Recent facts show global warming4
will be much worse than thought... and
detailed analyses of 4 km. of Antarctic and Greenland
ice cores show catastrophic temperature changes
of 5-9C happen fast, as quickly as a few
years. Over the last 25 years climatologists have
drilled 5 cores down through 900,000 years
of history, through 8 complete ice ages,
revealing temperatures, weather, dust, pollen,
bacteria, and the actual atmospheric gases
trapped in the yearly tree-like layers- the
most detailed record of the earth's history
ever seen. The big one- the full Antarctic
record (EPICA)- was only finished in 2004. [all
temps are C]
According to the book ICE , by Newsweek
reporter Mariana Gospel, the shock was the
startling abrupt shifts: 20 times in the
last 100,000 year ice age, temperature spiked upward 5-9C (70% up
towards current warmth) in as little as 5-10 years in the
Northern hemisphere. Climate changes apparently often
aren't like mountain building- slow grinding changes that take
thousands of years. They are sometimes more like earthquakes- sudden sharp convulsions that totally
change life on Earth; or maybe more like a seesaw, that, slowly overbalanced, finally
slams to the other side. After the 1300 year Younger
Dryas return to Ice Age weather 12,500 years ago after the spastic
start of the current interglacial warm period (probably due to massive glacial
Lake Agassiz- covering Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Mn- venting it's fresh water
into the Atlantic when the Ice Cap dam broke, and interrupting the Gulf Stream),
the end was explosive- temperatures extremes went up 9C in
in a decade.
"I cannot insist
that the climate changed
in one year, but it certainly looks that
way," says UNH Greenland ice borer Richard
Alley. The start of the Younger Dryas was
harsh too- the temperature plummeted 8
C in a few years, but the rises have always
been incredibly precipitous. The last warm
Interglacial 115-135,000 years ago, the Eemian
(Sangamon), was also punctuated by sudden
severe coolings, less stable than ours.
[Most warming numbers here refer to the most
extreme changes, not the world average.]
The
evidence is sobering: the spiking charts of temperatures over the last
million years (measured by the amount of heavy Oxygen-O18) exactly
match the peaks and valleys of CO2
and methane concentrations, but the
current CO2
levels are off the chart,
49% higher than preindustrial levels, and 32% above anything seen in
a million years1, and the entire unprecedented rise has been
since 1750, the official cutoff for before industrial greenhouse gases-but actually
since 1910). The 100,000 year ice age cycles are believed to be mainly due to several regular variations in Earth's orbit (changes from circular to
closer to Sun ellipse during Interglacials), but potent greenhouse gases can
amplify or alter them.
Average
world warming is quite deceptive, since the effects increase enormously
with
latitude, so the 1.0C (1.62F) average rise, the number,
over the last 110 years (from 1907 to 2017 a 1.1C rise
in annual averages), can mean
a .5C rise in the tropics, 1-1.7C rise in Europe, and
3-8C change in the Arctic, especially in the night temperature minimums,
which
reduces ice formation. "You have
a factor of 3 between the tropics and the highest latitudes,"
says the NASA Goddard Director, climatologist Gavin Schmidt. Some places have "warmed
much more than normal in the last 50 years. There's been a huge warming in
Siberia and Alaska, but if you go to the Labrador Sea, it's very small."
We
are cranking out 9 billion tons* of CO2 a year, and
emissions are now
increasing 2.5% every year
(fluctuates), now 419 (3/2022)
ppm and rising by 2-3
ppm (depends on fires) a year, and economically booming China's
(and soon India) CO2 generation is
exploding- a new power plant in China that could alone supply San Diego
built every 7-10 days, burning coal- the
worst fuel (their only), creating only carbon dioxide (and a little soot and
sulfur). Just since 1960, atmospheric CO2 has increased 33%! Every ton
of burning coal makes over 3 tons of CO2 !
2
After being stable for 8 years, Chinese coal burning in the 2 years up
to Dec 2004, increased 46% (using 10
times as
much as all of Africa), leading to a worldwide coal use
increase of 16%- they passed USA as the worlds greatest atmospheric
polluter in 2006, and since increased their annual emissions 2.5-fold, more than US, EU, Canada, Japan + Australia combined! And per capita, the Chinese are now only using an eighth the electricity
of Americans. For now. Even America's use of coal has gone up
54% from 1980 to 2000- 90% for generating electricity, it was expected to rise another
20% by 2020, but the explosion of fracked natural gas has reversed that. In the 1990's CO2 emissions increased by 1-1.5% a year, so coal's effect has been catastrophic.
*[metric ton=2200 lbs= room of 1 Atm CO2 8 M3=27 ft3=volume of a small summer house, so we emit maybe 9 billion houses full of CO2 a year]. The emissions weight refers to only the Carbon (standard practice), if you see 31gt/year, that refers to actual CO2 weight!
Yet carbon dioxide isn't the worst actor- Methane has a warming effect 84 times that of CO2 over 20 years-
it breaks down into CO in 9-15 years2 (normally used number is 28 times over 100 years, but I'm more interested in
flipping the
see-saw), and we've been dumping this in
the air like mad too- from rice paddies,
tilling soil in farming, leaking natural
gas pipes or oil wells, cattle and sheep- atmospheric
methane has increased 2.7 fold in 250 years.
Luckily for us there is 220 times less methane
in the air than CO2- 1.86 parts per million,
but that could change fast with the explosion of fracking and likely leaks from fractured shale fields.
Less than
half of methane is generated naturally- in
volcanoes, peat bogs, organic decomposition-
altogether 600-800 megatons a year, but
that's uncertain.
Then
there is nitrous oxide, 265 times more potent CHG
than CO2, and this lasts 114 years, created from fertilizer, farming,
deforestation, and car exhausts (increased 18% by man but only .31ppm); ozone, 03,
protecting from ultraviolet 25km up, but a deadly irritant and powerful
greenhouse gas at the surface; and the worst stuff- the
artificial man-made CFC's- chlorofluorocarbons and
halocarbons used in cooling and propellants, 2000-23,000
times stronger than CO2 ,
and lasting thousands of years. Taken together, the many
halocarbons contribute about double the warming of NO, ozone roughly 2 times more
and methane about 2.5 times more than halocarbons, and CO2 2
times that of methane. These gases reinforcing and
coordinate effects on warming haven't really been taken into account.
Talk about the "carbon load" often means just CO2, but the Equivalent CO2 number of all the gases together is 490 ppm!.
Methane may be the time bomb that
does us in. Maybe 1400 billion tons of carbon exists as organic material
in the tundra peat bogs and permafrost of
Siberia, Greenland, Canada, Alaska, immobilized
in the frozen ground. The worst in the world
warming is in the Arctic: 3-8C (5-14F) in
the night, and it's suddenly melting a 115,000 year stable
tundra the size of France and Germany into a patchwork of mud and
lakes; allowing the natural decomposition of all that organic matter into
methane. Russian scientist Sergei Kripotin
said, it was "an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible, and undoubtedly
connected to global warming" (which)
has all happened in the last three or four years."
"If
it's waterlogged and low oxygen environment,
you'll get methane; if it's aerated, not soggy, it'll
aerobically decompose and you'll get CO2," says UCLA hydrologist Larry
Smith, who has extensively studied Siberian lakes and rivers. His
research says Siberia is drying because the permafrost barrier is melting, allowing
some lakes to drain away (6% loss of lake +area) through porous deposits,
"like pulling the plug out of a bathtub. "It's a lot faster when it's dry,
cause then you have more oxygen to use- the bacteria get more energy," says
Univ. Alaska's Katey Walter. Those holes in the permafrost also allow methane
reserves below to outgas.
In 3 half years
in northeastern Siberia, Walter's joint
Russian/American team found methane hot spots, bubbling to the
-40C winter frozen lake surface
so fast that it couldn't freeze, an effect that indicates
there's much more organics than thought. "We think it's biological
decomposition.. of the rich Pleistocene grasslands
that the mammoths, bison, and lions were
eating," she said from her office at the
Prince William Sound Science Center. "It
was the Serengeti of the North, really organic
rich, and all the grass and dead animals
are decomposing. It's constantly bubbling
up like the lake is boiling!" Exploring the geological cross section of recentvast Siberian sinkholes (NOVA), apparently ancient sub-permafrost methane has pierced the frozen layer, causing 600 ft deep land collapses!!
In
a May 2006 presentation to the US
Senate, she estimated a breathtaking 500 gigatons of carbon in the Siberian
Yedoma Ice Complex alone, almost as much as all the vegetation on Earth
(650gt), and doubling all known Arctic carbon!
Worse, she claims if thawed it could mostly decompose within a
century. The YIC is an 25 meter layer bigger than Texas that is 50-90% ice,
soil, and 2.6% organic remains (20 times that of normal deep soil), formed from
loess, a strange windblown dust that afflicted the end of last Ice Age,
according to Sergei Zimov of the plushly outfitted Russian Northeast Science
Station near the Arctic Ocean 800 miles west of NW Alaska. The carbon isn't in a
narrow 2M band like the peat bogs. "The grasses were growing", clarifies Walter,
"but they had a high accumulation rate (of loess), and the surface was
riding higher and higher. We're talking about 80 feet (thick layer- 25 m.) for a million
square kilometers."
Historically,
before man mucked things up, there was supposedly about 3 gigatons a
year more CO2 absorbed than emitted- a cushion for fires and volcanic
emissions. Now there's 3-4 gt. excess carbon a year, much more than can be
absorbed by all the sinks. Excluding limestone, the total amount of carbon in
the earth's cycle is about 47,000 gigatons: 40,000
in the oceans, 4000 in the fossil fuels, 1600 in the soil, 900 in the
tundra, 750 in the atmosphere, and 650 in the
vegetation, with maybe up to 8000 gt. uncertainty.
Large
portions of the 8000 mile weakened tundra coastline are eroding and
collapsing into the Arctic Sea and releasing their stored gases (including unknown
amounts of clathrates- below). "During winter you have sea ice attached to the
shore; it's called fast ice- as warming continues it's open water.. and waves
are crashing against the shore," clarifies Smith. "There's a lot of erosion
taking place." Up to 20 m. a year disappears in Alaska, says Walter's paper.
The potential danger from methane is immense- if just 1/2
% a year of the 500 gigatons of carbon in the organic material
in this Yedoma Ice Complex (2 1/2 gt/year) fermented off as methane, it would
create a century long warming effect over double
all the net human-caused emissions in the world. 3
Take that, see-saw.
t concurred. The Japanese funded a well,
Mallik, on the Mackenzie River delta in northern
Canada and found the clathrate (they call
it "gas hydrate" or just "hydrate")
1000 m. down, and successfully extracted
it with heat or vacuum, and now they and
the Indians are drilling on their own coasts.
Methane hydrate contains 168 times more gas
than it's volume, meaning this entertaining guy to the right just could blow his hand off!
From a drilling
ship in the Indian Ocean,
Collett replied that clathrate was found
as shallow as 300 M under permafrost in Alaska-Canada,
but his charts show it could theoretically
exist as shallow as 80 M Huge deposits exist
off the Carolinas, Washington, the North
Slope, Western Central America, Japan and
50 other places. Solid hydrate ice should
float to the surface, but gaseous methane
tends to dissolve in the ocean in a few hundred
meters, whereupon, "bacteria eat the methane,
and produce CO2", says Walter.
If
the oceans warm enough to set this stuff free, we are talking hothouse
horror, which they believe happened 55 million years ago, in the Paleocene
Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when the earth heated
15C hotter than today. North America was tropical, redwoods grew
over Greenland, and one could go swimming on the North Pole.
The entire ocean was heated 8 C down to the bottom and 40% of the
micro-shellfish species perished from the lack of oxygen. They believe
a methane belch occurred because of an absence of heavy carbon 13 in all
the living limestone sediments, which is reduced in clathrates. Gavin
Schmidt thinks that's impossible today. "The ocean is so large and has such a
large heat capacity, that it takes an enormous amount of energy to warm it,"
said the editor (one of several) of the readable resource realclimate.org
from his office in NYC.
Vertical river into mile thick Greenland
ice sheet -
UCSB's
Jim Kennett, author of the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis
thinks the lower continental shelf clathrates are responsible for the abrupt heating spikes
in the middle of the ice ages too, because the 105M drop in ocean levels may have reduced
pressure enough for them to break down and changes in the proto-Gulf Streams suddenly
exposed them to much more heat. "In ocean sediments offshore of California, colleagues
at Woods Hole recently found geochemical traces of clathrate releases coincident with
warmings in the Greenland ice core records," says Schmidt in a long paper. Clathrate bubbling out of the sediment can cause immense undersea landslides, like one (the
Storegga) that happens 260 m. thick and hundreds of km long periodically off of
Norway, relieving pressure on the buried hydrates and than causing an immense
further methane release. 2008 research has found high levels of methane along
the Arctic coast, presumably from holes in the ocean bottom ice cap
over clathrate or already released methane- a potential for massive releases as the frozen fresh water runoff cap layer is melted (salt water freezes ~1C lower).
UCSB scientists have recently witnessed blowouts of methane from the sea floor in the Santa
Barbara Channel. Doing an aerial survey of Alaska, Katy Walter-Anthony found 150,000
methane outgassing sites! Schmidt
and Co. think methane has been vastly underestimated, probably
accounting for a third of all warming,
because of reaction with nitrogen oxides and sunlight to create the irritating pollutant
ozone in smog, another potent greenhouse gas that has been tied
to extreme warming in the Arctic (latest estimate 36%). The worldwide exposion of fracking
for natural gas that has made America an exporter is another disturbing
trend- in a first survey NOAA discovered 4%
leakage from Denver area fields of fractured shale, making fracking
much worse than burning coal (balancing
point was 2%). A recent study showed only 2.3%, however others have indictated much higher loss. This finally
explains why the temperature rises are smaller than expected, and showcases
the extraordinary risk if this cooling were quickly stopped (from massive plane groundings
from bankruptcies, gas prices, recession, tsunamis, or war). With $115/barrel oil and the
economic meltdown from the junk mortgage disaster, many major airlines were teetering
on shutdown- Delta alone was losing $8 billion
a year and several went bust, though they have recovered, especially with cheap oil. In fact,
if this effect ceased we might be dealing with extreme effects, 3 C rise by 2050,
from 5-10 C (9-18 F)
rise by the end of the century, enough to totally change the ecology of earth. Even a 50% reduction
of flights would have instant devastating effects, increasing AGW by 50% in a pop.
High altitude (6-11 km) particulate pollution also cools by providing seed points for water
droplets, which form in greater number and smaller size, thereby making clouds more
reflective than with larger droplets. Dust from the Chichon and Pinatubo volcanoes cooled the whole earth by 1C for a year each in 1982 and
1991. Some scientists are skeptical, claiming
only a 4% solar reduction from 1961 to 1990, but other are aggressively advocating
deliberate high altitude sulfer injection to jet exhaust to "manage" and limit GW, an extraordinarily risky (consider
damaging the Ozone layer) solution that probably will be enacted by default when the Great Famine
first hits. The
total warming is accelerated by 8-10 feedback loops,
where the warming causes something that increases the warming. As ice melts off
of the Arctic cap, the shiny white mirror that absorbs only 15% of the heat,
becomes dark ocean that absorbs 90% or tundra that absorbs maybe 80%. That
is a 6-fold warming increase when the polar ice cap disappears one
summer, expected soon. The summer ice cap has shrunk by 43% from
1968-2010, but the summer ice volume has dropped 78% from 1979
to 2011, so what's left is thin. As more moisture is evaporated into
the atmosphere, the most powerful GHG of all- water
vapor- jacks up the temperature more (water causes about 40-70% of all
GHG warming,
but it generally is excluded because it's so variable, mostly a liquid,
and not
under man's control). Hurricanes cause more hurricanes.
Every
year since 1980 stratospheric water vapor has increased more than
1%, partly from
methane breakdown and jet contrails. As the world bakes and dries;
monster
forest fires turn millions of acres of carbon sink forests into CO2.
10% of Alaska's interior burned in 2004 and
2005, says Walter. In it's worst natural
disaster, Australia was subject to Dante's
Inferno in Feb 2009, where Saharan 48C temperatures,
weeks of drought, and hurricane force winds
created a megafire
in Victoria that incinerated many towns, killed +200 people, even those
in open areas
100m from the flames or fleeing at high speed in cars. Then
they were devastated by megafloods in 2011 the area of France +
Germany, and more
hellish
fires. Video
In almost comically bad news, the highest projected GW outside the
extreme Arctic is
in
the Amazon basin, the world's great genetic
storehouse of live organic carbon and generator of oxygen. By 2100
scientists expect it to be largely destroyed by drought, fire, and
replacement.
Polar
Summer Ice Shrinkage-
Non-snows of Kilimanjaro We
are on track to be emitting 12 gigatons/yr of CO2 by 2030,
20 gigatons
by 2100, according to The End of Oil. If
CO2 reaches 550 ppm from it's current 419, the
wheels will come off the car and devastating
changes would occur, but we would reach 520
by 2100 even if we froze emissions at current levels, says Paul
Roberts, pretty much impossible
(I get 556ppm based on 15p
Imagine the effect
of a 3 km thick 20 x 300
km chunk of ice (Long Island size) cracking off the continental
shelf and tobogganing into the deep ocean
at 200kph- it will make the Indonesia tidal
wave look like child's play.. and it would
happen over and over for centuries. [I HAVE been told this is impossible by the physics of ice sheets.] Over
600 million people live under 10 M altitude
(height devastated by 2004 Christmas tsunami and 2011 Japanese 9.0 tsunami);
about half the globe within 30M altitude.
Or maybe the Northern hemisphere should be
more worried about Greenland, where devastating melting is occurring
and tsunami
warning would be far shorter (1-4 hours)-
on the southeast tip, the continental shelf
is only 100 miles wide. On the 400M high
conical island of Lanai off of Maui (I lived in HI 3 years), a
yellowish
bathtub ring is evident at 250M, from an
ancient landslide off of the Big Island and
the catastrophic tsunami resulting (this
is a danger today with the entire eastern
fourth riven by a huge volcanic fault). Except for
15-20 cities (including Kiev), every major
city is on the coast, so even a 30M worldwide
tsunami could virtually destroy civilization. I
made many of these points in a 1998 Maui Time
global warming article (Alt.),
and
advocated to VP Gore huge subsidies to the
beautiful new electric cars, like
the GM EV-1, created to meet Cal.
2003 0%
pollution standard (but of course, that was the year of Monica). When
the auto
industry overturned that rule in
2002, they recalled all their leased
electric cars and crushed them in contempt, no
matter how much people
were willing to pay. Electric cars would prevent global warming and
ease the
oil crunch in 3 different ways- reducing GHG's by 80-85%
compared to internal combustion engines (because of the efficiency of scale in large
power plants and the 50% efficiency of electric
motors on wheels compared to 12% for internal
combustion engines, most of which goes up
as heat). Electric cars would eliminate the
incredible GHG cost of refining, distilling
(with coal), fertilizing + harvesting
(with alcohol),transporting, storing.... a liquid fuel-
the electrical grid is a costless invisible
existing distribution network. 5 new models
are just reaching distribution, but the much heralded GM Volt,
is very expensive and only has a range of 40 miles, 45% of the
1996 EV1.
blue=fresh water; red=saline
In
January and February 2006, Europe and Russia, from Italy to the Urals
suffered one of worst cold
waves on record with perhaps 1000 people dead for
5 weeks. For 3 weeks it didn't break -18 in Russia. Maybe the onset of bitter ice age cold comes fast too-
but we don't have to guess- the tale is written in the ice cores. According to
ICE, the end of the Eemian warm period came hard and fast 115,000 years ago,
and Neanderthals back then found themselves flung from warmth to Ice Age...
in only 50 years. One scientist theorized that the ice sheets mostly didn't
roll down from the North but were formed in place- the stupendous recent
rainstorms- 1 m. in Bombay in a day, 1.54 m. in 2 days
in Haiti, would be 10-15 m. of snow. The thinking in
Russia and Canada has often been that global warming is mostly good: leading
to longer growing seasons, milder winters, a Northern Passage from Asia to Europe; but the possibility of
catastrophic climate shifts from the interruption of the Gulf Stream illustrate
the extraordinary danger of tinkering with the planetary balance.
Gore's book shows a nighttime photo of the eastern hemisphere with Siberia blazing
with light from the hundreds of medieval torches of flaring gas in oil
fields, a destructive practice stopped most places; but ironically, considering
the greenhouse power of methane- better than venting it directly. "The latest
election (US 2010 -of Tea Party Republicans, who took over the House),
you could almost interpret .. as a death knell for the species,"
intones wisest man Noam Chomsky, "Nobody else is going to do very much
unless the United States does alot- takes the lead." Many of the new
Representatives, some heading committees, are Global Warming
deniers- fools or corporate prostitutes, but in few decades, they may
be considered.... mass murderers. With a $15-30 trillion carbon
infrastructure at stake, billions to bribe and propagandize are small
change, and have been horribly effective. Maybe a third of Americans
now doubt GW is human caused! The collapse of the Copenhagen Climate
talks due to complete Chinese intransigence, who rejected even
voluntary European targets, (you don't want us to get ours) was
indicative. A
few years ago, geneticists tracked back the Y-DNA transmitted unchanged
from
man to man to find the so-called Adam, the first man. They thought it
would
lead back hundreds of thousands of years and were stunned when it only
showed Adam
living only about 65,000 years ago, among
the famous Bushmen (San) people of the Kalahari.
Within the same year, other geologists investigating
an unknown massive supervolcano (Toba)
in Sumatra, Indonesia (near the origin of
the 2004 tsunami), that had left very thick
ash layers all over the world, dated it
to 73,000 years, and found it was the largest
eruption in many million years (2800 cu.
km. ejected). In other words, this monstrous
eruption and the 6 years of global winter
and 2000 year bitter cold it provoked* in
the depth of last ice age may have come close
to wiping out the human race- but they all came back from one
tribe in
Southern Africa.
*(lowest red dip in the exact middle of the first graph) It's
likely all these new findings mean that warming will be at least
double what was expected in the
worse case, maybe much more, and that all margin for
delay is gone. The earth's climate is an
enormous system with a huge amount of inertia.
It will resist change, and resist movement
until the pressure is overwhelming... when
it will swing unseeing and unstoppable, like
a wrecking ball towards our civilization.
We have engaged in a massive reckless experiment
by deforesting the earth and altering our
atmosphere, thinner proportionally than the
skin of an apple, and the results are coming like a freight train.
---- "The
consequences of deforestation were starvation, a population crash, and
a descent into cannibalism. Surviving islanders' accounts of starvation
are graphically confirmed by the proliferation of little statues called
moai kavakava, depicting starving people with hollow cheeks and
protruding ribs. Captain Cook in 1774 described the islanders as
"small, lean, timid, and miserable." ---- Easter Island after
they had eradicated 11 species of trees, 12 of seabirds, and lost 85%
of their population. - Collapse
by Jared Diamond Copyright
2006-2022 Michael Hammerschlag
1 278 to
411= 133/278= 48%; highest CO2
seems 303ppm 320,000 years
ago= 108/303=35%;
Ocean sediment indicates highest CO2 in 6-20 million years 2 Atomic
weight of Carbon = 12; Molecular Wt.
of CO2 = 12+16+16 = 44 (3.66 times more) 3 This is
conservative; if one considers that emission without the atmosphere
over 20 years, the effect of that much methane (4x more than current emissions)
could create a warming 23 times that of all the CO2 humans emit, but
these things operate by atmospheric concentrations and increase only by the
square root.. 4"Climate Change"
as a label came from a successful Republican Oil/Coal campaign to
confuse the issue. The problem is GLOBAL WARMING; Climate Change is the
result, rarely it might be cooler in some locations; but monster storms
and rainfall are consistant with much more water in the atmosphere.. -- If you want see
how complicated this stuff can be see this chart. Michael Hammerschlag's
commentary and articles (HAMMERNEWS.com) have appeared in New York
Times, International Herald Tribune, Seattle Times,
Providence Journal, Columbia Journalism Review,
Honolulu Advertiser, Capital Times, MediaChannel;
Moscow News, Tribune, Times, and
Guardian + Novaya Gazeta; Kyiv Post, Weekly, Business Ukraine, He was a
chemist, worked on a Mauna Kea telescope, and has written on the energy
crisis and global warming over 3
decades. He broke the first comprehensive story on media mistakes in the 2000
election, spent 15 years in Russia + Ukraine back to the collapse of the Soviet Union,
and has covered 6 Presidential campaigns.
rick@hammernews.com
It seems these devastating
superheating eras happen about every 100 million years, so there
may be an astronomical source like the Sun's rotation around the Milky Way near
an unaffiliated hot cloud or star, or some insanely long-period orbital or
solar oscillation. They say the Milky Way's rotation takes 200
million years, but who knows. If all the CO2 in carbonate rocks- limestone, cooked
off (impossible, they say), the Earth would look like the Dantesque hell of Venus, which
has a CO2 atmosphere 100 times thicker than Earth, as much pressure as 3300 ft below
the ocean, and 500C surface temperatures that would melt lead. Oh, and sulfuric acid
clouds.
Swimming
the kilometer across a local lake in 40C (104F)
weather, I'm stymied from getting out by floating
layers of algae/seaweed. Barely standing
on a loose bed of the stuff, a plethora of
bubbles pops to the surface, which I sniff.
It has a slight delicate order- pure methane-
not the foul stench from human or animal
gas (which is other compounds), or the distinctive
odor of natural gas, which is treated to
keep people from blowing themselves up. Methane,
not even recognized as a GHG 45 years ago, may
become the most dominant and life-changing one. It has the power to
fuel man's future or devastate his world (natural gas is
easier to sequester carbon from).
become
more acidic, dissolving
limestone shells
and releasing more CO2. In 8 years the
ocean pH (acid-alkaline
rating)
has
fallen
by
.36, 23 times faster
than expected. As the oceans acidify and warm, algae and diatoms
diminish uptake of CO2. and output of oxygen- a threat to
these foundations of the food chain threatens all species. As the
warming Gulf Stream's possible shifts cause ocean clathrates to vaporize or the
tundra to melt, hideous quantities of ancient sub-permafrost methane (23 times more potent than CO2) are vented or
fermented into the atmosphere. As the glaciers shrink, rivers dwindle,
vegetation dies, and evaporative cooling fades. In only
one year, 2005-
glaciers lost 1.4M of ice thickness. As forest and jungle are cleared
for development
and burned, the carbon drinking stops, and the equilibrium shifts
towards a
permanently hotter planet. Forest areas 4 times the size of
Switzerland, or the size of Washington State are destroyed every
year, causing 20% of anthropogenic global warming. Scientists now
project man's parasitical use of Earth's land will
exceed
50% by 2023 (now 43%), perhaps causing a cascade of
extinctions. 
pm rise in 8 years
since 1998). Other studies showing that the heating effect of current
releases
will persist for many centuries, say AGW
must almost cease by 2050 to save the earth.
Paul Hansen, director of Goddard, has
revised the target peak to avoid catastrophe down
to 425 ppm, if coal use was phased out; and an eventual target of only 350
"if humanity wishes to preserve a planet on which life adapted". Without several more New
Orleans, or many millions dead from food collapse, there isn't the
political will to do the massive changes necessary- up to 2% of US GNP to control
the US's 30% portion of anthropogenic global warming. Worldwide CO2 emissions are 5 times higher
today than in 1950. That 425 ppm target would be reached by only 2024, at a 3ppm yearly rise.
Bill McKibben talks of 3 new terrifying
numbers- 2 C maximum temp rise to avoid catastrophe, 565 gigatons
allowed of new CO2 to reach that point, and 2795 gigatons, the amount
of CO2 produced if all the known oil, coal, gas
reserves are burned - $27 trillion worth, and the near impossibility of
preventing the carbon lobby from expending their "riches".
I long believed the US corn alcohol
craze
demands so much energy that it isn't better than using gasoline to begin
with (29% better,
says Gore). Now stories are that huge swathes of forest
are being clear cut for fuel crops, making
alcohol twice as bad as oil. Converting
food into fuel also has explosive
moral consequences in an increasingly hungry
world, as evidenced by the latest food price
rises, which cause ever more forest destruction. To fill a 50L alcohol
tank takes 232kg of corn,
enough to feed 2 people for a year, and the
US is now diverting 30% of their inefficient
corn to make fuel (sugar cane is 3 times
more efficient). This may come to be regarded as a crime against
humanity. Insanely the US and Europe
are mandating increasing food to fuel conversion. T Boone
Pickens
was investing $10 billion in a truly massive
scheme of 2700 wind turbines across the Texas
Panhandle, and wants a national program of
building them in a swath from south to north,
with solar from Texas to Ca. across the southwest,
what Obama should have committed half the TARP stimulus to-
$400 billion, instead of agreeing to a $300 billion tax cut. An
enormous opportunity to lead the world and set America towards energy
independence was squandered.
The future is coming clear with the catastrophic US 2012 drought (where
corn is being plowed under), and Russian
2010 harvest- 40% below normal due to searing drought that smoked
Moscow like a sausage for a month. Every one of the 5 food growing regions has had 2 or more +50% drought-caused crop collapses in the last 20 years! There will be a drought like no one
has ever seen- 40-50C (104-122F) for 2 months across America, Canada, Europe,
Russia, Northern Africa; and suddenly there will be 40-50% less food
for the world, prices will skyrocket 4-10 times, those with food will
start hoarding for the future... and a billion people will starve. They
will be the poorest people in India, China, South America, Africa- and
civilization will start to unravel. The millions of weakened and dying
people will provide a fertile field for epidemics and superbugs- and
the next Bird Flu will rip through the world. I see this happening
within 10 years, definitely 25. The astronomical zone of habitability
is very narrow, and the Earth is about to radically reduce the presence
of man. [We may see a little version of this from the Ukraine Invasion removing 30% of the grain + fertilizer]
