ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Scientists have concluded that Canada’s precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.

Canada’s 1.2 million square miles of trees account for more than 7 percent of Earth’s total forest lands. As the “lungs of the planet,” they could be depended upon to suck up and sequester vast quantities of carbon dioxide.

In a series of recent studies  scientists have concluded that Canada’s forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, are now pumping out more carbon dioxide than they are sequestering. They’ve shifted from being a carbon sink to a carbon source.

This post is based on a story by Howard Witt in the Chicago Tribune that has been widely distributed and cited. The story referenced “a series of recent studies” but failed to identify or cite to any of them. I searched the web for them, hoping to provide a link to one or more of the actual studies that Witt refers to and supposedly relies on, to no avail.  Drives me nuts.

Professor James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s preeminant global warming scientist, has written a personal  letter to Barack and Michelle Obama, warning of the “profound disconnect” between the politics of climate change and the magnitude of the problem:

There is a profound disconnect between actions that policy circles are considering and what the science demands for preservation of the planet. . .

Science and policy cannot be divorced. It is still feasible to avert climate disasters, but only if policies are consistent with what science indicates to be required.

Hansen makes three recommendations for action:

• Moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that do not capture and store CO2.
• Rising price on carbon emissions via a “carbon tax and 100% dividend”.
• Urgent R&D on 4th generation nuclear power with international cooperation.

Hansen says focusing on “cap and trade” schemes not only wastes valuable time. Cap and trade generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non productive millionaires, all at public expense. He advocates instead a carbon tax with 100% dividend, we he argues “would spur our economy, while aiding the disadvantaged, the climate, and our national security.”

Insisting on a 100% return of carbon tax proceeds is a continuation of the anti-government, free market fundamentalism that has gotten us into the economic and environmental pickle we find ourselves in.

Hansen doesn’t ignore the radioactive waste and proliferation problems with nuclear power, but thinks they can be handled. He fingers cost as the primary hurdle. But here’s why nuclear will never be the answer to our energy needs. Hansen, while acknowledging that “there’s no such thing as clean coal at this time,” also thinks CCS deserves strong R&D support.  As the disaster in Tennessee demonstrates, there is and can never be any such thing as clean coal.

While Hansen may be one of the world’s top scientists, that doesn’t mean he’s one of the world’s top economists, philosophers, or historians.

While Hansen has done the world a great service in the realm of climate science, his ideas outside of the realm of science are warped by historicism. He is deeply enmeshed within the myth of progress, wedded to ever-increasing technological complexity which he believes will enable us to overcome the ecological limits that he was among the first to warn were approaching.

Climate change is likely to produce significant new stresses and alterations to water quantity and quality, fish, wildlife, plant life, forests and fire regimes of the Rogue Basin.

So say the scientists who wrote Preparing For Climate Change in the Rogue River Basin of Southwest Oregon. The research team included Bob Doppelt and Roger Hamilton from the University of Oregon Climate Leadership Initiative, Cindy Deacon Williams from the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy, and Marni Koopman from the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.

The team downscaled three climate models (CSIRO, MIROC, and Hadley) and incorporated a global vegetation change model (MC1) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They then assessed the likely risks posed by changing climate conditions to natural systems. Finally, they made recommendations for increasing the capacity of ecosystems and species to withstand and adapt to those stressors.

Expected impacts within the Rogue Basin include:

• An increase in annual average temperatures from 1 to 3° F (0.5 to 1.6° C) by around 2040 and 4 to 8° by around 2080, with summer temperatures increasing dramatically by up to 15° (8.3° C).
• Snowpack reduced 75% from the baseline by 2040, and another 75% from 2040 to an insignificant amount by 2080.
• Both deeper drought and more extensive flooding.
• Significantly more wildfire due to reduced snowpack and soil moisture, hotter temperatures, and longer fire seasons.
• Increased vulnerability of aquatic and terrestrial species.
• Increased disruption and direct damage to energy infrastructure, transportation systems, buildings, and real estate.
• Tougher times for agriculture, timber, and winter recreation.

The report cautions that even if efforts to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80% or more and other global efforts to restabilize the climate are realized (fat chance!), it will take fifty years or more for this to occur because of the residence time of emissions already built-up in the atmosphere.  These consequences of climate change are already built in to the system.

In other words, we’ve already screwed the pooch.

Climate Feedback reports that new research presented at the AGU conference last week finds that the entire Antarctic continent has warmed significantly over the past 50 years.

The study suggests that warming is not limited to the Antarctica peninsula region. As well as uncovering evidence of warming over a wider region than previous studies have shown, the researchers found that warming occurred throughout all of the year and was greatest in winter and spring. In contrast, cooling over east Antarctica was restricted to autumn.

Obama has tapped Oregon State University’s Jane Lubchenco to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Lubchenco’s expertise includes interactions between humans and the
environment: biodiversity, climate change, sustainability science,
ecosystem services, marine reserves, coastal marine ecosystems, the
state of the oceans and of the planet.  She was a Presidential
appointee to two terms on the National Science Board, which advises the
President and Congress and oversees the National Science Foundation.
She served on the Pew Oceans Commission and now the Joint Oceans
Commission Initiative (a merger of the Pew Oceans Commission and the
U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy) and co-chaired Oregon Governor
Kulongoski’s Advisory Group on Global Warming which recommended actions
the state should take to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

A video of her talk on “Climate Change and its Implications for Oregon” can be found here.

This week the American Geophysical Union has been holding its fall conference in San Francisco. Here are some highlights.

While many of the scientists presenting work dithered with whether stabilizing at 450ppm – or even higher – is economically and technologically feasible, James Hansen called for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to be restricted to 350ppm. Hansen has said that we lower our target from 2°C to a 1°C increase above pre-industrial levels.

Olive Heffernon reports at Climate Feedback:

What is striking about the discussions on climate stabilization here this week is the overwhelming acceptance that we’ll overshoot even the 2°C target.

Dr. Eric Rignot, one of the world’s top ice sheet and sea-level rise experts, told attendees that one meter sea level rise by 2100 is “very likely” if the rate of ice melt just stays the same. What he didn’t address is what will happen if the rate of melt increases - as is expected.

Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech told the press that the fate of Earth’s climate hinges on the size of the world’s coal reserves - but how much coal remains is highly uncertain. Rutledge has estimated that coal reserves are much less than assumed in the IPCC scenarios and combustion of all remaining conventional oil, gas, and coal reserves would produce an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of approximately 470 ppm in 2100, not too much above the 450 ppm that many climatologists argue we must achieve to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Of course that doesn’t consider feedback effects or other carbon sources such as methane. University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientists reported alarming news:

A team led by International Arctic Research Center scientist Igor Semiletov has found data to suggest that the carbon pool beneath the Arctic Ocean is leaking. . .

The new data indicates the underwater permafrost is thawing and therefore releasing methane. Permafrost can affect methane release in two ways. Both underwater and on land, it contains frozen organic material such as dead plants and animals. When permafrost thaws, that organic material decomposes, releasing gases like methane and carbon dioxide. In addition, methane, either in gas form or in ice-like methane hydrates, is trapped underneath the permafrost. When the permafrost thaws, the trapped methane can seep out through the thawed soil. Methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, is thought to be an important factor in global climate change.

Incredibly, scientists, industry leaders and governments throughout the world are looking to methane to replace depleting oil and natural gas (Japan has a methane hydrate program and a state-backed drilling company has managed to extract industrial quantities of the gas). The amount of methane trapped as hydrates globally exceeds by many times the total combined oil, coal and natural gas reserves that have ever existed on earth. Release of methane  correlates with previous rapid global warming events in Earth’s history.

Tar sands, oil shale development, deepwater oil extraction, the ongoing proliferation of coal-fired power plants, now methane hydrates.  Methane hydrates - what are they thinking? Are humans as a species truly suicidal?

Today marks the release of the ‘meteorological year’ (December - November) averages for the surface temperature records (GISTEMP, HadCRU, NCDC).

RealClimate advises looking at 5-year averages, as this cuts through the “noise” in the annual numbers. What do we see?

More robustly, the most recent 5-year averages are all significantly higher than any in the last century. The last decade is by far the warmest decade globally in the record.

NOAA has posted a summary of 2008 highlights. NCDC, using a calendar year, ranks 2008 as ninth warmest if expected trends continue through December. A similar NASA analysis indicates that the January – November global temperature was 0.76 degree F (0.42 degree C) above the 20th century mean.

NOAA reports that the global land surface temperature for 2008 was the fifth warmest on record, with an average temperature 1.44 degrees F (0.80 degree C) above the 20th century mean of 48.1 degrees F (9.0 degrees C). Looking at the land data alone filters out the cooling impact of the La Niña that impacted the Pacific in the first half of the year.

Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 reached its second lowest melt season extent on record.

The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most costly on record in current dollars, after 2005 and 2004, and the fourth most active year since 1944.

The United States Geological Survey has published a new report titled Abrupt Climate Change. Peter Clark and Edward Brook, both of whom are in the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University, were contributors to the report.

Chapter 2, “Rapid Changes in Glaciers and Ice Sheets and their Impacts on Sea Level,” observes that our current models can’t predict the changes in ice sheets and glaciers that we’re already seeing. The report reviews the new data accumulating about ice flow processes and concludes that “Inclusion of these processes in models will likely lead to sea-level projections for the end of the 21st century that substantially exceed the projections presented in the IPCC AR4 report (0.28 ± 0.10 m to 0.42 ± 0.16 m rise).”

During the last interglacial period (~120 thousand years ago) with similar carbon dioxide levels to pre-industrial values and Arctic summer temperatures up to 4° C warmer than today, sea level was 4-6 meters above present. The report points out the obvious: with sufficient time at elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, sea levels will continue to rise to historic levels as ice sheets continue to lose mass.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress point out that the recent post-IPCC literature has been quite consistent in warning of sea level rise of one meter or more by 2100. There’s a 2008 Science study  (“Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100”), a 2007 Science article (A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise) projecting that sea levels could be up to 5 feet higher in 2100 and rising 6 inches a decade, and another 2007 study from Nature Geoscience (“Sea levels may rise 5 feet by 2100“) that came to the same conclusion.

Chapter 3, “Hydrological Variability and Change,” concludes that subtropical aridity is likely to intensify and persist due to future greenhouse warming. This projected drying extends poleward into the United States Southwest, potentially increasing the likelihood of severe and persistent drought there in the future. If the model results are correct, this drying may have already begun.

The U.S. Southwest could see a permanent drying by the mid-21st century similar to the historic “megadroughts” that occurred from about A.D. 900 up to about A.D. 1600 - even though the cause of these previous droughts was not similar, as they occurred in a climate system “that was not being perturbed in a major way be humans.”

A new study from scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says that Arctic ice is in its death spiral.

The UK Independent reports:

Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.

Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.

The Arctic is considered one of the most sensitive regions in terms of climate change and its transition to another climatic state will have a direct impact on other parts of the northern hemisphere, as well more indirect effects around the world.

Scientists’ models have predicted totally ice-free summers in the Arctic sometime in the last half of this century, but many scientists now believe that the first ice-free summer could occur within the next 20 years.

The loss of Arctic ice has serious consequences for amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks, as the accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland. Joseph Romm sums it up at Climate Progress:

Once the Arctic sea ice goes, it becomes much harder to save the defrosting of the tundra, which contains as much carbon as the atmosphere, much of which is likely to be released as methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

New NASA satellite data reveals more than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland,  Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003.

Stanford professor Mark Jacobson has published a study which compares the global warming consequences of different energy alternatives.

Joseph Romm has posted this chart at Climate Progress.  Wind and concentrated solar power are the best, hands down. CCS (carbon capture and storage, or the oxymoronic “clean coal”, is by far the filthiest)

In addition to global warming, the paper looks at other factors, too: air pollution mortality, and energy security, water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition. As this chart (posted at Gristmill) shows, cellulosic ethanol is the worst, with corn ethanol right behind:

The study, “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security“, was published in Energy and Environmental Science.

The National Research Council calls for immediate government action to reduce urban and Midwest farmland runoff blamed for feeding an 8,000-square-mile oxygen-depleted “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. The report released Thursday says nitrogen and phosphorus loads must be reduced by at least 45% if the dead zone is to be reduced in size.

The report, requested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which sought the advice of the NRC in implementing the Clean Water Act, recommends that a load reduction allocation scheme be implemented. In exemplary bureaucratese, the report identifies five principles to be followed to allocate and achieve cap load reductions for the Mississippi River basin:

• Select an interim goal for nutrient load reductions as the first stage of an adaptive, incremental process toward subsequent reduction goals;
• Target watersheds to which load reductions are to be allocated;
• Adopt an allocation formula for distributing interim load reductions to targeted watersheds within the basin that balances equity and cost-effectiveness considerations;
• Allow credit for past progress; and
• Encourage the use of market-based approaches to allow jurisdictional flexibility in achieving allocated load reductions. It bears keeping in mind, however, that such markets do not automatically lead to satisfactory outcomes. Such markets require some regulatory caps on nutrient losses in order to operate.

The full report along with other material is available here.

Even as international climate talks are beginning in Poznan, Poland, the world’s top climate scientists are warning that Earth’s climate is changing more quickly and deeply than the benchmark IPCC report predicted just last year.

New studies are showing that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that may be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further. At the top of the list is the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap. When the reflective ice surface retreats, the Sun’s radiation is absorbed by open water rather than bounced back into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop of heating.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a great summary of  why scientists are running around with their hair on fire:

Joe Romm passes along the news today that Himalayan glaciers are melting faster than anyone has previously predicted. You can add this to Romm’s list of other climate change impacts that are happening faster than most climate models predict, including the canonical IPCC models:

• “The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models” [PDF] — and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. The retreat has accelerated in the past two years.
• The ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.” That was Penn State climatologist Richard Alley in March 2006. In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.
• Sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 — 3.3 millimetres per year as measured by satellites — was higher than the IPCC climate models predicted.
• The ocean carbon sink is saturating sooner than expected.
• The subtropics are expanding faster than the models project.

This op-ed by Elliot Diringer, Pew Center on Global Climate Change illustrates why cap-and-trade schemes are a waste of precious time and political energy. They simply can’t accomplish what is necessary to accomplish within the time frame necessary to avert climate catastrophe.

What’s needed is an international agreement to not build any more coal-fired power plants (without carbon capture and storage, which of course is not feasible) and to phase out existing coal plants within 20 years.

Global warming is forever, warns an article in Nature Reports. Some of the world’s top climate scientists have concluded: carbon dioxide emitted from today’s homes, cars and factories will continue to heat up the planet for hundreds of thousands of years.

Most governments have assumed that carbon dioxide emissions would work their way out of the atmosphere in about a century, enabling it to clean itself fairly rapidly once the world switched to clean sources of energy. But Professor David Archer of Chicago University warns:

“the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilisation so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.”

He and other leading scientists spell out why in a paper to be published in the journal Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Carbon dioxide mainly leaves the atmosphere by being soaked up by the oceans. But those processes are slowing down. Much of the carbon released today will have to wait hundreds of thousands of years before being removed by another, infinitely slower, process: the natural weathering of rocks, which incorporates the gas into other substances.

Archer has a book out, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, that contains this graph illustrating the process (helpfully posted by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress):

Co-author Professor Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institute for Science, in Stanford, California, adds another alarming twist to the story: even after the pollution stops, the Earth’s temperature will not start to fall but will settle at a new, higher level.

Professor James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, warns that the long lifetime of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning means that just slowing down emissions is no solution. Some of the fuels must be left in the ground for ever, and then CO2 must actually be removed from the air. Hansen proposes removing carbon dioxide by growing trees.

Most important: no more coal (or oil from “unconventional” sources such as tar sands).

Scientists at the University of Michigan claim a revolutionary device they call Vivace - “vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy” - can harness enough energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents to provide enough power for the entire world. The technology was developed in research funded by the US government. “Vortex induced vibrations” were first observed 500 years ago by Leonardo DaVinci, a phenomenon he described as “Aeolian tones.”

The technology - a system of cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs - can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe.

As water flows past, the cylinder creates vortices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in the vibrations is then converted into electricity. Cylinders arranged over a cubic meter of the sea or river bed in a flow of three knots can produce 51 watts. This is more efficient than similar-sized turbines or wave generators, and the amount of power produced can increase sharply if the flow is faster or if more cylinders are added. A “field” of cylinders built on the sea bed over a 1km by 1.5km area, and the height of a two-story house, with a flow of just three knots, could generate enough power for around 100,000 homes. Systems could be sited on river beds or suspended in the ocean.

Existing turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth’s currents are slower than three knots.

Because the parts only oscillate slowly, the technology is likely to be less harmful to aquatic wildlife than dams or water turbines. And as the installations can be positioned far below the surface of the sea, there would be less interference with shipping, recreational boat users, fishing and tourism.

The European Space Agency reports new rifts have developed on the Wilkins Ice Shelf that could lead to the opening of the ice bridge that has been preventing the ice shelf from disintegrating and breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula.

As Antarctica summer is about to begin, the Wilkins Ice Shelf is experiencing significant changes which could lead to a new break-up. The ESA site has posted animated photos showing the gradual opening of fractures during the last days, in particular on 26 November 2008.

In the past 20 years, seven ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated or disintegrated, including the most spectacular break-up of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002.

Wilkins is the size of the state of Connecticut, or about half the area of Scotland. It is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened. The ice shelf had been stable for most of the past century before it began retreating in the 1990s.

Scientists have found that global warming actually changes the molecular structure of organic matter in soil, releasing carbon in the process in a feedback loop that worsens global warming.

Soil contains more than twice the amount of carbon than the atmosphere in the form of organic matter. Organic matter makes dirt fertile and able to support plant life, retains water in the soil, and prevents erosion. Natural processes of decomposition of soil organic matter provide plants and microbes with the energy source and water they need to grow. Carbon is released into the atmosphere as a by-product of this process. Warming temperatures speed up this process, which will increase the amount of CO2 that is transferred to the atmosphere. The loss of organic matter in soils also has ominous implications for agriculture.

The research findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Figures contained in the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) document Marine Programme Plan ahow a decline in zooplankton of more than 70% since the 1960s.

The data for graph at p. 9 of the report came from a 2005 assessment of the state of the UK’s
seas. The graph charts a steady decline in zooplankton from 1990 to 2006 - a decline described by the environmental group Charity Buglife as “a biodiversity disaster of enormous proportions.”

These microscopic sea animals are at the bottom of the food chain. They are food for crustaceans and fish, which are food for sea birds and mammals. And the oceanic food web plays a crucial role in the planetary biosphere.

Richard Heinberg ruminates on the grim implications for humans:

At the top of the global food chain sits a species that we really do care about—Homo sapiens. The ongoing disappearance of zooplankton, amphibians, butterflies, and bees is tied directly or indirectly to the continuing growth of our own species—both in population (there are nearly seven billion of us large-bodied omnivores, more than any other mammal) and in consumptive voracity (water, food, minerals, energy, forests—you name it).

But the current economic Armageddon (that we care about) is related to human-induced biodiversity loss (that many of us don’t notice) in systemic ways. Both result from pyramid schemes: borrowing and leveraging money on one hand; on the other, using temporary fossil energy to capture ever more biosphere services so as to grow human population and consumption to unsustainable levels. Our economic pyramid is built out of great hewn blocks of renewable and non-renewable resources that are being made unavailable to other organisms as well as to future generations of humans.

The financial meltdown tells us these trends can’t go on forever. How the mighty have fallen!—Masters of the Universe reduced to begging for billion-dollar handouts in front of a television audience.

Next will come a human demographic collapse (resulting from the economic crisis, with poor folks unable to afford food or shelter), as mortality begins to exceed fertility.

In all of this it’s important to remember that the species on the lower levels of the biodiversity pyramid have been paying the price for our exuberance all along.

The pyramid appears to collapse from the top, while in fact its base has been crumbling for some time.

A new study conducted in the Pacific Ocean at Tatoosh Island off the coast of Washington finds that ocean acidity has increased more than 10 times faster than had been predicted by climate change models and other studies. The new study is based on 24,519 measurements of ocean pH spanning eight years, which represents the first detailed dataset on variations of coastal pH at temperate latitudes where the world’s most productive fisheries are found.

This increase will have a severe impact on marine food webs and suggests that ocean acidification may be a more urgent issue than previously thought. Many sea creatures have shells or skeletons made of calcium carbonate, which is dissolved by acid. The increased acidity of the ocean could interfere with many critical ocean processes such as coral reef building or shellfish harvesting. The study documented that the number of mussels and stalked barnacles fell as acidity increased. At the same time, populations of smaller, shelled species and noncalcareous algae increased.

The ocean plays a significant role in global carbon cycles. When atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid, increasing the acidity of the ocean. During the day, carbon dioxide levels in the ocean fall because photosynthesis takes it out of the water, but at night, levels increase again. The study documented this daily pattern, as well as a steady increase in acidity over time.

The study, “Dynamical Patterns and Ecological Impacts of Declining Ocean pH in a High-Resolution Multi-Year Dataset,” will be published in the Dec. 2 issue of PNAS.

“The lifetime of fossil fuel CO₂ in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. The next time you fill your tank, reflect upon this.”

So says University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer in his new book The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate.

“The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO₂ to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge. Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.”

The effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere drop off so slowly that unless we stop burning fossil fuels we could force Earth out of its regular pattern of freezes and thaws that has lasted for more than a million years.

Archer warns:

“If the entire coal reserves were used, then glaciation could be delayed for half a million years.”

If all recoverable fossil fuels were burnt up, after 1,000 years the air would still hold around a third to a half of the CO₂ emissions. For practical purposes, 500 to 1000 years is forever, as the face of the planet would be transformed.

Civilization is adapted to climate zones of the Holocene. As James Hansen and colleagues write in their study Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? (now published in the The Open Atmospheric Science Journal), CO2 levels 450 ppm or larger, if long maintained, would push Earth out of the Holocene past climate tipping points toward the ice-free state, initiating dynamic responses beyond humanity’s control. The Earth’s climate system, because of its inertia, has not yet fully responded to the human-made climate forcings already in the pipeline. If we are to preserve a climate resembling that to which humanity is accustomed, CO2 amount must be reduced to 325-355, if not further.

Hansen draws the energy policy implications of the lasting effects of CO₂:

“Because of this long CO₂ lifetime, we cannot solve the climate problem by slowing down emissions by 20% or 50% or even 80%. It does not matter much whether the CO₂ is emitted this year, next year, or several years from now.”

Bottom line: preservation of the climate of the Holocene requires that most remaining fossil fuel carbon is never emitted to the atmosphere. The only realistic way to sharply curtail CO2 emissions is to phase out coal use except where CO2 is captured and
sequestered.

NSIDC reports air temperatures over the period September 15-October 31 were unusually high over much of the Arctic, especially over the Arctic Ocean.

Counterintuitively, these warm conditions are consistent with a rate of ice growth exceeded only in 2007. NSIDC explains:

“Before sea ice can start to grow, the ocean must lose the heat it gained during the summer. One way the ocean does this is by transferring its heat to the atmosphere. This heat transfer is largely responsible for the anomalously high (but still below freezing) air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean seen in Figure 3. Only after the ocean loses its heat and cools to the freezing point, can ice begin to form.”

NSIDC says that “Arctic amplification” was predicted by climate models:

“In the past five years, the Arctic has shown a pattern of strong low-level atmospheric warming over the Arctic Ocean in autumn because of heat loss from the ocean back to the atmosphere. Climate models project that this atmospheric warming, known as Arctic amplification, will become more prominent in coming decades and extend into the winter season. As larger expanses of open water are left at the end of each melt season, the ocean will continue to hand off heat to the atmosphere.”