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.

Supposing The End

Methane is belching out of the Arctic.

The end of the world is an odd thing to think about.  It doesn't seem real, even in looking at the physics and the geology and the ground truth of what is happening and what might.

And, smart people can and do make mistakes.  Sometimes something cannot - must not - be allowed to be true, so it is explained away.  Sometimes the fallacy underpins some belief system, and even seriously listening to "the other side" is tantamount to blasphemy.  Conservatives do this.  Other times people make predictions that end up being lines in the sand from which they cannot bear to withdraw.

But regardless of human psychological malfunctions, there are hard, cold, facts that are not easy to accept as true.  One is the idea that Earth could warm enough that human life is essentially impossible on most or all of the planet.

One feared possible path to that end involves methane.  It is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, 100 times stronger in the short term.  There is an awful lot of frozen methane in the Arctic.  If it thaws and is released as methane, we are in big trouble fast.  If it gets digested to CO2 by microbes on the way out, we're still in big trouble, but slower.

An end of the world scenario is being discussed, with no immediate technical rejection of it.

It is essentially a cascade of runaway events.  First the reflective (and cooling) features of the Arctic are lost.  They are now.  Then massive amounts of super-greenhouse gasses are released.  This too has started.  Then water is evaporated in very large quantities to further boost the greenhouse effect.  Earth's warming runs away and a Venus-type state results.  Mostly this depends on methane being released fast enough to do that.

I don't know if it is possible or not.  But I do know that what is happening now was thought next to impossible less than 10 years ago.

Volcanoes Damped Recent Warming

We've been putting ever more CO2 into the atmosphere, which should be causing ever faster warming.  But warming has not been as fast as expected (globally) since around the turn of the century.  What's going on?

We recently went through the deepest solar minimum in a long time, but solar cycles have too small an effect to explain it.  Turns out it's mostly been aerosols.

Earth can be cooled by a kind of atmospheric sunscreen: sulfur gasses make tiny droplets - aerosols - that are reflective and have a cooling effect.  In fact this idea is being advanced as an emergency cooling measure: aerosol-forming compounds can be sprayed by aircraft.

Aerosols don't stay in the air very long (months to a few years), so aerosol spraying would have to be kept up.  CO2, in contrast, stays in the air for thousands of years.  As soon as the aerosol rains out, wham!  Warming comes back.

You can see the effect of volcanic cooling (Mt. Pinatubo in 1991), and the recent slowdown of warming, in the most recent NASA data - note the dip to the right of the word "Global":

Direct measurements showed that there were aerosols coming from somewhere.  It was assumed, since there haven't been enough really big volcanic eruptions, that the aerosols must have been coming from dirty new coal plants in Asia.

It presents the same problem: when you clean up coal plant aerosols, the warming that was masked will come to bear.  That's more or less what happened when post-WWII emissions were cleaned up to fix acid rain and other problems.  Warming started in earnest in the mid-1970s.

But it turns out that a lot of smaller volcanoes can do it too.  Close study reveals that's what's been happening.

The implication is that we have a lot of warming that's been hidden.  Time will tell how volcanoes behave in the future.  What they do, and how long aerosol shielding lasts, will have a big effect on how much warming happens in the coming years.

Arctic Sea Ice is Peaking

Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is about at its maximum for the year.

Sometime within the coming weeks it will begin its melt.  It is setting up to be another record breaking year.  You can't tell by that plot, but the ice is extremely thin.  It's also breaking up from wind, nearly 2 months ahead of last season.

The ice is melting from the bottom faster than from the sides.  It's a little like when I used to watch ponds melt in the fields around where I grew up.  The ice would retreat a little around the edges, it would get melted spots in the ice surface, and then it would all go away really quickly.

We are to the going-away-really-quickly part with Arctic sea ice.

Ice reflects almost all the light that hits it, but open water absorbs almost all light.  It warms as a result.  The same thing has been happening with land snow cover, actually faster.

So this melting and warming is feeding on itself.  Almost all of the sea ice that was there in 1980 is gone; last fall's volume was about one fifth of what was there in '80.

Most predictions used to be that Arctic sea ice would last until the turn of the next century.  Then it was mid-century.  Now most are saying 2020 or 2030.  But if you follow the volume plots, it looks more like 2 or 3 years from now.

We shall see.

Where No Man Has Gone Before

Atmospheric CO2 is pushing 400 ppm.  If you account for other man-made greenhouse gasses, we are closer to 500 ppm equivalent.

The last time the atmosphere had 400 ppm CO2 was millions of years ago.  That was before humans were even . . . however humans ended up here.

The plot above shows a recent reconstruction of global temperature since the end of the last ice age over 10,000 years ago.  The beginning of civilization is on that blue line.

Ice ages normally end fast and restart slowly.  The restart toward a new ice age is the cooling that started around 6000 years before present.  It was caused by slow orbital changes that drive the ice ages.

We reversed it.

Earth should still be cooling.  It stopped because we started dumping burned coal into the air, raising atmospheric CO2 from around 280 ppm to about 394 ppm now.  We're increasing CO2 at about 2 ppm per year, which is orders of magnitude faster than it happens naturally.

If we do nothing more the climate will stabilize at a level never before experienced by any human.  But we can't seem to stop.

If we don't stop, two things will happen.

First, natural feedbacks will take off, out of control.  Forests will burn, frozen carbon in the Arctic will thaw and be released, and lots of things like those.  Second, our emissions will add even more CO2.

The feared end state is a CO2 level of around 1000 ppm.  The last time that happened was tens of millions of years ago, when the planet was around 30 F hotter than now.

Earth has been there before, so no worries, right?

Well, making that change so fast is a little like driving around a corner.  Everything is fine at normal speed.  But at 120 mph, you have a problem.

That's what we're doing: going to a place mankind has never been, at a speed of approach that is insanely fast.