You can find more posts on climate change science, policy, and news on Climate 411.

 
OK, so I’m one day late for Earth Day because I was swamped at work yesterday ... on the plus side, after PA, people might have more time to check out a non-primary diary!
 

In honor of Earth Week, this is a bigger-picture diary than my usual offering.   Instead of covering a single topic as I normally do, I thought I’d give an overview of some of this week’s developments in climate change research.
 

Follow me over the fold for the latest on ocean acidification, Greenland’s glaciers, and the costs and opportunities from fighting global warming.

What's the upside of global warming?  Why, once the ice is gone from Greenland, it will open up whole new regions for oil exploration.  

Joern Skov Nielsen, deputy director of Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, said Thursday that there might be more oil in his country than the entire past production of the North Sea. That would be about 50 billion barrels. Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Husky Energy last year received licenses for exploration, which will be made easier by the melting of Greenland’s ice.

By the time we've burned all the oil in Greenland, Antarctica is bound to be ice-free.  Just imagine all the resources we'll find down there!

Please remind the presidential candidate of your choice that changing the sources of energy in the United States isn't a nice option at the end of a long list of "gotta haves."  Energy -- the source of which will determine everything from our foreign policy to our economy -- needs to be first.

Most of the biggest cities in the world are going to die an expensive death as the world tries to cope with the biggest catastrophe of all times, a catastrophe caused by the usual suspects:  rapacious corrupt Republican types who defile Mother Earth and everyone on the earth for their evil, ill-gotten profits.  And then of course they turn around and mock anyone who dares expose them.  The insidious global warming denier and planted doubter, Sen. Inhofe of Oklahoma, is just such an evil person.  I can't think of anyone that qualifies for the word "evil" anymore than the depraved individuals who propagate this coming hell.

In Greenland, Ice and Instability

Scientists are divided on that question, and on whether there is a near-term risk from a Texas-size portion of West Antarctica’s ice sheet that is also showing signs of instability. This split divides those foreseeing a rise in the sea level of a couple of feet this century from water added by Greenland, West Antarctica and mountain glaciers, and a few experts who speak of a couple of yards in that time.

Back in 1968, when I first heard a talk about global warming while visiting the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, almost everyone thought that serious problems were several centuries in the future. That's because no one realized how ravenous the world's appetite for coal and oil would become during a mere 40 years. They also thought that problems would develop slowly. Wrong again.

I tuned into abrupt climate change about 1984, when the Greenland ice cores showed big jumps in temperature and snowfall, stepping up and down in a mere decade but lasting centuries. I worried about global warming setting off another flip but I still didn't revise my notions about a slow time scale for the present greenhouse warming.

Greenland changed my mind. About 2004, the speedup of the Greenland glaciers made a lot of climate scientists revise their notions about how fast things were changing. When the summer earthquakes associated with glacial movement doubled and then redoubled in a mere ten years, it made me feel as if I was standing on shaky ground, that bigger things could happen at any time.

Sniffing around CNN and MSNBC tonight I saw this headline: "Arctic Is Screaming".

"Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

More below...

Did you know that a medieval warm period led to a medieval "mini" ice age?  Makes sense that it would go from one extreme to the other and that's exactly what happened just a few hundred years ago.... when Greenland really was green.

Did you know that this happened because the ocean current that shoots up near Great Britain got diverted due to massive melting of ice, amongst the many other related effects of global warming of that time?  Many if not most around here know all this but some don't, thus my diary, this appeal to try to turn around the ship to avoid this impending disaster....

Did you know that roughly the same thing is happening now, i.e. that an ice age is coming? According to scientists and computer models, see below, that's what we face.  The scientist cited in the McClatchy article benow says: 10 percent more ice has melted this year than in 2005, that the melting is due to a 7 percent increase in air temperature (see 80 degree temperatures here in NC); the article mentions that all Greenland's ice melting would rise sea levels by 21 feet, "swamping coastal cities and low-lying islands."  Of course the Atlantic "conveyor belt" would switch off before the whole thing could melt....

NASA funded microwave satellite studies revealed record melting this summer of the top of Greenland's ice cap.

Areas higher than 2000 meters in elevation melted up to 25–30 days longer than the average number of days calculated for the previous 18 years (1988–2006).

Further, the 2007 melting index—defined as the melting area times the number of melting days—for areas above 2000 meters was 153% greater than the average (Figure 1b), setting a new record.

Global Heat is apparently not the only problematic anthropogenic item hitching a ride pole-ward by wind and water. From the land of the midnight sun comes news of another unwelcome industrial stepchild with potentially far reaching effects on real children:

Times UK -- Twice as many girls as boys are being born across much of the Arctic because of pollution from industrialised countries, scientists have found. The study also found that in parts of Russia many newborn boys were sickly or underweight. The Scandinavian scientists behind the study suspect the same to be the case in Greenland and Canada. ..."In the north of Greenland, near the Thule American airbase, only girl babies are being born to Inuit families. The problem is acute in the north and east of Greenland, where people still have the traditional diet. This has become a critical question of people’s survival, but few governments want to talk about the problem."

Among the possible contributing causes are polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) which were released into the environment in massive quantities both here and abroad at one time. PCBs are a known toxin, carcinogen, and they can produce sexual changes in growing embryos -- including the feminization of male fetal anatomy and/or intersex babies.

As some of you may already be aware, the loss of arctic sea ice this summer has been extraordinary. According to the NSIDC, the amount of ice that melted this year that had never melted since recording began is about the size of the State of Florida.

The NSIDC website is updated a couple of times a week with the latest sea ice extent measurements and I watch the numbers with horror because I am one of those who think we have gone past the tipping point already and news like this just further validates my opinion.

Well in todays update there was a very scary section I want to share with you related to the BIG tipping point for climate change: changes to ocean circulation patterns.

And vice versa.

The faster we burn oil, the sooner the ice goes. This is good for oil corporations, which is a key reason why the Bush administration is not concerned about the loss of the polar ice cap, is because it opens up large new areas in the Arctic for oil exploration and exploitation.

But prospecting for oil is expensive. According to OPEC, "Oil exploration can cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars." Plus, there is no guarantee that your geologists will find oil where they're looking. So if you're a oil and gas corporation, then it would be good for the bottom line if you could eliminate areas that have no oil and focus in on places where there is a good chance of striking black gold.

And under the Bush administration, the job of finding where the Arctic oil is and isn't belongs to the taxpayer funded U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Coast Guard. This is better for the petrochemical corporations' bottom line.

Here is how our tax dollars are going to find more oil and why global warming is welcomed by our petrogovernment.

The title of the diary is part of what I felt to be an ominous quote from Marianne Douglas, a professor at the University of Alberta's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and director of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute. The quote itself seems benign until you really think about it and consider who it is coming from.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

It has long been feared that the pace of climate change would not take place in a gradual manner, but rather in an abrupt, totally unpredictable way happening so fast humans can’t successfully adjust to it. New NASA reports on the melting Greenland ice sheet show the melting ice is retreating with a fission-like acceleration, not an increase of 10% or 20% ever year, but a chain reaction doubling of the doubling every year.

Last night I went to the Yearly Kos fundraiser, burning four gallons of California gas on part of the most expensive transportation system the world has ever seen, the renowned drive of beauty up 280 to the metropolis of legendary San Francisco.  It didn’t even occur to me to take CalTrain, a horribly creaky, swaying diesel that doubled trip time versus personal car.  Will Californians and Americans change enough with their infatuation with cars to create a significant slowdown in the ice melt?  I doubt it.

Part of my new series on the 21st Century Crisis and also posted at Blue House Diaries

University of British Columbia geographer Greg Henry never used to wear a t-shirt in the Arctic, even in the middle of summer. But as The Tyee, a British Columbia-based lefty web magazine describes, he does now.

His data shows an average 6 C [nearly 11F] increase in winter temperatures at Alexandra Fjord since 1970, and a 1 degree per decade summertime increase.

The story of his findings is more than a sobering reminder of the inevitability of climate change. Instead it shows that massive climate change is already happening. The Arctic isn't the canary in the coal mine, Henry says, "the mine canary's dead. We're into full-fledged climate change."

This story in the NY Times and on AOL is about the melting Greenland ice cap and it has a cheerful gee whiz quality before it turns really ominous. First it describes people discovering islands that have been covered by glaciers for thousands of years. Isn't that just swell?

In August, Mr. Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean.

Bu then it goes on to say that Greenlands glaciers are sliding into the ocean in a way that computer model failed to predict. Greenland lost 80 cubic mile of ice last year.

This is my take on the status quo.

It sucks.

From an article published August 10, 2006 in Science:

A new analysis of data from twin satellites has revealed that the melting of Greenland's ice sheet has increased dramatically in the past few years, with much of the loss occurring primarily along one shoreline potentially affecting weather in Western Europe.

...

The Greenland study, for example, suggests that the amount of fresh water contributed from the melting of its ice sheet could add 0.56 millimeters annually to a global increase in sea levels, higher than all previously published measurements.

The warning signs are all around us -- the legacy of the industrial age is ushering in dramatic changes to the global climate.  There's no longer any use in even debating the issue, because the empirical data is too overwhelming, except for the looniest of flat earth theory adherents.

What remains to be seen (and debated) is the longer range impact of climate change.  Warning signs certainly abound there, as well.  What everyone wants to know, though, is "ok, so how am I impacted?"  The plight of the polar bears, as tragic as it might be, just doesn't touch a nerve with most people on a personal level.  In fact, the real impact of climate change is mostly charted on such a distant calendar that our short attention span society figures there's always tomorrow to fix the problem.

More depressing, non-Connecticut stuff after the jump...

From a mild winter in Greenland comes startling new data indicating that climate change and global melt may be even worse than we thought:

Link-- In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock -- in weeks, not decades or centuries. At the same time, University of Texas physicist Ginny Catania pulled an ice-penetrating radar in a search pattern around the camp, seeking evidence of any melt holes or drainage crevices that could so quickly channel the hot water of global warming deep into the ice. To her surprise, she detected a maze of tunnels, natural pipes and cracks beneath the unblemished surface.

We think of ice as something static, like ice cubes in the freezer. But on large scales, ice flows like warm cheese. There are a dozen or so outlet glaciers on the coast of Greenland that move in this manner. They drain Greenland's interior ice sheet in a slow motion version of creeks draining a rain swollen pond. But it appears that the layer of melt-water between land and ice has become enlarged and warmer, thus acting as a better lubricant for the outlet glaciers to slide along in their journey to the sea. As the ice moves faster and faster, structural weakness will bloom into rifts, rifts join up and expand becoming deep crevasses, crevasses widen into gullies. The process could eventually turn the slow moving outlet glaciers into ice choked rivers, at which point these natural, glacial dams would effectively collapse. Massive amounts of ice and water would then be released, as if from a dike, and thousands of cubic miles of fresh water and giant chunks of ice could pour into the ocean every year for decades.

The data from last February indicates that the Greenland ice sheet is melting twice as fast as it was just five years ago and the process is accelerating. This is the best studied ice sheet in the world. What's happening there may be, for all we know, happening elsewhere, including Antarctica.

Greenland's evolving outlet glaciers: The right glacier moves faster because of greater lubrication and instability provided by the growing melt-water over which it rides. Illustration created by Karen Wehrstein exclusively for this post (Artist Mojo)

There are many dangers associated with global warming. What's critical to understand is they often work together in ways that are genuinely alarming to contemplate. A near term, moderate rise in sea level of even a few feet, combined with a virtually instant increase in the intensity of hurricanes, both products of global warming, means that the deadly and destructive storm surges that accompany hurricanes would be greater and reach further inland. Gulf states, from Florida to Texas, would be especially vulnerable to this synergy. The Houston shipping channel, gulf energy platforms, the port of Miami; all could be knocked out of commission for months at time, or cease to exist. Imagine several million refugees fleeing a wrecked, inundated coastline at the same time a significant fraction of oil imports and other essential supplies are cut off, and you have some appreciation for the near term consequences of climate change.

Government sponsored research into alternative energy and greater fuel efficiency might just pay off in every way imaginable, even if the climate change worries are totally off the mark! Does it make sense to allow our entire economic fate to be held in the ruthless palm of the House of Saud and the bin Laden family, protecting their profits and keeping a tenuous hold on dwindling, finite supplies of oil half a world away with the blood of our youth and the treasure of our nation? Or might it make sense to lead the world in new technology and create jobs at home using a proven fusion of science, business, and policy? The former means preserving the status quo---along with permanent bases in Iraq and elsewhere for the next fifty years. More of the grim tragedy, never-ending expense, and unpredictable chaos we've seen far too much of for the last three years. The latter approach took us from Explorer 1 to the Sea of Tranquility in a decade.

The United States is, if anything, a science and technology nation. We can lick climate change and solve a bunch of other problems, if we make it a priority. And, if the party in power throws their arms up in the air whining "we can't", then maybe it's time for We the People to elect some leaders who can.