, given that these emissions are occurring in such a localized northern area, just how wide an effect on global warming there will be.  However, my best guess is that over the next 40 years there will be a significant, localized effect:  Methane emissions will increase Russian and lower-Arctic-sea heat retention over what it would have been by perhaps 25%, with a corresponding increase in Arctic average temperature and Russian permafrost methane/carbon release.  This, in turn, may add perhaps ½ degree Celsius to global warming over the next 40 years – and, of course, will add a comparable amount over the 50 years following, at least – always remembering that a major fraction of methane released turns into carbon dioxide, and hangs around in the atmosphere for a hundred years or so on average.  In other words, the major effect of the surprise may be a more long-term one:  arrival of a ½ - 1 degree Celsius additional increase in “thousand-year” global warming now rather than later, when it would have less practical effect.   

The Weather Effect Surprise and Implications

Taking my cue from James Hansen and Joe Romm, I had guesstimated in 2009 that we in the US would first see constant, undeniable reminders that global warming is real in the 2020-2025 timeframe.  These reminders would include not only “hundred-year” hurricane-type wind speeds and scorching summers that created Dust-Bowl conditions in many areas, but also an overall burden of disasters that reached 0.1% of GDP even for a country like the US.  I believe it was Heidi Cullen that imagined NYC missing a massive hurricane in 2017 and getting one in 2041, by which time the city was prepared and the sewers did not back up and overflow, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths from disease.

But, as Joe Romm noted in his blog, the things that should have been expected in 2020-2025 seem to be happening in 2011-2012, ranging from devastating Australian rainstorms to stupendous Russian wildfires to Hurricane Sandy and its 13-foot storm surge (still short of the 20-odd-foot storm surge that might cause the sewer outlets to be closed and the sewers to back up, but enough to flood the subways and make downtown Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island disaster areas).  It appears that the monetary effects of disasters globally, according to insurers like Munich Re, are 10 times what they were a decade ago, and there is no reason why they should not continue to double or triple by 10 years from now – meaning that the timetable for effects on global GDP should perhaps be moved up by 3-5 years.

The surprise is not that global warming is happening faster than predicted – globally, 2012 was actually about average for the last decade, which in turn means that it was one of the “dips” in our steady, accelerating global temperature ascent. The surprise is that the effects on weather were larger than expected.  What I suspect is that forecasts simply assumed that certain catastrophic events would happen more frequently than expected, but could not predict that these catastrophes would spread to areas where they had not before (devastating tornadoes in western Massachusetts), areas that were less adapted to a new set of weather patterns. We are reaching the point where we have not only extremes of existing weather patterns, but also new climates that produce new weather patterns.

And so, I also suspect that the effects of the “weather is changing faster than we expect” surprise are, like the methane surprise, bad but unpredictable.  I anticipate that the Nino/Nina cycle and North Atlantic Oscillation patterns that have driven weather around here since time immemorial (i.e., the last 5,000 years) are changing, but will manifest first in longer versions of the extremes of this cycle – and that’s a total guess.  Certainly, an extended Nino would mean even greater Dust Bowl conditions and summer heat over a great extent of the US for longer than ever before, even leaving out the effects of the ongoing global temperature warming.  Initial predictions show the US except the Northeast and Pennsylvania in catastrophic drought conditions in 2050 – is it possible it could happen before then?

Boy, I hope not. But, as a clueless Presidential candidate noted in 2008, hope is not a plan.

Conclusions

Overall, oddly enough, the implications of these surprises for me are not great.  I concluded in 2009 that we desperately needed to cut carbon emissions in absolute terms by 40% 2010-2020, and another 40% 2020-2030.  Since then, with extremely minor exceptions, all major countries in the world have utterly wasted their time in that regard.  In fact, my definition of functional insanity is to see oil companies and countries seeing Arctic sea ice melt as an opportunity for increased drilling of fossil-fuel carbon pollutants, and the United States seeing a Keystone XL pipeline that solidifies tar-sand drilling that sharply increases the likelihood of the end of all life on Earth as an opportunity worth considering, much less actually being relatively close to implementing it.

So, to my eyes, the horrible effects of the two 2012 surprises simply speed up what’s coming and increase its bad effects in relatively minor ways, and that will be worth it if people wake up now and start doing something globally effective.  Except that there’s little sign as yet that people and their leaders are even beginning to understand the urgency of an adequate scale of action.

I wonder what new surprises 2013 will bring?  I could really use some good news.