After Gutenberg

6 Comments

1. jcwinnie
   Posted 2009-4-7 at 6:17 pm | Permalink

   Via West Coast Climate Equity, we learn that the respected UK Met Office Hadley Centre advises that an Arctic global warming spike is imminent. The Arctic should prepare for a blast of heat in 2010. “These projections by the Met Office Hadley Centre, observes WCCE, “are in the median range; they don’t show the worst-case scenario.”

   The temperature of the air and waters surrounding Greenland is of special significance. Warmer temperatures are causing the ice sheets and glaciers of Greenland to melt and slide into the sea, forcing a global sea-level rise that is now twice as much as was predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

   Moreover, the melting of the floating Arctic sea ice is exposing more and more of the ocean to the heat of the sun and driving more warming for the entire planet. Wind and water currents are being affected, causing unstable climatic conditions and extreme weather.

   The Met Office Hadley hope that projections made with Google Earth Outreach, we serve as “a warning to world leaders of the urgency of taking immediate action to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

2. jcwinnie
   Posted 2009-4-7 at 6:23 pm | Permalink

   And, Climate Progress repeats information about one key danger inherent with an Arctic global warming spike.

   The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Monday:

   [Arctic] ice older than two years accounted for less than 10% of the ice cover at the end of February.

   So it is “thinner and more vulnerable than at anytime in the past three decades,” as the AP reports. “The amount of thick sea ice hit a record wintertime low of just 378,000 square miles this year, down 43 percent from last year.” Why is that a concern?

   “That thick ice really traps ocean heat; it keeps the planet in its current state of balance,” said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado and NASA’s former chief ice scientist. “When we start to diminish that, the state of balance is likely to change, tip one way or another.”

   Sounds like a tipping point to me — and to NSIDC and IPY (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did.” and The International Polar Year: “Arctic sea ice will probably not recover.)

   Why should we care about Arctic ice disappearing? Because, as a major 2008 study found, Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss:

   We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland….

   In other words, the recent trend in sea ice loss is poised to triple Arctic warming, causing large emissions in carbon dioxide and methane from the tundra this century. What is especially worrisome is that 2007 provides strong evidence on behalf of this theory:

   • NOAA reported that methane levels rose in 2007 for the first time since 1998 (see here).
   • The tundra can emit vast amounts of methane when it defrosts (see Part 1).
   • Scientific analysis suggests the rise in 2007 methane levels came from Arctic wetlands (see here).
   • And 2007 saw record Arctic ice loss [see "Ice Ice Maybe (not)"] — as did 2008.

   David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has analyzed permafrost loss this century under various warming scenarios:

   

   [Lawrence told me that using the above figure is "still fine as long as one mentions the caveats that permafrost is probably degrading a bit too rapidly in the original” (see discussion, literature links here).]

   Note that the B1 scenario is “stabilizing” at 550 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, but in fact NCAR’s model doesn’t look at the feedback of the CO2 and methane emissions from the tundra loss, which would drive concentrations far higher! So we must avoid 550 at all cost, since the tundra feedback, coupled with the climate-carbon-cycle feedbacks that the IPCC models, could easily take us to the unmitigated catastrophe of 1000 ppm (see Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return).

   We are, of course, on pace to exceed the A2 scenario — U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm.

   So it will soon be time to retire the word “permafrost” from our vocabulary, along with “polar” bear and “glacial” change.

   I’ll end with longer excerpts from yesterday’s NSIDC report on Arctic ice:
   
   

   Arctic sea ice extent has begun its seasonal decline towards the September minimum. Ice extent through the winter was similar to that of recent years, but lower than the 1979 to 2000 average. More importantly, the melt season has begun with a substantial amount of thin first-year ice, which is vulnerable to summer melt….

   How vulnerable is the ice cover as we go into the summer melt season? To answer this question, scientists also need information about ice thickness. Indications of winter ice thickness, commonly derived from ice age estimates, reveal that the ice is thinner than average, suggesting that it is more susceptible to melting away during the coming summer.

   As the melt season begins, the Arctic Ocean is covered mostly by first-year ice, which formed this winter, and second-year ice, which formed during the winter of 2007 to 2008. First-year ice in particular is thinner and more prone to melting away than thicker, older, multi-year ice. This year, ice older than two years accounted for less than 10% of the ice cover at the end of February. From 1981 through 2000, such older ice made up an average of 30% of the total sea ice cover at this time of the year.

   While ice older than two years reached record lows, the fraction of second-year sea ice increased compared to last winter. Some of this second-year ice will survive the summer melt season to replenish the Arctic’s store of older ice; however, in recent years less young ice has made it through the summer. To restore the amount of older ice to pre-2000 levels, large amounts of this young ice would need to endure through summer for several years in a row.

   But conditions may not always favor the survival of second-year and older ice. Each winter, winds and ocean currents move some sea ice out of the Arctic ocean. This winter, some second-year ice survived the 2008 melt season only to be pushed out of the Arctic by strong winter winds. Based on sea ice age data from Jim Maslanik and Chuck Fowler at the University of Colorado, since the end of September 2008, 390,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles) of second-year ice and 190,000 square kilometers (73,000 square miles) of older (more than two years old) ice moved out of the Arctic. View animation (1.1 MB).

   The time to act is yesterday.

3. jcwinnie
   Posted 2009-4-8 at 9:33 am | Permalink

   New data shows that Arctic sea ice now not only covers less area, but it also is thinner, chimes in New York, New York Treehugger Matthew McDermott.

   
   
   image: National Snow and Ice Data Center, courtesy J. Maslanik and C. Fowler, Univ. Colorado

   There’s new satellite data in from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It further illustrates the degree to which Arctic sea ice has shrunk over the past decade, as well as showing how much the ice that remains is thinning:

   In 2008-2009 the maximum extent of sea ice was 5.85 million square miles, or some 278,000 square miles below the average maximum for the period of 1979-2000. That’s the fifth lowest maximum sea ice extent on record. In case you’re wondering, the past six years have seen the six lowest sea ice extents.

   Perhaps the more interesting thing is that, according to a study done by the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research over the past five years newer, thinner ice has replaced older ice as the dominant type. This seasonal ice now composes about 70% of Arctic ice in winter; in the 1980s and 90s that figure was 40-50%. First-year sea ice is usually about 6 feet thick, while older sea ice that has lasted through one summer is on average about 9 feet thick.

   
   image: National Snow and Ice Data Center, courtesy J. Maslanik and C. Fowler, Univ. Colorado

4. jcwinnie
   Posted 2009-4-8 at 11:46 am | Permalink

   Alex Steffen echoes Donella Meadow’s advocacy to see nature as Mentor, Model, and Measure.

   The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological era, meant to signal the idea that we’ve changed the Earth’s biosphere and climate so dramatically that we’ve left the Holocene, the interglacial period that began 12,000 years ago.

   It’s a catchy (if grim) concept, but one whose utility I find myself seriously questioning. I don’t doubt the magnitude of human impact on the planet. Quite the opposite. I think we consistently underestimate the degree of disruption we’ve already caused by altering the raw biological function of nearly every corner of the Earth and changing the chemistry of its atmosphere, oceans and soils. Very little “wild” anything remains, and all that does remain exists at our sufferance and will endure only with our conscious commitment. None of this, it seems to me, is really a matter of much debate. It’s just how the world is now.

   I get the utility of using the idea of the Anthropocene to provoke recognition of the mind-bending reality that we are transforming the very planet on which we walk.

   Where the Anthropocene as a concept breaks down, it seems to me, is in the implications it raises, particularly among certain crowds who seem to be saying with increasing frequency, “well, dude, we’re in the Anthropocene, anything goes.”

   The first troubling implication is that we can sketch the blueprint of an era better than the Holocene — the era that produced the planet on which agriculture, civilization and cities arose — and that we can geoengineer the climate at will to fit that (or any other) blueprint. Because we’re really not up for the job.

   The reality is that modern humanity and human civilization are the fruit of a very tightly banded set of interconnected climate and biological conditions. We need a certain kind of world in order to thrive, and that world is essentially the mild, moderately wet, biologically abundant world of the Holocene. We’ve never left that world, and in fact we are still intimately dependent on its plenty for our very survival. We don’t know of another set of conditions that would allow us to thrive on this planet. There is no human-designed set of planetary conditions that we know of that will suit us better. We don’t want the Holocene to end: the whole point is that we want to go back to lower greenhouse gas concentrations in order to continue the Holocene climate indefinitely, as long as we possibly can.

   The second implication is that we know what we’re doing well enough to get the results we want from planetary engineering, even if we don’t have a better climate blueprint. We don’t. The magnitude of our ignorance about even the most fundamental aspects of the planetary systems on which we depend staggers the informed mind. We’re just coming to understand the climate system. We’ve discovered only a tiny fraction of the planet’s species. We are almost still in the age of alchemy when it comes to truly understanding all the interplay of influences that make up an ecosystem. We are simply not up to the task of running the biosphere as a whole like a machine, because we don’t have a copy of the operating manual, and we’re probably still illiterate anyways. This may be true for generations to come.

   That doesn’t mean that we aren’t being forced to make all sorts of choices about how the planet functions. We are, effectively, choosing to screw the climate system up in some unpleasant predictable ways and some potentially disastrous unpredictable ways. Wild nature now pretty much only exists where we protect it and garden it (and this will be more true as climate change shifts habitats). A great many species will only survive if we make saving them a priority (for some, the best we can do may be to find them, freeze them and archive them, but we’re not even doing that). What the planet looks like is now largely a matter of our choices.

   But that doesn’t mean that we can choose to do anything. There’s a crazy mistaken logic out there that assumes that because we’re having to make real choices about the planet’s climate and biosphere, we can choose anything we want, redesign the planet in any way we see fit; even that no environmental problems are even problems, because between terraforming and bioengineering, we can figure out how make new planets.

   I’ve heard the sneering comments about how environmentalists think natural systems are better because they’re natural. But the reality is this: natural systems are better not because they’re natural but because they’re better at being ecosystems than anything we could possibly come up with in the foreseeable future — they’re more complex than we’re able to understand, with creatures and relationships between creatures that have evolved into marvelous particularities of place. These elegant solutions are profoundly more intricate, complex and resilient than anything we know how to make.

   Preserving those ecosystems, and the species in them, is the best thing we know how to do. Humble and attentive restoration — through a multitude of interconnected careful efforts crafted to a particular place and alive to the adaptations climate change may demand; each small, but in aggregate massive and planetary — is the next best. Everything else is a distant, almost wishful, possibility. Our goal, in essence, is to preserve and restore the Holocene biosphere, wherever we can (and in some cases, that might mean looking back to restoring systems and relationships damaged long before the industrial era even began, through re-wilding and resurrection ecology).

   So, do we need to take responsibility for the planet? Yes. Do we need to take the climate in hand, and aim to release zero or less-than-zero greenhouse gasses? Yes. Do we need to garden nature, greatly reducing our demands on ecosystem services and preserving wild biological hotspots but also practicing adaptive restoration and so on? Yes.

   But our goal in all of this ought to be clear: preserve the planet on which humanity evolved, and, even more importantly, the planetary era whose attributes underpin everything we now are. Our goal should be, simply, to save the Holocene.

5. jcwinnie
   Posted 2009-4-8 at 12:12 pm | Permalink

   via Wonkline, we learn that the Interior Department during the end of the Bush regime suppressed Antarctic maps that show the disintegration of ancient ice shelves due to global warming. They were “finished in the middle of last year” but just now released.

   
   “The 40-kilometer (25-mile) ice bridge – which was the Wilkins Ice Shelf’s last bridge to the coast – has now completely broken off and can be seen in satellite images as a free-floating island of ice roughly the size of Jamaica.”

6. jcwinnie
   Posted 2009-4-8 at 9:29 pm | Permalink

   Yes, that is the sound of a tipping point, you hear. Yes, yes, I know it sounded like a scream.

   I am shocked, truly shocked,” says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them.”

   via New Scientist

   Um, yes, you now can officially panic.