Brrrr, It’s Warm

The trouble with predicting the time line on global climate change and its impact on rising seas, droughts and flood, storm intensity and disease/insect migration is that there are a series of potential tripping points that can accelerate the change of pace very quickly. Some known. Some yet to be discovered.

By way of example, if arctic tundra begins to melt, it releases tons and tons of methane gas (from decomposed plant and animal life literally frozen in time). Methane is 23 times heavier than carbon dioxide, the latter which gas is viewed by most people as greenhouse gas that has caused the earth’s temperature to rise. But methane is a greenhouse gas on steroids, creating a vicious circle of higher temperatures, more methane is released, even higher temperatures, even more methane gas released, etc. And while snow and ice reflect sunlight back up, darker seas and exposed land mass absorb the sun’s heat. Melt more white stuff… and… well, you get it.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to measure how many more intense cyclones (including hurricanes) the earth has experienced in the last two decades. What’s worse, even less intense storms cause more damage because climate change has saturated the air, making the storms heavier and slowing them down. What these news storms lack in intensity they more than make up for by dumping vastly more rainwater than expected. The recent flooding has been particularly catastrophic.

There are also changes that we are just beginning to notice. All those scientists living down in the Antarctic, which unlike the North Pole, know actually has an underlying land mass covered with and surrounded by humongous levels of ice. And that ice is the problem. Scientists have noticed how much smaller Antarctica was 125,000 years ago when temperatures were only a couple of degrees warmer than they are now. As the earth cooled, Antarctica absorbed vast swaths of ocean water, dropping ocean levels the world over by 20 to 30 feet. That’s just Antarctica!

And there are parts of the ice shelf off that continent that are beginning to show signs of breaking off and melting. Now and in the immediate future. “‘It doesn’t need to be a very big warming, as long as it stays 2 degrees warmer for a sufficient time, this is the end game,’ said David Wilson, a geologist at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the new research, which was published in Nature. Scientists at institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Spain also contributed to the work.

“The research concerns a little-studied region called the Wilkes Subglacial Basin, which is roughly the size of California and Texas combined and contains more than 10 feet of potential sea-level rise. Fronted by three enormous glaciers named Cook, Mertz and Ninnis, the Wilkes is known to be vulnerable to fast retreat because the ice here is not standing on land and instead is rising up from a deep depression in the ocean floor…

“Humans have caused about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above the preindustrial planetary temperatures experienced before the year 1880 or so. The world has pledged to avoid a warming above 2 degrees Celsius, and even hopes to hold the warming to 1.5 degrees, but current promises made by countries are not nearly enough to prevent these outcomes.

“In other words, we are already on a course that could heat the planet enough to melt some or all of the Wilkes Basin… ‘We say 2 degrees beyond preindustrial, and we’re already beyond preindustrial,’ Wilson said. ‘So this is potentially the kinds of temperatures we could see this century.’

“The study cannot reveal, however, just how quickly ice emptied out of the Wilkes Basin. The past warm periods in question are thought to have been driven by slight variations in Earth’s orbit as it rotates around the sun, leading to stronger summer heat. That warmth was maintained for thousands of years.

“‘What we definitely can say is that during the [geological] stages where temperatures were warm for a couple of degrees for a couple of millennia, this is where we see a distinct signature in our records,’ Wilson said. ‘We can’t necessarily say things didn’t happen quick, but we can’t resolve that in our data.’” Washington Post, September 20^th.

But global warming is just a series of seemingly unrelated occurrences all over the world. Many are mysteries waiting to be unraveled. Nevertheless, it’s not about any one story; it’s about the aggregation of all those occurrences, trends and laws of nature responding to human activity. And the unpredictable mixture of activity in differing parts of the world, the combination of human events triggering accelerating natural phenomena, should have us all concerned. We are stupidly proceeding at our collective peril.

I’m Peter Dekom, and understanding the impact of climate change is to understand how many parts there are to this human-induced path… and how much their interaction can make things worse… so much worse.