Get Your Popcorn Here. "The biggest story of all time"

[Junkdrawer]

Last edited Thu Sep 6, 2012, 07:32 PM - Edit history (1)

What is happening in the Arctic is what Peter Wadhams, myself and others in AMEG have been dreading – that our deductions from the physics of the Arctic sea ice situation have come true. We also understand some of the dreadful repercussions from a sea ice collapse, which nobody has wanted to believe. But it is also like a cloud lifted, because now we can tell the world that we’ve been right all along. The sea ice extent was bound to start collapsing within the next year or two, because the thickness was decreasing steadily. Now it’s happened. Now people will have to face up to the repercussions. Now people can realise that our only choice, if we want to avoid decent into a hellish nightmare, is to geo-engineer like mad – use all the measures and techniques at our disposal that we can deploy immediately or at least before next summer’s melt, in the hope of trying to prevent further collapse.

We have left action awfully late. The first sea ice collapse in 2007 should have prepared us for further collapse in the following years. The physics is elementary. It was not put in the climate models, which have continued to forecast that the sea ice would last for decades. The Hadley Centre models were predicting end century demise. This is what is cemented into IPCC AR4 on which all climate negotiations are based. These models have now proved rubbish. Yet it was the chief scientist at the Met Office, Prof Julia Slingo, ultimately responsible for the Hadley models, who rubbished the PIOMAS data on sea ice volume, saying that her models would prove Wadhams and AMEG wrong. This is on public record, because she gave this as evidence to the Environment Audit Committee hearing on “Protecting the Arctic”.

But far more serious than the denial of physics and the laws of nature was the denial of the precautionary principle – if our concerns about sea ice loss and repercussions (particularly a methane excursion) had even a small probability of proving correct, it would have been sensible to prepare for the worst by developing the geoengineering techniques that could provide enough cooling power to avoid a sea ice collapse. The cost would have been minimal in relation to the cost of trying to deal with repercussions – which some of us fear could be the end of civilisation. But nothing happened, so no geoengineering has been prepared.

AMEG has had a predicament – a dilemma. If we say how bad the situation really is, people will brand us as doom-mongers and not want to listen. If we don’t, then nobody will learn the truth.

But now it’s different. Our predictions on the sea ice have proved correct. We have the credibility. Our timescales are appropriate. (Only the other day a student wrote an article for the Ecologist saying that, after consulting experts at UEA, he was convinced that AMEG had got its timescales wrong.)

The most visible repercussions of sea ice decline and rapid Arctic warming (it’s warming five or six times the global average by my reckoning, and that ratio will leap up as the sea ice disappears) are the escalating emissions of methane, now seen to be bubbling in vast plumes from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf seabed, and the global weirding, seen to be affecting farmers all over the world as the Arctic warms, polar jet stream meanders more, sticking in places to cause weather extremes, long periods of both hot dry weather and cool wet weather. These two repercussions have been AMEG’s focus of late, see press release.

Never in the history of the human race has there been so much danger to confront. We have the brains – we should have the intelligence – to deal with it. Psychologically we have real problems, continuing to believe that we are immortal and “it can’t happen to us”. It is.

http://a-m-e-g.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/the-biggest-story-of-all-time.html#comment-form

As late as July, Peter Wadhams and his "Exponential decline of Arctic Ice Volume" was a fringe player. Now people are switching to his side en masse. Whether people are ready for Geoengineering remains to be seen.

[villager]

1. What kind of geoengineering could there be...

...to put the methane genii back in the bottle?

[Junkdrawer]

2. They're talking about trying to get a record winter freeze and shade next summer's melt.

These may also be the guys who propose to get giant hoses and spay extra water to augment the winter freeze.

Turns out this guy:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112722993

has been saying for years that we should be doing geoengineering environmental impact studies IN CASE we needed it someday.

IMHO, boy was he right.

[Speck Tater]

3. What is needed is for the whole world to mobilize to attack this problem.

Of course the whole world won't mobilize to attack the problem, and so the problem will remain un-solved, and will only get worse until it's so bad that there's not enough left of industrial civilization to do anything about it.

Any solution that depends on getting even a single government to mobilize the kind of resources necessary is destined to fail for political reasons. Suppose we discovered that we had six months in which to act before it was too late. What would Congress do for those next six months? Argue. Point fingers. Deny that there is a problem. Point out that the solution is too expensive. And that the solution isn't really necessary anyway. We would see six months of gridlock and inactivity and nothing whatsoever would be accomplished. Such is the nature of the beast we have become.

In a word, we're doomed. End of story.

[joshcryer]

4. Geoengineering will require global consensus.

Any state taking it upon itself to do it will be committing an act of war, potentially.

So what will happen is nothing and we'll wait and see how bad the clathrate release is.

If it's really bad we're going to be fucked and forced to force an ice age with massive amounts of dimming aerosols in the atmosphere.

If we overshoot, well, that will be stories history will talk about for eons as we populate Mars and the solar system.

[Junkdrawer]

5. Great debate on the subject is going on over at Neven's Sea Ice blog:

This comment by sea ice regular Superman is close to my take:

Artful Dodger,

"Yes, Geoff. And even the 2C target itself is suspect. It was a round number agreed upon at Copenhagen, when the advice was actually 1.5C as a safe upper limit.

We're already seeing just how unsafe 0.8C is, and there's probably already that much more warming in the pipe due to delayed equilibrium.

It's clear that we will not even attempt to avoid 2C. I think were fighting over 3C vs 10C now, if we let feedbacks take hold.

Personally, I'd much rather live in a +3C world than an even warmer one. But when you're in a hole, the first thing you must do is stop digging."

What concerns me is that climate change is, by far, the defining problem of our time, and the data we're using is as soft as jelly on a Summer's day. My impression of these articles that talk about 'safe' limits of CO2 emissions/atmospheric accumulations is that they relate these CO2 emissions to temperature increases based on past experience, and assume these temperature increases will 'hold' when making their impact estimations. But, we know people today and even yesterday are observing positive feedbacks, and some of these feedbacks are increasing signicantly. So, what makes us believe that a temperature increase of even 1.5 C is 'safe' or 'acceptable', or can be stabilized, in the absence of any fully coupled models that include positive feedbacks?

I suspect that if you assembled Wadhams and Barber and Hansen and others who have many years of actual observation and/or modeling experience in an Irish pub, and plied them with a few high-hop Guinness Stouts, they would raise serious questions about whether what we have generated up to this point can be stabilized, much less what we would generate in another five or ten years at the present rate of CO2 emissions. Intuition alone would dictate we have gone over the brink, and without fully coupled models that include all the major feedbacks to offer any possibility of disputing intuition, I have zero confidence that we can avoid the climate change bullet.

Prove me wrong!

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/09/arctic-ice-melt-20-years-of-co2-emissions.html?cid=6a0133f03a1e37970b0177448dba41970d#comment-6a0133f03a1e37970b0177448dba41970d

[DataDon]

6. Thinking ahead or call it forward thinking

It just occurred to me that the earth, in order to exist for 4.5 billion years, must has great survival instincts. Also I have been observing the sun's, current, and it's long term activity. Currently the sun is experiencing the lowest activity in hundreds of years. Particularly, it is similar to the maunder era when we had a very cold phase and severe freezing.

With these thoughts in mind, I began to wonder if the earth is preparing itself for a cold era. What I mean is this....If the ice cover reflects the sun, it would be an advantage for the earth to reflect the sun back to space. I understand that this is the current fear. Conversely, the oceans, without the ice cover, will absorb the suns rays and store the heat that it absorbs. Now if the earth and mother nature, God or whatever, knows that a cold phrase is upcoming, wouldn't it be an advantage to have the oceans free of ice covering so to have the ability to store as much heat as possible.

Maybe we are looking at this all wrong. After all, humans are, by nature, fearful of change and we usually apply whatever knowledge or fearful thoughts we have. I think that this could be a instinct that we are endowed with so that we protect ourselves but, as we all know, sometimes it doesn't always work to our advantage.

As the current phraseology would put it.....I'm just saying!

[cprise]

7. We were definitely on our way toward an ice age

But our carbon emissions are slamming the planet with additional heat in such a short period of time that it has swamped the cooling trend and could threaten our very survival.

You may want to read a book by Peter Ward titled Under a Green Sky. It looks at past warming trends due to an unevenness in the natural carbon cycle, and how global warming once reduced life on this planet to little more than microbes.

We are creating a catastrophe that wouldn't reoccur naturally for hundreds of millions of years, and probably trashing the web of life in the process.

So, tell me how this 'global instinct' you imagined squares with humans emitting heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere...

[tkmorris]

8. That's a fine theory if one assumes that the Earth is a sentient being

But it isn't.

[Speck Tater]

9. Earth has survival instincts?

Earth knows the future of the sun so it can prepare in advance for what the sun is soon going to do?

Really? You can't be serious! Maybe the Leprechauns are plotting to steal all our gold so they have made a deal with the sun to heat up and fry us while the Leprechauns hide out under the earth with the Morlocks until it is safe to come out again and gather up all the abandoned gold.

Or maybe the arctic ice melt is really due to all the dragons hiding in the hollow earth who come out at night when nobody can see them to blow fire on the ice.

Or maybe with the population increasing the way it has, Santa and the elves have expanded their toy factories and all the heat they're generating is what's melting the ice.

I mean if we are going to make up fairy tales we might as well go all the way.