What if Our Numbers Are Wrong?

We may have passed the tipping point on climate change. We’ve begun measuring increasing melting glacial ice at both poles… and the more white, heat-reflective, ice melts, the more the darker earth (e.g., in the Antarctic, Greenland, etc.) and darker seas (e.g., in the Arctic) – knowing that darker surfaces absorb heat – replace that reflective surface. Likewise, the more tundra/permafrost melts releasing organic-based gasses (mostly methane) trapped for millennia, the more these much-heavier-than-carbon-dioxide greenhouse accelerants rise into the atmosphere.

Once these processes reach critical mass, and they are very close to achieving that nasty reality, then global warming becomes unstoppable. Mankind’s reduction in fossil fuel emissions may mitigate some of the damage, but the horribles scientists have been predicting will happen much faster with greater consequence than predicted. The numbers we are seeing, looking at ocean temperatures, sea rise as well as melting ice and permafrost are much worse.

“Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a ‘tipping point,’ and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday [1/21 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (“PNAS”)].

“The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012 was nearly four times the rate in 2003, and after a lull in 2013-14, it has resumed.

“The study is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative. Just a week ago, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is contributing more to rising sea levels than previously thought.” New York Times, January 21^st. That latter study, Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979–2017, was also published in PNAS, January 14^th.

Right here in the United States, the increasing intensity western states’ wildfires and the Gulf and Atlantic hurricanes is a direct and immediate result of those worsening numbers.  The outer banks in the Carolinas and some of the land mass off coastal Louisiana have eroded to the point where no one seriously doubts that they will disappear. Islands are disappearing. Flooding in Southern Florida, even big cities like Miami, has become routine. Droughts in some reaches of our nation and floods in others are a direct consequence of our arrogant inattentiveness.

The world has talked a good game against global warming, got some nice treaties signed on the subject (noting the United States wouldn’t even agree to the most basic treaty on point), but there is not remotely enough concerted environmental action anywhere even to begin the process of a necessary environmental turnaround.

The anatomy of a hurricane lends itself well to defining the scope of the problem. A hurricane forms when opposing currents of relatively warmer and cooler air create swirling air (swirls reflected in the sea below). Clearly, the determination of expected intensity begins there, but what make a hurricane even deadlier is how much water it picks up. And that depends on the temperature of the surface water that feeds the hurricane. Warmer water evaporates faster, and the hurricane absorbs the additional moisture accordingly. The more water inside a hurricane, the heavier that storm gets… and the heavier a storm gets, the slower it moves. Slower storms, therefore, just sit over land mass dumping vastly more downpours below. We’ve witnessed this extra form of damage in the recent horrific Hurricanes, Harvey and Maria.

We now know that 2018 was the warmest year for oceanic temperatures in recorded history, “a stark indication of the enormous amount of heat being absorbed by the sea as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, scientists reported Wednesday [1/16]… The analysis by an international team of scientists confirms that the oceans are heating up much faster than previously recognized and that the pace of warming has accelerated sharply since the 1990s… Rising ocean temperatures are already having profound consequences across the globe, scientists say, contributing to more intense hurricanes, destroying coral reefs and causing sea levels to rise.

“The report in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences builds on a study last week that found oceans are warming 40% more, on average, than was estimated by a United Nations scientific panel just five years ago. In fact, each of the last 10 years is among the 10 warmest on record, according to data from Lijing Cheng of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing, who led the research… The unrelenting pattern is ‘incontrovertible proof that the Earth is warming,’ and an unmistakable signal of the serious damage humans are already causing through climate change, the authors of the new study wrote.

“Earth’s oceans provide a crucial buffer against climate change by swallowing 93% of the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse gases humans are spewing into the atmosphere… ‘The oceans are really the Earth’s thermometer,’ said Zeke Hausfather , a climate scientist with the academic nonprofit Berkeley Earth who collaborated on the research. ‘They’re where all the heat ends up. They’re where we’d expect the strongest signs of climate change to be. And that’s exactly what we see.’

“In contrast with rising surface temperatures, which can vary from year to year with the influence of weather and cyclical climate patterns such as El Niño, the warming of the ocean has been inexorable, with virtually every year breaking the heat record set just 12 months earlier… ‘There’s no sign of any slowdown or pause,’ Hausfather said. ‘The ocean temperature is increasing year over year in lockstep with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.’

“Indeed, emissions have accelerated as President Trump and some other world leaders have pursued energy policies that promote fossil fuels. Global carbon emissions increased 1.6% between 2016 and 2017, then jumped an additional 2.7% in 2018, according to estimates published last month in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Last week, the research firm Rhodium Group reported that U.S. carbon emissions rose 3.4% in 2018 after years of declines.

“Rather than measure the water’s temperature, the researchers focused on the amount of energy the oceans had taken in. They determined that the heat content has increased by around 370 zettajoules since 1955.” Los Angeles Times, January 17^th. To get an idea of what this means, 1 Joule/sec = 1 watt, 1 calorie = 4.2 Joules, 1 BTU = 1055 Joules. A zettajoule is a joule followed by 21 zeroes.

The oceans have always absorbed heat. What is different over the last few decades is how much more heat the oceans have absorbed beyond what scientists initially had estimated. A November 1^st study led by Morgan Kelly of the Princeton Environmental Institute and Robert Monroe of Scripps Institution of Oceanography tells us: “For each year during the past quarter century, the world’s oceans have absorbed an amount of heat energy that is 150 times the energy humans produce as electricity annually… 60 percent more heat per year than previously thought…

“Climate sensitivity is used to evaluate allowable emissions for mitigation strategies. Most climate scientists have agreed in the past decade that if global average temperatures exceed pre-industrial levels by 2℃ (3.6℉), it is all but certain that society will face widespread and dangerous consequences of climate change.

“The researchers’ findings suggest that if society is to prevent temperatures from rising above that mark, emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas produced by human activities, must be reduced by 25 percent compared to what was previously estimated, [said Laure Resplandy, an assistant professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute, one of the authors].” It’s pretty bad now. Even that cold air in the Midwest and East is simply the result of expanding warmer Arctic air pushing colder Canadian air south. It is going to get a lot worse a lot faster, and we are running out of time for governmental debate on the reality of the problem.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and the answer to the question posed by the title of this piece is that our numbers are indeed wrong; we have severely underestimated the timing and the growing force of global warming.