After Gutenberg

jcwinnie

Those worryworts at ClimateProgress.org are concerned that the estimates for the year 2006 indicate further shrinking of the world’s glaciers took place. The shrinking equated approximately to 1.4 metres [1400 mm] of water equivalent. In comparison, losses in 2005 were one half of a metre. (Note: Thickening and thinning of glaciers is calculated in terms of ‘water equivalent’.)

The WGMS (World Glacier Monitoring Service) “has been tracking the fate of glaciers for over a century. Continuous data series of annual mass balance, expressed as thickness change, are available for 30 reference glaciers since 1980.” Here’s the mean annual specific net balance:

About the record global glacial melt, Prof. Dr. Wilfried Haeberli, Director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service observed:

“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight…. This continues the trend in accelerated ice loss during the past two and a half decades.”

I know what you’re thinking: “Trend? No end in sight? But Dr. Haeberli, everybody knows the globe is cooling, and the apparent warming is just the urban heat island effect plus lousy temperature-recording stations.” As Dr. Haeberli might reply, if he had Jon Stewart’s sensibility, “Damn you, 30 reference glaciers!”

Why should we care about a bunch of melting glaciers?

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UNEP (which funds WGMS) explains:

“Millions if not billions of people depend directly or indirectly on these natural water storage facilities for drinking water, agriculture, industry and power generation during key parts of the year. There are many canaries emerging in the climate change coal mine. The glaciers are perhaps among those making the most noise and it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice….

“The litmus test will come in late 2009 at the climate convention meeting in Copenhagen. Here governments must agree on a decisive new emissions reduction and adaptation-focused regime. Otherwise … like the glaciers, our room for manoeuvre and the opportunity to act may simply melt away,” he added.

jcwinnie

(Photo: Dominic Buettner for The New York Times)
“An 1870 postcard view of the Rhone glacier in Gletsch, Switzerland, contrasted with the shrinking 21st-century version of it.”

Andrew Revkin gently tells us to say farewell to the Ice cuz dee Gray Lady say ain’t no fare well to ICE advertising.

jcwinnie

“James E. Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who has long had a habit of pushing past where many colleagues dare go in describing the risks posed by global warming, has done it again, observes Andrew Revkin in the New York Times.

(Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times)
James E. Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

He and eight co-authors have drafted a fresh paper arguing that the world has already shot past a safe eventual atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which they say would be around 350 parts per million, a level passed 20 years ago. (The atmosphere currently holds about 385 parts per million of the greenhouse gas.)

Looking at evidence from past climate swings and greenhouse-gas concentrations, he concludes that a sustained concentration of carbon dioxide at double the 280 parts per million that prevailed for hundreds of millenniums before the industrial revolution would — after a host of slowly-responding feedbacks kicked in to amplify the temperature rise — result in an enormous warming of some 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius).

To avoid a centuries-long slide to conditions profoundly different than those that saw the rise and spread of modern civilization, the paper concludes, humans need to reverse course on emissions rapidly — no mean feat in a growing world wedded to coal and oil for decades to come, given the slow pace of change in energy technologies.

Dr. Hansen had articulated the idea in a speech in December, but this is his first detailed defense of the target. The paper’s main conclusions are below.

Some longtime champions of Dr. Hansen, including the Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm, see some significant gaps in the paper (it is a draft still) and part ways with Dr. Hansen over whether such a goal is remotely feasible.

The draft paper (a fat pdf called “Target CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?) was posted on Monday at Dr. Hansen’s Columbia University Web page, columbia.edu/~jeh1.

I’ve sent the draft around to some climate and energy experts to see what they think, both in terms of the scientific conclusions and implications for energy policy. I’d be happy to hear from you on this once you read the paper.

Here’s the summary:

Humanity today, collectively, must face the uncomfortable fact that industrial civilization itself has become the principal driver of global climate. If we stay our present course, using fossil fuels to feed a growing appetite for energy-intensive life styles, we will soon leave the climate of the Holocene, the world of human history. The eventual response to doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 likely would be a nearly ice-free planet.

Humanity’s task of moderating human-caused global climate change is urgent. Ocean and ice sheet inertias provide a buffer delaying full response by centuries, but there is a danger that human-made forcings could drive the climate system beyond tipping points such that change proceeds out of our control. The time available to reduce the human-made forcing is uncertain, because models of the global system and critical components such as ice sheets are inadequate. However, climate response time is surely less than the atmospheric lifetime of the human-caused perturbation of CO2. Thus remaining fossil fuel reserves should not be exploited without a plan for retrieval and disposal of resulting atmospheric CO2. Paleoclimate evidence and ongoing global changes imply that today’s CO2, about 385 ppm, is already too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted. Realization that we must reduce the current CO2 amount has a bright side: effects that had begun to seem inevitable, including impacts of ocean acidification, loss of fresh water supplies, and shifting of climatic zones, may be averted by the necessity of finding an energy course beyond fossil fuels sooner than would otherwise have occurred.

We suggest an initial objective of reducing atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm, with the target to be adjusted as scientific understanding and empirical evidence of climate effects accumulate. Limited opportunities for reduction of non-CO2 human-caused forcings are important to pursue but do not alter the initial 350 ppm CO2 target. This target must be pursued on a timescale of decades, as paleoclimate and ongoing changes, and the ocean response time, suggest that it would be foolhardy to allow CO2 to stay in the dangerous zone for centuries. A practical global strategy almost surely requires a rising global price on CO2 emissions and phase-out of coal use except for cases where the CO2 is captured and sequestered. The carbon price should eliminate use of unconventional fossil fuels, unless, as is unlikely, the CO2 can be captured.

A reward system for improved agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon could remove the current CO2 overshoot. With simultaneous policies to reduce non-CO2 greenhouse gases, it appears still feasible to avert catastrophic climate change. Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

jcwinnie

Also via the Big Gav, the Vancouver Sun also has an article on the melting arctic – Arctic ice melting at alarming rate.

Barber and his colleagues got an even bigger surprise when they sailed north into M’Clure Strait, the main channel connecting the Northwest Passage to the western Arctic. The strait is legendary as a gateway for thick, rock-hard, multi-year ice that piles in from the Beaufort Sea, but Barber and his colleagues found nothing but clear sailing.

“It was surreal,” he said. “The weeks spent on the ship were some of the most remarkable of my career. The multi-year pack ice had migrated about 150 miles (240 kilometres) north from where it has traditionally been located. So the ice-associated, high-pressure system that traditionally forms over the southern Beaufort at this time of year was displaced.

“All that cyclonic activity that was drawn in by the warm, open water not only made for some rough sailing, it also put more heat into the air, keeping the local climate warmer than usual.”

Barber isn’t alone in wondering whether this winter signals the climatic tipping point that many scientists have been anticipating. That’s the moment in time when sea ice in the Arctic becomes so thin and vulnerable that the ice produced each winter can no longer keep up with the spring and summer melts.

Many scientists now believe that when this happens, the world will enter a new era of global change — one that no one really understands, but that will likely have an enormous impact on the climate of the rest of the world.

Up until last summer, most scientists didn’t expect that to occur for another 50 or 60 years. Even the most daring weren’t willing to wager that it would happen in 15 years.

But this winter’s unexpected developments in the Beaufort Sea suggest that all bets are off. Waters that used to lose 10,000 square kilometres a year in ice cover, according to scientists, currently lose at least eight times that amount. Now, some scientists are speculating that the Arctic could be seasonally ice-free in less than a decade.

“The ice is no longer growing or getting old,” says John Falkingham, chief forecaster for the Canadian Ice Service, the Environment Canada agency that helps ships find a way through the Northwest Passage and other parts of the Arctic.

Cold as it was this winter in the Arctic and most parts of Canada, it wasn’t enough to temper the heat that warmed the ocean and melted so much ice last summer. By the middle of last September, scientists recorded a decline of almost 50 per cent of the normal ice cover. By way of comparison, the area of sea ice lost was equivalent to 10 United Kingdoms.