Among the most unpredictable -- yet predictable -- of the
apocalypses.
Predictable, according to mountains of evidence from the most
dispassionate scientists in the world, who can hardly believe what they're seeing.
Unpredictable, because the interconnecting systems are beyond our
ability to accurately model.
Many feedback systems are at play: in the human systems, we have China
building one coal-fed power plant every week, and an increasing desire within India (one+ billion), Indonesia (one+ billion), and Africa (one+ billion), and more
for an increasingly energy-intensive lifestyle -- not unlike the US
experience. This demand
is most cheaply met by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer;
rapid change is quite costly to the huge financial systems currently in power.
In the natural systems, other feedback systems look equally bleak.
The former permafrost now melting in Siberia
is releasing gigantic amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
The increasing openness of the Arctic waters means less reflection,
and more absorption, of solar heat. The same is true of land, as the
glaciers retreat. New evidence indicates that many
plants, as the temperature rises, begin to release CO2
instead of absorbing it. The interconnected, mutually exacerbating
systems make this apocalypse exceedingly difficult to halt, and merely "very
difficult" to slow down.
We are projecting, over the next ten years, using mostly pessimistic predictions, the following scenario:
- Ocean levels and, more importantly, storm surges will rise
two feet and seven feet, respectively
- Significant economic disruption on industries and economies based in
coastal areas will affect worldwide economies (as ports are affected by the rising tides)
- The multitude of direct impacts on coastal residents (home values, insurance
costs, transportation costs, etc.) will create new kinds of economic refugees
-- some "telecommuting" remotely, others having to just up and leave
- Coastal infrastructure (sewer systems, bridges, roads, shipping
systems, and more) will be pressured, requiring significant financial outlay and consequent pass-on to consumer prices
and taxes
- Insurance and reinsurance industries
recalibrate, creating great economic turmoil, and greater final costs to
both businesses and consumers
- New opportunities will be created by the disruptions, and there will
be sufficient global capital to provide both seed capital and
development capital for energy, infrastructure, and societal realignment
- Energy will continue to be expensive, but availability will not drop
off precipitously for the 10 year period in question
- Large swathes of farmland, especially in the Midwest, China, and
Russia, not to mention Africa and South America, will be
affected by drought, heat, and/or decreases in aquifir replenishment
through lower snow- and -rainfall, causing significant economic disruption
and much higher food prices, resulting in famine in many areas of the
developing world
- Al-Qaeda and the "war on terrorism" in
general are recognized as functionally meaningless, compared to the
real crisis
- The internet, and communications technologies, will continue to
grow and prosper, as telecommuting and entertainment help us to forget
(or watch incessently) the predictable and unpredictable chaos going on around the
world.
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| Recent Climate Chaos News |
EPA Moves to Ease Air Rules for Parks
The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing new air-quality rules that would make it easier to build coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and other major polluters near national parks and wilderness areas, even though half of the EPA's 10 regional administrators formally dissented from the decision and four others criticized the move in writing.
Documents obtained by The Washington Post show that the administration's push to weaken Clean Air Act protections for "Class 1 areas" nationwide has sparked fierce resistance from senior agency officials. All but two of the regional administrators objecting to the proposed rule are political appointees.
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Missing radioactivity in ice cores bodes ill for part of Asia
When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research.
But those missing markers of radiation, remnants from atomic bomb tests a half-century ago, foretell much greater threat to the half-billion or more people living downstream of that vast mountain range.
It may mean that future water supplies could fall far short of what's needed to keep that population alive.... "that ... means that no new ice has accumulated on the surface of the glacier since 1944," nearly a decade before the atomic tests.
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Water vapor confirmed as major player in climate change
Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
With new observations, the scientists confirmed experimentally what existing climate models had anticipated theoretically.... "This new data set shows that as surface temperature increases, so does atmospheric humidity," Dessler said. "Dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere makes the atmosphere more humid. And since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, the increase in humidity amplifies the warming from carbon dioxide."
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At Exxon, Making the Case for Oil
While other oil companies try to paint themselves greener, Exxon's executives believe their venerable model has been battle-tested. The company's mantra is unwavering: brutal honesty about the need for oil and gas to power economies for decades to come.
"Over the years, there have been many predictions that our industry was in its twilight years, only to be proven wrong," says Mr. Tillerson. "As Mark Twain said, the news of our demise has been greatly exaggerated."
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David Suzuki keeps his optimism
David Suzuki, scientist and environmentalist icon, is ever the realist. The reality is that we're in deep trouble and we've been sleepwalking into the future," he says.
But in spite of the almost daily revelations about global warming, pollution and climate change, Suzuki is also an optimist.
With children and grandchildren I can't give up and say it's too late. It's very, very late, but you have to have hope."
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Are Human Beings Hard-Wired to Ignore the Threat of Catastrophic Climate Change?
...a growing number of social scientists are offering their expertise in behavioral decision making, risk analysis, and evolutionary influences on human behavior to explain our limited responses to global warming. Among the most significant factors they point to: The way we're psychologically wired and socially conditioned to respond to crises makes us ill-suited to react to the abstract and seemingly remote threat posed by global warming. Their insights are also leading to some intriguing recommendations about how to get people to take action-including the potentially dangerous prospect of playing on people's fears.
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U.S. undercuts clean-air rule
Looking to bolster the fight against childhood lead poisoning, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month approved a tough new rule aimed at clearing the nation's air of the toxic metal.
A key part of the initiative is a new network of monitors that will track lead emissions from factories. But the Bush administration quietly weakened that provision at the last minute by exempting dozens of polluters from scrutiny, federal documents show.
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Limiting global warming to 2-degree rise will require $180/t carbon price says energy think tank
In a report released Wednesday the International Energy Agency warned that a business-as-usual approach to energy use would result in a 6-degree rise in temperatures putting hundreds of millions at risk from reduced water supplies and diminished agricultural production. But the energy think tank said that limiting temperature rise to 2-3-degree-rise by the end of the century would be "possible, but very hard."... "Current trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable -- environmentally, economically and socially -- they can and must be altered," said Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
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Lawmaker says action on warming will take time
Congress will not act until 2010 on a bill to limit the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming despite President-elect Barack Obama's declaration that he will move quickly to address climate change, the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee predicted Wednesday. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said that while every effort should be made to cap greenhouse gases, the economic crisis, the transition to a new administration and the complexity of setting up a nationwide market for carbon pollution permits preclude acting in 2009.
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Climate change brings Kansans dire prediction
Over the next century, eastern Kansas will get warmer and drier.
Western Kansas will get warmer and a lot drier.
The first in-depth analysis of climate change in Kansas, released Tuesday, offers a bundle of future worries as well as a bleak outlook for agriculture in the state.
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Giant Asian smog cloud masks global warming impact-UN
A three-kilometre thick cloud of brown soot and other pollutants hanging over Asia is darkening cities, killing thousands and damaging crops but may be holding off the worst effects of global warming, the UN said on Thursday.
The vast plume of contamination from factories, fires, cars and deforestation contains some particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth, cutting its ability to heat the earth... The amount of sunlight reaching earth through the murk has fallen by up to a quarter in the worst-affected areas and if the brown cloud disperses, global temperatures could rise by up to 2 degrees Celsius.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Existing climate actions 'not good enough', EU warned
Global warming is driving major environmental changes more quickly than expected, with the Earth's average temperature racing towards dangerous levels and the transition to a low-carbon economy stalling, leading climate experts say. The world is in even "more dire straits" than the worst predictions set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, told a climate change conference in Brussels yesterday...
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Alaska permafrost study reveals larger global warming problem
Alaskans should watch where they step. University of Alaska professor Chien-Lu Ping and a team of researchers have dug more than 100 holes around the state, taking permafrost samples for a paper published in the October issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.
In the paper, Ping concluded frozen Arctic soil contains nearly twice as much organic material and greenhouse gases as previously thought. He based his conclusions on the information collected in Alaska and more than 10 years of research.
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The ocean's acid test
...according to a new report issued today by Oceana ... today’s ocean chemistry is already hostile for many creatures fundamental to the marine food web. The world’s oceans – for so long a neat and invisible sink for humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions – are about to extract a price for all that waste.
The effects are not local: Entire ecosystems threaten to literally crumble away as critters relying on calcium carbonate for a home – from corals to mollusks to the sea snail – have a harder time manufacturing their shells. Corals shelter millions of species worldwide, while sea snails account for upwards of 45 percent of the diet of pink salmon.
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Marine invasive species advance 50km per decade, World Conference on Marine Biodiversity told
A rapid, climate change-induced northern migration of invasive marine is one of many research results announced Tues. Nov. 11 during opening day presentations at the First World Conference on Marine Biodiversity, Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, in Valencia.
Investigators report that invasive species of marine macroalgae spread at 50 km per decade, a distance far greater than that covered by invasive terrestrial plants. The difference may be due to the rapid dispersion of macroalgae propagules in the ocean, according to Nova Mieszkovska, from the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. ... "The impacts of the pressure of climate change are particularly dramatic, according to results presented at the Conference, in the abrupt deterioration of the Arctic and coral reefs" Duarte asserts.
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Infrastructure Stakeholders May Soon Find Themselves Liable For The Effects Of Climate Change
Climate change may be to blame for buckling roads and flooding, but failure to adapt to a changing climate could soon have its own set of consequences. A variety of legal actions charging different types of actors for alleged actions or omissions have occurred (or are now underway) -- all related in some way to greenhouse gas emissions. Our law, therefore, is evolving as our knowledge of climate change and its effects evolve.
Very little attention has been paid to potential legal liability for failing to adapt infrastructure to climate change-related risk. Amendments to laws, building codes and standards that would take into account the potential impact of climate change on infrastructure assets are still some time away.
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Symptoms of global warming overrun Greenland
Although millions of people across the world still aren't convinced global warming is as big a problem as scientists claim, symptoms of the planet's warming pop up everywhere in Greenland.
The island's summer fishing season is longer. Crops are being grown in areas never thought possible for cultivation. Tourism is booming.... [But] a lack of sea ice has made winter passage between settlements more difficult, if not impossible. That's a huge problem because there are no roads between villages.... Full-sized halibut that used to be available at depths of about 1,000 feet now swim at depths of about 2,600 feet.
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Revised theory suggests carbon dioxide levels already in danger zone
If climate disasters are to be averted, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) must be reduced below the levels that already exist today, according to a study published in Open Atmospheric Science Journal by a group of 10 scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
The authors, who include two Yale scientists, assert that to maintain a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, an optimum CO2 level would be less than 350 ppm -- a dramatic change from most previous studies, which suggested a danger level for CO2 is likely to be 450 ppm or higher. Atmospheric CO2 is currently 385 parts per million (ppm) and is increasing by about 2 ppm each year from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) and from the burning of forests.
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Obama climate policy caught in Democratic tussle
A fight within the Democratic Party over control of the House Energy and Commerce Committee could influence the outcome of President-elect Obama's efforts to limit the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming.
Obama has said he wants to act quickly on climate change. But crucial bipartisan support could be tested if liberal California Rep. Henry Waxman succeeds at unseating Chairman John Dingell of Michigan, the panel's top Democrat for 28 years and a key ally of automakers and electric utilities.
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The rate of warming is 'unprecedented'
Washington - Research on Arctic and North Atlantic ecosystems shows the recent warming trend counts as the most dramatic climate change since the onset of human civilisation 5 000 years ago, according to studies published on Thursday.
Researchers from Cornell University studied the increased introduction of fresh water from glacial melt, oceanic circulation, and the change in geographic range migration of oceanic plant and animal species.
The team, led by oceanographer Charles Greene, described "major ecosystem reorganisation" - or "regime shift" - in the North Atlantic, a consequence of global warming on the largest scale in five millennia... "The rate of warming we are seeing (now) is unprecedented in human history," said Greene...
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Bush officials moving fast to cut environmental protections
In the next few weeks, the Bush administration is expected to relax environmental-protection rules on power plants near national parks, uranium mining near the Grand Canyon and more mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia. The administration is widely expected to try to get some of the rules into final form by the week before Thanksgiving because, in some cases, there's a 60-day delay before new regulations take effect. And once the rules are in place, undoing them generally would be a more time-consuming job for the next Congress and administration.
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Taking On King Coal
The future of coal will dictate the future of the climate. Plants in the U.S. that burn this low-cost, high-carbon fuel account for about 40 percent of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions, not to mention other air pollutants. Right now there are about 600 coal power plants in the U.S., and an additional 110 are in various stages of development. Without ways to capture the carbon burned in coal and sequester it underground, new plants all but guarantee billions of tons of future carbon emissions and essentially negate efforts to reduce global warming.
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Global warming predicted to hasten carbon release from peat bogs
Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world's peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change.
Such an atmospheric release of even a small percentage of the carbon locked away in the world's peat bogs would dwarf emissions of manmade carbon.... "Previous modeling has assumed that decomposition in peat bogs is like that in a conventional soil," Moorcroft says. "Ours is the first simulation to take a realistic look at the interaction between the dynamics of the water table, peat temperatures, and peat accumulation."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Ozone hole over Antarctica covered area size of North America
The hole was the fifth biggest since satellite monitoring began in 1979.... Ozone loss was at its worst in 2006 when the hole covered more than 11.4m square miles at its peak but by last year the ozone hole had returned to average size and depth and was 30 per cent smaller than the record size.
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True cost of China's coal: $250 billion in pollution, environmental damage, and social ills
Every year China is spends $250 billion in hidden costs due to its reliance on coal, according to a report compiled over three years by top Chinese economists. These hidden costs are in the form of both environmental degradation and social ills.... According to the report, air pollution from coal has become so bad in China that chronic respiratory disease has become a leading cause of death. In addition to air, coal has also impacted China's water availability. For every ton of coal produced two-and-a-half tons of water become polluted; already 71 percent of the coal mines in China are facing water shortages. When rain falls it is often unusable. Acid rain, due largely to coal production, is now recorded in thirty percent of China. China's land is not left unaffected. Mercury from the coal has seeped into China's soil and landslides due to mining are not uncommon. Mining accidents leading to injury or death are common in China where little has been invested in miner safety; according to the BBC, 3,700 miners died in accidents in 2007 alone.
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Drought land 'will be abandoned'
Parts of the world may have to be abandoned because severe water shortages will leave them uninhabitable, the United Nations environment chief has warned.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said water shortages caused by over-use of rivers and aquifers were already leading to serious problems, even in rich nations. With climate change expected to reduce rainfall in some places and cause droughts in others, some regions could become 'economic deserts', unviable for people or agriculture, he said.
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Mass relocation planned as seas rise
The government is preparing to relocate people living on islands considered vulnerable to rising sea levels over the next three decades.
Sea levels are expected to surge drastically between 2030 and 2040 because of global warming. Experts and the government fear that about 2,000 islands across the country will sink.
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What the Public Doesn't Get About Climate Change
In a paper that came out Oct. 23 in Science, John Sterman -- a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Sloan School of Management -- wrote about asking 212 MIT grad students to give a rough idea of how much governments need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by to eventually stop the increase in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. These students had training in science, technology, mathematics and economics at one of the best schools in the world -- they are probably a lot smarter than you or me. Yet 84 percent of Sterman's subjects got the question wrong, greatly underestimating the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions need to fall. When the MIT kids can't figure out climate change, what are the odds that the broader public will?
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Polar warming 'caused by humans'
In 2007, the UN's climate change body presented strong scientific evidence the rise in average global temperature is mostly due to human activities.
This contradicted ideas that it was not a result of natural processes such as an increase in the Sun's intensity.
At the time, there was not sufficient evidence to say this for sure about the Arctic and Antarctic. Now that gap in research has been plugged, according to scientists who carried out a detailed analysis of temperature variations at both poles.
Their study indicates that humans have indeed contributed to warming in both regions.
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Climate Change Seeps Into The Sea
Good news has turned out to be bad. The ocean has helped slow global warming by absorbing much of the excess heat and heat-trapping carbon dioxide that has been going into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
All that extra carbon dioxide, however, has been a bitter pill for the ocean to swallow. It's changing the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic and otherwise inhospitable, threatening many important marine organisms.
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Methane Gas Levels Begin To Increase Again
The amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing to an end a period of about a decade in which atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable, according to a team led by MIT researchers. Methane levels in the atmosphere have more than doubled since pre-industrial times, accounting for around one-fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global warming....pound for pound, methane is 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide...
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Geoengineering: How to Cool Earth--At a Price
Three recent developments have brought [geoengineering] back into the mainstream.
First, despite years of talk and international treaties, CO2 emissions are rising faster than the worst-case scenario envisioned as recently as 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The trend is upward and toward an ever increasing reliance on coal," says Ken Caldeira, a climate modeler at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif.
Second, ice is melting faster than ever at the poles, suggesting that climate might be closer to the brink -- or to a tipping point, in the current vernacular -- than anyone had thought.
And third, Paul J. Crutzen wrote an essay. The 2006 paper in the journal Climatic Change by the eminent Dutch atmospheric chemist, in which with heavy heart he, too, urged serious consideration of geoengineering, "let the cat out of the bag," Keith says. Crutzen had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the destruction of atmospheric ozone in 1995; if he was taking geoengineering seriously, it seemed, everyone needed to.
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