Marking Earth Day . . . Or Not

There is much discussion about Earth Day, and how what I call traditional environmentalism misses the mark.  It's really past the point of saving whales and things like that.  From the looks of it, we've already got a developing mass extinction on our hands.

The funny thing is, a lot of people think all this is hypothetical: "oh, we can't ruin the economy to solve a problem that might not be real," or some such general failure to face what is going on.

One of the more interesting things is what's going on with the jet stream.

The basic version is, the Arctic is warming way faster than thought possible a few years ago, and that is changing the way the jet stream works.  No one knows for sure how that will develop, but it's already disrupting agriculture quite severely.  That has the potential to badly disrupt political stability in various places, and will screw up people's food supplies.  I'm sure storms and droughts and floods and other extreme weather effects don't affect the economy at all.

So here's an idea to "observe" Earth Day: do something to increase your own personal food security and health.  Grow a vegetable in a pot (it's a start).  Simplify your diet by cooking your own simple foods (much cheaper).  Get a good reference on nutrition - even "engineered" sports foods have work-arounds that actually are healthier and work better.

Be healthier on less money and gear up for simpler living that might be a make-or-break skill set.  And cause fewer emissions in the process.  Sounds like a win-win to me.

Miami Will Not Be There In 100 Years

The ice that will melt and submerge Miami is sitting in water that has gotten too warm for it to survive.

The great ice sheet on the western half of Antarctica sits mostly below sea level.

The vast majority of heating involved in global warming goes into the oceans.  It has been warming the oceans around Antarctica for decades.

That warm water has begun melting Antarctica.  The ice that sits below sea level is no longer stable.  The only physically possible way to stop it would be to cool the ocean.  There is no known way to do that.

So, in 40 or 50 or 60 years or something, we will lose Miami (and Venice, and the Portlands and . . .).

That is Miami with just over 3 ft (1 m) of sea level rise.  West Antarctica will cause about five times that.  Parts of East Antarctica will be lost too, as well as Greenland.

In the same amount of time since the creation of the United States of America, the coastal cities where so much founding history was made will be far under the waves.  Other nations have far more history that will be forever lost.

The first several feet will do the majority of the damage.  No city can withstand the level of lost infrastructure shown in the above map of Miami.  That will happen in decades to a century at the very extreme conservative edge, but it will happen.  And it won't stop there.  We've probably locked in something like 70 ft (about 25 m) of sea level rise.

The implication is that kids today will grow up and raise their own children in a world where coastal cities are being abandoned.

That is the heritage that has been made for them.

Check, Check, Check . . .

James Hansen is retiring from NASA.

He is one of the leading climate scientists in the world, and has been for decades.  He's been more right longer than anyone else.

In 1981 (!) he and his team did a study entitled, "Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide" in which some predictions were made about what we would face in the (then) future.  These have begun, far ahead of schedule, and are accelerating.  From the abstract:

Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America [check] and central Asia [check] as part of a shifting of climatic zones [check], erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet [check] with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level [check], and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage [check].

Sea level is in fact rising because of melting ice sheets, about a third to a half of the 3.2 mm/yr happening now.  Ice sheet contribution is doubling about every 7 years, but it's pretty early in the process to see exactly how that is going to go.  It will be either fast or really fast: kids alive today will see the loss of cities like Miami either near the ends of their lives or in the middle.  We should have a better sense of timing in 5 or 10 years.

The short version of sea level rise is that the ocean has been taking in enormous amounts of heat, so ice sheets (like West Antarctica) that are grounded below sea level cannot survive.  In other words, something on the order of 70 ft of sea level rise now is unavoidable.

Protecting Our Way of Life

There are people who reject the very notion of climate change because they feel the whole situation threatens their way of life.

They see "environmentalism" as a religion that other people are trying to force on them.  They feel their values are being labeled as "bad" and their culture being targeted for elimination.  They see their goals and aspirations as being dismissed.

The fact is, no one wants the level of destruction that is headed our way, not even those who promote lies about it.

Coming to terms with what is happening is difficult and painful and profoundly disappointing.

It's as though we're on a luxurious cruise ship: the food is delicious, the music beautiful, the furnishings warm and comfortable.  Then the ship lists suddenly.  To the lifeboats: cold wind, choppy waves, not even enough space. The Titanic has hit an iceberg.

Climate change is like that.

We'll be leaving the lap of luxury whether we like it or not (I can't imagine anyone would).  There will be loss.  There will be sacrifices.  There will be a more comfortable existence left behind.  No one intends on voyaging in a lifeboat.

But if we're diligent and hardworking (and lucky), our way of life will survive.

"Way of life" invariably means different things to different people.  Driving a four wheel drive truck up and down a wilderness stream at full throttle for fun probably will go by the wayside.  But there are other ways to experience nature.

So it depends on what you care about.  If you care about being outside and having fun, that can still be done, but how it is accomplished might need to change.

In a warming world a lot of the luxuries we enjoy won't be there.  Having good quality of life is going to require some changes.  Some changes will be needed if we are going to avoid further damage.  Other changes will be needed to deal with damage that can no longer be avoided.

We have hit an iceberg.  We need to man the lifeboats.  It's not that anyone wants to, but it's what we have to do if we're going to be okay.

This Is Not Your Grandfather's Pollution

Well, in a sense it is.  CO2 increases from early in the 1900s still are floating around the atmosphere.  But the problem we have isn't anything like what people are used to thinking about . . .

David Roberts gave a talk last year about how climate change is simple.  His body language and tone of voice show that he gets it.  We are in really serious trouble.

He wrote a new piece about two reasons climate change is not like other environmental problems.

They boil down to this: it's permanent.

First he talks about the permanence of CO2 emissions.

To make this clear, let’s use the old bathtub analogy. The faucet is the source of the pollutant. The tub is the environment. And the drain represents the means by which the pollutant exits the environment. The key fact to remember: The damage to public health is determined by the total amount of pollutant in the tub.
Take a familiar air pollutant like particulate matter. We are spewing it into the air from tailpipes and smokestacks (the faucet). It leaves the air through simple gravity (the drain). Most of it falls to earth in days or weeks.
So when it comes to the particulate-matter bathtub, the drain is very large. We can reduce the total level of particulate matter in the tub any time we want; all we have to do is turn the faucet down, or off, and the tub will drain rapidly.
Carbon dioxide is not like that. Once it’s in the tub, it stays there for up to 100 years before it drains out. And the drain in the bathtub (so-called “sinks” that absorb carbon out of the air, like oceans and forests) is comparatively small relative to the enormous amounts coming out of the faucet. And by the way, we’re actively making the drain smaller by cutting down forests and carbon-loading the oceans.

This makes for a very different situation. Even if we cut our emissions by a third tomorrow, we would still be increasing the total amount in the bathtub:

The other issue  is that once things get heated up, they stay heated up for a long, long time.

But as this 2009 paper in Nature (among many others) makes clear, it doesn’t work that way:

This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. Following cessation of emissions, removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide decreases radiative forcing, but is largely compensated by slower loss of heat to the ocean, so that atmospheric temperatures do not drop significantly for at least 1,000 years. [my emphasis]

This is not the time cycle of particulate pollution — days or weeks — it is the time cycle of the Earth’s basic biophysical systems, which move much more slowly. A thousand years is not “forever,” but in terms of human agency it might as well be.

 These are two things most people haven't really internalized.  Things like acid rain can be cleaned up.  Even the ozone hole can be cleaned up.  We're doing something completely different.

Arctic Throwing Off Its Coldness

. . . and it is landing on us.

It used to be that the Arctic was always intensely cold and that cold was kept in place in the extreme north.  But now the Arctic is having fits of not-so-intensely-cold, and that is screwing up the cold-holding-in-place mechanisms of atmospheric circulation.  Some new research is looking at that:

The satellite record since 1979 shows downward trends in Arctic sea ice extent in all months . . . Previous studies have linked changes in winter atmospheric circulation, anomalously cold extremes and large snowfalls in mid-latitudes to rapid decline of Arctic sea ice in the preceding autumn. Using observational analyses, we show that the winter atmospheric circulation change and cold extremes are also associated with winter sea ice reduction through an apparently distinct mechanism from those related to autumn sea ice loss. . . .

So, there are multiple ways that atmospheric circulation is changing.  Atmospheric circulation is changing.  It's not hypothetical; it's being measured.

There are several root causes at work here.

One of the more fundamental is "albedo flip" which is a fancy term that says, when snow melts and things get darker, they heat up enough to stay that way.  There is no going back.

Another is that a warmer, melted Arctic Ocean has less of an ice lid to keep water from evaporating out into the sky.  Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, so amplifies what warming caused the melting in the first place.

These and a few other things are causing the Arctic to "flip" to a melted and much warmer state.  Having warmth where there used to be intense cold wreaks havoc with the physics of atmospheric circulation.

It's time to think about dealing with weather extremes, because there is a certain amount of "runaway" that has begun to happen and will continue until it has run its course.  How long that will be depends on whether other runaway processes will be tipped.  Odds are this will be the first of a long line of dominoes.

Plants that Migrate 450 Miles in 30 Years

They don't.

But growing zones in Canada and elsewhere have moved that far.

Winters are already significantly warmer and shorter than just 30 years ago. The temperature regimes and plant life of the south have marched more than 700 kilometres northward, new research shows. . . .

This is the stuff of mass extinctions.

If you believe in that kind of stuff.  Environmentalism is a religion, you know.  I'm not sure if it is the math or the physics or the chemistry or the geologic evidence that has led people astray.