I Came, I Thawed, I Conquered

Beastly hot weather on the east coast, raging forest fires tearing up in Colorado, California, Texas and New Mexico and farmland through the mid-west, southwest and west that is bone dry with no relief in sight. And that’s just the United States. The news “elsewhere” is equally discouraging, and when you look at the extreme evidence, there has to be a large contingent of environmental scientists and climatologists who are quietly asking the big question, trying not to speak it too loudly for fear of sparking panic: have we reached that tipping point in global warming where the process of melting and warming has grown sufficiently that such phenomenon are able to accelerate the process regardless of what humans do to contain their greenhouse gasses?

The barometer that captivates the scientific community is Greenland, that massive Danish island off Canada that is usually anything but green. In normal times, about 40-50% of the surface ice melts in the summer months and reforms as the colder months take over. This year, in late July, that number actually doubled to a 97% meltdown of surface ice. The above rendered satellite comparison photograph is about as strong a visual presentation of this phenomenon as you can find. Startling! July had already seen a huge crack release a massive glacier into the sea: “An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan tore off one of Greenland's largest glaciers, illustrating another dramatic change to the warming island.

“For several years, scientists had been watching a long crack near the tip of the northerly Petermann Glacier. On [July 23^rd], NASA satellites showed it had broken completely, freeing an iceberg measuring 46 square miles. Stuff.com.nz, July 25^th. Water is rising fast in Greenland, as this recent photography illustrates:

Skeptics have countered that Greenland has seen this level of meltdown before – back in 1889 – but even the skeptics are worried that if this trend does in fact continue, it is a profoundly bad omen. By 2100, depending on whose numbers you believe, oceans should rise globally by two to six feet. I won’t be here, so someone else will have to check it out for me. What worries me is the here and now… and the immediate future my son and his family will have to live in. I fear that those bad projections might just accelerate and happen well before my son (who is a married adult) is my age.

Some of the nastiness comes from simple stuff. Ice is white and reflects light and heat away from the earth. Lack of ice creates darker shades that absorb and hold such heat. So as ice melts, there’s more dark spots, which generate heat, which melt more ice, and so on. Tundra traps lots of organic methane, a gas which creates the greenhouse effect over twenty times more serious than a comparable release of carbon dioxide. When temperatures melt tundra – which is happening in places like Russia and Canada – the escaping methane accelerates the greenhouse effect, heating the tundra even more, and you can see how pernicious that cycle has become.

Back in March of this year, “leading scientists, policy-makers and environment groups gathered at the ‘Planet Under Pressure’ conference in London” and reached the collective conclusion that “The world is close to reaching [irreversible] tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming.” Reuters, March 26^th. But are we already there? “Despite this sense of urgency, a new global climate treaty forcing the world's biggest polluters, such as the United States and China, to curb emissions will only be agreed on by 2015 - to enter into force in 2020.

“‘We are on the cusp of some big changes,’ said [executive director of the Australian National University's climate change institute Will] Steffen. ‘We can ... cap temperature rise at two degrees, or cross the threshold beyond which the system shifts to a much hotter state.’” Reuters. And exactly how will we live in the new environment if we have in fact tipped that scale?

I’m Peter Dekom, and reactive solutions simply don’t work in dynamics where irreversible tipping points govern.