I have finally come to the conclusion without a shadow of a doubt that humanity is irredeemable. People are repulsed by my belief that our fate of extinction has been sealed. I no longer even use the caveat of “with business as usual” because business as usual always persists, no matter how dire the empirical evidence of global environmental collapse. No amount of anoxic dead zones, extinguished species, or toxic groundwater will curtail business as usual. In fact, humans spin off new business ventures like fish farming, animal cloning, and water purification in lieu of changing the status quo. A recent headline proves my point:
It’s not just bad news for the polar bear,” said Gail Whiteman, a researcher at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and a co-author on the paper, published in Nature. “It’s a global economic time bomb.
The obliteration of the Arctic is just another milepost in mankind’s headlong race down the one-way road to oblivion. Notice that the above quote implies the economy is the primary yardstick for measuring human well-being. Everything is modeled into Dollar$ and Cents and nothing holds any intrinsic value except what humans, particularly those at the top of the exploitation pyramid, can extract from it. Don’t you think the economy should be re-examined for its supposed function as a “wealth-building” system if it’s killing the planet as well as the human species. But no, this sort of introspection will never take place; instead capitalist industrial civilization will roll onward crushing and pulverizing everything in its path until it runs out of energy and crosses a critical threshold without notice.
…Still, the situation is not hopeless, the authors said. Abating global warming buys time for intensive geo-engineering research into strategies for dealing with methane release, noted Dr. Wadhams…
Of course geo-engineering is the expected response when your economic system of eternal growth and expansion hits a little snag like planetary tipping points. In today’s disposable society, humans build and price things to be thrownaway when they break; but since spare planets are hard to come by, out comes the box of amazing techno-gadgetry fixes to save the day. We’ve already terraformed and geo-engineered the Earth into a planet which looks to be transforming itself into a place inhospitable for most lifeforms. And we think we can unravel this Gordian knot? Are they going to geo-engineer a solution for the accompanying problem of ocean acidification as well? These sorts of schemes are always billed as “buying us time”, but buying time is simply a euphemism for delaying the executioner. Christ, humans really are eternal optimists! I think that a future headline from some alien race would be the following (just replace Mars with Earth):
Yeah, that catastrophic event would not be an asteroid, but abipedal organism called Homo economicus. So what are the options for humans domesticated into the life of industrial civilization? According to famed climate scientist James Hansen, we’re between a nuke and a hard place. He says nuclear energy is the best way to go to “preserve our lifestyles” while reducing carbon, and he gives his view on people who think “renewable” energy can fill the hole of our fossil-fueled civilization:
Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewable will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
So people like blogger Robert Scribbler can go pound sand when they accuse me of propagandizing for the fossil fuel industry. I’m just being realistic. People misinterpret my worldview as overly pessimistic, but Big-Busine$$ interests control the corrupt political machine, the jaded masses, and the corporate media shills; therefore, no solution can come from something so rotten. I’d love to be proven wrong. I’d love for nothing more than to wake up from what seems like a nightmare, but it looks like the fat lady is already starting to sing:
I’m reminded of the recent farewell note by environmentalist Michael McCarthy who saw the endgame:
…People are doing this(ecocide). Let’s be clear about it. It’s not some natural phenomenon, like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. It’s the actions of Homo sapiens. What we are witnessing is a fundamental clash between the species, and the planet on which he lives, which is going to worsen steadily, and the more closely you observe it – or at least, the more closely I have observed it, over the past 15 years – the more I have thought that there is something fundamentally wrong with Homo sapiens himself. Man seems to be Earth’s problem child. We humans have always thought ourselves different in kind from other creatures, principally for our use of language and our possession of consciousness, but there is another reason for our uniqueness, which is becoming ever clearer: we are the only species capable of destroying our own home. And it looks like we will…
Before I get into a particular discussion on the new business opportunities afforded by a rapidly melting Arctic, I need to preface it with a short explanation and history of who wrote the article in question and what this group’s agenda is. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was established after the First World War to formulate and plan the imperial ambitions of the U.S. as the world’s new superpower. The CFR is composed of top officials in the banking, manufacturing, commerce, and finance industries, as well as lawyers, university bureaucrats, and public figures from the media networks. CFR meetings are often held in secret. The primary funders of the CFR have been The Ford Foundation, the federal government, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation. There exists a revolving door between positions held in the CFR and those in the government. The CFR represents the U.S. financial oligarchy and the wealthy elite of America. Lawrence H. Shoup wrote a seminal book on the CFR entitled ‘Imperial Brain Trust – Council on Foreign Relations’. I have a link to it under “Notes and Documents’ on the left side of this website. A quote from page 278 of that book best summarizes what the CFR is truly about:
A recent article by Shoup puts some familiar faces to the CFR with Democratic Party politician Dianne Feinstein and her husband finance capitalist Richard C. Blum, both members of the Council. In the following selection from that article, you can see how environmental protection is subverted for the financial interests of the power elite:
So now we go to the ecological catastrophe unfolding in the Arctic which the CFR and the ruling class see as simply another doorway through which capital accumulation can be carried out via environmental exploitation. The title of the CFR’s article is ‘The Coming Arctic Boom‘ published in the July/August 2013 edition of their journal ‘Foreign Affairs’.
In this deranged essay, the CFR gushes over the busine$$ opportunitie$ afforded by such a once-in-a-lifetime event as the melting of the Arctic:
[My comments are highlighted red and in brackets]
Yeah that’s who forms foreign policy for this country. The Mack Truck of climate chaos is barreling full speed ahead with mankind straight in its path, but all Homo Stupidicus can see are dollar signs.
Techno-Narcissism Looking at the just-completed 5.5 million square foot mega-building in Chengdu China, one could hold the mistaken belief that there is no ever-worsening ecological crisis of Earth or that mankind’s dominion over nature, built on a once stable and predictable weather regime, is not in serious jeopardy. The report that just came out a few days ago describing America’s energy infrastructure as “a sitting duck in the face of climate change” can be applied to all of the world’s infrastructure as well. So why is humanity continuing to build ugly monstrosities that will be ripped apart by torrential flooding, epic hurricanes, and other continent-sized storms as described by James Hansen in his book “Storms of My Grandchildren”? Because it’s all about growth, and capitalist carbon man is propping up his “growth” with the Viagra drug of QE money printing and accounting fraud, but Mother Nature ain’t amused and will bobbitize man’s conceit in short order. Industrial civilization’s relentless construction of such projects under the pall of climate chaos is the height of foolishness. We seem to be saying, “Why worry about deadly air pollution, runaway climate change in the Arctic, and a dangerously deformed, agriculture-destroying Jet Stream when you can create an artificial ecosystem complete with its own “sun” and a man-made beach free from algae bloom pollution?”:
…But most impressive of all is the artificial sun. Being an industrial hub, Chendu is known for its rather serious smog problem, with air qualities ranking in the mid to high 100s (unhealthy for people with allergies or respiratory problems). Hence the reason for the 24 hour, 150-meter-long LED screen that serves as a stand-in for the horizon. While inside, people do not have to worry about grey skies preventing them from getting a little warmth and a possible tan.
With this last aspect, China may now lead the world in terms of creating buildings that are more akin to self-contained ecosystems than anything else. In addition to this being a major building milestone, this structure may represent the way of the future for a nation that’s running out of healthy spaces to put its people. It’s no secret that China, with roughly 1,354,040,000 people as of 2013, is severely overpopulated, but even more problematic is the fact that urban population densities and air and water pollution continue to grow apace, leading to hundreds of thousands of respiratory and pollution-related deaths a year.
As more people move to the city, air and water quality becomes more problematic, and more living space needs to be created, the only solution may be to build structures that contain all the facilities needed to make life complete. This would include sun, surf, air circulation and vacation spots – everything that makes indoor living feel like an outdoor experience.
The idea of building such self-contained super structures to house an overpopulated planet from the natural world we are fast destroying is a psychosis of epic proportions. It illustrates the extreme level of detachment industrial civilization has reached in relation to its dependence on a healthy and irreplaceable environment. With the exception of space colonies, insanity and hubris are rarely illustrated on such a grand scale. As a last-ditch effort to survive climate chaos, perhaps hermetically sealed ‘space’ colonies, complete with wall-to-wall and overhead display screens simulating what the ‘outside’ used to look like when we could actually go outside, are what we will soon be building right here on a wrecked planet.
Another behemoth construction plan that caught my eye is this one:
Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 76 miles (123km) long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s two longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through two fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century…
…Provincial leaders of Shandong and Liaoning hope the tunnel will stimulate economic growth by connecting China’s northern rustbelt region with the upper reaches of the wealthy eastern coast. A member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering projected annual revenue of $3.7 billion, largely from freight, meaning the project would potentially pay for itself in 12 years. And if that’s not rationale enough, there’s bonus of claiming another world record (the government seems to have a fondness for superlative infrastructure)…
…But depth and length are only part of the challenge—the Bohai Tunnel also will need to plan around two major fault zones…
…Throughout modern Chinese history, the Tanlu and Zhangjiakou Penglai fault zones have been the source of chronic seismic activity. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed between 250,000 and 650,000 people, is the most notorious, though as you can see in the map above, there have been others. Perhaps the most concerning historical earthquake for the tunnel engineers to consider is the 7.4-magnitude quake of 1969 that occurred under the bay itself.
What exactly is there to do about it? Li Sangzhong, a maritime geology professor at Ocean University of China, told Caixin that the solution was simply to reinforce the strength of the tunnels walls so that it could “withstand at least a magnitude eight earthquake.
Yes growth at any cost and through any tectonic fault line, especially if you can rack up a world record or two, is the undying belief of homo economicus. “Mine is bigger than yours” is the game being played by a species living high on the fumes of fossil fuels and lust of money… madness to the Nth degree. But of course this isn’t madness in the context of an organism simply exploiting an energy source to its full potential under the social cues of capitalism, now is it?
The Reality of Eco-Apocalypse
Despite AMEG’s(Arctic Emergency Methane Group) techno-narcissist support of geoengineering our way out of this environmental crisis, they are one of the more clear-minded groups of scientists when it comes to the severity of our civilization-ending predicament. Here are excerpts from a presentation given by AMEG at the “Davos Atmosphere and Cryosphere Assembly DACA13”, July 12, 2013:
We’re in the midst of a global extinction event and facing mass starvation, yet the world is building even more colossal monoliths to the failing God of global industrial capitalism. The superorganism of capitalist industrial civilization is suicidally barreling down a one-way road which cannot be diverted by the likes of passionate, yet small-numbered groups of activists and conscientious whistleblowers. This thing has a mind of its own and won’t go down for good until the annihilation of eco-apocalypse reshapes its megacities into moth-eaten hulks of concrete and steel.
The gasping beast fell down with a thunderous boom, and all was still and quiet over the war-ravaged Earth. The vanity of man laid claim to the land no longer.
I’ve heard that 70% of American workers are “disengaged” or “checked out” at their job; in other words, they hate their work. This statistic is as good as any in illustrating the moribund nature of life in 21st century industrial civilization. No wonder zombie movies are so popular these days. In America’s 9 to 5, cog-in-the-corporate-wheel life, a majority of the population feels like the living dead, thoughtlessly going through the motions of slave-wage work in order to race home and crash in front of the boob tube with a microwaved dinner. Not much energy left in the day to do anything but drift to sleep while flipping through endless channels of Hollywood sitcoms, infomercials, and consumer-friendly corporate news. For the vast majority, the best hours of one’s life are spent performing this lifeless routine day in and day out. The banal and deadening existence of industrial civilization appears to be wearing on the masses, and a vague awareness of its unraveling seems to be understood on at least a subliminal level — another 100 species drops off the face of the Earth today, ice sheets and glaciers disappear at a rapid clip, weather patterns become erratic and unstable, street protests erupt in various countries, talk of pulling the plug on the money presses roils “the market”, etc.
Amongst the human chatter, some people rationalize such unusual events as acts of God, others as an illuminati conspiracy, while many believe it’s just the natural variability of the world and nothing to worry about. Forming a consensus on anything, let alone climate change, from such a divergent array of thinking in a global population of billions with different languages, governments, and cultures would be a feat of biblical proportions indeed. The hope of any significant portion of the population unplugging from industrial civilization and its carnival-like atmosphere can safely be called a pipe dream. Empire and the allure of industrial civilization entraps nearly all who enter.
Like puppets on a marionette string, the legions of indoctrinated consumers pursue the latest material object to fill a void left by everything industrial civilization destroyed. Those who step foot on this out-of-control treadmill find themselves on a trip to oblivion in which, quite literally, everything will be forgotten, as in ‘NTE’. Although jumping off this treadmill certainly has its benefits, in the bigger picture everyone gets carried over the cliff by the catatonic actions of the majority. There’s no escaping what has been called the greatest “bioevent” in geological history, from which a distinct record of our rampage through the fossil fuel carbon deposits will follow us into the Earth’s strata.
Talk of hardening communities to the effects of a destabilized and fast deteriorating climate will make the phrase “quality of life” a cynical joke; therefore, a redefining of “the good life” is essential in a future of climate chaos. The new definition certainly won’t include vacations in Miami, unless you plan on scuba diving. And the standard American dinner of meat and potatoes will likely change to simply having a stomach temporarily free from hunger pains after dining on insects, roasted rodent, and foraged weeds. And as far as a lifetime of gainful employment, everyone will be self-employed in the field of survivalism, i.e. “every man for himself.” Climbing up the “rungs of progress” will go into reverse, becoming a regress into medievalism. Of course remnants of Techno-fundamentalism will still exist, but they’ll mainly be confined to the realm of the world’s only remaining type of government – totalitarian technocracies.
There are quite a few who believe that we can hang on to some semblance of today’s global planet-killing civilization, but with so many vectors of collapse converging upon us we’ll be lucky if humans themselves survive in any significant number greater than zero. Throughout history, Empires have grown by stealing resources and energy from others. Ours is no different except that now the criminal elite have colonized the entire world under the guise of the “free market.” The school of neoclassical economics assumes unending supplies of cheap energy and resources for continued growth while ignoring waste and pollution, externalizing those costs upon the environmental commons. Money printing hasn’t solved or circumvented this false belief. It has only created phantom wealth in stock markets and asset bubbles. Today’s professional psychopaths in suits are no different than those in the past who took millions of lives with them to the grave, but this time it’s a mass extermination on a global scale — 7 billion people and counting, along with all other living things.
The Arctic is melting, but it’s just an invitation to exploit it as the next hydrocarbon frontier. It’s a golden busine$$ opportunity with new shipping lanes, untapped oil/gas reserves, minerals, and fish. Hell, it’s even got potential as another tourist trap.
Drill it, frack it, dig it up, pump it out and burn it!
Gotta keep our six lane highways humming, our three-story malls and big-box stores bustling, our jumbo jets flying, and our semi trucks hauling.
Drill it, frack it, dig it up, pump it out and burn it!
Our food supply is failing from floods, droughts, and heat waves, but it’s the perfect open door for Mon$anto’s GMOs. A DNA tweak here and a genetic alteration there to our fossil fuel-dependent monoculture crops is all that is needed to withstand this strange new weather.
Drill it, frack it, dig it up, pump it out and burn it!
The forests are dying, biodiversity is disappearing, the oceans are acidifying and plasticizing, the fresh water aquifers are drying up, and the skies are simmering, but the show must go on, for the corporations know no other way. Business-as-usual must continue, even if it kills us.
Drill it, frack it, dig it up, pump it out and burn it!
The history of large-scale industrialization, whether capitalist or communist, has been marked by the mindset of ‘develop-first and clean-up later’ if at all. The costs of oil spills, nuclear meltdowns, dead zones, industrial GHG pollution, chemical contamination and countless other adverse effects of man’s activities are paid for collectively by the human race as well as every other living thing on the planet. The totality of all these environmental assaults has reached such a high degree that it has set into motion an escalating disruption and alteration of the Earth’s weather and seasonal patterns. Last year was a record for CO2 emissions; methane spikes have been recorded in the ongoing runaway climate change of the Arctic; and we now know that both poles are primarily melting from below by the warming oceans. What has been the response of this planet’s human inhabitants? …to sprint headlong toward the climate cliff. This kind of reaction to the unfolding eco-apocalypse can hardly be the sign of a wise being, but rather that of a fossil-fuel addict who cannot stop using, even in the face of death, i.e. near term extinction (NTE). Wisdom requires a broad and deep understanding of reality as well as acknowledgment of one’s limitations and humbleness of one’s capabilities. Industrial man exhibits neither of these traits, but instead thinks of himself as somehow outside the web of life and a Master over nature.
Radical change is unequivocally needed, and the alternative of business-as-usual, which we appear hellbent on following, is assuredly catastrophic and final. “But we have technology!”, they say. Technology cannot substitute for a stable climate or for the myriad of ecosystem services the Earth provides free of charge to the human economy. Sorry, but none of the geoengineering schemes proposed by man will bring back the melting glaciers and ice sheets nor stop the methane time bomb we have unwittingly released. We are talking about geologic processes which have been unleashed, far beyond the capability of humans to stop or control at this late stage. We’re sort of like ticks on a rampaging elephant. Nevertheless humans will try to sequester the carbon, sprinkle the atmosphere with reflective nanoparticles or aerosols, seed the ocean with iron, or any other of a number of schemes, but to no avail. I suppose the following 1990 statement by the U.N. Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases should have been taken more seriously:
Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.
In light of the sudden cancellation of the Halocene’s stable climate regime, I would say that the statement, “The American Way of Life is not negotiable!“, first uttered by George Bush Senior at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, is not only negotiable, but will soon be null and void. Yes the lifestyle of industrial civilization marked by mountains of disposable plastic bottles and wrappers, cheap crap shipped from Asia, and hours-long commutes from suburbia to corporate enslavement centers will inevitably fail as will all things propped up by hydrocarbon energy. What we took for convenience and progress was actually killing us, both physically and spiritually. The trappings of industrial civilization snuffed out the last connections we had with the real world so that people now think food comes from grocery stores, water comes from faucets, and climate control comes from a thermostat. As disconnected as we are, most never saw Mother Nature slowly pulling the plug on what Joe Bageant called “the theater state’s 400 million screens” of the “American Hologram.” Being released from the 24/7 American hologram would actually come as a welcome relief for most if not for the fact that the real world which they had been disassociated from for so long was rapidly deteriorating. In tandem with the collapse of the biosphere is America’s not so surreptitious slide into overt totalitarianism. You must have already figured out that a few well-heeled individuals are going to try to protect their opulent lifestyle as the rest of humanity turns to a diet of insects and rodents. Somebody’s got to pay the price for all those externalized costs and it’s going to be the unwashed masses – the climax of socialized losses and privatized gains.
And what about the children, if by some miracle a few do survive the ravages of climate chaos? Well, we can only hope that in the aftermath of their ancestor’s sociopathic behavior and lack of conscience, they will forgive us. Bequeathing a destroyed planet to one’s descendants most certainly earns such a person a seat in the innermost circle of Hell. But quite literally, Hell is what we are creating right here on Earth.
I have yet to meet Guy McPherson, but with a blog entitled “Collapse of Industrial Civilization”, it appears inevitable. Who else on Earth has such an unvarnished view of the horror show modern man is orchestrating? Truth delivered up with no hidden agendas is a very bitter and difficult pill to swallow, but being a true radical means getting at the root of the problem irrespective of “ideological and/or theological prejudice“, or as Guy says…
For those wanting to keep abreast of the deteriorating habitability of the planet, Guy posts periodic updates to the unfolding climate chaos here.
There exists no high quality recording of Guy’s speech at the most recent “Age of Limits” conference that I know of. In order to review his talk I watched this clip and studied his powerpoint slides which he sent me and which are posted here.
I’m certain that many who attend Guy’s speeches don’t internalize all the information he sets forth, fore if they did, their language would lose all the culturally ingrained phrases of hope for any kind of eleventh hour rescue by our technology-worshipping society. If there were a fix, don’t you think we would have implemented it by now before setting off a list of unstoppable positive feedback loops, known and unknown? Hell, even the much-trumpeted cleanliness of natural gas has turned out to be a farce. A recent study shows methane release from natural gas production is much higher than was known.
We seem to be leaking greenhouse gases from every orifice. Yes Moore’s law and the illusion of infinite progress have brainwashed everyone into believing mankind is immortal, forever in control of primal earth forces. In 2000, Chris Bright of the Worldwatch Institute introduced the term “nemesis effect” which refers to the cumulative effect of multiple stressors and conditions that lead to unanticipated consequences. Taken as a whole, the information in Guy’s speech equates to a global nemesis effect which is taking the planetary biosphere past the threshold of human habitability.
After stating the “benefits to the biosphere” from the collapse of industrial civilization, he presented a brief history of climate science’s implication of man as the primary culprit of climate change:
Benefits to the Biosphere from the Collapse of Industrial Civilization
– will slow down climate chaos, but too late to stop it.
– will terminate human population overshoot which is proceeding currently at the rate of 217,000 per day (births minus deaths every single day).
– will slow or stop the 6th Great Extinction proceeding at a pace of roughly 217 species per day (conservative estimate).
– will terminate environmental decay such as the soil we wash away into the oceans, the air we foul, the water we pollute, and all the other consequences of industrial civilization.
Brief History of Climate Change Science and the Pinpointing of Human-Induced Climate Change
In 1847, George Perkins Marsh is credited with being the first person to have implicated human activity as the source of climate change.
In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, considered the father of climate change science, predicted a 1 degree Celsius rise by the year 2,000. Few quote him today because he thought that a slight warming of the atmosphere would be a good thing for human agriculture. In the end, no such benefits will result from human-induced climate change due to the extreme weather swings and our oil-dependent agricultural system…
Last year, James Hansen (et al), pointed out that extreme weather events of all kinds (hot, cold, wet and dry) are becoming more frequent. In fact, their statistical analysis of historical data (as opposed to computer modelling of future events) demonstrated that extreme events (i.e. more than 3 standard deviation above or below average) are now ten times more likely than they used to be…
Our Oil-Dependent Agricultural System Spews CO2
Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil – equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.
Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.
We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.
Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated…
Past Predictions of Mass Extinction and Human Die-Off
Despite the rantings of wingnuts like Alex Jones, free-market ideologues, and conspiracy theorists, the following warning given in 1986 by Robert Watson, who was the director of NASA’s upper atmospheric program at that time, remains prescient…
A dramatic loss of ozone over antarctica proves the “greenhouse effect” is real and presages a gradual warming of the Earth that threatens floods, drought, human misery in a few decades and – if not checked – eventual extinction of the human species, scientists warned Tuesday…
Recent Findings of Hansen and the NASA scientists…
James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned Wednesday that human-made climate change could lead to the deaths of millions of species.
“If we continue with business as usual this century, we will drive to extinction 20 to 50 percent of the species on the planet,” he told Current TV host Eliot Spitzer. “We are pushing the system an order of magnitude faster than any natural changes of climate in the past.”
In a recently published study, Hansen and his team concluded that the drastic increase in record high temperatures in recent years could be directly traced to human-made climate change, particularly the increase in greenhouse gases…
Large-Scale Climate Assessment Projects
Guy then goes into some large-scale climate assessment studies which do not include data for:
(a) Positive Feedbacks (tipping points)
(b) Economic Collapse
Back in 1990, the U.N. Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases warned:
Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.
Our Dying Oceans and Back to the Future with Mass Extinctions
CO2 levels are now at 400ppm which does not account for methane and other greenhouse gases accumulating from human activity. CO2 has never exceeded 280 ppm in the last million years (based on actual readings of atmospheric chemistry from Antarctic ice-core data.) The last time greenhouse gases were at 400 ppm was three million years ago — a time when no humans existed. Humans have managed to radically alter the chemistry of the atmosphere to such a degree as to replicate pre-historic levels when no humans walked the Earth.
Phytoplankton has plummeted in the last century due to ocean warming and acidification:
A 2012 Science study found that the paceof ocean acidification today is ten times faster than during the PETM – the most rapid acidification event in the geologic record. Looking as far back as 300 million years, the study found that at current trends the projected rate of acidification of the world’s oceans will be the worst ever – worse than all the major extinctions of this time span: the end-Cretaceous, the end-Triassic, and even the end-Permian 250 million years ago, when 96% of marine species went extinct.
The current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 million years of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.
Considering the projections of increasing temperatures from the numerous large-scale assessments listed above, we can logically predict that the remaining phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, will suffer catastrophically.
Can CO2 Emissions and Economic Growth Be Decoupled?
Even with the economic meltdown of 2008, carbon emissions only slowed temporarily, quickly rebounding in 2010.
What this implies is that only a complete collapse will prevent runaway climate change. Others seem to agree. A censored 2012 study [original paper here] by University of Utah professor Tim Garrett explains that energy efficiency gains actually accelerate global energy consumption and CO2 emission rates and that only collapse can stop this process:
…Taking [a] global perspective with respect to the economy, the implication is that efficiency gains will do the exact opposite of what most claim it will do. If technological changes allow global energy productivity or energy efficiency to increase, then civilization grows faster into the resources that sustain it. The consequence is that energy consumption and CO2 emissions accelerate.
CO2 emissions can be stabilized despite efficiency gains. But this is possible only if decarbonization occurs as quickly as energy consumption grows. At today’s consumption growth rates, this would require roughly one new nuclear power plant, or equivalent, to be deployed each day. Barring this, since wealth and energy consumption rates are linked, it can only be through an economic collapse that CO2 emissions rates will decline. If the size of civilization enters a long and profound decline then wealth, energy consumption and CO2 emissions will all decrease at roughly the same rate. If the collapse is sufficiently rapid then it may be possible to maintain atmospheric CO2 concentrations below levels that are normally considered dangerous.
Perhaps there is a way out of this admittedly grim sounding double-bind. But Jevons’ Paradox tells us that it will not be by way of increasing energy efficiency. Quite the opposite…
Although it “feels good to conserve energy,” he said, “there shouldn’t be any pretense that it will make a difference.”
These views, both radical and controversial, will be published this week in Climate Change, an online academic journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. Other research journals declined to publish Garrett’s research.
Garrett believes current options to potentially avert climate change — increased energy efficiencies, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, as well as underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning — are “not meaningful.”
“Fundamentally, I believe the system is deterministic,” Garrett said. “Changes in population and standard of living are only a function of the current energy efficiency. That leaves only switching to a non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power source as an available option.” Some economists are critical of his approach, but his solution is targeted to solve economic issues as “physics problems,” looking at civilization as one big problem instead of calculating individual problems based on population growth, increasing energy efficiency and other things.
“I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have,” he said. Garrett treats civilization as a “heat engine” that “consumes energy and does ‘work’ in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,” he said.
Ominous Signs of Disturbing a Fragile Planet
Following in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau’s 1851 observations of flowering plants, Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Boston University, and his then-graduate student, Abe Miller-Rushing, observed the habits of the same species and found drastic changes:
…An analysis of Thoreau’s observations, those of another 19th-century naturalist and their own modern records indicate the first flowering date for 43 of the most common species has moved up by an average of 10 days. What’s more, species that aren’t shifting their flowering times in response to warmer springs are disappearing…
Recently, researchers at Penn State reconfigured the habitability zones for planets and Earth was calculated to be much further to the edge of what is called the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. The Goldilocks Zone is defined as…
…a narrow belt around a star where an orbiting planet would be warm enough to support life, but cool enough that life wouldn’t just go around bursting into flames all the time, a factor that can significantly delay evolutionary development. The term was introduced nearly two decades ago, and hasn’t been substantively updated since then.
Guy said that this suggests “relatively minor changes in the chemistry of the planet will produce significant impacts that might take us out of the habitable zone for humans.”
Back in 2010, researchers calculated the maximum wet-bulb temperatures reached in a high carbon dioxide emissions future climate scenario:
Reasonable worst-case scenarios for global warming could lead to deadly temperatures for humans in coming centuries, according to research findings from Purdue University and the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Researchers for the first time have calculated the highest tolerable “wet-bulb” temperature and found that this temperature could be exceeded for the first time in human history in future climate scenarios if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate…
…”Whole countries would intermittently be subject to severe heat stress requiring large-scale adaptation efforts,” Huber said. “One can imagine that such efforts, for example the wider adoption of air conditioning, would cause the power requirements to soar, and the affordability of such approaches is in question for much of the Third World that would bear the brunt of these impacts. In addition, the livestock on which we rely would still be exposed, and it would make any form of outside work hazardous.”…
…”We found that a warming of 12 degrees Fahrenheit would cause some areas of the world to surpass the wet-bulb temperature limit, and a 21-degree warming would put half of the world’s population in an uninhabitable environment,” Huber said….
Since 1998, global surface air temperatures have flattened despite continued increases in greenhouse gases. Climate change deniers have used this as proof that there is no human-induced climate change happening. Where is all the heat going? Into the deep oceans…
…If extra heat is temporarily stored elsewhere thanks to natural climate variations, we won’t necessarily notice it.
But sooner or later it will inevitably emerge, which means that the current slowdown in warming may well be balanced by a period of rapid warming in a few years — nobody knows how many — from now. Scientists have always said that global warming would proceed in fits and starts, not in a smooth upward trend in temperatures…”
Another factor (global dimming or the aerosol effect from Asian industrialization) causing the dampening of current surface air temperatures in the last 15 years was mentioned in a previous post by David Wasdell:
…The effects of global dimming have been enhanced during this period [Asian Industrialization] by the mixing of more surface heat down to deeper ocean water, by the dominance of La Nina (cooler) conditions in the Pacific, and by a prolonged period of minimal solar radiation. The absence of temperature increase has also blocked all amplification from the temperature-dependent feedback mechanisms…
Unstoppable Feedback Loops
The following list of positive feedbacks are identified by Guy (with one added by me) as irreversible, although the last one appears to be hampered by the increasingly treacherous conditions that the resource extraction corporations are faced with as they try to set up shot in the melting and warming Arctic. I have added links to articles and essays, a few of which are very recent and add new information about these feedback loops (increased CO2 from hidden fires in the Amazon, boreal forest migration, and loss of top predators)
Standing on the Beach of Doom and waiting at the Last Chance Saloon for the waves to come in…Brace for Impact.
Irreversible Positive Feedback
1.) Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)
2.) Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011)
3.) Siberian methane vents have increased in size from less than a meter across in the summer of 2010 to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)
4.) Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the United States in 2010 (Science, February 2011)
Using an innovative satellite technique, NASA scientists have determined that a previously unmapped type of wildfire in the Amazon rainforest is responsible for destroying several times more forest than has been lost through deforestation in recent years…
…In years with the most understory fire activity, such as 2005, 2007 and 2010, the area of forest affected by understory fires was several times greater than the area of deforestation for expansion of agriculture, according to Morton. The study goes further and fingers climate conditions – not deforestation – as the most important factor in determining fire risk in the Amazon at a regional scale…
…The new knowledge about the scope of understory fires could have implications for estimates of carbon emissions from disturbed forests. How experts account for those emissions depends on the fate of the forest – how it is disturbed and how it recovers.
“We don’t yet have a robust estimate of what the net carbon emissions are from understory fires, but widespread damages suggest that they are important source of emissions that we need to consider,” Morton said…
5.) Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Communications, November 2011)
…The planet’s boreal forests won’t expand poleward. Instead, they’ll shift poleward. The difference lies in the prediction that as boreal ecosystems follow the warming climate northward, their southern boundaries will be overtaken by even warmer and drier climates better suited for grassland.
And that’s a key difference. Grassland stores a lot of carbon in its soil, but it accumulates at a much slower rate than is lost from diminishing forests…
6.) Methane is being released from the Antarctic, too — over ten tens more carbon than parts of the Arctic (Nature, August 2012)
7.) Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)
8.) Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, October 2012)
9.) The Beauford Gyre has apparently Reversed Course (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, October 2012)
10.) Exposure to sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon, thus accelerating thawing of the permafrost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2013)
11.) Summer ice melt in Antarctica — highest level in 1,000 years and the most rapid melting has occurred in the last 50 years (Nature Geoscience, April 2013)
I would add one more here…
12.) The Disappearance of Top Predators accelerates CO2 emissions (Nature Geoscience, Feb 2013)
People play a big role in predator decline and our study shows that this has significant, global implications for climate change and greenhouse gases,” says Atwood.
“We knew that predators shaped ecosystems by affecting the abundance of other plants and animals but now we know that their impact extends all the way down to the biogeochemical level.
Reversible Positive Feedback?
13.) Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012
On a higher level, we have a superorganism, our civilization, which has accessed an energy gradient the same way that old growth forests have.
The human population makes up this superorganism’s myriad of cells. The nervous system is made up of the various mediums that transmit information – internet, television, phone, print media, etc… The circulatory system is the transportation system providing paths of production and distribution – roads, bridges, trains, airline and shipping routes, etc… Of course energy, primarily oil and fossil fuels, are the life-blood that fuels this system. If you have ever tried to fight against this Leviathan, you will have its immune system, the law and security apparatus, thrust upon you so that you may be hammered into conformity or isolated and quarantined in a tiny prison cell. Of course there are many malcontent cells within the belly of the beast, but capitalist industrial civilization is fortified with self-perpetuating social structures which ensure its survival.
Take for instance its education system which churns out countless drones who lack the ability to think critically and are filled with fragmented and specialized knowledge which prepares them as cogs for the corporate world. Everything, including one’s relationship with fellow humans, is reduced to a “business relationship” or “investment”. The various institutions of modern society are configured to reinforce capitalist industrial civilization. The media are corporate mouthpieces and echo chambers for the dominant capitalist system – materialism, conspicuous consumption, atomization and alienation of man from nature and from his own humanity, etc… The entertainment industry fosters an acquisitiveness for high consumption lifestyles. It relies on the corporate state to mass market and mass produce these values. The primary metric of social worth in the corporate state is money, and the class which has managed to accumulate vast sums of it are those who have usurped the levers of governance. You have heard of the two-tiered justice system we have in this country which coddles the elite and discards everyone else. Thus the ethos of society flows downward from those who have at their disposal the power to mold and influence society’s perceptions and norms.
Will man go extinct? He certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure it happens:
…the worship of an economic system that reduces everything to a financial object.
…the continued exploitation and burning of an increasingly more expensive and environmentally damaging energy source which is causing the climate to swing out of control with various feedback loops.
…the dismantling and perversion of regulations and the rule of law to satisfy greed and a grossly unjust social hierarchy.
…the indoctrination of the population into a materialist society detached from the appreciation of nature’s fundamental role in our survival.
…the degeneration of public debate into infomercial sound bites by way of mass media manipulation.
…the wholesale destruction of the natural world and the latest attempts of a so-called green economy to monetize every bit of nature in order to save capitalism.
…and the spread of the above described culture through globalization.
If you think about the modern globalized civilization as a super-organism, then you come to realize how futile it is to think that an organism, any organism, would voluntarily starve itself or constrict its own growth. If you plant a tree in a pot, it will eventually become root-bound or send its roots over the lip of the container or straight through the ceramic wall. This is exactly what our capitalist industrial civilization is doing.
It has utilized every resource available to sustain growth, and now speaks of manipulating the weather in order to avoid the threat that climate chaos poses to its vitality. As far as mineral depletion, there has even been plans drawn up to mine asteroids for their deposits. The next frontier is to break the bonds of Earth itself. But we have irreparably cracked the vase that is our home. The Arctic will soon have an annual “window” in September through which the sun’s rays will work their way inside, prying that annual crack ever wider every year. In addition, we have pushed most other species, the building blocks of biodiversity, out of their habitat and onto the one-way path of extinction. The life-giving fluids of our vase have slowly been poisoned and acidified by the waste from our fossil fuel energy slaves. The hydrologic cycle within our little world has been hopelessly fouled with. The superorganism of capitalist industrial civilization is now starving the majority of its cells in order to keep healthy a few of its privileged cells who sit in places of power and Mammon worship. This potted plant or superorganism we call industrial civilization is looking rather pale and shriveled these days. As a matter of fact, it’s like a tree whose bark has been peeled off. It’s still standing at the moment and it does not know it’s dead, but its days are surely numbered.
The hope of environmentalists can no longer be that this corrupt system will run out of energy(Peak Oil), that the money presses will break down, or that it can be changed through capitalist schemes of “greening the economy”. The only thing that would have stopped the destruction would have been to build a new system that holds the health of the natural world as the primary metric through which all human activity is viewed and planned. Suffice it to say that such a system would not have been capitalism. Of course such a sentiment would brand you as an “eco-terrorist”, but the purpose of this essay is not to give hopium, but to describe the entrenched power structure which has laid waste to the environmental movement and our planet. Although small and ineffective, individual acts of moral courage and sacrifice are all that is left as this Beast of industrialized civilization tumbles to the ground, dying from self-inflicted wounds too numerous to count.
Since I was young, I knew I’d find you
But our love was a song sung by a dying swan
And even now you’ll hear me calling
You’ll hear me calling
And in your dreams you’ll see me falling, falling
Breathe in the light
I’ll stay here in the shadows
Waiting for a sign, as the tide grows
Higher, and higher, and higher…
The extinction event which I talked about in ‘Free Markets, Corporate Profits and Mass Extinctions‘ looks by all unbiased scientific accounts to be happening again. Instead of volcanoes inducing climate change, today it is man’s industrial activities, specifically the burning of stored ancient sunlight, that is bringing about the end of the world as we know it. We will soon breach 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 levels:
The ratio of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere is flirting with 400 parts per million, a level last seen about 2.5 million to 5 million years ago, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego….
…The speed at which Earth’s atmosphere has reached that density of carbon dioxide, a known greenhouse gas, has scientists alarmed.
Scientists estimate that average temperatures during the Pliocene rose as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea levels during that 2.8-million-year epoch ranged between 16-131 feet higher than current levels, according to Richard Norris, a Scripps geologist.
“I think it is likely that all these ecosystem changes could recur, even though the time scales for the Pliocene warmth are different than the present,” Norris said. Heating the ocean probably will cause sea level rises and change the Ph balance of the ocean, affecting a wide array of marine life, he said. “Our dumping of heat and CO2 into the ocean is like making investments in a pollution bank,” he said…
Let’s go over and update the major tipping points again(covered earlier here and here) which are currently in play:
Jason Box speaks the language of Manhattans. Not the drink—the measuring unit.
As an expert on Greenland who has traveled 23 times to the massive, mile thick northern ice sheet, Box has shown an uncanny ability to predict major melts and breakoffs of Manhattan-sized ice chunks. A few years back, he foretold the release of a “4x Manhattans” piece of ice from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, one so big that once afloat it was dubbed an “ice island.” In a scientific paper published in February of 2012, Box further predicted “100 % melt area over the ice sheet” within another decade of global warming. As it happened, the ice sheet’s surface almost completely melted just a month later in July—an event that, in Box’s words, “signals the beginning of the end for the ice sheet.”
Box, who will speak at next week’s Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., pulls no punches when it comes to attributing all of this to humans and their fossil fuels. “Those who claim it’s all cycles just don’t understand that humans are driving the cycle right now, and for the foreseeable future,” he says. And the coastal consequences of allowing Greenland to continue its melting—and pour 23 feet’s worth of sea level into the ocean over the coming centuries—are just staggering. “If you’re the mayor of Hamburg, or Shanghai, or Philadelphia, I think it’s in your job description that you think forward a century,” says Box. “They’re completely inundated by the year 2200.”…
3.) Unleashing of Tundra methane clathrates and sub-sea methane deposits from (1) and (2):
Courtesy of the work by Sam Carana, the multitude of reinforcing feedback loops from the loss of the Arctic Ice Sheet are listed below:
Albedo feedback: Accelerated warming in the Arctic speeds up the decline of ice and snow cover, further accelerating albedo change.
Methane feedback: Methane releases in the Arctic further add to the acceleration of warming in the Arctic, further contributing to weaken Arctic methane stores and increasing the danger that methane releases will trigger runaway global warming.
Currents feedback: Sea ice loss can cause vertical sea currents to weaken, reducing the cooling effect they had on the seabed. This can thus further cause sediments to warm up that can contain huge amounts of methane in the form of free gas and hydrates.
Storms feedback: Increased frequency and intensity of storms can cause substantially more vertical mixing of the sea water column, causing more warming of the seabed, thus further contributing to the warming of sediments, as above.
Storms feedback: Accelerated warming in the Arctic can result in more storms, causing mixing of cold Arctic air with warmer air from outside the Arctic. The net result is a warmer Arctic.
Storms feedback: More open waters can result in more storms that can push the ice across the Arctic Ocean, and possibly all the way out of the Arctic Ocean.
Storms feedback: Storms also cause more waves that break up the sea ice. Smaller pieces of ice melt quicker than large pieces. A large flat and solid layer of ice is also less susceptible to wind than many lighter and smaller pieces of ice that will stand out above the water and capture the wind like the sails of yachts.
Storms feedback: Storms cause waters to become more wavy. Calm waters can reflect much sunlight back into space, acting as a mirror, especially when the sun shines under a low angle. Wavy waters, on the other hand, absorb more sunlight.
Fires feedback: More extreme weather comes with heatwaves and storms. Thus, this is in part another storms feedback. The combination of storms and fires can be deadly. Heatwaves can spark fires that, when fueled up by storms, turn into firestorms affecting huge areas and causing huge amounts of emissions. Storms can whip up particles that when deposited on ice, snow or the bare soil, can cause more sunlight to be absorbed.
Open doors feedback: Accelerated warming in the Arctic causes the polar vortex and jet stream to weaken, causing more extreme weather and making it easier for warm air to enter the Arctic.
Two papers released last week in the journal Nature Geoscience provide evidence that warming and melt in West Antarctica are occurring at levels that are highly unusual compared to natural variability.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains about 2.2 million cubic kilometers of ice; enough to raise global sea levels by 3 to 4m. What’s making glaciologists nervous is that the ice rests on bedrock which is below sea level; this makes it vulnerable to attack from below by a warming ocean as well as attack from above by increasing air temperatures.
As some of us were heading off for the Easter holiday weekend, the Brazilian government was quietly releasing deforestation trends showing an increase in deforestation for the first time in five years.
These numbers use the DETER rapid response satellite system, a system that provides estimates of deforestation rates every month. Over the time period documented, August 2012 to February 2013, the rates increased an estimated 26.82% and an area of the Amazon larger than the size of the city of London disappeared.
In absolute numbers, that means 1,695 square kilometers (654 square miles) of forest have disappeared. That equals an area the size of 237,000 soccer fields…
…The increase in deforestation rates can be directly attributed to the Brazilian government’s systematic dismantling of the laws and agencies that protect the Amazon…
…President Dilma Rousseff’s approval of a new Forest Code, a law that provides amnesty for crimes committed after 2008 in the Amazon and reduces large areas of protected land, paved the way for the increase in deforestation. The president also structurally weakened government agencies like IBAMA, the federal environmental enforcement agency, so unfortunately it won’t be a surprise if deforestation continues to rise in the Amazon…
After more than a decade, the mountain pine beetle epidemic that surged through British Columbia appears finally to be in remission. Having devastated the province’s lodgepole pine forests, the insect is running out of food.
But forest managers now see new beetle infestations appearing at the edge of the Boreal Forest, in Alberta, and in the Yukon and Northwest Territories — areas well outside the insect’s historical range. As a warming climate lifts the temperature limitations that once kept the beetle in check, scientists fear it may continue its push across the continent, perhaps as far as the Atlantic Coast…
…Without debating the causes of global climate change the effects of forest dieback can be viewed factually. The earth is warming and droughts are increasing in severity and magnitude. Temperature and drought are major contributing factors to forest dieback, so more trees will be dying in the future. As more carbon is released from dead trees, especially in the Amazon and Boreal Forests, more greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere. Increased levels of greenhouse gasses increase the temperature of the atmosphere. The negative feedback loop is reinforced and the biological adaptations of the species determine its survival. Projections for dieback vary, but the threat of global climate change only stands to increase the rate of dieback. The issue is complex and models are intricate, so scientists have serious work ahead of them.[8]
Scientists do not know the tipping points of climate change and can only estimate the timescales. When a tipping point, the critical threshold, is reached a small change in human activity can have long-term consequences on the environment. Two of the nine tipping points for major climate changes forcast for the next century are directly related to forest diebacks. Scientists are worried that forest dieback in the Amazon[9] rain forest and the Boreal[10] evergreen forest will trigger a tipping point in the next 50 years.[2]… – source
7.) The Sahara and Sahel in Africa
It is difficult to estimate the overall ability to increase food production, but a recent analysis suggests that human consumption may be approaching the limits of the net primary plant production (NPP) — that is, the maximum photosynthetic production that is possible on the planet.
It is “not whether humans will reach the global NPP boundary but when they will do so.” It seems probable that the developed countries will continue their excessively high levels of consumption. The emerging economies are likely to continue to eat more protein and a larger slice of grain production in countries with an appropriate climate for grain production will be diverted to feeding animals, or ethanol to drive automobiles. A child born in the Sahel today could belong to the first generation to come to maturity in the contemporary world where the ability to feed large numbers of ecological refugees may well diminish. It is also possible that the secondary effects of the collision of population growth and climate change could create what scientists call an “asymmetrical uncertainty.” The possible consequences of this asymmetrical uncertainty on political processes and violence could range from a slow worsening of the current situation to extremely serious conflict over resources and threats to security. Biologically, adverse factors can interact in ways that can cause a rapid downward spiral. For example, as noted above, ambient temperatures over 29°C (84°F) lead to a rapid decline in crop yields.
[At least 95% of the food production in the Sahel is based on rain-fed agriculture. The agricultural sector employs, directly or indirectly, more than half of the Sahel’s population…Global warming will mean that in temperate lands, where much of the global crop production occurs, the most productive regions will migrate away from the equator. While the net aggregate change as a result of climate change at a global level may be slow, the regional effects in the Sahel will be more rapid, significant, and adverse.] – source
8.) The El Nino Southern Oscillation(ENSO):
Climate models appear to be unable to accurately predict ENSO changes. Although scientists can predict some large-scale and long-term effects of anthropogenic global warming, there remains a lot of unknowns about specific regional effects.
The problem may lie in the models’ inability to reproduce the cycling between the ENSO’s El Niño and La Niña phases, especially given that many scientists think that La Niña is the major driver of drought in the southwest. The ENSO “behaves much messier in the real world than in climate models”, says Jessica Tierney, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who has investigated the role of the ENSO in East African rainfall variability2. “We’re not sure how it has varied in the past, and we don’t know how it might change in response to climate change. This is really one of the big uncertainties we’re facing.”
In addition to their failure to reproduce El Niño and La Niña, existing models do not fully capture other factors that influence rainfall, such as clouds and vegetation. But Smerdon adds that the atmospheric and oceanic dynamics that inhibit rainfall and favour prolonged drought may be essentially random and so almost unpredictable.
Last week’s findings highlight the broader challenge of predicting how precipitation patterns will change as the global climate warms. Models are often at odds over the very direction of regional changes. For example, different projections prepared for the Colorado Water Conservation Board disagree on whether mean precipitation in the state will increase or decrease by 2050 (ref. 3).
But the uncertainties don’t change the larger picture, scientists say. “Climate models are not perfect, but they do the big things really well,” says Tierney. “We can be pretty confident that the southwest will warm and that water will become scarcer.
…since the 1970s the atmospheric circulation patterns over the Pacific have tended to favor La Nina conditions over El Nino ones. And, they write: “The overall trend towards a stronger, La Niña-like Walker circulation is nearly concurrent with the observed increase in global average temperatures.”
We know from historical data that from these two climatic events – the Medieval Warm Period(the long stable warming period over Europe) and the Little Ice Age(a well-known described historical event) – that the temperature changed, and our big question is, “Does the ocean also respond in this very short time scale?”
And one of the major results and maybe one of the biggest prices is that the ocean and the thermohaline circulation(THC) respond to these thermal drivers within just a decade.
…What we are mostly concerned about is that there is a certain threshold which is then reached, a certain point of no return more or less. So we will have a trend where it’s getting warmer and warmer and warmer, and there will be no return from this warming… and that will change the whole system, the whole flow of the system, and the thermohaline circulation may be changed…
The major threats we see right now to the thermohaline circulation mainly derive from the Arctic region. We see increased melting from the Greenland Ice Sheet. We see a retreat of Arctic See Ice. We see large reorganizations in the Arctic ocean system which accumulate fresh water. All of these things are components which may affect the thermohaline circulation.”
The most important factors affecting changes in the conditions of the thermohaline circulation are:
1.) Global warming itself caused partly by greenhouse gases from human activity.
2.) From AGW, there will be more rainfall in the higher latitudes causing glacial melt.
Density in the water is a key factor for the THC driver mechanisms. Cold surface water temperatures make the water denser and high ocean salinity cause these waters to sink. These are the main engines that run the THC, but now more fresh water is entering the ocean through the melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets.
When this is integrated into the models, a new development of the engines is revealed. In a warmer climate state, the engine of the Labrador Sea seems to simply collapse…
10.) The Indian Summer Monsoon:
…Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Potsdam University in Germany said increasing temperatures and a change in strength of a Pacific Ocean circulation pattern known as the Pacific Walker circulation in spring could cause more frequent and severe changes in monsoon rainfall.
The Walker circulation usually brings areas of high pressure to the western Indian Ocean but in El Nino years this pattern gets shifted eastward, bringing high pressure over India and suppressing the monsoon, they said.
Computer simulations show that with future global warming the Walker circulation is likely to bring more high pressure over India even without an increase in El Nino events.
These failures of the monsoon system suggested by the simulation, defined as a 40 percent to 70 percent reduction in rainfall below normal levels, were unprecedented in the researchers’ observational record, taken from the India Meteorological Department dating back to the 1870s.
“Our study points to the possibility of even more severe changes to monsoon rainfall caused by climatic shifts that may take place later this century and beyond,” lead author Jacob Schewe said. – source
Indeed if humans were able to set aside their anthropocentric view of the world, we would be frantically changing our behavior and rearranging our economic and social activities in order to prevent our own demise. But alas, if things aren’t right between one’s ears, then everything else is moot.
(Edit on 3-9-2015: The following video has been made “private”, but it can be viewed in its entirety here.)
This week, a number of top scientists, experts, DoD and Homeland Security Department notables are convening an emergency meeting warning White House officials that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free during summertime within two years.
This A-Team (A for Arctic) includes NASA’s chief scientist Gale Allen, National Science Foundation Director Cora Marett, Director of the Oceans Institute of the University of Western Australia marine scientist Prof Carlos Duarte, and nine other top Arctic specialists together with key representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.
The Washington meeting is the second major climate emergency meeting of its kind to occur within the past month. Just a few weeks ago, the UK held its own climate meeting in response to severe and unprecedented weather occurring throughout Europe this winter and spring.
Scientists and specialists descending on the White House are now echoing increasingly urgent warnings coming from Arctic…
Paul F. Getty brought to my attention a new essay written by environmentalist Daniel A. Drumright. I featured his writing in a prior post entitled ‘The Day The Whole World Went Away‘. This new one, entitled ‘The irreconcilable acceptance of near-term extinction‘, was a bit long-winded for me, so I have whittled it down to the meat and potatoes and corrected a few typos. It’s worth your time to read it. I cannot find any fault with the machinations of capitalism he describes and his general outline of how things will fall apart, but of course the timing is always up to debate. However, seeing that the disintegration of the Arctic is happening faster than any scientific models had predicted, global famine may come much sooner than most know.
In conjunction with this essay, I would also point you to a recent post by Robert Scribbler – ‘For Central US, Climate Change and a Mangled Jet Stream Means Drought Follows Flood Follows Drought‘ – which should help bring everyone up to speed with some ominous trends in the climate of Earth. Humans are continuing to pump so much CO2 into the atmosphere in such a very short time span, geologically speaking, that a considerable lag time has built up, in terms of human time scales, for the final catastrophic effects to play out over the coming decades and centuries.
As far as how one should live their life from here on out, Daniel says “ethical hedonism” is the choice he has made in the face of NTE[Near Term Extinction]. As for myself, a lot of people are dependant on me, so I cannot take that route.
For anyone else reading this, how will you live henceforth, knowing the end is near?
