Global Warming: A Sudden Change of State
Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic(1).
The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimeters but by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).
We now have a pretty good idea of why ice sheets collapse. The buttresses that prevent them from sliding into the sea break up; meltwater trickles down to their base, causing them suddenly to slip; and pools of water form on the surface, making the ice darker so that it absorbs more heat. These processes are already taking place in Greenland and West Antarctica.
Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it “implausible” that the expected warming before 2100 “would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century.” As well as drowning most of the world’s centers of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. “Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end.”(4)
I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
Or we are led there. A good source tells me that the British government is well aware that its target for cutting carbon emissions - 60% by 2050 - is too little, too late, but that it will go no further for one reason: it fears losing the support of the Confederation of British Industry. Why this body is allowed to keep holding a gun to our heads has never been explained, but Gordon Brown has just appointed Digby Jones, its former director-general, as a minister in the department responsible for energy policy. I don’t remember voting for him. There could be no clearer signal that the public interest is being drowned by corporate power.
The government’s energy program, partly as a result, is characterized by a complete absence of vision. You can see this most clearly when you examine its plans for renewables. The EU has set a target for 20% of all energy in the member states to come from renewable sources by 2020. This in itself is pathetic. But the government refuses to adopt it(5): instead it proposes that 20% of our electricity (just part of our total energy use) should come from renewable power by that date. Even this is not a target, just an “aspiration”, and it is on course to miss it. Worse still, it has no idea what happens after that. Last week I asked whether it has commissioned any research to discover how much more electricity we could generate from renewable sources. It has not(6).
It’s a critical question, whose answer - if its results were applied globally - could determine whether or not the planetary “albedo flip” that Hansen predicts takes place. There has been remarkably little investigation of this issue. Until recently I guessed that the maximum contribution from renewables would be something like 50%: beyond that point the difficulties of storing electricity and balancing the grid could become overwhelming. But three papers now suggest that we could go much further.
Last year, the German government published a study of the effects of linking the electricity networks of all the countries in Europe and connecting them to North Africa and Iceland with high voltage direct current cables(7). This would open up a much greater variety of renewable power sources. Every country in the network would then be able to rely on stable and predictable supplies from elsewhere: hydroelectricity in Scandanavia and the Alps, geothermal energy in Iceland and vast solar thermal farms in the Sahara. By spreading the demand across a much wider network, it suggests that 80% of Europe’s electricity could be produced from renewable power without any greater risk of blackouts or flickers.
At about the same time, Mark Barrett at University College London published a preliminary study looking mainly at ways of altering the pattern of demand for electricity to match the variable supply from wind and waves and tidal power(8). At about twice the current price, he found that we might be able to produce as much as 95% of our electricity from renewable sources without causing interruptions in the power supply.
Now a new study by the Center for Alternative Technology takes this even further(9). It is due to be published next week, but I have been allowed a preview. It is remarkable in two respects: it suggests that by 2027 we could produce 100% of our electricity without the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power, and that we could do so while almost tripling its supply: our heating systems (using electricity to drive heat pumps) and our transport systems could be mostly powered by it. It relies on a great expansion of electricity storage: building new hydroelectric reservoirs into which water can be pumped when electricity is abundant, constructing giant vanadium flow batteries and linking electric cars up to the grid when they are parked, using their batteries to meet fluctuations in demand. It contains some optimistic technical assumptions, but also a very pessimistic one: that the UK relies entirely on its own energy supplies. If the German proposal were to be combined with these ideas, we could begin to see how we might reliably move towards a world without fossil fuels.
If Hansen is correct, to avert the meltdown that brings the Holocene to an end we require a response on this scale: a sort of political “albedo flip”. The government must immediately commission studies to discover how much of our energy could be produced without fossil fuels, set that as its target then turn the economy round to meet it. But a power shift like this cannot take place without a power shift of another kind: we need a government which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.
George Monbiot’s book Heat: How to Stop The Planet Burning is now published in paperback.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. James Hansen et al, 2007. Climate Change and Trace Gases. Philiosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – A. Vol 365, pp 1925-1954. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2052. http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf
2. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, February 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis – Summary for Policymakers. Table SPM-3. http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf
3. I am grateful to Marc Hudson for drawing my attention to this paper and giving me a copy.
4. James Hansen et al, ibid.
5. In the Energy White Paper it says the following: “The 20% renewables target is an ambitious goal representing a large increase in Member States’ renewables capacity. It will need to be taken forward in the context of the overall EU greenhouse gas target. Latest data shows that the current share of renewables in the UK’s total energy mix is around 2% and for the EU as a whole around 6%. Projections indicate that by 2020, on the basis of existing policies, renewables would contribute around 5% of the UK’s consumption and are unlikely to exceed 10% of the EU’s.” Department of Trade and Industry, May 2007. Meeting the Energy Challenge: A White Paper on Energy, page 23. http://www.dtistats.net/ewp/ewp_full.pdf
6. Emails from David Meechan, press officer, Renewables, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
7. German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Technical Thermodynamics Section Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment, June 2006. Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection for Concentrating Solar Power. Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany. http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/system/projects/TRANS-CSP_Full_Report_Final.pdf
8. Mark Barrett, April 2006. A Renewable Electricity System for the UK: A Response to the 2006 Energy Review. UCL Bartlett School Of Graduate Studies – Complex Built Environment Systems Group. http://www.cbes.ucl.ac.uk/projects/energyreview/Bartlett%20Response%20to%20Energy%20Review%20-%20electricity.pdf
9. Center for Alternative Technology, 10th July 2007. ZeroCarbonBritain: an alternative energy strategy. This will be made available at www.zerocarbonbritain.com.
© 2007 The Guardian/UK
I am not a scientist, but this article is no surprise to me. I have long felt that the scientific community was missing what is right before their eyes.
One only need look at at ice in a glass of water on a warm summer day. For a long time the ice looks as though it is melting slowly, then you blink and it’s all gone.
What surprises me is that scientists like Hansen are just now figuring this out. There have been sudden and massive collapses in the past, as when the Laurentide Ice Shelf sent billions of tons of water roaring through the center of our continent at the end of the last Ice Age.
I realize that my anectodal evidence does not science make. But can these people be so dense as to believe that ice melts in a linear fashion? Or are they trying to protect us from too much knowledge too quickly?
Elohi Gadugi Journal.
Gore 2008!?
The greedy ambitions of the global corps trump all other consideration. That is the only matter given attention in terms of reality.
Starting with the increase of ozone depletion in the early 1980s I have been following climate change closely. Several years ago, I observed a disturbing trend, which was that scientists began reporting that things were changing faster and the expected changes were more dramatic than they had projected. At first, they were revising their estimates yearly, but more recently more often, and most recently, more frequently. That is, the frequency of the sine wave of information change is decreasing. And the amplitude is increasing. Time to wake up. So what does it take?
People talk about Gore as if he was our savior. I don’t trust him. His past behavior has been that of a sellout and a coward. He talked environmental and acted corporate. Maybe he’s changed in 8 years. People can. But I’d like to see evidence of that besides talk. Talk is easy.
You know that in the weeks before an avalanche, the ‘thermodynamic equilibrium state’ of all that snow at the top of the mountain is actually at the bottom of the mountain. Snow and ice, like other solids, stubbornly retain their shape long past the time when a fluid would have moved to its equilibrium state. When the solids finally begin to play ‘catch up’, though, it can be catastrophic. That is what awaits us in Greenland and the W Antarctic Ice Shelf. Much of that ice is already supposed to be in the water, it just doesn’t know it yet.
Sometime in the next ten years, be prepared to wake up one morning and find that global sea levels have gone up 3 feet. DO NOT BUILD OR BUY near sea level: its too risky.
Even this report is too optimistic. We really won’t be in the clear until more ice is forming than is melting. Can we get together and do what it will take to make that happen?
We are dealing with a diffucult double problem.
I wrote a small article on it on my web page under the title “Fossil Fuel Based Energy – Access and Climate: a Double Clamp”.
For those interested see:
http://www.euronet.nl/users/e_wesker/ew@shell/Fossil.html
Mazzel & broge, Evert Wesker
My poor daughter. Depending on a bunch of short-sighted primate politicians for her future.
Kathyodat,
My thoughts exactly regarding Al Gore.
As far as climate change, I have a geology education, which has undergone quite a shift itself. Until the late 1970’s, uniformitarianism ruled - no geological phenomena could be considered credible unless a example of it could be found on the present day earth. It all seemed to be based on an unscientific bias against anything that might, in the, tiniest way look like creationism or divine intervention.
However, there has been increasing evidence that the evolution of life and even physical features are the result of infrequent but sudden and very violent events like asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions many orders of maginitude greater than anything humans have seen, and sudden climate shifts. A large planetary runaway greenhouse effect is the most well-accepted explanation for great Permian-Traissic extinction (95% of all species dissapeared). The extinction event was so sudden that there is a dramatic increase in fungal spore fossils - the fungus feeding on the dead plants and animals. The earth became so uninhabitably hot, and atmospheric oxygen so low, that only areas near sea level and near the poles had any appreciable terrestrial life.
So, in the same way a large dam must be conservatively designed for very unlikely probable maximum percipitation and maximum credible earthquake events, so it is perfectly reasonable that we consider this catstrophic extinction event in determining the measures we take to assure we avoid it. But no one seems to be treating climate change this way. They are instead like an engineer who designs the dam only to withstand flods and earthquakes that can be proven will occur in the life of the dam - even though such a dam would have a 50% chance of failing over it’s life.
So, to what degree should we be stopping, right now, the things that might even have a small chance of causing our extinction?
Even if we manage to reduce our combined carbon footprint to zero, it still leaves that 40% of excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
Everything we do will be of no avail unless people begin to appreciate that over population is the primary cause of the problem and then, for two or three generations, they begin to limit their families to only one child. Too much to hope for?
PJD … of possible interest.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml
Human population will need to be reduced by at least 60%. This per-centage will actually get larger as population rises and we do more damage to the ecosystem. There is no way that any one nation is going to volunteer for drastic population reduction. Even if the whole world agreed to this kind of reduction it could not be done quickly enough in any acceptable way. Our population will be reduced by ‘acts of nature’. Population may also be reduced by acts of ruthless people in power using such things as genetically engineered microbes and nanotechnology. Deliberate use of technology to reduce population may sound unlikely now but when nature makes it clear that human population will be reduced in one way or another then there are people who will be willing to decide who stays and who goes. Ask Dick and George if they think that there are people in this world who would resort to those means. They will assure you that there are!
Whenever kathyodat writes about Al Gore I have to walk away and cool off for a while. Let’s see–coward and sellout. These are some powerful words. Perhaps you should listen to your own doctrine–”Talk is easy.” I’m pretty certain that writing a book to warn people about global warming and producing a movie to spur the world to action is not in the category of mere talk.
Congratulations for noticing a disturbing trend in climate change. Common sense would lead one to that same conclusion. My young children understand as much. The signs of impending disaster are widespread and have been for decades.
You have advocated John Edwards over Al Gore in previous posts. The corporate lawyer who made millions by ambulance chasing, is building a mansion that makes Gore’s abode look modest, and throws out a few slogans about the environment. The enironment is THE issue for Gore. He reminds us that the environment and the economy are not at odds with each other, but that it makes no sense to sacrifice the future of the planet for the economy. Where do you see sellout? Gore is brilliant. He has the attention and respect of the world and we have a global problem.
You don’t trust him. That is rather vague.
The problem is the difficulty we, as individuals and societies, have to responding to abrupt changes whose transformations are unheralded by a significant signal from the natural world that cannot be obscured by the buzz of social chatter.
George Monbiot is a 911 Truth denier and when I read his hysterical article, I was reluctant to help him out. It just pisses me off that he can get his panties in a knot over something he can’t see and yet ignore the obvious controlled demolition of the WTC, which he can.
But, chacun a son gout, George. I’ve come to bring you a message of hope anyway.
Methane is a more potent green house gas than CO2. Approximately 1 liter of methane is equivalent to 100 liters of CO2 in terms of its heat trapping potential.
We are all methane emitters. In our culture, when we emit methane we never say “Excuse me!” nor do we laugh if we have any breeding at all. We remain stoic and adopt a poker face and hope the elevator does not stall between floors.
This is wrong. We must put an end to this Victorian hypocrisy. People fart. Cows fart. Elephants fart. All God’s creatures fart.
This is no laughing matter because a single human flatulence may yield as much as a liter of highly potent green house gas, the equivalant of driving your car from Baltimore to Washington, DC.
Friends, WE ARE THE PROBLEM, since we are the most numerous, though elephants, cows, pigs, and so on, are not exonerated.
Instead of tacitly condoning flatulence by ignoring it, as though it is not happening, as though it will cease to happen, we need to take action.
No more inane rhetoric, no more throwing up the hands in despair!
Methane burns readily. Combustion of methane reduces this potent greenhouse gas to heat, water vapor, and a small amount of less dangerous CO2.
Whether we are smokers or not, we should each carry a good butane lighter or similar small torch that can be produced quickly when flatulence threatens.
Each of us should take responsibility for global warming and ignite our own farts at the opportune moment when they are emitted. In most cases this will not cause an explosion, but a pleasant bluish specter of flame, which will be admired by others in the vicinity.
Caution - some fabrics may be singed. But what is more important, a stable global environment, or your stupid mohair skirt?
Global rock concert events provide an excellent teaching platform to educated the public about the methane conversion option, MCO.
Though animals are too dumb to implement the MCO themselves, we can organize communities to oversee most domestic animals, thus creating millions of meaningful jobs, which we can fund with the peace dividend when we withdraw from Iraq.
WE CAN HAVE ALL ELECTRIC CARS ON OUR ROADS IN FIVE YEARS!!!!
See: “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
If GM doesn’t want to do it, we can raise a corporation to build electric cars — subsidize the manufacture and the purchase.
We can replace 20% of the gas-guzzlers every year — and totally replace them all in 5 years.
At the moment we are on the pathway of chaos —
chaotic weather — earthquakes, tornadoes, doughts, floods, hurricanes of increased power.
We are seeing this kind of extreme weather increase every day.
We must take back control of our natural resources –
no private family should “own” our oil or our minerals.
Americans need to think and act politically — everyday!!
And yet the easiest baby steps have not been taken. At this point no study or dramatic report seems to get through. If their beach front homes are under water maybe they will notice something is going on.
Conserve today then come up with the magic technological solutions.
Conservation is certain.
It seems that hysteria and science do not mix well. George how about using reason and logic so that public hysteria does not turn into a new dark age? Perhaps if we stop believing in global warming and other mysteries, we might be able to get to science, research and planning that benefit liberty, equality and brotherhood.
“Large Methane Release From Siberian, Canadian Tundra and Atlantic Seabeds Reported”
If and we read headlines like this, it will be all out of control… As if it isn’t already. The huge quantities of methane dissolved in frozen water-ice around the world is 24 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. I’m 50, and I hope I don’t live to read the headline above.
Methane jokes aside. We encounter the problem of inertia when trying to change large open systems. Our civilized way of life is competitive rather than cooperative by nature. We seek profit more than we do efficiency. It’s caught up to us and we see the need to change things fast. There is the problem. Doing it fast. On paper we could have vast areas of solar in the sahara or mojave desert but in the real world Exxon-mobil made 75 billion in profit in just two years, the record for profits of any corporation ever. They are in no rush to change that. We encounter inertia…in saving our planet…because just right now, it is more profitable to continue killing the planet. Don’t buy any beach front property for your retirement some day, get that little cottage on the hill…somewheres up north. We do not want to believe how bad it is even as it gets worse. On Easter Island when they were about to chop down the last few remaining trees, I’m sure the people who did the chopping were insisting that it was okay because the trees would grow back anyway no matter what people did but the trees never did grow back. Even if we need oil…we certainly could use far less, wind farms, solar roofing materials, geo-thermal what have you, all would decrease carbon production…yet we do not. Economic inertia is why.
Very well put shakker and BugsBBunny. Our lifestyle is like a methamphetamine addiction. It doesn’t make us happy, it puts us on the path to certain demise, yet it becomes the only thing we care about. It’s not so much that we are in denial, but we seem to be choosing to fizzle out rather than make the simplest changes.
Too many people!
Too many meat-eaters! We don’t need to kill a billion methane-producing animals per year in this country alone. Let the herds die off naturally and go vegetarian. Meat-eaters have a carbon footprint many times greater than we vegetarians. And the vegans have an even smaller print. For example, it is now widely accepted among those who study such things that a meat-eater requires 17 acres of land to produce his or her food. A vegetarian requires a single acre. Too many people? Not at all! Too much wsste!
Global warming will continue to accelerate. We can’t stop it. And we’re going to pay the price as a civilization.
It is well understood that when a common resource is shared by many parties, those parties which exploit the resource will thrive whereas those who defer to better judgement will not, until the resource is depleted to the point of becoming economically unviable to harvest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Unfortunately in the past(Grand Banks Cod Fishery), the level at which it becomes economically unviable to harvest the resource is often below the point at which the resource can reproduce itself reliably.
With respect to global warming, the entire environment can be seen as a resource, and the tipping point at which catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable is analogous with the point at which a threatened resource becomes unsustainable.
Fouling the environment is extremely profitable and will be even moreso in the future as “responsible” societies move towards sustainability. Those parties who don’t get on the sustainability bandwagon will make more money, plain and simple. There is still lots of oil and coal left to burn.
Without a strong and immediate commitment to severe collective police and economic action against countries and individuals who contribute inordinately to global warming, I expect we may well be headed for a truly planet-wide and soon to be irreversible extinction event at worst. At best, we’ll all be moving inland.
The reason I don’t hold out much hope for most of us (billions will die) is that societies only respond to crises as they occur. And vested interests will not give up all they have gained on what amounts to a “Chicken Little” scenario.
I am willing to wager with anyone that our response as a species will be “Too Little, Too Late”.
I really can’t understand this obsession with population as a solution to global warming. In no other leftist fora except Commondreams is this idea brought up.
Considering the speed at which we need to take action, and considering that it is the the first-world countries with stable, moderate population densities that produce most of the greenhouse gases, advocating “population control” seems to be barking up entirely the wrong tree.
Population control is a separate, much less urgent issue, and one that is largely irrelevant to the current world’s problems. It is the criminal, Capitalist mal-distributrion of resources among the world’s people, not the number of people, that is the immediate problem.
Just as Monbiot refers to the ice shield melt reaching a tipping point, we have to consider that social (dis)order will too reach a tipping point. Competition for energy, food, water, and other necessities will increase social disorder. As resources decline and competition increases, the social order will quickly move to chaos. Katrina was not just a failure of city, state or federal governments … it was a glimpse of the future.
An incredible amount of coordinated work and wise,rational, future-oriented decisions are needed to avert total social disintegration. The probability that they will happen, given our ability to rationalize inaction at every step, is akin the assumption that you will have a successful future because you have decided to win the lottery with a single ticket. That probability also gets smaller with each passing day of inaction.
The game is still being played but the outcome is clear. If you think there is still a chance then, to paraphrase the movie , “show me the action!”.
Carbon emmissions are only part of the global warming puzzle.
We also need to reduce methane emissions. About 80% of those methane emissions come from raising animals for food (cows, pigs, etc).
Until we give up meat, we’re going to keep feeding methane into the atmosphere, which has a 23x more damaging effect than CO2.
PJD, I agree with you that population is not the central issue. The insistence that population is the problem is, in my opinion, disguised elitism. The writer of the 1800s understood that Malthus was basically a shill for the elites: Here was a theory that allowed the elites to blame poverty on the numerous poor. They were poor because they were numerous; they were numerous because they lacked sexual restraint.
Fact is, of course, people are poor because they are systematically robbed by the rich–as your comment about “mal-distribution” so tactfully (far too tactfully) suggests.
Were the first-world peoples, with their moderate population levels, to leave off robbing and exploiting the third world, both we and they could live sustainably, if we were all willing to live moderately.
Back in the 80s, it was frequently pointed out that you could stand the entire human population of the world within the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida. Nowadays I suppose it might take two such counties.
It is the numbers of humans on earth that is the problem. The problem is that a tiny minority of those numbers is eating the earth alive–and dining on the misery of the majority.
What drives this compulsion to consume to excess, to amass such wealth? I think it may be a pathological fear of want. This same pathological fear drives us to try to position ourselves among the elites, to exploit and denigrate the right of human populations (other than ourselves and our fellow elites) to exist.
The ultimate answer to the destruction of the earth may well be to free ourselves from fear, to learn to trust the cycles of nature to sustain us, as a swimmer trusts the water. We need to stop clinging to wealth and possessions for security, to cultivate faith in the earth’s power to sustain us.
With such scientific luminaries as Al Gore and george Monbiot, we are in good hands. Hakunamatata!
Hakunamatat - what is your point? Monbiot may not be a scientist himself - he has written a book on the subject - he has given us plenty of reference material to go back to sources - which is so much more than is usually given when people present the view discounting global climate change - could you try advancing the dialogue?
David
‘kathyodat’ says Al Gore is a coward and a sellout. Harsh. Do progressives love to eat their own? True, as VP he sold out on NAFTA. But Kathy, how much have you personally contributed to educating the world about global warming? Al Gore has traveled the globe and given his presentation over 1,000 times. He produced an Oscar winning film that’s catalyzed and energized the environmental movement. He’s just staged a huge concert to promote global warming awareness. I don’t see any indication of selling out or cowardice, quite the contrary. Al is knocking himself out while his critics do nothing but snipe and accuse.
surely on the whole people must be moving slowly towards the basic undeniable truth that nothing susbstantial is going to be done to prevent climate change
either because we are - on the whole- too stupid which is a terrifying concept all by itself..
or because their is no answer..an equaly terrifying concept..
or for me the most likely and human concept that the phrase “acceptable losses”
is being banded about in the dark rooms of power…
only a global movement of unprecedented size and numbers could ever think to alter the position of the governments and buisness communities…and if it is not in their best interests to implement change than in whose best interests is anything at all right now?
maybe then given even the slightest hint of truth in the above head scratchings..the damnable thing is perhaps that it can’t be stopped and those who have the priciple power base may well retreat to the big governmental nuclear bunkers and abandon the rest of us to what ever fate lies ahead of us
nuclear winter style..
acceptable losses..
it comes down to this
either they know or they are stupid
either way they are not doing anything..
never mind “big Brother” is back on the telly so we can vote ourselves out of the universe in the ultimate act of stpidity