Climate Change Bulletin 2016 #1

In the last week of December 2015, a storm from the northern United States surged northwards, reaching a near-record low barometer reading and, for a period of about 22 hours, heating the air on a line running along the eastern coast of Greenland to the North Pole to above freezing – or more than 50 degrees F above the average temperature at this time of year.  It was the deepest into winter that above-freezing temperatures had been recorded by almost a month, and it was accompanied by rain whose warm moisture caused serious melting of sea and land (Greenland) ice.

The consensus of scientific observers has been that such an occurrence at this time of year will not by itself significantly reduce the sea ice at maximum or minimum.  However, it will give a significant acceleration to melting of Greenland’s glaciers into the sea, thus keeping the “doubling every decade” trend of Greenland land ice melt going.  This is not a one-off event, but rather related to the “wavy jet stream” pattern of weather in the winter that will not only export colder air south but also import much warmer air north into the Arctic.  In other words, this event suggests that the pessimistic forecast of sea rise of 15-30 feet this century is more in line with what is happening than more optimistic forecasts of 1-15 feet.

That is all. 

All Us Drowned, Burned, Starved Rats

Recently I came across a purported map by National Geographic of what the world would look like if all the ice melted. They got stuff wrong (they failed to note that higher ocean temperatures would expand the water, leading to about another 22 feet of rise beyond the 216 feet of land ice melting), and they failed to make clear that higher energy in storms means higher storm surges (like about 40-50 feet instead of 10-20), effectively making the real area affected by ocean salt water (read: it gets into the fresh-water supply, so you can’t live there) close to 300 feet above where it is now. They did note that there would be a vast increase in deserts, and places uninhabitable due to heat (according to Joe Romm’s citation of a study, there’s a 2% decrease in productivity for every degree above 77 F, meaning that when you get to 110 degrees, you can’t do much). Still, the general outlines are clear.

So here’s a brief summary, in no particular order:

• Florida, gone. Louisiana, gone. Mississippi, mostly gone.
• Major US cities on the coast from Boston to NYC to Charleston to Houston to ILA to much of San Francisco (plus a big inland sea), gone.
• Greenland (they got this wrong), an archipelago about ½ its present size. Same for Antarctica.
• Holland, Belgium, Denmark, gone. Eastern England and London, northern Germany, Venice, gone.
• Caspian Sea doubles in size, connects with Black Sea.
• Habitable Libya on the seacoast becomes an island.
• Most of eastern China from Beijing to Shanghai goes underwater, and so does most of Southern Vietnam and Cambodia.
• Bangladesh and much of Pakistan (the Indus valley) is beneath the wave.
• Australia loses much of the coastal strip where four of five Aussies now live, and there’s a new big inland sea or maybe an inlet of the ocean in the center.
• It goes without saying that most of the Pacific islands are gone, gone, gone.
• And, of course, the world’s deltas, where a large percentage of food is grown today, are gone.

All this is for our descendants – like, 2200, not 2030. But we are locking in its inevitability right now. And, as noted, we will also be burned by the heat and starved by the destruction of crop-growing land.

Not a pretty picture.