… and yes, we’re all hosed. Due to CO2 that humans have already released into the air, we’re already talking about an adjustment period of hundreds of years — even if we stopped altogether right away.
“When you look at the American government, which is saying essentially, ‘Wait a minute. We need to study this some more. We can’t flip our energy use overnight. It would hurt the economy.’ When you hear that, what do you think?” Pelley asked.
“Well, what I do then is, I try to tell them exactly what we know scientifically. The science is, I believe, unassailable,” says [climatologist] Corell. “I’m not arguing their policy, that’s their business, how they deal with policy. But my job is to say, scientifically, shorten that time scale so that if you don’t push out the effects of climate change into the long, long distant future. Because even under the best of circumstances, this natural system of a climate will continue to warm the planet for literally hundreds of years, no matter what we do.”
More Katrinas: Count on it.
PS: If you have a strong stomach, see what one of our esteemed commenters had to say on Boston’s response to rising sea levels, from a thread about a year ago. Optimism!
specific climate changes seen in Vermont:
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killing frost didn’t come last fall until November. Therefore , no red leaves on maple trees, no foliage season, tourist who won’t come back, since there’s nothing remarkable to see. So, serious loss of income for hotels, restaurants, stores and small businesses depend on tourists.
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this winter: man made snow for skiing, but not for snow mobiling, not thick enough ice for ice fishing. Again, why will tourists, second homers, come?
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Sap in maples trees running in January, stressing the trees which need the dormant time ( a nice long cold winter) for good growth. l know farmers who tapped in March and had an infintessimal sap run. Stressed trees die.
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Farmers plant planning around existing soil conditions, and a known growing season. At the moment both of these are more unpredictable that usual: another dry September? another October too wet to harvest? Frost in October, November? Around me I see corn which was too dry to harvest, still standing in fields. This was intended as food for cows, then milk and meat for us… Around here winter squash didn’t ‘set’ last fall, due to the warm weather and rotted in the fields, never having ripened .
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This is not about scientific stuff to debate, this is about sustaining life.
A nasty feedback mechanism, first noticed in western Siberia, will soon flood the atmosphere with methane. Unstable permafrost methane clathrates (also called hydrates) will melt, and the freed methane will cause local warming, leading to further clathrate melting and bacteria growth. Do you understand what a yearly release of a few billion tons of methane would do??
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Just the facts Jack:
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Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing the Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to when we will pass the tipping point and be helpless to stop the runaway global warming.
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There are enormous quantities of methane trapped in permafrost and under the oceans in ice-like structures called clathrates. The methane in Arctic permafrost clathrates is estimated at 400 billion tons.
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Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as CO2, and the atmosphere currently contains about 3.5 billion tons of the gas.
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The highest temperature increase from global warming is occurring in the arctic regions-an area rich in these unstable clathrates. Simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show that over half the permafrost will thaw by 2050, and as much as 90 percent by 2100.
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Peat deposits may be a comparable methane source to melting permafrost. When peat that has been frozen for thousands of years thaws, it still contains viable populations of bacteria that begin to convert the peat into methane and CO2.
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Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. The west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70 billion tonnes of methane. Local atmospheric levels of methane on the Siberian shelf are now 25 times higher than global concentrations.
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By the way, warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons have caused microbial activity to increase dramatically in the soil around the world. This, in turn, means that much of the carbon long stored in the soil is now being released into the atmosphere.
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Releases of methane from melting oceanic clathrates have caused severe environmental impacts in the past. The methane in oceanic clathrates has been estimated at 10,000 billion tons.
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55 million years ago a global warming chain reaction (probably started by volcanic activity) melted oceanic clathrates. It was one of the most rapid and extreme global warming events in geologic history.
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Humans appear to be capable of emitting CO2 in quantities comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels releases more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes.
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Methane in the atmosphere does not remain long, persisting for about 10 years before being oxidized to CO2 (a greenhouse gas that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years). Chronic methane releases oxidizing into CO2 contribute as much to warming as does the transient methane concentrations.
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To summarize, human activity is causing the Earth to warm. Bacteria converts carbon in the soil into greenhouse gasses, and enormous quantities are trapped in unstable clathrates. As the earth continues to warm, permafrost clathrates will thaw; peat and soil microbial activity will dramatically increase; and, finally, vast oceanic clathrates will melt. This global warming chain reaction has happened in the past.
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Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rose by a record amount over the past year. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply. Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear the trend could be the first sign of runaway global warming.
an oil truck just drove down my road .
Have you practical suggestions beyond voting and recycling? I’ve already changed all my light bulbs to compact flourescents.
The government will follow here, not lead. I hear people say, “there’s nothing we can do”. Are they right?