Fear of Ice – Green Party conference Day 3 September 8, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Green in the City , trackbackIf you’re feeling relaxed about global warming, look at this picture of the arctic sea ice in September, 1989.
1989 Minimum Sea Ice
Then look at this for September 2007.
2007 Minimum Sea Ice
Then go and visit the good people at NASA, and see how it’s shaping up for 2008. The ice cover has been retreating at about 10% per decade, and its accelerating. It’s not just the melting ice, its the change from nice, white, stuff sitting at the top of the planet reflecting all that energy back into space to dark blue stuff absorbing it and getting hotter. Any minute now, the Arctic will be an open sea for the first time in human history.
An update on climate research remotivates me in a big stick followed by small carrot sort of a way.
The stick was administered by Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, who has just published a paper* on targets for emission reduction. We talk about reducing emissions by 60% by 2050, but that is meaningless. The planet can only support so much CO2, so we need to worry about the total amount in the atmosphere, not some future rate of increase. This means that we are almost certainly heading for a 2C increase in global temperature whatever happens, and 4C is likely. We might be okay, maybe. Bangladesh and Tuvalu will not.
Even limiting CO2 in the atmosphere to 650ppmv, and a likely 4C increase, requires us to start cutting emissions drastically now, rather than letting them keep on rising as they have ever since Rio in 1992. If the coming recession is drastic (on the scale of the collapse of the economy of the Soviet Union) we might manage it, but there doesn’t seem to be any other way it will happen.
We have to change now. Fortunately, the Center for Alternative Technology believes its possible, and has a plan for doing it. Its not a detailed, do this on Monday, this on Tuesday type of plan which is what we really need, but it does show a way. They show how the UK could be self-sufficient in renewable energy, providing we both reduce demand and invest heavily in renewables now.
So, we know the problem. We have ideas about the solution. Now, its finding the will to do something about it.
* Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows
Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trendsPhil. Trans. R. Soc. A November 13, 2008 366:3863-3882; doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138
Comments»
What absolute tosh! The planet can only support so much CO2?
In prehistoric times it has been many times higher than the measly 0.0385% of the atmosphere that it currently is. A doubling of CO2 cannot increase the temperature by 4 deg C because basic physics won’t allow it. The major greenhouse gas is not CO2 but water vapour and the modellers cannot model it properly.
The Arctic ice has been as low as this before and has even been ice free, but satellite measurements were only started in 1978. It currently has 13 million square kilometres out of a total 14 million square kilometres total area. It isn’t going to disappear any time soon. Explorer and Navy log books show Arctic ice extent was similar in the 19th century to today, but as now it varied from decade to decade and even from year to year.
Amundsen negotiated the North West passage in 1905, it has been accomplished many times since but with ice breakers.
A few decades earlier: THERMAL PATHS TO THE POLE, THE CURRENTS OF THE OCEAN, BY SILAS BENT, SAINT LOUIS: 1872. This is from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) archives
“Just as the work was completed upon these currents in the North Pacific, in 1855, the news was received in the United States that Dr. Hane had discovered an open sea near the Pole, and people began to ask how that could be possible, when it was well known that a belt or region of ice several hundred miles in width must lie to the south of that sea, and which was never dissolved.”
In the global cooling of the sixties and seventies: Controlling the Planet’s Climate, J. 0. Fletcher (Rand corporation) From the book “Omega – Murder of the Eco-system and the Suicide of Man , Paul K Anderson, 1971
“For example, suppose that the warming of the Arctic, which by 1940 had greatly reduced the thickness of the pack ice, had continued? As the ice receded farther in summer and the thinner ice became more fractured in winter, evaporation would have increased, thus increasing the density of the surface waters both by increasing the salt concentration and by cooling; this would tend to decrease the vertical stability of the upper layers of the ocean.”
These extracts from a letter by the President of the Royal Society addressed to the British Admiralty, recommended they send a ship to the Arctic to investigate the dramatic changes in ice cover described thus: “2000 square leagues of ice with which the Greenland Seas between the latitudes of 74° and 80°N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years entirely disappeared.” The letter was written in 1817.
The Danish Foreign Ministry has a History of Greenland which includes the following passage:
“Towards the end of the 10th century the climate became warmer, and the change affected all those living in the northern hemisphere. Much of the ice in the seas around the Canadian archipelago disappeared, and baleen whales moved into the area to search for food. Eskimo whalers from northern Alaska sailed east in their large, skin-covered boats and reached Greenland in the 12th century.”
This is a journey of a minimum 3000 miles in Kayaks; How did they paddle across a frozen waste?
When glacial melting takes place so does glacial rebound: When tons and tons of glacier melt, Earth’s crust bounces back like a mattress,
first getting a bit thicker and then beginning a gradual rise. The rebound, which scientists are also studying in Hudson Bay in Canada, takes thousands of years. In Hudson Bay, a glacier many times the size of Alaska’s Glacier Bay melted at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Since then, the land has risen about 375 feet in some places. Sullivan Island, between Juneau and Haines, has risen more than 18 feet in the last 250 years.”
So much for sea level rise.
The Tyndall Centre is a centre for sociological research into the promotion and acceptance of climate change as fact.
This working paper from 2004 shows their agenda:”The Social Simulation of the Public Perception of Weather Events and their Effect upon the Development of Belief in Anthropogenic Climate Change” September 2004.
“Global warming (or climate change) is, without elaboration, a much debated and contested issue. Not only is it contested among scientists, but also among all those with vested interests.
In this paper, we explore under what conditions belief in global warming or climate change, as identified and defined by experience, science and the media, can be maintained in the public’s perception.
As the science itself is contested, needless to say, so are the potential policy changes. So how then do people make sense or construct a reality of something that they can never experience in its totality (climate) and a reality that has not yet manifest (i.e. climate change)?
To endorse policy change people must ‘believe’ that global warming will become a reality some time in the future.
Only the experience of positive temperature anomalies will be registered as indication of change if the issue is framed as global warming.
Both positive and negative temperature anomalies will be registered in experience as indication of change if the issue is framed as climate change.
We propose that in those countries where climate change has become the predominant popular term for the phenomenon, unseasonably cold temperatures, for example, are also interpreted to reflect climate change/global warming.
Sound familiar? The Institute for Public Policy Research, Labour’s favourite think tank, had this advice in 2006 for public agencies interfacing with the public.
Treating climate change as beyond argument:
..it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won.
This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective.
The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.
The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) – gives an example of this approach.It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.
Millions of pounds of money are spent on social engineering to get us to accept environmental taxation, to “save the planet”. Unfortunately the opposition are fully signed up as well.
oh all right, why not.
There are a lot of physicists on the IPCC, and that’s where the predictions of levels of warming are coming from. Are you saying they’re all getting basic physics wrong?
Amundsen navigated the north-west passage in 1903-1906 spending two winters trapped in the ice. In 2007, it was done without icebreakers.
Of course the reduction in the sea ice itself doesn’t prove anything – its just graphic. Its all the other evidence
Glacial rebound happens, so does sea level rise. Melting the Arctic sea ice (which is floating) won’t directly cause either.
Water vapour is dealt with, its just that the amount in the atmosphere is pretty constant – it condenses out, or more evaportates in very quickly. So while water vapour is responsible for a large proportion of the natural greenhouse effect, it doesn’t contribute to the anthropomorphic effect and isn’t making the situation any worse. That’s a red herring.
The Tyndall Centre studies adaptation strategies, which is what the paper was about. Yes, the science is contested, so is any science. But the dispute now is around the detail, not the general direction. I for one am pleased that there are people trying to work out how to adapt to it, and how to make others aware of the dangers we face.