After Gutenberg

And, America is ignoring both

Permafrost melting is widespread and no IPCC model has taken into consideration the feedback from a melting permafrost and, thus, the likely future impact of permafrost melting has been underestimated. “Whereas the models indicate that about half of the ice loss from 1979 to 2006 was due to increased greenhouse gases, and the other half due to natural variations in the climate system, the new study indicates that greenhouse gases may be playing a significantly greater role.”

Joe Romm and Jim Hansen have been corresponding by email again. Hansen believes that it is not too late to save the Arctic. While he believes that we need action now to save the Greenland ice sheet, Joe Romm doubts whether we can or will act in time to stop the total loss of Arctic summer ice.

In a New York Times op ed entitled “A Swiftly Melting Planet” Thomas Homer Dixon repeats the warning that “the Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming.” He warns of “feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.”

About the Albedo Flip, Dixon informs:

Our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.

And, about our oceans of acid, Dixon also informs op-ed readers:

Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.

“Variations of atmospheric CO2 occurring as a climate feedback on the time scale of the ice ages can be ~100 ppm in 5000 years, or 0.02 ppm/year. This atmospheric change is due to a shifting of carbon among the atmosphere, ocean, soil and biosphere compartments within the surface carbon pool, a warmer climate driving more CO2 into the air. This natural glacial-interglacial variation of atmospheric CO2 is quite rapid in comparison with the geologic cycling of carbon between the Earth’s crust and the surface carbon pool, which amounts to ~10**(-4) ppm/year of CO2.”

Then, he gets to the really bad news, permafrost fans:

Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).

Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.

This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.

The problem is that the time scales to which Hansen and Romm, Dixon, or Gore wants us to attend are quite over-sized for our channel zapping nation. It is as if we tried on adult clothes to pretend that we have grown enough to wear them. The urgency of defining a realistic path that could avoid these dangerous consequence felt by such observers is lost on a populace that still awaits sound bites of good cheer about the war for oil in Iraq.