The Tipping Point - Canadian Documentary on Arctic Meltdown

Despite the economic and political turmoil, some Canadians still remember the coming climate crisis. A person at a holiday party last night tipped me off to this important-sounding documentary: The Tipping Point - Passionate Eye Monday | CBC Newsworld
From the promo page:

Scientists say that by 2013, there will be no sea ice left in the Arctic, causing a tipping point for climate change throughout the world. "The tipping point is where you've pushed a system into a state where, with no further pushing, it will rapidly change", explains Dr Ted Scambos. "It seems as though the Arctic simply can't recover". Polar bears, who are at the top of the Arctic food chain, are feeling the heat. As the sea ice shrinks, so does their world.

[...]

Melting permafrost could soon be a worldwide disaster, as it locks in carbon dioxide, which is released as the ice melts. "The amount of carbon which is sequestered in permafrost is at least the same as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere", says an expert in permafrost. "Thawing permafrost will release this methane and it is like a bomb will explode".

"The Arctic will export change to the rest of the world", warns Robie MacDonald. "Melting sea ice will intensify the extreme weather caused by climate change, bringing violent storms and cyclones." Very quickly the world's food and water supplies will begin to run short. "To put it in context, the Arctic Ocean has not been clear of ice for a couple of million years at least. This is extraordinary."

In the video preview, one expert also mentions the risk of war over arctic resourses, especially with the opening of the Northwest Passage (which I had discussed independently here).

I'd really like to see the full documentary, so I hope that they re-run it soon.

[Important Notice]

First Commercial Ship Sails Canada's Northwest Passage: Good News -- or Is It?

1st commercial [Canadian] ship sails through Northwest Passage (CBC)

They didn't see even "one cube of ice". Sounds like good news for arctic communitieswho can get supplies delivered cheaper and faster. Of course the opening of the Northwest Passage is also one of the predicted effects of climate change, it's happening much sooner than expected, and any traditional activities that depend on year-round ice cover (directly or indirectly) may have to be abandoned. And the more arctic (and other) fossil carbon is burned, the more the climate would change -- further degrading traditional arctic ways of life.

The race to exploit arctic mineral and energy resources will also heat up. The CIA thinks that it would benefit Canada as a whole and "...it is unlikely to trigger major armed conflict." And we all know from events in the last eight years how prescient they are. Oh wait...

[Important Notice]

There Goes a Rocky Mountain Glacier

Here's another part of our heritage that the Harper Conservative Government is willing to sacrifice by resisting meaningful and binding GHG emissions targets: the Athabasca Glacier.

Image Source: Ben W. Bell, Wikipedia (click for copyright info)

"Since 1843, its toe has retreated 1.5 kilometres and more than half of its volume has vanished. In winter, the mass is now exhaling at a rate of about 15 metres a year and gasping back in summer at a pace of at least 25 metres. Scientists have detected car exhaust, DDT and other pollutants in its layers of compressed snow dating to 1932.

"Over all, less snow has been falling each winter to maintain the glacier's mass, while meltwater bleeds along blue-tinged streams earlier each summer. But there is increasingly less of it to feed the appetites of people, agriculture and industry who depend on it in Alberta, across the Prairies and the western United States.

'The Athabasca Glacier is the single best accessible example in what we are seeing happening in the world because of climate change today,' says Bob Sandford, author of The Columbia Icefield. 'The scale is monumental.'

"The signs erected by Parks Canada leading to the toe of the glacier explain that there is strong evidence that greenhouse-gas emissions caused by human activity is to blame for the incredible shrinking ice.

"'If the glacier continues to recede at its current rate, there will be very little left in 100 years,' a placard notes. 'Within the next three generations the Athabasca Glacier and the water it provides to communities across western North America may almost disappear'

"Sandford, who is Canada's chair with the United Nations International Decade for Action, Water for Life program, says every Canadian needs to visit this place. Once there, he says, they will see that if we simply carry on, there's more at stake than just the magic disappearing" (Globe & Mail story).

Ron Stevenson commented on the Globe & Mail site:

"The most ironic thing about the article... recommending to drive a car to see the very thing that we are losing faster because of green house gases" [ellipses in the original].

That's a good point, but you can get to the Athabasca Glacier by VIA RAIL from most major cities in Canada. Train travel would reduce per-visitor carbon emissions significantly. Unfortunately, the Globe & Mail neglected to mention this option.



This has been a Blog Action Day post, honouring this year's theme, Environment. Of course, this entire blog is about a major environmental issue, but it's nice to see so many other bloggers participating in this year's event, many of them taking time out of their main themes to write about environmental issues and solutions.

[Important Notice]

Discuss this on your own Blogger blog! Click on the post's title for a permalink in the Address Bar > highlight any text for quoting > click BlogThis!

Climate Worsening Faster Than Predicted - But Canada "Voting for Apocalypse" at UN Talks

BlogThis!

Sounds nice -- until you think about it:

• Record high temperatures in the 30 C range in Eastern Canada -- in Early October -- Rest Of Month Warmer Than Average Throughout Canada
  

"... Enjoy it while it lasts, because you 'know what's ahead.'" --Environment Canada's David Phillips

Sure, there's some cold weather ahead this winter -- but what about a few years from now? Could we have more of this:

"'We've got an invisible disaster going on [in Toronto and area],' Mr. Phillips said, adding that the ground in some parts of the region has become so dry that it isn't able to absorb water any more, and that young trees may not make it to spring.'"

Source: Gandhi, U. (Sept 26, 2007). Weather continues to set records. Globe & Mail, p. A15, via Gale Group or Globe & Mail (subscription/payment required for either one - public library may provide free access to Gale).

The global headlines are grim:

• Arctic thaw may be at "tipping point"

"OSLO, Sept 28 (Reuters) - A record melt of Arctic summer sea ice this month may be a sign that global warming is reaching a critical trigger point that could accelerate the northern thaw, some scientists say.

"'The reason so much (of the Arctic ice) went suddenly is that it is hitting a tipping point that we have been warning about for the past few years,' James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Reuters.

The Arctic summer sea ice shrank by more than 20 percent below the previous 2005 record low in mid-September to 4.13 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles), according to a 30-year satellite record. It has now frozen out to 4.2 million sq km."

• "Pollution 'beyond worst-case scenario': Global economic growth boosts greenhouse-gas levels faster than predicted, expert says"
  

'"...the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that can potentially cause dangerous climate change,' Flannery told the broadcaster yesterday. 'We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change, that's what these figures say. It's not next year or next decade, it's now.'

"Flannery, whose recent book The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth made best-seller lists, said the data showed the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions had reached about 455 parts per million by mid-2005, well ahead of scientists' previous calculations.

"'We thought we'd be at that threshold within about a decade, that we had that much time,' Flannery said. 'I mean, that's beyond the limits of projection, beyond the worst-case scenario as we thought of it in 2001,' when the last major IPCC report was issued."

• See also Climate change happening faster, scientist says
  

• 10-year forecast a grim one: scientists - Half of next decade will be warmest on record

"Global warming will slow briefly in the next year or two, but then charge ahead, making at least half of the years after 2009 warmer than at any other time in recorded history, British scientists claim [...] [in a study published] in Science, a major journal scientists rely on to judge and announce top discoveries."

• Humid enough for you? Blame global warming, scientists say

Apparently, it's the heat -- and the humidity!

• Drought catastrophe stalks Australia's food bowl

Meanwhile,

• Nations backing off on greenhouse cuts

"The European Union and many developing nations such as China and India want industrial states to use the stringent 25-40 percent range to guide future talks to force a shift away from fossil fuels, blamed by U.N. reports for stoking global warming.

"But Russia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland objected to setting the stringent range in negotiations about extending the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, the main plan for fighting global warming that runs to 2012, delegates said.

"'The lower the stabilization level (of greenhouse gases) achieved, the lower the consequent damages,' the draft said. It mentions the option of 25-40 percent cuts but drops a previous reference to them as an indicative guide for future work.

"'This is voting for the apocalypse,' said Stephanie Tunmore of environmental group Greenpeace. 'The 25-40 percent range is needed to help avert dangerous climate change' such as more powerful storms, rising seas and melting glaciers, she said.

"'Japan is willing to let the typhoons roll in and the water flow onto its coastal land. Switzerland is committed to melt all its remaining glaciers,' environmentalists said in a newsletter" [bolding added].

Apparently, "Canada's New Government" is willing to let much of the Maritime Provinces be washed away, Arctic ice to melt even faster, and the rest of us to suffer from drought!

[Important Notice]

Discuss this on your own Blogger blog! Click here for a permalink in the Address Bar > highlight any text for quoting > click BlogThis!

One Degree of Desperation (Or, What if NASA's James Hansen is Right Again?)

NASA scientist James Hansen's 1988 warnings about climate change have proved to be largely correct (realclimate.org). The IPCC has recently estimated relatively slow sea level rise this century (18–59 cm, with a midrange of 20–43 cm). But Hansen suggests in a scientific paper that 5 meters per century would be a more realistic estimate. He add in the same paper that

"The threat of a large sea level change is a principal element in our argument (Hansen et al 2006a, 2006b, 2007) that the global community must aim to keep additional global warming less than 1 °C above the 2000 temperature, and even 1 °C may be too great. In turn, this implies a CO₂ limit of about 450 ppm, or less" [emphasis added]. [1]

Or else, it's "Goodbye Miami", as New Scientist says on a recent cover. Their map of Florida in 2007 and 2107 would come as a shock to the many Canadians who are familiar with South Florida's sunny shores. It gets worse: as Michael Le Page points out,

"Without mega-engineering projects to protect them, a 5-metre rise would inundate large parts of many cities - including New York, London, Sydney, Vancouver, Mumbai and Tokyo - and leave surrounding areas vulnerable to storm surges. In Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and elsewhere, whole regions and cities may vanish. China's economic powerhouse, Shanghai, has an average elevation of just 4 metres" (New Scientist, "If sea level rises by 5 metres..." [near bottom of page; emphasis added]).

For the devastating effects on Canada's Maritime Provinces, see my previous blog post.

Hansen and his co-authors write in another recent scientific paper [2]:

"With GHGs continuing to increase, the planetary energy imbalance provides ample energy to melt ice corresponding to several metres of sea level per century

[...]

"The gravest threat we foresee starts with surface melt on West Antarctica and interaction among positive feedbacks leading to catastrophic ice loss.

[...]

Our concern that BAU [Business As Usual] GHG scenarios would cause large sea-level rise this century (Hansen 2005) differs from estimates of IPCC (2001, 2007), which foresees little or no contribution to twenty-first century sea-level rise from Greenland and Antarctica. However, the IPCC analyses and projections do not well account for the nonlinear physics of wet ice sheet disintegration, ice streams and eroding ice shelves, nor are they consistent with the palaeoclimate evidence we have presented for the absence of discernable lag between ice sheet forcing and sea-level rise.

"The best chance for averting ice sheet disintegration seems to be intense simultaneous efforts to reduce both CO2 emissions and non-CO2 climate forcings. As mentioned above, there are multiple benefits from such actions. However, even with such actions, it is probable that the dangerous level of atmospheric GHGs will be passed, at least temporarily. We have presented evidence (Hansen
et al. 2006b) that the dangerous level of CO2 can be no more than approximately 450 ppm. Our present discussion, including the conclusion that slow feedbacks (ice, vegetation and GHG) can come into play on century time-scales or sooner, makes it probable that the dangerous level is even lower.

"Present knowledge does not permit accurate specification of the dangerous level of human-made GHGs. However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades" [bolding added; italics in original].

Among other things, Hansen and his co-authors have a plan to save the Earth:

"...a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting GHGs from the air. Development of CO2 capture at power plants, with below-ground CO2 sequestration, may be a critical element. Injection of the CO2 well beneath the ocean floor assures its stability (House et al. 2006). If the power plant fuel is derived from biomass, such as cellulosic fibres... grown without excessive fertilization that produces N2O or other offsetting GHG emissions, it will provide continuing drawdown of atmospheric CO2" [2] [bolding added].

In other words:

• Take more CO2 out of the air than we are putting in.
• Use biomass fuels to remove CO2 from the air.
  
• Don't let the CO2 from the biomass go back into the air, for a new crop of plants to absorb (the conventional biofuels cycle). We don't want the CO2 to be released at all, as that would provide no net reduction.
• Instead, sequester the CO2 at source, right from the power plant.
• Put it below the ocean floor, where it would be safe forever.

Sadly, world leaders had been giving up even on the IPCC's milder recommended target of holding the warming at 2 degrees C. How would they react to Hansen's target of 1 degree C or less? George Monbiot thinks that if people understood the implications, there would be a massive movement to demand immediate action, but he notes that most people go about their business as if there is no prominent scientist predicting a major planetary disaster.

On the other hand, some environmentalists are sceptical about CO2 sequestration and storage, and an international convention may regulate any materials stored in or under the ocean.

But what if there's even a 10% chance that Hansen is right about the potential damage if we do not follow his proposals? Multiply that 10% chance by the forecast amount of damage, and you still get an awesome risk!

Is it time for both politicians and environmentalists to start taking his latest research very seriously?


______________

[1] James Hansen, 2007. Scientific reticence and sea level rise, Environ. Res. Lett. 2 (April-June 2007) 024002, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/2/2/024002 (via newscientist.com)

[2] James Hansen et al, 2007. Climate Change and Trace Gases. Philiosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - A. Vol 365, pp 1925-1954. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2052. [PDF] screen pages 25-26 of 30 (via monbiot.com)

[Important Notice]

Discuss this on your own Blogger blog! Click on the title of this post to ensure that you have a permalink in the Address Bar, highlight any text that you wish to quote, then click here: BlogThis!