The Coming 'Instant Planetary Emergency'
Dahr Jamail
December 17, 2013
The Nation
Waves wash over a roller coaster from a
Seaside Heights, New Jersey, amusement park that fell in the Atlantic
Ocean during Superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo)
This article originally appeared at latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
I haven't returned to Mount Rainier to see just how much further that
glacier has receded in the last few years, but recently I went on a
search to find out just how bad it might turn out to be. I discovered a
set of perfectly serious scientists?not the majority of all climate
scientists by any means, but thoughtful outliers?who suggest that it
isn't just really, really bad; it's catastrophic. Some of them even
think that, if the record ongoing releases of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, are aided and abetted
by massive releases of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas,
life as we humans have known it might be at an end on this planet. They
fear that we may be at?and over?a climate change precipice
hair-raisingly quickly.
Mind you, the more conservative climate science types, represented by
the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), paint
scenarios that are only modestly less hair-raising, but let's spend a
little time, as I've done, with what might be called scientists at the
edge and hear just what they have to say.
"We've Never Been Here as a Species"
"We as a species have never experienced 400
parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," Guy McPherson,
professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and
ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of
twenty-five years, told me. "We've never been on a planet with no Arctic
ice, and we will hit the average of 400 ppm…within the next couple of
years. At that time, we'll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the
summers.… This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at
least the last three million years."
For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms, here's what an ice-free
Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the planet: minus the
reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation would be
absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean. That would heat those
waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the potential to
change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and even someday
possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet streams are
fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the earth's atmosphere
that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical role in
determining the weather of our planet.
McPherson, who maintains the blog
Nature Bats Last, added, "We've never been here as a species and the
implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of
the living planet."
While his perspective is more extreme than that of the mainstream
scientific community, which sees true disaster many decades into our
future, he's far from the only scientist expressing such concerns.
Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge
University, has been measuring Arctic ice for forty years, and his
findings underscore McPherson's fears. "The fall-off in ice volume is so
fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly," Wadhams told a
reporter. According to current data, he estimates "with 95% confidence"
that the Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018. (US Navy
researchers have predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier?by 2016.)
British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (of which Wadhams is a member), suggests
that if the summer sea ice loss passes "the point of no return," and
"catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks" kick in, we'll be in an "instant
planetary emergency."
McPherson, Wadham and Nissen represent just the tip of a melting
iceberg of scientists who are now warning us about looming disaster,
especially involving Arctic methane releases. In the atmosphere, methane
is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively short-term time scale, is far
more destructive than carbon dioxide (CO2). It is twenty-three times as powerful as CO2
per molecule on a 100-year timescale, 105 times more potent when it
comes to heating the planet on a twenty-year timescale?and the Arctic
permafrost, onshore and off, is packed with the stuff. "The seabed,"
says Wadham, "is offshore permafrost, but is now warming and melting. We
are now seeing great plumes of methane bubbling up in the Siberian
Sea…millions of square miles where methane cover is being released."
According to a study just published in Nature Geoscience,
twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the
East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a two million square kilometer area off the
coast of Northern Siberia. Its researchers found that at least 17
teragrams (one million tons) of methane are being released into the
atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.
The day after Nature Geoscience released its study, a group of scientists from Harvard and other leading academic institutions Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[/I]
showing that the amount of methane being emitted in the United States
both from oil and agricultural operations could be 50 percent greater
than previous estimates and 1.5 times higher than estimates of the
Environmental Protection Agency.
How serious is the potential global methane build-up? Not all scientists
think it's an immediate threat or even the major threat we face, but
Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the recent Arctic
Methane study, pointed out to me that "the Permian mass extinction that
occurred 250 million years ago is related to methane and thought to be
the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet." In
that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95 percent of all species
were wiped out.
Also known as "the Great Dying," it was triggered by a massive lava
flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global
temperatures of six degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting
of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the atmosphere,
it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a
period of approximately 80,000 years.
We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth
mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species
going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the "natural" or
"background" extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to,
or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass
extinction. The difference being that ours is human-caused, isn't going
to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries and is now
gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.
It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts
yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of
the sort of process that led to the Great Dying. Some scientists fear
that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing
feedback loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing
our own extinction. Worse yet, some are convinced that it could happen
far more quickly than generally believed possible?even in the course of
just the next few decades.
The Sleeping Giant Stirs
According to a NASA
research report, "Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?":
"Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated
vast stores of organic carbon?an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of
it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That's
about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth's soils.
In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all
fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this
carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable top soils within 10 feet (3 meters)
of the surface."
NASA scientists, along with others, are learning that the Arctic
permafrost?and its stored carbon?may not be as permanently frosted as
its name implies. Research scientist Charles Miller of NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator of the Carbon in
Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led
field campaign to study how climate change is affecting the Arctic's
carbon cycle. He told NASA, "Permafrost soils are warming even faster
than Arctic air temperatures?as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit
(1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years. As heat from
Earth's surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize
these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as
carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic's carbon balance and
greatly exacerbating global warming."
He fears the potential results should a full-scale permafrost melt
take place. As he points out, "Changes in climate may trigger
transformations that are simply not reversible within our lifetimes,
potentially causing rapid changes in the Earth system that will require
adaptations by people and ecosystems."
The recent NASA study
highlights the discovery of active and growing methane vents up to 150
kilometers across. A scientist on a research ship in the area described
this as a bubbling as far as the eye can see in which the seawater looks
like a vast pool of seltzer. Between the summers of 2010 and 2011, in
fact, scientists found that in the course of a year methane vents only
thirty centimeters across had grown a kilometer wide, a 3,333 percent
increase and an example of the non-linear rapidity with which parts of
the planet are responding to climate disruption.
Miller revealed another alarming finding: "Some of the methane and
carbon dioxide concentrations we've measured have been large, and we're
seeing very different patterns from what models suggest," he said
of some of CARVE's earlier findings. "We saw large, regional-scale
episodic bursts of higher than normal carbon dioxide and methane in
interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and
they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in
July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness
that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels.
That's similar to what you might find in a large city."
Moving beneath the Arctic Ocean where methane hydrates?often
described as methane gas surrounded by ice?exist, a March 2010 report in
Science indicated that these cumulatively contain the
equivalent of 1,000?10,000 gigatons of carbon. Compare this total to the
240 gigatons of carbon humanity has emitted into the atmosphere since
the industrial revolution began.
A study published in the prestigious journal Nature this
July suggested that a fifty-gigaton "burp" of methane from thawing
Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is "highly possible at
anytime." That would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of
carbon dioxide.
Even the relatively staid IPCC has warned
of such a scenario: "The possibility of abrupt climate change and/or
abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with
potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out. Positive
feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from
the terrestrial biosphere and oceans."
In the last two centuries, the amount of methane in the atmosphere
has increased from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7 parts per million. The
introduction of methane in such quantities into the atmosphere may, some
climate scientists fear, make increases in the global temperature of
four to six degrees Celsius inevitable.
The ability of the human psyche to take in and grasp such information
is being tested. And while that is happening, yet more data continues
to pour in?and the news is not good.
Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire
Consider this timeline:
* Late 2007: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)announces that the planet will see a one degree Celsius temperature increase due to climate change by 2100.
* Late 2008: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C increase by 2100.
* Mid-2009: The UN Environment Programme predicts
a 3.5C increase by 2100. Such an increase would remove habitat for
human beings on this planet, as nearly all the plankton in the oceans
would be destroyed, and associated temperature swings would kill off
many land plants. Humans have never lived on a planet at 3.5C above
baseline.
* October 2009: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research releases an updated prediction, suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060.
* November 2009: The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a climate science report, predict 6C and 7C temperature increases, respectively, by 2100.
* December 2010: The UN Environment Programme predicts up to a 5C increase by 2050.
* 2012: The conservative International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017.
* November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035.
A briefing provided to the failed UN Conference of the Parties in
Copenhagen in 2009 provided this summary: "The long-term sea level that
corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters
above today's levels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more
higher. These estimates are based on real long-term climate records, not
on models."
On December 3, a study
by eighteen eminent scientists, including the former head of NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, showed that the
long-held, internationally agreed-upon target to limit rises in global
average temperatures to two degrees Celsius was in error and far above
the 1C threshold that would need to be maintained in order to avoid the
effects of catastrophic climate change.
And keep in mind that the various major assessments of future global
temperatures seldom assume the worst about possible self-reinforcing
climate feedback loops like the methane one.
"Things Are Looking Really Dire"
Climate-change-related deaths are already estimated
at 5 million annually, and the process seems to be accelerating more
rapidly than most climate models have suggested. Even without taking
into account the release of frozen methane in the Arctic, some
scientists are already painting a truly bleak picture of the human
future. Take Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Neil Dawe, who in
August told a reporter
that he wouldn't be surprised if the generation after him witnessed the
extinction of humanity. All around the estuary near his office on
Vancouver Island, he has been witnessing the unraveling of "the web of
life," and "it's happening very quickly."
"Economic growth is the biggest destroyer of the ecology," Dawe says.
"Those people who think you can have a growing economy and a healthy
environment are wrong. If we don't reduce our numbers, nature will do it
for us." And he isn't hopeful humans will be able to save themselves.
"Everything is worse and we're still doing the same things. Because
ecosystems are so resilient, they don't exact immediate punishment on
the stupid."
The University of Arizona's Guy McPherson has similar fears. "We will
have very few humans on the planet because of lack of habitat," he
says. Of recent studies showing the toll temperature increases will take
on that habitat, he adds, "They are only looking at CO2 in the atmosphere."
Here's the question: Could some version of extinction or
near-extinction overcome humanity, thanks to climate change?and possibly
incredibly fast? Similar things have happened in the past. Fifty-five
million years ago, a five-degree Celsius rise in average global
temperatures seems to have occurred in just thirteen years, according to
a report in the August 2013 issue of Science
revealed that in the near-term Earth's climate will change ten times
faster than at any other moment in the last 65 million years.
"The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet," climate scientist James Hansen has said.
"There are potential irreversible effects of melting the Arctic sea
ice. If it begins to allow the Arctic Ocean to warm up, and warm the
ocean floor, then we'll begin to release methane hydrates. And if we let
that happen, that is a potential tipping point that we don't want to
happen. If we burn all the fossil fuels then we certainly will cause the
methane hydrates, eventually, to come out and cause several degrees
more warming, and it's not clear that civilization could survive that
extreme climate change."
Yet, long before humanity has burned all fossil fuel reserves on the
planet, massive amounts of methane will be released. While the human
body is potentially capable of handling a six-to-nine-degree Celsius
rise in the planetary temperature, the crops and habitat we use for food
production are not. As McPherson put it, "If we see a 3.5 to 4C
baseline increase, I see no way to have habitat. We are at .85C above
baseline and we've already triggered all these self-reinforcing feedback
loops."
He adds: "All the evidence points to a locked-in 3.5 to 5 degree C
global temperature rise above the 1850 'norm' by mid-century, possibly
much sooner. This guarantees a positive feedback, already underway,
leading to 4.5 to 6 or more degrees above 'norm' and that is a level
lethal to life. This is partly due to the fact that humans have to eat
and plants can't adapt fast enough to make that possible for the 7-to-9
billion of us?so we'll die."
If you think McPherson's comment about lack of adaptability goes over
the edge, consider that the rate of evolution trails the rate of
climate change by a factor of paper in the August 2013 issue of Ecology Letters.
Furthermore, David Wasdel, director of the Apollo-Gaia Project and an
expert on multiple feedback dynamics, says, "We are experiencing change
200 to 300 times faster than any of the previous major extinction
events."
Wasdel cites with particular alarm scientific reports showing that the oceans have already lost 40 percent of
their phytoplankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because
of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature
variations. (According to the Center for Ocean Solutions: "The oceans have absorbed almost one-half of human-released CO2
emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Although this has moderated
the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, it is chemically altering marine
ecosystems 100 times more rapidly than it has changed in at least the
last 650,000 years.")
"This is already a mass extinction event," Wasdel adds. "The question
is, how far is it going to go? How serious does it become? If we are
not able to stop the rate of increase of temperature itself, and get
that back under control, then a high temperature event, perhaps another
five to six degrees [C], would obliterate at least 60 percent to 80
percent of the populations and species of life on Earth."
What Comes Next?
In November 2012, even Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank
Group (an international financial institution that provides loans to
developing countries), warned
that "a 4C warmer world can, and must be, avoided. Lack of action on
climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a
completely different world than we are living in today."
A World Bank?commissioned report warned that we are indeed on track to a "4C world" marked by extreme heat waves and life-threatening sea-level rise.
The three living diplomats who have led UN climate change talks claim
there is little chance the next climate treaty, if it is ever approved,
will prevent the world from overheating. "There is nothing that can be
agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the two degrees," says Yvo
de Boer, who was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a
summit in Copenhagen crumbled. "The only way that a 2015 agreement can
achieve a two-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."
Atmospheric and marine scientist Ira Leifer is particularly concerned about the changing rainfall patterns a recently leaked
IPCC draft report suggested for our future: "When I look at what the
models predicted for a 4C world, I see very little rain over vast swaths
of populations. If Spain becomes like Algeria, where do all the
Spaniards get the water to survive? We have parts of the world which
have high populations which have high rainfall and crops that exist
there, and when that rainfall and those crops go away and the country
starts looking more like some of North Africa, what keeps the people
alive?"
The IPCC report suggests that we can expect a generalized shifting of
global rain patterns further north, robbing areas that now get
plentiful rain of future water supplies. History shows us that when food
supplies collapse, wars begin, while famine and disease spread. All of
these things, scientists now fear, could happen on an unprecedented
scale, especially given the interconnected nature of the global economy.
"Some scientists are indicating we should make plans to adapt to a 4C
world," Leifer comments. "While prudent, one wonders what portion of
the living population now could adapt to such a world, and my view is
that it's just a few thousand people [seeking refuge] in the Arctic or
Antarctica."
Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are often not the most
popular guys in the global room. McPherson, for instance, has often been
labeled "Guy McStinction"?to which he responds, "I'm just reporting the
results from other scientists. Nearly all of these results are
published in established, esteemed literature. I don't think anybody is
taking issue with NASA, or Nature, or Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from
legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration], for example. I'm not making this information up, I'm
just connecting a couple of dots, and it's something many people have
difficulty with."
McPherson does not hold out much hope for the future, nor for a
governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes
that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream media to put much
effort into reporting on all of this because, as he says, "There's not
much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human
extinction." The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a
good bet, he believes, "because there is money in this, and as long as
that's the case, it is going to continue."
Leifer, however, is convinced that there is a moral obligation never
to give up and that the path to global destruction could be altered. "In
the short term, if you can make it in the economic interests of people
to do the right thing, it'll happen very fast." He offers an analogy
when it comes to whether humanity will be willing to act to mitigate the
effects of climate change: "People do all sorts of things to lower
their risk of cancer, not because you are guaranteed not to get it, but
because you do what you can and take out the health protections and
insurance you need in order to try to lower your risk of getting it."
The signs of a worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we
allow ourselves to see them or not. Certainly, the scientific community
gets it. As do countless communities across the globe where the effects
of climate change are already being experienced in striking ways and
local begun.
People in such areas, out of necessity, are starting to try to teach
their children how to adapt to, and live in, what we are causing our
world to become.
My niece and nephews are doing something similar. They are growing
vegetables in a backyard garden and their eight chickens provide more
than enough eggs for the family. Their parents are intent on teaching
them how to be ever more self-sustaining. But none of these heartfelt
actions can mitigate what is already underway when it comes to the
global climate.
I am 45 years old, and I often wonder how my generation will survive
the impending climate crisis. What will happen to our world if the
summer Arctic waters are indeed ice-free only a few years from now? What
will my life look like if I live to experience a 3.5 Celsius global
temperature increase?
Above all, I wonder how coming generations will survive.
Dahr Jamail has written extensively about climate change as well
as the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a recipient of
numerous awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and
the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is the author
of two books: The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He currently works for al-Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar.
Read next: Typhoon Haiyan's message to the
This post was edited on 12/19 11:47 AM by eastcane
Dahr Jamail
December 17, 2013
The Nation
Waves wash over a roller coaster from a
Seaside Heights, New Jersey, amusement park that fell in the Atlantic
Ocean during Superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo)
This article originally appeared at latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
I haven't returned to Mount Rainier to see just how much further that
glacier has receded in the last few years, but recently I went on a
search to find out just how bad it might turn out to be. I discovered a
set of perfectly serious scientists?not the majority of all climate
scientists by any means, but thoughtful outliers?who suggest that it
isn't just really, really bad; it's catastrophic. Some of them even
think that, if the record ongoing releases of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, are aided and abetted
by massive releases of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas,
life as we humans have known it might be at an end on this planet. They
fear that we may be at?and over?a climate change precipice
hair-raisingly quickly.
Mind you, the more conservative climate science types, represented by
the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), paint
scenarios that are only modestly less hair-raising, but let's spend a
little time, as I've done, with what might be called scientists at the
edge and hear just what they have to say.
"We've Never Been Here as a Species"
"We as a species have never experienced 400
parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," Guy McPherson,
professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and
ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of
twenty-five years, told me. "We've never been on a planet with no Arctic
ice, and we will hit the average of 400 ppm…within the next couple of
years. At that time, we'll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the
summers.… This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at
least the last three million years."
For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms, here's what an ice-free
Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the planet: minus the
reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation would be
absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean. That would heat those
waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the potential to
change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and even someday
possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet streams are
fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the earth's atmosphere
that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical role in
determining the weather of our planet.
McPherson, who maintains the blog
Nature Bats Last, added, "We've never been here as a species and the
implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of
the living planet."
While his perspective is more extreme than that of the mainstream
scientific community, which sees true disaster many decades into our
future, he's far from the only scientist expressing such concerns.
Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge
University, has been measuring Arctic ice for forty years, and his
findings underscore McPherson's fears. "The fall-off in ice volume is so
fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly," Wadhams told a
reporter. According to current data, he estimates "with 95% confidence"
that the Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018. (US Navy
researchers have predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier?by 2016.)
British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (of which Wadhams is a member), suggests
that if the summer sea ice loss passes "the point of no return," and
"catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks" kick in, we'll be in an "instant
planetary emergency."
McPherson, Wadham and Nissen represent just the tip of a melting
iceberg of scientists who are now warning us about looming disaster,
especially involving Arctic methane releases. In the atmosphere, methane
is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively short-term time scale, is far
more destructive than carbon dioxide (CO2). It is twenty-three times as powerful as CO2
per molecule on a 100-year timescale, 105 times more potent when it
comes to heating the planet on a twenty-year timescale?and the Arctic
permafrost, onshore and off, is packed with the stuff. "The seabed,"
says Wadham, "is offshore permafrost, but is now warming and melting. We
are now seeing great plumes of methane bubbling up in the Siberian
Sea…millions of square miles where methane cover is being released."
According to a study just published in Nature Geoscience,
twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the
East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a two million square kilometer area off the
coast of Northern Siberia. Its researchers found that at least 17
teragrams (one million tons) of methane are being released into the
atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.
The day after Nature Geoscience released its study, a group of scientists from Harvard and other leading academic institutions Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[/I]
showing that the amount of methane being emitted in the United States
both from oil and agricultural operations could be 50 percent greater
than previous estimates and 1.5 times higher than estimates of the
Environmental Protection Agency.
How serious is the potential global methane build-up? Not all scientists
think it's an immediate threat or even the major threat we face, but
Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the recent Arctic
Methane study, pointed out to me that "the Permian mass extinction that
occurred 250 million years ago is related to methane and thought to be
the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet." In
that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95 percent of all species
were wiped out.
Also known as "the Great Dying," it was triggered by a massive lava
flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global
temperatures of six degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting
of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the atmosphere,
it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a
period of approximately 80,000 years.
We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth
mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species
going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the "natural" or
"background" extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to,
or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass
extinction. The difference being that ours is human-caused, isn't going
to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries and is now
gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.
It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts
yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of
the sort of process that led to the Great Dying. Some scientists fear
that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing
feedback loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing
our own extinction. Worse yet, some are convinced that it could happen
far more quickly than generally believed possible?even in the course of
just the next few decades.
The Sleeping Giant Stirs
According to a NASA
research report, "Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?":
"Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated
vast stores of organic carbon?an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of
it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That's
about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth's soils.
In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all
fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this
carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable top soils within 10 feet (3 meters)
of the surface."
NASA scientists, along with others, are learning that the Arctic
permafrost?and its stored carbon?may not be as permanently frosted as
its name implies. Research scientist Charles Miller of NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator of the Carbon in
Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led
field campaign to study how climate change is affecting the Arctic's
carbon cycle. He told NASA, "Permafrost soils are warming even faster
than Arctic air temperatures?as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit
(1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years. As heat from
Earth's surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize
these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as
carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic's carbon balance and
greatly exacerbating global warming."
He fears the potential results should a full-scale permafrost melt
take place. As he points out, "Changes in climate may trigger
transformations that are simply not reversible within our lifetimes,
potentially causing rapid changes in the Earth system that will require
adaptations by people and ecosystems."
The recent NASA study
highlights the discovery of active and growing methane vents up to 150
kilometers across. A scientist on a research ship in the area described
this as a bubbling as far as the eye can see in which the seawater looks
like a vast pool of seltzer. Between the summers of 2010 and 2011, in
fact, scientists found that in the course of a year methane vents only
thirty centimeters across had grown a kilometer wide, a 3,333 percent
increase and an example of the non-linear rapidity with which parts of
the planet are responding to climate disruption.
Miller revealed another alarming finding: "Some of the methane and
carbon dioxide concentrations we've measured have been large, and we're
seeing very different patterns from what models suggest," he said
of some of CARVE's earlier findings. "We saw large, regional-scale
episodic bursts of higher than normal carbon dioxide and methane in
interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and
they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in
July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness
that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels.
That's similar to what you might find in a large city."
Moving beneath the Arctic Ocean where methane hydrates?often
described as methane gas surrounded by ice?exist, a March 2010 report in
Science indicated that these cumulatively contain the
equivalent of 1,000?10,000 gigatons of carbon. Compare this total to the
240 gigatons of carbon humanity has emitted into the atmosphere since
the industrial revolution began.
A study published in the prestigious journal Nature this
July suggested that a fifty-gigaton "burp" of methane from thawing
Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is "highly possible at
anytime." That would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of
carbon dioxide.
Even the relatively staid IPCC has warned
of such a scenario: "The possibility of abrupt climate change and/or
abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with
potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out. Positive
feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from
the terrestrial biosphere and oceans."
In the last two centuries, the amount of methane in the atmosphere
has increased from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7 parts per million. The
introduction of methane in such quantities into the atmosphere may, some
climate scientists fear, make increases in the global temperature of
four to six degrees Celsius inevitable.
The ability of the human psyche to take in and grasp such information
is being tested. And while that is happening, yet more data continues
to pour in?and the news is not good.
Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire
Consider this timeline:
* Late 2007: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)announces that the planet will see a one degree Celsius temperature increase due to climate change by 2100.
* Late 2008: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C increase by 2100.
* Mid-2009: The UN Environment Programme predicts
a 3.5C increase by 2100. Such an increase would remove habitat for
human beings on this planet, as nearly all the plankton in the oceans
would be destroyed, and associated temperature swings would kill off
many land plants. Humans have never lived on a planet at 3.5C above
baseline.
* October 2009: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research releases an updated prediction, suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060.
* November 2009: The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a climate science report, predict 6C and 7C temperature increases, respectively, by 2100.
* December 2010: The UN Environment Programme predicts up to a 5C increase by 2050.
* 2012: The conservative International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017.
* November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035.
A briefing provided to the failed UN Conference of the Parties in
Copenhagen in 2009 provided this summary: "The long-term sea level that
corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters
above today's levels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more
higher. These estimates are based on real long-term climate records, not
on models."
On December 3, a study
by eighteen eminent scientists, including the former head of NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, showed that the
long-held, internationally agreed-upon target to limit rises in global
average temperatures to two degrees Celsius was in error and far above
the 1C threshold that would need to be maintained in order to avoid the
effects of catastrophic climate change.
And keep in mind that the various major assessments of future global
temperatures seldom assume the worst about possible self-reinforcing
climate feedback loops like the methane one.
"Things Are Looking Really Dire"
Climate-change-related deaths are already estimated
at 5 million annually, and the process seems to be accelerating more
rapidly than most climate models have suggested. Even without taking
into account the release of frozen methane in the Arctic, some
scientists are already painting a truly bleak picture of the human
future. Take Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Neil Dawe, who in
August told a reporter
that he wouldn't be surprised if the generation after him witnessed the
extinction of humanity. All around the estuary near his office on
Vancouver Island, he has been witnessing the unraveling of "the web of
life," and "it's happening very quickly."
"Economic growth is the biggest destroyer of the ecology," Dawe says.
"Those people who think you can have a growing economy and a healthy
environment are wrong. If we don't reduce our numbers, nature will do it
for us." And he isn't hopeful humans will be able to save themselves.
"Everything is worse and we're still doing the same things. Because
ecosystems are so resilient, they don't exact immediate punishment on
the stupid."
The University of Arizona's Guy McPherson has similar fears. "We will
have very few humans on the planet because of lack of habitat," he
says. Of recent studies showing the toll temperature increases will take
on that habitat, he adds, "They are only looking at CO2 in the atmosphere."
Here's the question: Could some version of extinction or
near-extinction overcome humanity, thanks to climate change?and possibly
incredibly fast? Similar things have happened in the past. Fifty-five
million years ago, a five-degree Celsius rise in average global
temperatures seems to have occurred in just thirteen years, according to
a report in the August 2013 issue of Science
revealed that in the near-term Earth's climate will change ten times
faster than at any other moment in the last 65 million years.
"The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet," climate scientist James Hansen has said.
"There are potential irreversible effects of melting the Arctic sea
ice. If it begins to allow the Arctic Ocean to warm up, and warm the
ocean floor, then we'll begin to release methane hydrates. And if we let
that happen, that is a potential tipping point that we don't want to
happen. If we burn all the fossil fuels then we certainly will cause the
methane hydrates, eventually, to come out and cause several degrees
more warming, and it's not clear that civilization could survive that
extreme climate change."
Yet, long before humanity has burned all fossil fuel reserves on the
planet, massive amounts of methane will be released. While the human
body is potentially capable of handling a six-to-nine-degree Celsius
rise in the planetary temperature, the crops and habitat we use for food
production are not. As McPherson put it, "If we see a 3.5 to 4C
baseline increase, I see no way to have habitat. We are at .85C above
baseline and we've already triggered all these self-reinforcing feedback
loops."
He adds: "All the evidence points to a locked-in 3.5 to 5 degree C
global temperature rise above the 1850 'norm' by mid-century, possibly
much sooner. This guarantees a positive feedback, already underway,
leading to 4.5 to 6 or more degrees above 'norm' and that is a level
lethal to life. This is partly due to the fact that humans have to eat
and plants can't adapt fast enough to make that possible for the 7-to-9
billion of us?so we'll die."
If you think McPherson's comment about lack of adaptability goes over
the edge, consider that the rate of evolution trails the rate of
climate change by a factor of paper in the August 2013 issue of Ecology Letters.
Furthermore, David Wasdel, director of the Apollo-Gaia Project and an
expert on multiple feedback dynamics, says, "We are experiencing change
200 to 300 times faster than any of the previous major extinction
events."
Wasdel cites with particular alarm scientific reports showing that the oceans have already lost 40 percent of
their phytoplankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because
of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature
variations. (According to the Center for Ocean Solutions: "The oceans have absorbed almost one-half of human-released CO2
emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Although this has moderated
the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, it is chemically altering marine
ecosystems 100 times more rapidly than it has changed in at least the
last 650,000 years.")
"This is already a mass extinction event," Wasdel adds. "The question
is, how far is it going to go? How serious does it become? If we are
not able to stop the rate of increase of temperature itself, and get
that back under control, then a high temperature event, perhaps another
five to six degrees [C], would obliterate at least 60 percent to 80
percent of the populations and species of life on Earth."
What Comes Next?
In November 2012, even Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank
Group (an international financial institution that provides loans to
developing countries), warned
that "a 4C warmer world can, and must be, avoided. Lack of action on
climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a
completely different world than we are living in today."
A World Bank?commissioned report warned that we are indeed on track to a "4C world" marked by extreme heat waves and life-threatening sea-level rise.
The three living diplomats who have led UN climate change talks claim
there is little chance the next climate treaty, if it is ever approved,
will prevent the world from overheating. "There is nothing that can be
agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the two degrees," says Yvo
de Boer, who was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a
summit in Copenhagen crumbled. "The only way that a 2015 agreement can
achieve a two-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."
Atmospheric and marine scientist Ira Leifer is particularly concerned about the changing rainfall patterns a recently leaked
IPCC draft report suggested for our future: "When I look at what the
models predicted for a 4C world, I see very little rain over vast swaths
of populations. If Spain becomes like Algeria, where do all the
Spaniards get the water to survive? We have parts of the world which
have high populations which have high rainfall and crops that exist
there, and when that rainfall and those crops go away and the country
starts looking more like some of North Africa, what keeps the people
alive?"
The IPCC report suggests that we can expect a generalized shifting of
global rain patterns further north, robbing areas that now get
plentiful rain of future water supplies. History shows us that when food
supplies collapse, wars begin, while famine and disease spread. All of
these things, scientists now fear, could happen on an unprecedented
scale, especially given the interconnected nature of the global economy.
"Some scientists are indicating we should make plans to adapt to a 4C
world," Leifer comments. "While prudent, one wonders what portion of
the living population now could adapt to such a world, and my view is
that it's just a few thousand people [seeking refuge] in the Arctic or
Antarctica."
Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are often not the most
popular guys in the global room. McPherson, for instance, has often been
labeled "Guy McStinction"?to which he responds, "I'm just reporting the
results from other scientists. Nearly all of these results are
published in established, esteemed literature. I don't think anybody is
taking issue with NASA, or Nature, or Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from
legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration], for example. I'm not making this information up, I'm
just connecting a couple of dots, and it's something many people have
difficulty with."
McPherson does not hold out much hope for the future, nor for a
governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes
that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream media to put much
effort into reporting on all of this because, as he says, "There's not
much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human
extinction." The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a
good bet, he believes, "because there is money in this, and as long as
that's the case, it is going to continue."
Leifer, however, is convinced that there is a moral obligation never
to give up and that the path to global destruction could be altered. "In
the short term, if you can make it in the economic interests of people
to do the right thing, it'll happen very fast." He offers an analogy
when it comes to whether humanity will be willing to act to mitigate the
effects of climate change: "People do all sorts of things to lower
their risk of cancer, not because you are guaranteed not to get it, but
because you do what you can and take out the health protections and
insurance you need in order to try to lower your risk of getting it."
The signs of a worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we
allow ourselves to see them or not. Certainly, the scientific community
gets it. As do countless communities across the globe where the effects
of climate change are already being experienced in striking ways and
local begun.
People in such areas, out of necessity, are starting to try to teach
their children how to adapt to, and live in, what we are causing our
world to become.
My niece and nephews are doing something similar. They are growing
vegetables in a backyard garden and their eight chickens provide more
than enough eggs for the family. Their parents are intent on teaching
them how to be ever more self-sustaining. But none of these heartfelt
actions can mitigate what is already underway when it comes to the
global climate.
I am 45 years old, and I often wonder how my generation will survive
the impending climate crisis. What will happen to our world if the
summer Arctic waters are indeed ice-free only a few years from now? What
will my life look like if I live to experience a 3.5 Celsius global
temperature increase?
Above all, I wonder how coming generations will survive.
Dahr Jamail has written extensively about climate change as well
as the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a recipient of
numerous awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and
the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is the author
of two books: The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He currently works for al-Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar.
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This post was edited on 12/19 11:47 AM by eastcane
