SUMMER OF CLIMATE COLLAPSE?

Fifty years ago, I decided that a Master of Public Administration degree would be useful in my expected career in government. In 1975, I obtained on of the first MPA degrees in the field of “Environmental Management.”

One of the books we read was “The Limits to Growth,” published by the Club of Rome, which detailed current enviornmental problems and forecast where they would be in 30 years of no action was taken, some action was taken, or effective action was taken. I rediscovered that book in a box in my garage 25 years ago and re-read it with the benefit of hindsight, since their 30 year period had just ended. In every case, no action had been taken, and in every case the current situation had been accurately forecast by the contributors to the book.

In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr.'s prescient "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis" was published in "Science" magazine. His thesis was:

"In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."

Perhaps it’s fitting that during this summer of climate collapse - and if you think it’s something other than that, consider that June was Earth’s hottest month on record since the Permian Collapse - the event that brought on the Age of Dinosaurs after killing off 70% ofr species in the ocean and 80% of those on land - until the end of this month when the record will be broken by July, a record that will likely last another 31 days to the end of August. The atmosphere is warmer now than it’s been in 125,000 years, when our species was a few thousand individuals living a precarious existence on the edge of extinction in what is now South Africa .

That we are all transfixed not by this news but rather by the prospect of the United States falling to the machinations of a tenth-rate failed circus clown demonstrates the problem.

The initial success of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” suggests Hollywood is finally ready to portray the American development and use of atomic weapons during World War II as something other than an absolute necessity. Unlike past movies, Nolan’s film points out that J. Robert Oppenheimer and many of his contemporaries knew they were ushering in an era where eradicating civilization had never been so easy

The parallels to climate change may not be obvious to people who don’t sit around pondering the end of the world, but I see them. Both climate change and ever-looming nuclear catastrophe are willful human creations driven by “progress” - one by scientific theory and research turbocharged by limitless wartime government resources, the other by oil-fueled industrialization. Both rationalized as necessary evils; climate change as a consequence of endless convenience for the human species, and nukes as guarantor of fragile world peace via “mutual assured destruction.”

It only took nearly 80 years to get to the point that National Mythology can be questioned in a commercially-successful film In all the time scientists have tried to focus our attention on climate change, they’ve had nothing as visually arresting as a single bomb instantly wiping out a city.

That has changed this summer.

We now have a global heat wave few could have envisioned even ten years ago, while the fossil fuel companies driving this destruction are coming off a year of record profits.

I wonder how this will be portrayed on screen 80 years from now.

The World Meteorological Organization expects temperatures in North America, Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean to be above 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) "for a prolonged number of days this summer." It also expects more frequent heatwaves, spread across the seasons.

The ocean around Florida hit a record temperature of 101 degrees this week. Warm water like that will produce a hurricane that could wipe Miami off the map, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

While the Southwest swelters under a heat dome, Vermont saw its second 100-year rainstorm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began, a milestone surpassed the following day. Yesterday there was flooding across the northeast from Wisconsin to Maine.

As these temperature and weather records fall, Earth may be nearing so-called tipping points. A “tipping point” is where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change, leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted.

If these tipping points are passed, some effects such as permafrost thawing or the world’s coral reefs dying - both are already happening in Siberia and the Central Pacific - will happen more quickly than expected. We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.

Some natural systems, if upended, could herald a restructuring of the world. Take the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica: It’s about the size of Florida, with a protruding ice shelf impeding the glacier’s flow into the ocean. Although the overall melt is slower than originally predicted, warm water is eating away at it from below, causing deep cracks. At a certain point, that melt may progress to become self-sustaining, which would guarantee the glacier’s eventual collapse. That will affect how much sea levels will rise; 80% of humans live near the ocean.

When melt from Greenland’s glaciers enters the ocean, it alters an important system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is a conveyor belt, drawing warm water from the tropics north. The water’s salinity increases as it evaporates, which, among other factors, makes it sink and return south along the ocean floor. As more glacial fresh water enters the system, that conveyor belt will weaken. Right now it’s the weakest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.

The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.

Consider that: Paris and London are at the same latitude as Hudson’s Bay, yet Europe has the climate it does because of the AMOC - we commonly call it the Gulf Stream - which brings warm water in contact with cold air, resulting in the clouds and rain that provide for all living things there. If that collapses, life in Europe could soon resemble that of northern Canada. Right now, Europe can grow enough food to feed its 740+ million people; if the AMOC was to die, the continent could be plunged into famine in a matter of years.

The study published this last Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around 2050-2080. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to a drop in temperatures in northern Europe and elevated warming in the tropics, as well as stronger storms on the east coast of North America.

If the temperature of the sea surface changes, precipitation over the Amazon might too, contributing to deforestation, which in turn is linked to snowfall on the Tibetan plateau.

A new study published in Nature Communications last week titled “Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” reports global warming forced by all the CO2 and methane in our atmosphere - if we action is not taken immediately - could shut down the AMOC as early as 2025 and almost certainly before 2095.

We may not even realize when we start passing points of no return—or if we already have.

James Hansen, one of the early voices on climate and the founder of 350.org, says measures to mitigate the crisis may ironically now contribute to it. A working paper he published this spring suggests that reduction in sulfate aerosol particles—the air pollution associated with burning coal and the global shipping industry—has contributed to warmer temperatures because these particles cause water droplets to multiply, brightening clouds and reflecting solar heat away from the planet’s surface. Hansen predicts that environmentally minded policies to reduce these pollutants will likely cause temperatures to rise 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

This adds to a growing body of alarming climate science, like the one published last year in the Journal of Climate titled “Sixfold Increase in Historical Northern Hemisphere Concurrent Large Heatwaves Driven by Warming and Changing Atmospheric Circulations,” which indicates we’re much farther down the path of dangerous climate change than even most scientists realized.

That study essentially predicted this year’s shocking Northern Hemisphere heat waves. The lead researcher’s first name is Cassandra.

Perhaps most alarming was a paper published eleven months ago in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled “Evidence for Massive Methane Hydrate Destabilization During the Penultimate Interglacial Warming.”

It brings up the topic of the “Clathrate Gun Hypothesis,”which is the absolute worst case scenario for humanity’s future.

Across the planet there are an estimated 1.4 trillion tons of methane gas frozen into a snowcone-like slurry called clathrates or methane hydrates laying on the sea floor off the various continents. When they suddenly melt, that’s the “firing of the gun.” An explosion - in the context of geologic time - of atmospheric gas that’s over 70 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. The Clathrate Gun.

The PNAS paper mentioned above concludes that 126,000 years ago there was an event that caused a small amount of these clathrates to warm enough to turn to gas and bubble up out of the seas. The resulting spike in methane gas led to a major warming event worldwide:

“Our results identify an exceptionally large warming of the equatorial Atlantic intermediate waters and strong evidence of methane release and oxidation almost certainly due to massive methane hydrate destabilization during the early part of the penultimate warm episode (126,000 to 125,000 y ago). This major warming was caused by … a brief episode of meltwater-induced weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and amplified by a warm mean climate.”

The researchers warn we may be looking at a similar event in our time:

“This week, sea surface temperatures along the coasts of Southern Spain and North Africa were 2-4C (3.6-7.2F) higher than they would normally be at this time of year, with some spots 5C (9F) above the long-term average.”

This has never happened before while humans have existed.

The least likely but most dangerous outcome scenario is that the warming ocean might begin a massive melting of those methane hydrate slurries into gas, producing a “burp” of that greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, further adding to global warming, which would then melt even more of the clathrates.

At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, this runaway process led to such a violent warming of the planet that it killed over 90 percent of all life in the oceans and 70 percent of all life on land, paving the way for the rise of the dinosaurs, as cold-blooded lizards were among the few survivors. That period is referred to as the Permian Mass Extinction, or, simply, “The Great Dying.” It was the most destructive mass extinction event in Earth’s history.

As the scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted:

“The key findings of our study add to a growing body of observational findings strongly supporting the ‘clathrate gun hypothesis.’ … Importantly, the interval we have studied is marked by a mean climate state comparable to future projections of transient global climate warming of 1.3 °C to 3.0 °C.”

We just this year passed 1.3 degrees Celsius of planetary warming: we are now in the territory of the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis if these researchers are right

The last time our planet saw CO2 levels at their current 422 parts-per-million, sea levels were 60 feet higher and forests grew in Antarctica.

Meanwhile, we’re pouring more CO2 into the atmosphere right now than at any time in human history.

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