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.