Is Greenland Turning Green?

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New concerns from scientists over the ice sheets in the ironically named Greenland.

In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday.

To put that into perspective, the piece that broke off is about half the size of Manhattan Island.

But the most alarming sign, according to Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, is a huge 7-mile (11.3 kilometer) crack, seen above in the center right of the July 25 image, that has appeared farther back on the margin of the glacier.

The groove could create an imminent and even bigger breakup—up to a third of the ice field, he said in a statement.

"The pictures speak for themselves," Box told the Associated Press. "This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It's just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off … "

This is concerning for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if the glacier continues to calve, it will add to already rising water tables. Secondly, it could be an indicator of the growing impact of global warming.

The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming?

"It certainly is a major event," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. "It's a signal but we don't know what it means."

It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don't like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.

AP Photo/Byrd Polar Research Center

The Breathtaking Grandeur of Global Warming

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In today's Times a bittersweet contemplation on the Patagonia glaciers as seen from the deck of a disco blasting cruise ship.

The pieces of ice in the water around us are now larger; their shapes are mesmerizing, as are their colors, varying shades of an intense, crystalline blue that I’ve never before seen in nature. As if we were children watching clouds float through the sky, we start pointing out ice in the shapes of whales and giraffes, or fallen columns; the larger icebergs, showing only 15 percent of their incredible mass above water, look like ruined temples and amphitheaters.

We come in sight of the first glacier and it is strange and magnificent, a frozen river of jagged peaks. Water pours off the sides. Glaciers worldwide have been receding for more than a century, but the melting has accelerated catastrophically in the last few decades. The tree line has not had time to advance enough to catch up; the ice has left behind wide scars of bare, hardscrabble earth. All the glaciers in Patagonia save one are shrinking more rapidly every year.

To my teenage niece, who has unplugged herself and joined me on deck, I explain all the science of climate change I can muster. Every once in a while a thundering crack is audible over the human din, as a huge piece of ice breaks off the face of the glacier. By the time you’ve heard it, you’ve missed it, and can see only the widening ripples radiating from the water where the newly calved iceberg has fallen. We watch melting ice cascade off the glacier’s crenelated face. “I guess this gives new meaning to ‘a glacial pace,’” my niece remarks.

I try to imagine what it must have been like to see glaciers looming 19 or 20 stories above, as the guide puts it, from a small, fragile craft, rather than from our three-story-high cruiser, and then I realize how strange it is that we resort to the architectural measurements of skyscrapers to wrap our minds around such grandeur. Getting to the glaciers in a small boat as a backpacker might have done a mere 20 years ago is now a privilege reserved for the very wealthy. Our cruiser cannot get too close for fear of a chunk of ice breaking off and sinking it — in revenge?

So, how rapidly are the glaciers pitching bits of themselves into the ocean? According to NASA research, so quickly that the melt is a significant cause of rising sea levels. It is this "calving" process that makes their melt so rapid and it's impact so great.

The Patagonia Icefields of Chile and Argentina, the largest non-Antarctic ice masses in the Southern Hemisphere, are thinning at an accelerating pace.

They now account for nearly 10 percent of global sea-level change from mountain glaciers, according to a new study by NASA and Chile's Centro de Estudios Cientificos.

. . .

NASA scientists have concluded that the cause of glacial retreat is climate change, as evidenced by increased air temperatures and decreased precipitation.

Still, those factors alone are not sufficient to explain the rapid thinning. The rest of the story appears to lie primarily in the unique dynamic response of the region's glaciers to climate change.

The Patagonia Icefields are dominated by 'calving' glaciers, that spawn icebergs into the ocean or lakes, and have different dynamics from glaciers that end on land and melt at their front ends.

Calving glaciers are more sensitive to climate change once pushed out of equilibrium, and make the Patagonia region the fastest area of glacial retreat on Earth.

But they sure are beautiful.

Glacial Melt Accelerating

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Rapidly accelerating melting of the polar ice caps is causing some climatologists to revise their global warming tables. Catastrophe may be coming sooner rather than later.

The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced.

Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.

. . .

The Arctic has now lost about a third of its ice since satellite measurements began thirty years ago, and the rate of loss has accelerated sharply since 2002.

Dr [Mark] Serreze said: "If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate. It seems that the Arctic is going to be a very different place within our lifetimes, and certainly within our childrens' lifetimes."

But, if you really want to feel an icy chill run down your spine, consider this: What will Dr. Serreze be saying two years from now? Sudden climate change? Anyone?... Anyone?

Have We Passed the Tipping Point?

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As discussed here and here, climatologists are increasingly concerned about evidence of key tipping points, beyond which global warming rapidly accelerates, ultimately leading to a possibility of "sudden climate change."

As per Steven D at Booman Tribune, there is stunning evidence that we have passed a major tipping point, and much sooner than previously expected.

Via The Independent:

The earth's ability to soak up the gases causing global warming is beginning to fail because of rising temperatures, in a long-feared sign of "positive feedback," new research reveals today.

Climate change itself is weakening one of the principal "sinks" absorbing carbon dioxide - the Southern Ocean around Antarctica - a new study has found.

As a result, atmospheric CO2 levels may rise faster and bring about rising temperatures more quickly than previously anticipated. Stabilising the CO2 level, which must be done to bring the warming under control, is likely to become much more difficult, even if the world community agrees to do it. [...]

"This is the first unequivocal detection of a carbon sink weakening because of recent climate change," said the lead author of the study, Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia. "This is serious. Whenever the world has greatly warmed in the past, the weakening of CO2 sinks has contributed to it."

Others have characterized the study's results in even more alarming tones:

Ian Totterdell, a climate modeller at the Met Office Hadley Centre, described the research as “an important piece of work”.

He said: “This is the first time we have been able to get convincing evidence that a change in the uptake of CO2 by the oceans is linked to climate change. “It’s one of many feedbacks we didn’t expect to kick in until some way into the 21st century.”

We are witnessing changes that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Changes that were not predicted to occur for several more decades are showing up now, as you read these words of mine. Temperatures and sea levels rising faster than our climate change models predicted. Glaciers vanishing before our eyes. Ice melting in the interior of Antarctica in a region the size of California, where ice has never melted before in recorded history.

Debunking the Debunkers

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The first major tip-off that the New York Times hit piece on Al Gore masquerading as journalism is really raw meat for the right wing base comes right in the lede:

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,”...

Yes, Hollywood. That den of iniquity that is poisoning American culture. If Hollywood loves Al Gore, he must be bad for our children.

What follows from there is strawman arguments, unsubstantiated quotes, a rogue's gallery of scienticians, and other usual suspects. It's an old formula. Quote a handful of contrarians without revealing the controversy that surrounds them. Then proclaim opinion among experts divided, when, in fact, there is a near consensus.

But don't take my word for it. Good analyses of the New York Times piece can be found here and here. Check it out.

Nature's Not Working Quite Right

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Well this is alarming. Something truly awful is happening to the bee population. A mysterious illness is wiping out colonies all over the country.

A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.

Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder.

Reports of unusual colony deaths have come from at least 22 states. Some affected commercial beekeepers -- who often keep thousands of colonies -- have reported losing more than 50 percent of their bees. A colony can have roughly 20,000 bees in the winter, and up to 60,000 in the summer.

This follows another epidemic of bee killing mites a few years ago. But the current crisis points to a possible explanation for that ailment, and disturbing portent for the future of apiculture. An analysis of the dead bees points to an immune breakdown.

Cox-Foster said an analysis of dissected bees turned up an alarmingly high number of foreign fungi, bacteria and other organisms and weakened immune systems.

Researchers are also looking into the effect pesticides might be having on bees.

In the meantime, beekeepers are wondering if bee deaths over the last couple of years that had been blamed on mites or poor management might actually have resulted from the mystery ailment."

Now people think that they may have had this three or four years," vanEnglesdorp said.

This is disturbing on many levels. Not only does it bode ill for honey production and agriculture that relies on bees for pollination. It's yet another indicator of nature gone awry. And like global warming, this phenomenon probably has its roots in human behavior; in this case the use of pesticides.

Here's another example of nature gone mad, that can only be ascribed to the planet's rising temperatures. Cherry blossoms... in January.

Cherry blossoms have been sprouting from Baristaville to Brooklyn, but in January? It seems that mother nature is giving winter a miss this year. The evening news last night even reported "April Showers" for later this week.

And if you're thinking that the massive snowfall in New York state is an indication that global warming isn't such a threat, think again. Lake effect snow occurs when the warm air from lake water meets a cold front. The more the planet heats, the warmer those lakes get, and the greater the shock when cold air, from say Canada moves in. Kind of like our intensifying hurricanes, as the waters in Gulf of Mexico become warmer.

Well. Aren't I a ray of sunshine.

New Studies: Hurricane Intensity Rising

Two new studies released earlier this week conclude that hurricane intensity is increasing with increases in global temperature. In an earlier post I noted a study from the Georgia Institute of Technology that saw a correlation between rising water temperatures and stronger, more damaging hurricanes. Early this week both Purdue University and Pennsylvania State University studies reached similar conclusions. This New York Times article emphasizes the hotly debated nature of these studies. They cannot be read as conclusive, but certainly as very interesting and concerning.

The Purdue scientists found that their results matched earlier work by Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at M.I.T. Dr. Emanuel has argued that global warming, specifically the warming of the tropical oceans, is already increasing the power expended by hurricanes.

The approach used by the Purdue researchers, concentrating on what is called reanalysis data, has never been tried for this purpose before, Dr. Huber said in an interview, adding, "We were surprised that it did as well as it did."

In a statement accompanying the release of the study, Dr. Huber said the results were important because the overall measure of cyclone activity, whether through more intense storms or more frequent storms, had doubled with a one-quarter-degree increase in average global temperature.

In the other new study, Dr. Emanuel and Michael E. Mann, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University, compared records of global sea surface temperatures with those of the tropical Atlantic and said the recent strengthening of hurricanes was attributable largely to the rise in ocean surface temperature.

The impact of stronger storms is already taking a toll on the environment and damaging sensitive ecosystems. After last year's deluge of hurricanes the entire gulf region of the United States experienced multiplicative damage. As per the Baltimore Sun:

Throughout the Gulf Coast region from Texas to Florida, barrier islands have been battered by wind and waves, leaving many fragmented and submerged.

The Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana's coast were stripped clean by Katrina, submerging much of the 40-mile-long, uninhabited chain and leaving the mainland more vulnerable in the coming hurricane season.

"It takes a long time for these dunes to re-establish naturally, so the next storm that comes along will have an easier job overtopping the islands and flooding inland areas," said oceanographer Abby Sallenger of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Louisiana had been losing coastal wetlands at a rate of about 25 square miles a year, scientists say. It is estimated that Katrina caused a loss of 118 square miles of wetland marshes.

"What potentially could happen if you take away the barrier islands, the wetlands could even disappear faster," Sallenger said. "The marsh itself will just disintegrate, and it supports an incredibly rich ecosystem."

Another recent study shows that New Orleans is simply not ready for another major hurricane and the impact could be devastating. But Florida's ecosystem is also hanging in the balance.

"These hurricanes are just taking big chunks of our landscape," Doyle said.

"It could eventually be the threshold that tips the bucket and leads freshwater systems to become brackish ... and the whole system kind of collapses. We now have this game board set with certain things in place, and in combination with more frequent hurricanes it can aggravate the situation in terms of sustainability in our social, agricultural and natural systems."

In Florida, where the Everglades has become a managed network of canals and levees, scientists face the daunting task of controlling more water from frequent storms to keep developed areas from flooding and to cleanse agricultural runoff of fertilizers and pesticides before it reaches surrounding wetlands.

Anatomy of Climate Lie

It's behind the curtain of New York Times Select, but Paul Krugman's latest column is an insightful dissection of one emblematic case of disinformation used to obscure the evidence of global warming.

NASA climatologist James Hansen is introduced in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."

Dr. Hansen was one of the first climate scientists to say publicly that global warming was under way. In 1988, he made headlines with Senate testimony in which he declared that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now." When he testified again the following year, officials in the first Bush administration altered his prepared statement to downplay the threat. Mr. Gore's movie shows the moment when the administration's tampering was revealed.

Krugman fleshes out more of Mr. Hansen's story and demonstrates how far energy companies are willing to go to disinform the public about hard science.

But soon after Dr. Hansen's 1988 testimony, energy companies began a campaign to create doubt about global warming, in spite of the increasingly overwhelming evidence. And in the late 1990's, climate skeptics began a smear campaign against Dr. Hansen himself.

Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the energy industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen's predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud — that is, it wasn't what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen's prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being "on the high side of reality."

The experts at www.realclimate.org, the go-to site for climate science, suggest that the smears against Dr. Hansen "might be viewed by some as a positive sign, indicative of just how intellectually bankrupt the contrarian movement has become." But I think they're misreading the situation. In fact, the smears have been around for a long time, and Dr. Hansen has been trying to correct the record for years. Yet the claim that Dr. Hansen vastly overpredicted global warming has remained in circulation, and has become a staple of climate change skeptics, from Michael Crichton to Robert Novak.

It is just this kind of distortion that has allowed energy companies and their front men in political office to perpetuate the myth that global warming is still debatable and unproven. Pioneers like Dr. Hansen have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Meanwhile, the planet keeps getting warmer.

"Sudden Climate Change" pt. 4: Media Tipping Point

First "60 Minutes," now Time magazine. The mainstream media are suddenly waking up to the grim reality of global warming and its gathering danger.

Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry -- a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h. -- exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast -- when the emergency becomes commonplace -- something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.

Time's Jeffrey Klugar does a very capable job of describing some of the tipping points and feedback loops that are leading to escalated warming and escalating concern amongst climatologists.

What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft....

One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.

That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."

A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years--since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.

Only time will tell if this marks a tipping point in the public consciousness and will result in the drastic reform needed. But it appears time is the one thing we don't have.

"Rewriting the Science"

If you missed this Sunday's "60 Minutes" you can read a recap here. As I wrote a few weeks ago, only in the US is global warming still being debated. For most of the world it's settled science. Now comes further insight into how our current Administration has been keeping the jury out all this time -- by silencing the prosecution.

As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear but he's going to say them anyway.

Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent [sic] scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.

What the science actually says, according to Hansen is that global warming is real, accelorating, and caused largely by human activity. This is the message that an Administration with strong ties to the energy industry has suppressed with tactics Stalin might have envied.

"In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," says Hansen.

Restrictions like this e-mail Hansen's institute received from NASA in 2004. "… there is a new review process … ," the e-mail read. "The White House (is) now reviewing all climate related press releases," it continued.

Veteran of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations Rick Piltz explains the anatomy of that vetting process.

"It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality."

Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney."

Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says.

Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes “may be undergoing change.” “Uncertainty” becomes “significant remaining uncertainty.” One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out.

"He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout."

In a report, Piltz says Cooney added this line “… the uncertainties remain so great as to preclude meaningfully informed decision making. …” References to human health are marked out. 60 Minutes obtained the drafts from the Government Accountability Project. This edit made it into the final report: the phrase “earth may be” undergoing change made it into the report to Congress. Piltz says there wasn’t room at the White House for those who disagreed, so he resigned.

"Even to raise issues internally is immediately career limiting," says Piltz. "That’s why you will find not too many people in the federal agencies who will speak freely about all the things they know, unless they’re retired or unless they’re ready to resign."

As for Mr. Cooney:

For months, 60 Minutes had been trying to talk with the president’s science advisor. 60 Minutes was finally told he would never be available. Phil Cooney, the editor at the Council on Environmental Quality didn’t return 60 Minutes' calls. In June, he left the White House and went to work for Exxon Mobil.

"Sudden Climate Change" Pt. 3: Tipping Point

As I said in my previous entries on this topic, the climate is in far worse shape than most Americans know or our current governmental agencies will acknowledge. Now comes news that we have passed a key tipping point in global warming. The warming has become self-reinforcing so that even if we were to cease our production of greenhouse gases, the planet would continue to heat. As per Reuters:

"It would keep on warming even though we have stopped the cause, which is greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels," David Jhirad of the Washington-based World Resources Institute said on Wednesday.

The rate of warming would be slower, Jhirad said in a telephone interview, but a kind of thermal inertia would ensure that global temperatures continue their upward trend.

He referred to a report released by the nonprofit institute this week that analyzed research reports on climate change for 2005.

"Taken collectively, they suggest that the world may well have moved past a key physical tipping point," the institute wrote.

Jhirad said there were actually two tipping points. The first is that there is no doubt human activities cause global warming; a more physical tipping point is that the effects of global warming are evident now.

The report, based on research published in journals including Science and Nature, also found the effects of climate change were so severe they should spur urgent action to prevent more damage and to combat damage that has already occurred.

"We can't assume this change is so far in the future that we can afford to delay," Jhirad said.

The World Resources Institute, founded in 1982, is a nonpartisan environmental think tank that works with industry and other ecological groups around the world.

In other news the increased planetary temperatures are producing stronger hurricanes, according to a new study.

Rising ocean surface temperatures are the primary factor fueling a 35-year trend of stronger, more intense hurricanes, scientists report in a new study.

The finding backs up the results of two controversial papers published last year that linked increasing hurricane intensity to rising sea-surface temperatures, said Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

"Global warming is sending sea-surface temperatures up, so we're looking at an increase in hurricane intensity globally," Curry said.

She added that in the North Atlantic Ocean basin—where hurricanes that affect the U.S. form—the number of hurricanes may also increase.

"Other ocean basins don't show an increase in [the] number [of hurricanes], but the North Atlantic does," she said.

Curry is a co-author of the new study, which appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

She also co-authored a study published last September in Science, that found the yearly number of hurricanes that reach Category Four and Five—the strongest storms on the hurricane intensity scale—has doubled since 1970.

This finding coincides with a 1°F (0.5°C) rise in global sea-surface temperature over the same time period.

"Sudden Climate Change" cont.

Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster than thought; as much as 26 miles of ice per year. From the Washington Post.

The new findings, which are being published today in the journal Science, suggest that global sea level could rise substantially over the next several centuries.

It is one of a slew of scientific papers in recent weeks that have sought to gauge the impact of climate change on the world's oceans and lakes. Just last month two researchers reported that Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, and a separate paper in Science today predicts that by the end of this century lakes and streams on one-fourth of the African continent could be drying up because of higher temperatures.

The new Antarctic measurements, using data from two NASA satellites called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), found that the amount of water pouring annually from the ice sheet into the ocean -- equivalent to the amount of water the United States uses in three months -- is causing global sea level to rise by 0.4 millimeters a year. The continent holds 90 percent of the world's ice, and the disappearance of even its smaller West Antarctic ice sheet could raise worldwide sea levels by an estimated 20 feet.

Let's Talk "Sudden Climate Change"

It was a balmy, spring day in January when I bumped into my neighbor outside. "Lovely weather," he remarked.

"Lovely. But a little creepy when you consider it comes courtesy of global warming."

"Global warming? Maybe hundreds of years from now." He made a hasty break for his SUV.

Here in the United States, where the reality of global climate change is still being debated, such denial is common. However, as I tried to explain to my rapidly retreating neighbor, we are seeing the results of global warming right now, all over the world, and there is the very real threat that those results will escalate dramatically in a very few years. There are whisperings of something called "sudden climate change." New research is showing that we are ahead of many of the timetable predictions. Worse, at a certain point the changes in our climate become cumulative. As John Atcheson explains in "Hotter, Faster, Worser," there are developing "feedback loops" in which the increasing warmth of the planet is giving birth to sudden outpourings of carbon dioxide and methane, which accelorate the warming, which increases the release of carbon dioxide and methane... Well, you can see where this is going.

...the scientific community failed to adequately anticipate and model several positive feedback loops that profoundly amplify the rate and extent of human-induced climate change. And in the case of global warming, positive feedback loops can have some very negative consequences. The plain fact is, we are fast approaching – and perhaps well past – several tipping points which would make global warming irreversible.

In an editorial in the Baltimore Sun on December 15th, 2004 this author outlined one such tipping point: a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which higher temperatures caused methane – a powerful heat-trapping greenhouse gas (GHG) – to escape from ice-like structures called clathrates, which raised the temperature which caused more methane to be released and so on. Even though there was strong evidence that this mechanism had contributed to at least two extreme warming events in the geologic past, the scientific community hadn’t yet focused on methane ices in 2004. Even among the few pessimists who had, we believed – or hoped – that we had a decade or so before anything like it began happening again.

We were wrong.

In August of 2005 a team of scientists from Oxford and Tomsk University in Russia announced that a massive Siberian peat bog the size of Germany and France combined was melting, releasing billions of tons of methane as it did.

The last time it got warm enough to set off this feedback loop was 55 million years ago in a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, when increased volcanic activity released enough GHGs to trigger a series of self-reinforcing methane burps. The resulting warming caused massive die-offs and it took more than a 100,000 years for the earth to recover.

It’s looks like we’re on the verge of triggering a far worse event....

While I've been concerned about the environment for many years, there was a tipping point in my own consciousness in 2003 when I read reports of vast numbers of French citizens dropping dead from a heat wave. Atcheson puts the final tally of European heat related deaths that summer at 35,000. But aside from the alarming freakishness of this event, there were more far-reaching consequences. As Atcheson explains:

There are other positive feedback loops we’ve failed to anticipate. For example, the heat wave in Europe that killed 35,000 people in 2003 also damaged European woodlands, causing them to release more carbon dioxide, the main GHG, than they sequester – exactly the opposite of the assumptions built into our models, which treat forests as sponges that sop up excess carbon.

This is the type of occurence that could lead to sudden climate change. And Atcheson explains that there are similar concerns about other regions.

The same thing is happening to a number of other ecosystems that our models and scientists have treated as carbon sinks. The Amazon rainforest, the boreal forests (one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks in the planet), and soils in temperate areas are all releasing more carbon than they are absorbing, due to global warming-induced droughts, diseases, pest activity, and metabolic changes. In short, many of the things we treat as carbon sponges in our models aren’t sopping up excess carbon; they’re being wrung out and releasing extra carbon.

The polar ice cap is also melting far faster than models predict, setting off another feedback loop. Less ice means more open water, which absorbs more heat which means less ice, and so on.

Even worse, we’ve substantially underestimated the rate at which continental glaciers are melting.

Climate change models predicted that it would take more than 1,000 years for Greenland’s ice sheet to melt. But at the AAAS meeting in St. Louis, NASA’s Eric Rignot outlined the results of a study that shows Greenland’s ice cover is breaking apart and flowing into the sea at rates far in excess of anything scientists predicted, and it’s accelerating each year. If (or when) Greenland’s ice cover melts, it will raise sea levels by 21 feet – enough to inundate nearly every sea port in America.

All of this paints a picture far worse than people like my neighbor are taking in. The impact of global warming is not in the indefinite future. It's now. As a recent Washington Post article explains, increasing global temperatures are estimated to claim 150,000 lives and cause roughly 5 million illnesses a year. Most of the victims of the rising occurences of malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea are the world's poor, whose lack of political clout has made their deaths largely invisible to suburban America.

But the "oceans will not protect us" from the impact of sudden climate change and it could occur within 20 years. A report ordered by the Pentagon, and quietly buried without fanfare, posited that the effects of climate shift could plunge us into a world war.

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The theorist behind this alarming prediction is the respected military advisor Andrew Marshall; known in National Defense circles as "Yoda." He was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld in pre-9/11 2001 to bring his considerable influence to bear on the reshaping of the American military. But the report Marshall delivered in early 2004 concluded that the threat of an environmental catastrophe is far greater than that of global terrorism.

Worse, we may have already passed the point of no return. Says Atcheson:

A little over a year ago at the conclusion of a global conference in Exeter England on Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, scientists warned that if we allowed atmospheric concentrations of GHG to exceed 400 ppm, we could trigger serious and irreversible consequences. We passed that milestone in 2005 with little notice and no fanfare.

The scientific uncertainty in global warming isn’t about whether it’s occurring or whether it’s caused by human activity, or even if it will "cost" us too much to deal with it now. That’s all been settled. Scientists are now debating whether it’s too late to prevent planetary devastation, or whether we have yet a small window to forestall the worst effects of global warming.