After Gutenberg

Subtitle: It’s Spring Time in Burbank

Climate Progress commentator Leland Palmer has made some quite astute observations about the denial of climate change.

Here is a repost of his comment:

I remember last summer in northern California. We had a million acres burn, in California, last year, when a couple hundred thousand or less is normal.

The smoke from the California fires blew across the country, all the way to Montana, I think. It was easily visible from space.

It was almost comical, going to work, and walking out the door at work, to see the orange colored sunlight and smell the faint smell of wood smoke, with everyone at work trying to pretend that nothing unusual was happening. Every day, for over a month, the sky was brown, and the sunlight was orange. During this time my brother’s house was threatened by the Yosemite/Mariposa fire, which burned faster and wilder than any fire in the area in memory. This fire ended up burning all around his house, but left an area of a couple of square miles around his house intact.

Google Images contains many images taken from space at this time, showing plumes of smoke drifting across several states.

“Last year during the spring and early summer there was frequent news about wildfires. In April, 1200 residents of Colorado evacuated ahead of a destructive wildfire. In May, 90 wildfires burned more than 40,000 acres in Florida, including several structures worth nearly $10 million. in June, northern California lit up after lightning strikes ignited hundreds of fires that burned 272,000 acres.”

In April 2009, again visible to orbiting satellite have been brush fires in Florida and 11,000 or so acres in Texas and Oklahoma.

Chris Field recently testified before Congress. He is a Stanford climate scientist, and one of the IPCC group leaders. His testimony before Congress was rather subdued, but the next day on Democracy Now! he laid it on the line:

http://www.democracynow.org/ 2009/ 2/ 26/ member_of_un_environment_panel_warns

If we look since 2000, we’ve seen a rapid acceleration in CO2 emissions, so that the actual trajectory of emissions has grown more rapidly than in any of the scenarios that were characterized in detail. The reason I say we’re on a trajectory of climate change that we haven’t explored is that we have only looked at scenarios where the growth of CO2 was limited to in the range of two to 2.5 percent per year. We genuinely don’t know what a climate will look like with the more rapid rate of increase that we’re actually seeing….

….The IPCC projected that with the scenarios it explored, we could see 2100 temperatures that were anywhere from as little as two Fahrenheit to as much as eleven to twelve Fahrenheit warmer than possible.

And what we increasingly see is that with temperatures at the upper end of this warming range, we begin to get a large series of very dangerous feedbacks from the earth’s system. In particular, we see tropical forest transitioning from taking up large amounts of carbon to taking up very little or even releasing carbon. And it looks like there’s an increasing risk that high latitude ecosystems that are characterized by these frozen soils called permafrost may release some of the organic matter that’s stored in this permafrost to the atmosphere. So you end up in a situation where, instead of having ecosystems storing large amounts of carbon, their storing very little or releasing large amounts.

The calculations to date are that tropical forests—and this is something that is explored in the IPCC—could, at the higher ranges of temperature forcing, release anywhere from a hundred billion to 500 billion extra tons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2100. And that should be put in the context of understanding that during the entire period from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until now, all of the world societies have only released a little over 300 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere….

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask not only about what’s happening in the Southwest, but a vicious cycle you talked about that could do everything from ignite tropical forests to melt the Arctic tundra.

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: The idea of these vicious cycle feedbacks is that once warming reaches a certain point, the amount of assistance that we’re getting in terms of carbon storage from the land and oceans tends to go down. And this is quite clear from the IPCC models, and it’s clear from a number of other more recent lines of work. In the IPCC, the models characterize a future in which tropical forests at the high range of warming have a potential to release large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere.

One of the new numbers that’s a great concern to me is that we’ve been doing studies of how much organic matter is stored in these frozen soils in northern latitudes, permafrost soils, and the new numbers are that approximately a billion tons [the number is actually over a trillion tons - Leland Palmer] of carbon is stored in the organic matter in these high latitude soils. Climate model projections indicate that at high amounts of warming large fractions of the permafrost could melt, and some of the projections have that at from 60 to 90 percent of the permafrost melting.

And the surprising thing about these permafrost soils is that the organic matter that’s contained within them is not this incredibly stabilized, difficult-to-decompose stuff; it’s basically frozen plants that have been sitting there for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years. And when the permafrost is thawed, these plants decompose quite quickly, releasing their carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere or as methane to the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas that, on a molecule per molecule basis, is about twenty-five times as powerful as CO2.

The basic risk is that if we reach a certain point in the warming, what we’ll end up with is a vicious cycle, where the warming causes additional permafrost melt, which causes additional CO2 to be released to the atmosphere, which causes additional warming, which creates this vicious cycle.

So, even Chris Field, one of the group leaders that authored the latest IPCC report, says that the scientific consensus as expressed by the IPCC report was wrong, and understates the actual magnitude of the problem. He mentioned the tropical forests and the permafrost, but didn’t mention that the boreal forests and the oceans could also turn into net carbon sources rather than carbon sinks, and he did not mention specifically the ice albedo feedback in which a melting polar cap reflects less sunlight back into space.

Joe was really just saying what Chris Field said himself on Democracy Now!. The IPCC report seriously underestimated the effects we are already seeing.

We need to take whatever action that we need to take to put billions of tons of carbon back underground, I think.

I don’t think any of us would really mind being wrong, if it turns out that the CO2 fertilization effect is much larger than estimated, and the earth’s climate corrects itself, and is not in failure mode. I just really don’t see that happening, sorry to say.

The people that are telling us that the scientific consensus is wrong are the intellectual leaders in the field, including Chris Field, James Hansen and James Lovelock. That’s somewhat beyond ominous, and panic may in fact be an appropriate emotion right now.