EcoWatch - Bruce Melton*
Our planet's systems have a tremendous capacity to absorb punishment
before they begin to show signs of degradation. Earth's ecology
self-heals like a cut on a finger. It assimilates pollution by chemical,
physical and biological means—it changes pollutants into non-hazardous
materials and proceeds upon its merry way as if there had been no
pollution at all. Up to a point.
Acid rain is an excellent example
of how our planet can self-heal. By the late 1960s, the U.S. was
emitting so many sulfate and nitrate pollutants (smog) from burning
fossil fuels, that sulfuric acid washed from the sky was killing forests
and lakes. President Richard Nixon's Clean Air Act stopped about half
of the sulfur from going into our atmosphere. This was enough to allow
nature to take over again and our forests and lakes began to heal.
Global warming
didn't really get started in a big way until the 1950s. Today, the
warming rate is seven times greater than it was in the 1950s and the
carbon emission rate is four times greater than in the '50s.
That
same sulfur pollution that caused all the acid rain in the '60s and '70s
is a global cooling pollutant that hides warming. With grossly
increasing smog in Asia since about the turn of the century, the results
have been that 30 percent of warming that should have occurred has been
masked or covered up by global cooling sulfate smog.
It's also a
very common misconception that some of the warming is natural. However,
until about 100 years ago, our climate was cooling. The planet cooled
about 5 degrees F in polar regions near Greenland (half or less
globally) over the last 6,000 years. This research comes from
mini-icecaps on Baffin Island where easily dateable rooted plants were
revealed from melt. In the last 100 years, the temperature on Baffin has
warmed about 7 degrees Fahrenheit; 2 degrees warmer than at any time in
the last 120,000 years. Most of this warming has occurred since the
1950s.
The extremes we are experiencing now (temperature, rainfall,
drought,
etc.) will not increase at the same rate as the average temperature.
The physics of thermodynamics say extremes will increase nonlinearly.
Earth has lost its ability to buffer the warming. As we replace
coal
with non-fossil fuel alternatives, masking of warming by global cooling
pollutants will also disappear, compounding the nonlinear rate of
increasing extremes.
We live on a very complicated and dangerous
planet that is worthy of great respect and awe. The past year's advances
in climate science should urge us to put that respect and awe into
practice, taking definitive action against global warming.
1. Extremes
The American Meteorological Society's
latest report
on weather extremes tells us: "Without exception, all the heat-related
events studied in this year's report were found to have been made more
intense or likely due to human-induced
climate change and this was discernible even for those events strongly influenced by the 2015 El Niño."
Human-caused "anthropogenic" influence was documented in 23 of 28
major global geographic regions. The events included increasing average
temperature, warming of winter extremes, decreasing humidity due to
warming, increasing dryness, increasing heavy precipitation, increased
sunshine, more extreme drought, more extreme tropical cyclones,
increased wildfire burn area and intensity, decreased arctic
sea ice, more high tide flooding and decreased snowpack.
2. Attempts at Climate Reform
President
Obama's Clean Power Plan (CPP), which is the first policy to set a
national limit on power plant-generated CO2 pollution, was one of the
major developments of 2015. The CPP is
almost identical
to the U.S. Kyoto Protocol commitment (created in the mid-1990s) of
reducing CO2 emissions but the CPP is 18 years behind Kyoto. In other
words, the new regulations are no different than they were a generation
ago and we have emitted almost as much additional carbon dioxide during
the delay. Implementation of the CPP began in June 2015, six years after
carbon dioxide was successfully declared a pollutant by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In February 2016 however, the
U.S. Supreme Court ordered the CCP back to Federal Appeals Court to
determine if it is legal or not. This is the first time that the U.S.
Supreme Court has ever blocked an EPA rule.
The U.S. climate commitment at Paris, 80 percent CO2 emissions
reductions by 2050, is 30 percent less than and 30 years behind Kyoto
Phase 2, which was supposed to be implemented by 2020. President-elect
Trump has threatened to back out of the Paris Agreement and he will also
have final say over the CPP when it returns from court. After over 20
years of trying, we remain without meaningful climate pollution
regulations, even though the U.S. is the single country that has
unarguably emitted a third of all CO2 ever emitted—three times more than
China. It is also very important to note that the U.S. is the only
country in the world that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
3. Increasing Wildfires Across Western North America
Work from the Sierra Nevada Research Institute by
Anthony Westerling reveals the western U.S.
wildfire
season has increased by more than 60 percent since the 1970s, from 138
days to 222 days, because of earlier onset of spring. The average burn
time has increased nearly 800 percent, from six days to 52 days, because
of deeper drying from early snowmelt. Burned area increased an
astonishing 12 times (1,271 percent). Human-caused ignition has played a
very small role in increasing wildfire trends. Westerling also notes:
"Given projections for further drying within the region due to
human-induced warming, this study underlines the potential for further
increases in wildfire activity."
Work from the University of Idaho and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory led by
John Abatzoglou revealed
that most of the increase in wildfire across the American West has
happened since about 2000 and beetle killed trees are not factored into
the trends (40 million acres across the US West has been killed by
native beetles since 2000). Abatzoglou said that in 20 to 30 years, so
much of the forest will have burned that the annual burn rate will begin
to fall even with continued warming, because there will be too little
forest left to burn.
4. The Amazon Continues to Emit More Carbon Than it Absorbs
It
began in 2005 with a 100-year drought. Then in 2010, there was another,
more extreme drought. Billions of trees were killed. As a result, the
Amazon is no longer absorbing CO2. Instead, it is emitting it to the
tune of 257 megatons annually—more than half of Brazil's annual
emissions. The most recent and extensive study of this topic, from 56
researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK,
led by Ted Feldpausch,
showed the decreasing sequestration was not from drought kill alone,
but drought stress induced by higher temperatures was also responsible.
In 2010, I spoke with Leeds University researcher Simon Lewis who performed some of the
first work
on Amazonia after the 2010 drought. He said billions of trees were
killed in the two droughts, and that for all of the trees to decay will
take a relatively short 29 years in the rain forest. Lewis continued,
"Two droughts like this in one decade will not completely offset the
sink within that decade, but three in a decade may." Considering the
newer work by Feldpausch shows the flip has already occurred, it's clear
that—as so often happens with climate science—the deeper we look, the
more extensive the damage really is.
5. A Large Increase in Methane Emissions
Methane
is more than 100 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2 in
the 20-year short term time frame where abrupt changes pose the most
risk. Research from Harvard and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs
reports
that U.S. methane emissions have increased by more than 30 percent over
the 2002–2014 period. The increase is greatest in the central part of
the country, but no individual source was as yet discernable and was not
readily attributable to any specific source type. These researchers say
the emissions could account for 30-60 percent of the global growth of
atmospheric methane during this period. While fracked gas is obviously
the source, attribution in these atmospheric studies is more
complicated.
6. Global Warming Psychology
Work from Yale,
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
continues a trend of defining the culpability of the so-called Climate
Change Counter Movement (CCCM) in obfuscating climate science. This work
looked at 164 organizations identified in other academic literature as
being involved in the CCCM between 1993-2013 and included 40,785 pieces
of textual content and more than 39 million words. Two main findings
emerged: Organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have
distributed content meant to polarize the climate change issue; and
corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these
polarization efforts, confirming previous work showing the CCCM to be at
the root of climate change politics and discourse.
7. NOAA Ice-Sheet Collapse Warning
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says
(NOAA) it takes 10 years or more for new science to go from conception
to acceptance by the consensus. This "warning" implies the Antarctic,
and particularly the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), is likely the most
important part of climate change as sea level rise greater than
three feet per century
is beyond the rate at which our civilization can adapt. NOAA's
ostensible warning suggests that in the very near future, we will see
new modeling that shows 10 feet of abrupt sea level rise by 2050 to 2060
from collapse of the WAIS. This means coastal infrastructure that
represents a disproportionate piece of the global economy will be
submerged or degenerated to the point of dysfunction, with plausible
global economic breakdown.
Extremely salient to this ostensible "warning": prehistoric evidence of such ice-sheet collapse, not represented by modeling,
is common, and at its most extreme is represented by 6.5 to 10 feet of
sea level rise in 12 to 24 years
at Xcaret Reef
on the Yucatan Peninsula 121,000 years ago, from research out of the
Autonomous University of Mexico and the German Science Institute in 2009
by Paul Blanchon, et al.
8. Antarctic Ice Shelves Deteriorating Rapidly
Early
this year, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at
University of California, San Diego showed Antarctic ice shelf volume
decline from zero to 300 cubic kilometers in about the last 20 years.
The loss is caused by thinning, mostly from melt below the surface. Ice
loss was led by the WAIS, which increased by 70 percent in the last 10
years of the study. At its greatest, the under-ice melt rate is up to
100 meters per year (328 feet).
9. Ocean Heat Content Doubles in Recent Decades
The above research from Scripps Institute
is proven
through data collection that dates back as far as the extraordinary
18th century (1872-76) circumpolar ocean science expedition of the HMS
Challenger led by Captain George Nares. Work from the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, Princeton, NOAA and Penn State shows that nearly
half of the industrial-era increase in global ocean heat content has
occurred in recent decades, with over a third of the accumulated heat
occurring below 700 meters.
10. First Tipping Point Timeline for Collapse of the WAIS
Research out of the German National Science Institute
first described
a very distinct tipping point with the WAIS where collapse becomes
irreversible in about 2050 to 2060. The very important take-away from
this work is that to prevent ice-sheet collapse, we must return ocean
temperature to its preindustrial stable temperature by 2050. The
challenge here is that it is much more difficult to cool the oceans than
it is the atmosphere. See
here
for an in-depth article in Truthout about the WAIS and the ability of
current policy to prevent what would be the largest and most impactful
climate change reality of our time.
11. Dynamical Ice-Sheet Collapse Modeling Arrives
Consensus
climate projections have not, up to now, included abrupt sea level
rise, because it has not yet been modeled. But this is changing.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Penn State
(DeConto and Pollard) have
for the first time
modeled marine ice sheet collapse physics with results that begin to
show what ice-sheet collapse might have looked like in the distant past.
These physics include hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves (melt
water heavier than ice that forces crevasses open) and structural
collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs where 200 to 300 feet is as
tall as an ice cliff can get before it collapses under its own weight.
This has very important implications for the WAIS—which rises 6,000 feet
above sea level and whose bed rests on the ocean floor 3,000 feet below
sea level—where crushed ice debris from collapse can be rapidly washed
away from the collapsing ice face by ocean waters.
12. Larsen C Ice Shelf Collapsing
The Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica
is collapsing.
Preceding the Larsen C, the Larsen B went in 2002; preceding that, the
Larsen A went in 1995. Both A and B were about the size of Rhode Island.
B went in 40 days. It disintegrated into a pile of crushed ice three
times the size of Rhode Island and washed out to sea. In early 2016, a
crack across the back of the Larsen C Ice Shelf was discovered. By
December, it was 70 miles long and 300 feet wide, and extended 1,000
feet -- all the way through the 1,000 feet-thick ice shelf. It is only a
matter of time before a Delaware-size iceberg breaks off, or the ice
shelf disintegrates into crushed ice like the Larsen B.
The important thing here is that each of these three ice shelves was
closer to the South Pole than the one that melted before it, meaning
that warming is progressing. Moving even closer to the pole, the next
ice shelves are the Ross and Ronne, on either side of the WAIS, both
bigger than California. The great difference between the Larsen Ice
Shelves and the Ross and Ronne is that the Larsen's buttressing only
held back a small amount of mountain ice along the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Ross and Ronne will release the 9,000 feet-thick WAIS with enough
ice to raise the sea level 16 to 20 feet.
13. Alternatives and Renewable Energy
For the first time,
green energy implementation
was greater than increasing energy demand—meaning, more green energy
was made available than the total energy that was needed in the world.
China leads the world with clean energy installation, triple that of the
U.S. and Europe. China has also announced that it would not be building
new coal-fired power generation and 200 coal facilities already
permitted or in the planning stages will not be built. India said it had
enough generation already built to last three to five years.
In 2016, the cost of
solar
dropped to 2.7 cents per kWh, less than the 3 cents per kWh for fracked
gas. Solar costs have fallen more than 80 percent since 2008, onshore
wind is down 40 percent, and grid-scale batteries cost 70 percent less.
Total world solar and
wind generation is now more than 3 percent of the total.
14. Stratospheric Geoengineering With Limestone, Not Sulfates
Geoengineering
to cool the Earth with global cooling sulfates has a bad reputation and
is widely believed to make acid rain and ocean acidity much worse. This
is a good guess as lower atmospheric sulfate emissions have
historically created serious problems with acid rain and ocean acidity.
The geoengineering technology, however, uses 100 times less sulfate than
we are emitting today, and injects it into the stratosphere above
50,000 feet where it works literally 100 times better than in the lower
atmosphere. However, sulfate eats ozone and so far, we are pretty sure
that this relationship would not be a good thing.
Earlier this month, a
team from Harvard
led by David Keith published a study about using calcite (calcium
carbonate or limestone) to cool the Earth. This class of alkaline metal
salts results in similar cooling to sulfates—with a big difference. The
minute amount of stratospheric injection of calcite not only cooled our
atmosphere markedly, it increased stratospheric ozone (instead of
depleting it). Costs for an operation that uses calcite for cooling are
fantastically low compared to direct atmospheric removal of carbon
dioxide, which itself is dramatically less expensive than the cost of
emissions reductions. Calcite dust in our atmosphere is deposited
naturally across the globe at a rate that is 10 to 1,000 times greater
than the amount of calcite that would be needed to cool the Earth.
It's
also very important to note that geoengineering is not a substitute for
evolving global energy generation to alternatives other than fossil
fuels. The fossil fuel era was an extraordinary time that allowed our
civilization to mature. Now that we have discovered much cleaner,
cheaper and less impactful ways to generate our energy, the sooner we
ditch fossil fuels the better.
15. Sequestration Through Mineralization: Faster Than Previously Understood
A
field demonstration,
published by a cast of 18 scientists in Iceland, the U.S., Denmark,
Australia and the Netherlands, has shown rapid CO2 storage
(sequestration) through permanent mineralization at the CarbFix site in
Iceland. The project injected CO2 into basaltic rocks at a depth of 1800
feet and observed mineralization—the chemical conversion of CO2 into
stable metal salts like calcium carbonate. This process has been known
for quite some time but now a field evaluation has shown it to happen in
less than two years, instead of the hundreds of thousands of years
previously projected. This short duration mineralization vastly reduces
the risk to atmospheric leakage and compromise of aquifers.
16. Carbon Capture Using Fuel Cells Generates More Net Energy
This one is
particularly astonishing:
carbon dioxide removal from coal generation flue gas can be
accomplished with the addition of existing fuel cell technology to the
coal electricity generation process. This
private technology, partnering with
Exxon (
white paper)
showed removal of 90 percent of CO2 and 70 percent of smog-producing
pollutants. Most surprisingly, the process generates excess energy and
water as byproducts instead of requiring additional energy. The total
generation with the combined processes is 180 percent of the generation
that would come from the coal alone.
17. Direct Air Capture Work Continues
Throughout
the year, many climate scientists continued to advocate for both
dramatic reductions in emissions and an engagement with CO2 capture
technologies. Work in advancing our climate culture towards negative
emissions continued with private organizations completing field scale
production units (
Global Thermostat and
Carbon Engineering)
with costs far less than some theorists have suggested. Most of the new
technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere reduce energy
requirements and increase efficiency. It just goes to show that
some theoretical scientists, like is so often the case with climate research, are arguing against science that proves otherwise.
Of
great interest in 2016 was the advancement of the "moisture swing" CO2
capture process being developed by Dr. Klaus Lackner, director of the
Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University. In
2009, Lackner's work had proceeded to where costs were $16 per ton with
$0.05 kWh energy costs. Now that solar is at $0.03 per kWh and
continuing to fall rapidly, costs are obviously falling for direct air
capture with all technologies. This technology is particularly effective
because it does not use high temperature to restore the absorbing
materials. Instead, room temperature water is used to "wash" the CO2 out
of the process.
18. Emissions Reductions, Trump and the Future
Emissions
reductions can no longer prevent dangerous climate change. Even with
the best case scenario of 80 percent reductions by 2050 (as outlined in
the Paris commitment), we will see additional warming of
double to triple what we have already seen—well above the 2 degree C limit. We have simply delayed too long.
*Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, author and CEO of the Climate Change Now Initiative in Austin, Texas. Reposted with permission from our media associate Truthout.
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