Just a little reminder about the effects of warming

USGS data

Table 1. Estimated potential maximum sea-level rise from the total melting of present-day glaciers. [km3, cubic kilometers; m, meters] Location Volume (km3) Potential sea-level rise, (m) East Antarctic ice sheet 26,039,200 64.80 West Antarctic ice sheet 3,262,000 8.06 Antarctic Peninsula 227,100 .46 Greenland 2,620,000 6.55 All other ice caps, ice fields, and valley glaciers 180,000 .45 Total 32,328,300 80.32

80 meters = ca. 260 ft

Climate change: we are losing the debate

"It's one of those days when I feel I got off on the wrong planet. Terrifying report on climate breakdown greeted with indifference and guff." (tweeted by George Monbiot)

The new IPCC report is out and it tells us what we already know and that most people still refuse to believe or choose to ignore. Nothing new in the debate; nothing will change. The best that will happen is that the report will generate a moderate interest for some days before disappearing from the mediasphere. At worst, someone will find in it something that can be interpreted as a mistake and that will be enough to demolish the whole report in the media, just as it happened for the previous report with the story of the melting Himalayan glaciers.

Scientists are still working on the basis of the idea that their job is to examine, analyze, and report; then it is over. Maybe that's a correct definition of the duty of scientists in many fields, but scientists are also human beings and, as human beings, they must do more when their findings indicate that we are facing a terrible danger, as it is the case with climate change. They are the ones who can perceive the danger better than anyone else and it is their responsibility to tell people about that.

Imagine that you see someone who is going to jump out of the window of the fourth floor. You go there and you tell him "as a scientist, I can tell you what your speed will be when you reach the ground. But I won't tell you whether jumping out of the window is dangerous or not."

Now, look at the summary for policy makers of the IPCC report and look for the word "danger." You won't find it.
 
Let's face it: we are losing this debate. We need to start telling people what we really think about the dangers ahead. Otherwise, there is no hope.



(similar considerations have been expressed by Clive Hamilton in a post titled IPCC report will make no difference in culture of denial)

Climate change and the war in Syria

It escapes me how it can be that God cares so much about what we eat and what we don't eat. But I must also admit that the Pope knows more than me about theology. So, this Saturday I am going to fast for peace in Syria. There is nothing else that I can do, anyway. 

 

From "The Atlantic" of Sep 2, reporting portions of a memorandum by William Polk, a former State Department policy planner, on the situation in Syria. As published here. 

Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011.  Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well.  But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.

USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Commodity Intelligence Report, May 9, 2008

In some areas, all agriculture ceased.  In others crop failures reached 75%.  And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger.  Hundreds of thousands  of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies.  Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3  million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”

The domestic Syrian refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water and jobs, but also with the already existing foreign refugee population.  Syria already was a refuge for quarter of a million Palestinians and about a hundred thousand people who had fled the war and occupation of Iraq.  Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers.  And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

Survival was the key issue.  The senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in Syria turned to the USAID program for help. Terming the situation “a perfect storm,” in November 2008, he warned  that Syria faced “social destruction.” He noted that the Syrian Minister of Agriculture had “stated publicly that [the]  economic and social fallout from the drought was ‘beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.’”  But, his appeal fell on deaf ears:  the USAID director commented that “we question whether limited USG resources should be directed toward this appeal at this time.”  (reported on November 26, 2008 in cable 08DAMASCUS847_a to Washington and “leaked” to Wikileaks )

Whether or not this was a wise decision, we now know that the Syrian government made the situation much worse by its next action. Lured by the high price of wheat on the world market, it sold its reserves. In 2006, according to the US Department of Agriculture, it sold 1,500,000 metric tons or twice as much as in the previous year.  The next year it had little left to export; in 2008 and for the rest of the drought years it had to import enough wheat to keep its citizens alive.

So tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry and impoverished former farmers flooded constituted a “tinder” that was ready to catch fire.  The spark was struck on March 15, 2011  when a relatively small group gathered in the town of Daraa to protest against government failure to help them.  Instead of meeting with the protestors and at least hearing their complaints, the government cracked down on them as subversives.  The Assads, who had ruled the country since 1971,  were not known for political openness or popular sensitivity.   And their action backfired.  Riots broke out all over the country,  As they did, the Assads attempted to quell them with military force.  They failed to do so and, as outside help – money from the Gulf states and Muslim “freedom fighters” from  the rest of the world – poured into the country, the government lost control over 30% of the country’s rural areas and perhaps half of its population.  By the spring of 2013, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), upwards of 100,000 people had been killed in the fighting, perhaps 2 million have lost their homes and upwards of 2 million have fled abroad.  Additionally, vast amounts of infrastructure, virtually whole cities like Aleppo, have been destroyed.

Despite these tragic losses, the war is now thought to be stalemated: the government cannot be destroyed and the rebels cannot be defeated.  The reasons are not only military: they are partly economic– there is little to which the rebels could return;  partly political – the government has managed to retain the loyalty of a large part of the majority Muslim community which comprises the bulk of its army and civil service whereas the rebels, as I have mentioned, are fractured into many mutually hostile groups;  and partly administrative  – by and large the government’s  structure has held together and functions satisfactorily whereas the rebels have no single government.

See also

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/climate-change-warmed-syria-up-for-war

The greatest misallocation of resources in human history

Excerpt from Michael Klare's "How to fry a planet"


According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion. In these years, investment in oil alone, at an estimated $10.32 trillion, is expected to exceed spending on wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, hydro, nuclear, and every other form of renewable energy combined.


(see also a previous post on "The Frog")

So, how much for a brand new planet?

In a paper in Nature the authors estimate as about 60 trillion dollars the cost of methane release from melting permafrost. 

Climate change perspective: Canada in flames

With ongoing climate change, we often get both type of weather extremes at the same time. While Canada was battered with record floods in Calgary and Toronto, huge megafires were recently raging in Nothern Quebec. According to available statistics (see below) this fire is the 3rd largest since at least 1959, and has burned almost as much forest (1.6 mil. acres) as all forest fires this year in the US.

Here is the fire as seen from space by MODIS spectroradiometer:

And here is the same fire from the ground:

Let's look at the at the historical size of the wildfires in Canada from 1959, when the data are available:

The Eastmain fire is the 3rd largest in the history of Canada given that no bigger fires occured after 2000. Source: Canadian Forest Service.

Anf if we look at the longer-term perspective of the area of forest fires since 1921, we see a trend of an increased fire activity:

Source: Flannigan and de Groot 2009 (PDF presentation).

Regarding the tragic death of 19 firefighters this year in Arizona, lets look at the forest fires data from USA:

Six of the record fire seasons all occured after 2004. Source: National Interagency Fire Center.

The increase of wildfires is the combination of climate change and of aggressive fire suppresion after the WW2, so that the forests have grown much denser. Once they start to burn, crown fires are almost impossible to extinquish. Climate change and associated increased drought (less soil moisture), higher temperatures and more intense heatwaves add to the deadly combination. Forests in Western US are therefore in greatest fire deficit for at least 3000 years. 

But compared to Russia, US forests seem quite healthy! Look at the following graph:

Blue and red circles show yearly size of burned forests in Russia according the two methodologies, green circles show size of burned forest in USA over the longer time period (as show in previous graph alone).

In Russia this fire season seems to be a quiet one (as opposed to extreme years of 2010, or 2012), so no worries. Why then, an oil and natural gas rich country needs to borrow 40 mil dollars from the World Bank to fight forest fires?

So clearly, we see a taste of what will happen to our forests if climate change continues unabated.

Yes, Gaia can: wildfires in Colorado

The greatest misallocation of resources in human history.

Think of invading Russia in winter, of the Spanish Invincible Armada, of the US highway system, of the Pentagon budget, and of developing the Ford Edsel. Well, these were peanuts in comparison of what we are doing now

From "carbon tracker"

Unburnable carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets

This new research from Carbon Tracker and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE calls for regulators, governments and investors to re-evaluate energy business models against carbon budgets, to prevent $6trillion carbon bubble in the next decade.

Unburnable carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets has revealed that fossil fuel reserves already far exceed the carbon budget to avoid global warming of 2°C, but in spite of this, spent $674billion last year to find and develop new potentially stranded assets.


read the whole post on carbon tracker...

Yes, Gaia can

(h/t Alexander Ac)

Yes, Gaia can!

(Mauritius island, April 1, 2013. Notice that, miraculously, it mentions climate change as the cause of the disaster)

The tipping point of climate change denial

In a previous post I had noted how the position of climate deniers was becoming more and more untenable. Now, the speech by President Obama seems to have moved things forward quite a bit: many people seem to be "feeling the heat," almost literally.

At least, so it seems from a revealing article by Chris Ladd, Republican commentator writing on the Washington Times. This article needs to be read and savored - truly stunning for the way he clearly states how the GOP communication strategy is backfiring. Peter Sinclair has already commented on this piece; let me reproduce here some excerpts from it (highlighting mine):

..... we must realize that our strategy of blind blanket denial is developing into a political suicide pact. 

We must stop wheeling in crank “scientists” who deploy tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry to “debunk” the credible research on climate change. 


On a political level, Republicans must not confuse climate change with other science vs. belief issues. On this issue public opinion will eventually move in the direction of established facts regardless of how much distortion we generate.
 
Climate change ..... is becoming apparent enough to the average layman to affect their holiday plans. We cannot swim against this scientific tide much longer.

When public opinion comes into line with the established science, our denialist position will cost us our opportunity to participate in shaping policy. We are setting ourselves up for a sudden, catastrophic political collapse which could spread beyond this single issue.

 .... conservatives cannot participate in shaping these alternatives if the party allows itself to be defined politically by a pack of ridiculous cranks. Categorical climate denial might be the single greatest threat to the long term future of the conservative movement. For the Republican Party in the U.S., denial is a river that is rapidly running dry.


Now, the political debate is a complex system and, as such, it is subjected to rapid "phase transitions" in which issues ignored up to a certain point become suddenly centrally important. That may be the result of a single, exceptional event, such as the 9/11 attacks, or as the result of a gradually mounting body of evidence; as it may happen with climate change.

Are we seeing the climate debate tipping point arriving? We can't say yet, but note that Mr. Ladd's article didn't attract (so far) the usual flow of rabid denialist comments. So, we may be in for big changes, indeed.

Signs of change: are you ready for the great transition?

Signs of change are accumulating, but most people still are not taking notice

By Alexander Ac

Is Homo sapiens a truly serious evolutionary project? And with that I mean sustainable, are we able to sustain  all what we have done and built; constructions, networks, and  knowledge into a (distant) future? Can we choose a dramatically different path that we are currently on?

There are many people thinking deeply and constantly about sustainability, global problems, overpopulation, deforestation, overfishing, soil erosion, air pollution... and on top of everything climate change; since it is a survival issue for our species. But the real question is not whether a certain number of people think about sustainability and try to live accordingly. The real question is whether we (will) do so collectively. In other words, it is not important what 50 000 people do for few hours per day (e.g. protesting Keystone pipeline), but important is what 7 billion people do for 365 days per year.

We can see that the great change from Hunters and gatherers to Agricultural societies was enabled by a stable local climate and predictable weather (and crop yields!) during the last 12 000 years. At the end of the last Ice Age, this planet was inhabited by not more than 20 000 people. We do not really want to leave the Holocene behind us.

Look carefully at the two following graphs:

Fig. 1.: The upper graph shows that we are rapidly leaving behind the Holocene temperatures. The lower graph shows that this Holocene period is exceptionally steady in the 100 000 years of temperature record from Central Greenland. Some people confuse it with global temperature record, which is not the case.


Now, the latest speech of president Obama might sound optimistic for some scientists, and even if the promises are fullfilled, which is highly questionable given the past, consider also the following graph:

Fig. 2. You do not need to be a mathematician, or to fit an exponential function to see that this rate of debt increase is not sustainable. Planet resources will not allow to repay all the debts we have created. Source: St Louis FED. Effect of planet Earth is added for illustrative purpose.

In the graph you can see the Total Credit Market Debt Owed in the USA. The same country in which Obama promised to (finally) solve climate crisis. This is not meant to criticise president Obama. This is to show what we are collectively doing. Everyone with a mortgage, or almost any other type debt is claiming exponentially growing demand on our finite planet resources. How is that compatible with declining carbon footprint?

Debt is basically a claim on the future (energy) resources. So if we are to repay ALL debts, we need to continue in the exponential growth. If we are not going to repay all debts, debt deflation is upon us. And hyperinflation later on. Well, its already happening, despite the ultra-loose monetary policy and "money-printing" (can-kicking experiments), which is in exact opposite to what needs to be done in order to solve climate change and other sustainability related problems. But you will not hear it from monetarists like Ben Bernanke or Paul Krugman.

Of course debt deflation means huge economic problems and social unrest. Again, this is already happening. But it is also a solution for the climate change problem. At least until it lasts. We need to get rid off bad debt, and use good debt to transition away from fossil fuels and climate chaos.

Are we ready for that?

There is always a way

.... even in the most difficult situations, such as when fighting Catastrophic Climate Change.

h/t "Learning from Dogs"