Melting Fears

Many of the people I meet who deny that there is any climate change are afraid that if we limit oil or put a tax on carbon that such policies will cause economic hardship to people here in the United States and around the world.  And since oil drives our economy, I recognize that their fears have validity.  But the consequences of global warming will have a much more devastating impact than the transition from oil to cleaner greener fuels.  We are already seeing some of the consequences with increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, other extreme weather events, large swings in temperature creating record highs and lows, delayed or decreased rains in some areas causing droughts, while increased rain in others causing flooding.

If global warming continues we will have much more severe ecological and societal consequences to deal with than just the occasional record setting temperature or snowfall to deal with.  The climate change will have not only greater economic hardship than an oil to clean fuel transition, but cause wide spread property destruction, dislocation, and death.  The disparity between those who have contributed to the problem of global warming and those who experience the consequences will be so unjust as to create a religious crisis and threaten the relative peace of the entire planet.

Due to the efforts of weathermen, and popular publications like the National Geographic, some people have begun to recognize that climate change is happening.  However, oil companies have been doing and excellent job providing disinformation.  They have wormed their way into our churches, schools, government, and news agencies, telling their audiences that if they actually believe in climate change, it is a natural phenomena that is cyclical and there is nothing we can do about it. Their lies are believable because they contain half truths: there is a kind of cyclical climate change that is a natural phenomena. However, the truth is there is lots we can do about global warming whether it is a natural phenomena or man-made.  The truth is if we don't do something about global warming, a lot more is going to hurt than our pocket books.

There is great urgency to doing something about global warming.  The natural phenomenon of global warming works on a positive feedback loop, much like a snowball rolling down a hill.  Each small change gives momentum for more changes in the same direction.  Given enough changes, the phenomenon moves of its own accord tumbling out of control in much the same way as a snowball which reaches enough mass to overcome friction and roll down the hill gaining more mass and more momentum as it goes along.  If we want to influence the direction of global warming, the sooner the better.

In many ways the consequences of global warming are like debt on a credit card.  At the beginning we can charge lots of consequences to our future and only have to pay a small monthly balance.  The benefits we receive easily outweighs the climate debt. In the beginning we can emit extra greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane and the oceans will absorb it. But the oceans ability to absorb carbon is not a constant. It has a saturation limit. The more we emit, the closer we reached the limit the less carbon the ocean can absorb, the more saturated the atmosphere becomes, and the more we experience the greenhouse effect of carbon in the atmosphere increasing the average global temperature.  It is this average global temperature that wrecks havoc with our ecosystems and eventually our lives.

Similarly with a credit card, the more you charge and the longer you delay paying the principle, the more the debt increases. The monthly payment continues to become larger and larger until there is no way to pay back the debt because paying the interest alone consumes all a person's income leaving a person in financial ruins. The more we delay reducing our carbon debt, the more saturated our atmosphere becomes until the consequences of global warming are consuming all of the benefit we experience from emitting carbon in the first place.  Nature does not have a bankruptcy court. Eventually we must pay for our actions; we cannot cheat nature.  And what we don't pay, future generations will.  Nature will ask us to pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

It is urgent that we start paying our carbon debt now. Up until the mid 1970's the temperature of the earth did not significantly rise in proportion to the amount of CO2 emitted. The interest on our debt was less than our debt.  But in the past twenty years, we have begun to reach the limits of the ocean to absorb the carbon and the average global temperature has begun to rise.  It has already begun to exact a toll on our environment, melting glaciers and arctic ice; heating up oceans and increasing the variability and severity of weather patterns.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/


http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/globalchange/global_warming/03.html

As our arctic ice caps melt our day of reckoning gets closer and closer.  We don't have time to dilly dally or parry with global warming deniers.  Our hard working scientists have been using all the resources at their disposal to determine how soon and to what extent we will experience the damage of global warming.  In the report of Wieslaw Maslowski we learn that if present trends continue the arctic will be predominantly ice free in three to nine years, with six being the most likely. http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/06/arctic-death-spiral-maslowski-ice-free-arctic-watts-goddard-wattsupwiththat/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/06/arctic-death-spiral-maslowski-ice-free-arctic-watts-goddard-wattsupwiththat/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail  While some may see the reduced ice as opening up economic opportunities, I fear that such an event will increase the natural feedback loops to an uncontrollable amount ,setting off a cascade events with disastrous consequences.  Whatever economic benefit from burning of fossil fuels that we have experienced before the arctic ice disappeared will all melt away to nothing from the costs of the natural disasters that will plague us.

One of the natural feedback loops that will exacerbate our contributions to global warming is melting the permafrost.  In the permafrost are vast reservoirs of the natural gas methane.  Methane is twenty times the greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide is.  As the permafrost melts, the methane evaporates into the atmosphere, accentuating by twenty times the warming trend that our use of fossil fuels is generating.  There is even more methane at the bottom of the ocean stored on the sea bed as blocks of ice. When there is no ice to reflect back the sun, the arctic waters will warm up.  They may warm up even faster because the lack of ice allows the Gulf current to penetrate the arctic ocean.  Warming surface waters and new current paths may send methane up to the surface, further accentuating our warming trend. 

Whatever extreme weather events we have now will only become further compounded.  Hurricanes will occur in regions that have never had hurricanes before, causing increased flooding, mud slides, and property destruction. Tornadoes will be common. Droughts and warmer temperatures will allow for insect populations to explode.  Wetter conditions will increase fungus attacks. Glaciers will disappear leaving the mountains dry, killing the forests and making them ripe for further destruction from forest fires.   And the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica will melt and flow into the ocean causing the sea level to rise.  These things are difficult to adjust to on a slow scale.  They will be catastrophic in short time frames.

The ice on Greenland and Antarctica are already melting faster than scientists predicted ten years ago. http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_level.html  And current projections are that sea levels will rise between 0.22 to 0.44 meters above 1990 levels by the period 2090-2099 (IPCC 2007).  But as methane enters the atmosphere in increasing quantities, the average temperature of the earth will rise faster changing from a linear increase due to increasing fossil fuel consumption to an exponential or logarithmic increase due to the combination of carbon and methane entering the atmosphere.  Scientists do not yet know the rate at which methane will be entering the atmosphere or how it will affect their climate change models. http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/global-warming-methane-and-the-melting-of-permafrost-see-here-methane-being-released-from-permafrost-by-dr-katey-walter/

The rate at which the glaciers melt on Antarctica and Greenland depend on the overall temperature as well as the quantity and kind of precipitation that occurs on those land masses.  Currently central Greenland has been experiencing increased snow, but as ocean temperatures continue to rise, it may be that instead of snow, Greenland will experience rain.  If/when hurricanes track further north, Greenland may experience a lot of rain in a short period of time.  Rain melts snow quickly.  Rain creates gullies and mud slides, eroding mountain passes and carving canyons through which massive volumes of water, snow and ice can pass.

Greenland has about two miles of ice in a central valley surrounded by mountains with a few channels that allow the glaciers to move to the ocean.  The National Geographic did a very nice article recently on how this ice is melting.  Dark dust is accumulating on the surface and is causing the ice to melt faster than normal because the dark dust radiates more heat, rather than reflects the light like white snow does. The melt water creates vast lakes on the surface that eventually disappear down into the interior, but the scientists have not been able to track where all the water goes. Because of the geography of Greenland being a basin and the fact that ice is less dense than water, I suspect that most of the water is pooling in the interior raising up the height of the glacial ice mass much like a pitcher of water raises the ice cubes to the top.

My fear is that in a very short period of time the ocean levels could change in feet.  Melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise,  or about twenty feet. a b "Some physical characteristics of ice on Earth". Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/412.htm#tab113.    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/earth-environment/article6875260.ece Greenland has very few trees, and none near where the glaciers are emptying into the ocean.  If it had trees, the roots would hold in the dirt when the ground becomes saturated with water.  But without trees rain, the weight of the ice, and the flow of the water, will quickly erode deep gullies.  These deep gullies will allow the lake in the interior of Greenland to drain to the ocean rapidly, taking whatever remaining ice that floats on top.  Events like this have happened before in geological history.  The flooding of the Black Sea is one example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory  The draining of lake Missoula in northwest Montana is another. http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/ColumbiaPlateau/description_columbia_plateau.html http://www.glaciallakemissoula.org/

Glacial Lake Missoula drained the “glacial-outburst waters that crossed the Channeled Scablands during the Spokane floods (Missoula Floods) were channeled through Wallula Gap. For several weeks, as much as 200 cubic miles of water per day were delivered to a gap that could discharge less than 40 cubic miles per day. Ponded water filled the Pasco Basin and the Yakima and Touchet valleys to form temporary Lake Lewis”. http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/ColumbiaPlateau/description_columbia_plateau.html  Greenland has a volume of 630,000 cubic miles, if it all drained at the rate of 200 cubic miles like Lake Missoula then in about eight years the oceans would rise about twenty feet.  How fast Greenland drains depends upon how wide and how many channels the water has in which to travel.  It is possible that Greenland could drain more quickly given that it has a wider area and many fjords.

The volume of water contained on Antarctica is more than double that of Greenland. And it is unclear how fast Antarctica will melt, but according to wikipedia, ”there has been a 75% increase in Antarctic ice mass loss in the ten years 1996-2006, with glacier acceleration a primary cause[11].”  “Large parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) sit on a bed which is below sea level and slopes downward inland.[4] This slope, and the low isostatic head, mean that the ice sheet is theoretically unstable: a small retreat [in the ice shelves] could in theory destabilize the entire WAIS leading to rapid disintegration. Current computer models do not include the physics necessary to simulate this process, and observations do not provide guidance, so predictions as to its rate of retreat remain uncertain. This has been known for decades.”

Even though scientists are unable to predict how quickly the ice might flow into the ocean, we are getting some ideas.  The more the ice melts the faster the glaciers move, not in an even creeping manner, but a slide and stick manner causing earthquakes or glacialquakes that can reach an order of magnitude seven. http://www.livescience.com/environment/080606-glacial-earthquakes.html  “Two bursts of seismic waves are released every day, each one equivalent to a magnitude 7 earthquake, and are seemingly related to the tidal action of the Ross Sea. During each event a 96 by 193 kilometer (60 by 120 mile) region of the glacier moves as much as .67 meters (2.2 feet) over about 25 minutes, remains still for 12 hours, then moves another half-meter.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_earthquake  When the ice shelf in the Ross Sea melts the glacier will be able to move more quickly into the ocean and not necessarily be paused for twelve hours by the tides.  The melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise.[11] The collapse of the grounded interior reservoir of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level by 5–6 m.[12]
11 ^ a b "Some physical characteristics of ice on Earth". Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/412.htm#tab113. 
12 ^ Geologic Contral on Fast Ice Flow - West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Right now, the weight of the ice has depressed the Greenland landmass as well as parts of Antarctica into the ocean.  But as that ice and water leave, Greenland and Antarctica will rise up out of the ocean displacing more water.  The water they shed will depress the land masses which have become flooded. These shifting land mass will set off a series of earthquakes, even possibly a few volcanoes as the continents move to a new equilibrium. Areas not prone to earthquakes will be shaken, and since much of the construction in those areas is not designed to withstand earthquakes many people will die like we saw in Haiti.  The earthquakes will also cause tsunamis and break communication cables.  Many of the people on the new coasts will not have experience with tsunamis leading to further loss of life.  Breaking communication cables will challenge our economic system since we depend so much on information flowing around the world quickly and easily.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:SeaLevel has a map of the areas that will be affected by rising sea levels.  If the oceans only rose one meter 145 million people will be directly affected.  If it raises seven meters a quarter of the world's population will be affected.  People will lose their homes, their businesses, and their farms.  One meter rise will inundate 2,223,000 km2 with over 800,000 km2 in Asia alone. In 2007 US$ there will be property loss of close to a trillion dollars.   http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/population-area-and-economy-affected-by-a-1-m-sea-level-rise-global-and-regional-estimates-based-on-
 
Displaced people, with nothing to do, nothing to eat, and nothing left to lose makes for a political nightmare.  Where will all these people go?  How will they get new jobs? According to a 2006 census there are already 33 million people that are refugees or displaced for some reason or another. We are not being able to handle the refugees we have, what will we do when the number of displaced persons quintuples or more?

What will these people eat?  According to the UN there are already a billion people who are starving or suffering malnutrition. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14032  Our agricultural lands are already stretched to their limits; our aquifers are becoming depleted and poisoned; we are loosing tonnes and tonnes of soil through erosion; our artificial fertilizers are destroying the fertility of the soil and washing into our streams, rivers, and oceans where it destroys the aquatic life for miles and miles; the herbicides and pesticides are creating super resistant strains of plants and insects while poisoning those who eat the crops. Genetically modified crops do not mitigate any of the issues that are destroying our environment, they only secure profits for those who design them. And lots of land we used to farm will be inundated with sea water.  With the extreme weather conditions that global warming brings, crops will fail for lack of water or too much water.  Crops will fail because of freezing at critical times, or crushed by hail, or damaged by wind.  We will have trouble feeding those people who could afford food, not to mention all those who have lost everything and have no jobs.

Will we in America be generous with those who have lost so much, or will we be frightened that we might lose our security and grasp to maintain the status quo?  Will we continue to be in denial of our contribution to the problem, or will we embrace change? Will we exercise self discipline with our finances, food, and freedom so that the problems of global warming will diminish, or will continue to strive to be king of the mountain even if means destroying the planet in the process? And if we don't willingly change, how long will the rest of the world tolerate such behavior?  How long will starving people stay passive while people in the United States die from obesity related problems? How long will  persons displaced by hurricanes, drought, or rising sea levels put up with the average North American generating 20 tons of CO2  per year, when the the global average carbon footprint is only about 4 tons of CO2 per year? http://www.eoearth.org/article/Carbon_footprint

 America is the only country in the world not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Everywhere I turn I find people in active state of denial about global warming.  If someone recognizes there is a warming problem, they attribute it to natural causes.  If they recognize that we might be contributing to the problem, they feel there is nothing that can be done, or that it is someone else's job to change, or that it is too expensive to change.  I hear many people claim to value life here in America, but few are willing to give up their convenience, time, or money for the life of the planet, for the poor who will suffer the consequences of greenhouse gases we have emitted. We have a choice now to change to postpone or advert the disaster global warming is bringing.  We may not be able to advert the disaster too much longer.