Purple waves

Purple Haze

   -Jimi Hendrix

Purple Rain

    -Prince

Greetings

     Hope you are having a fun summer.   I think I had too much fun in the garden to pay much attention to the climate.  But here is something that caught my eye.

    Oregon's purple waves off Neskowin?      No, not that, although it is pretty spooky.  A bacteria that eats hydrogen sulfide - an early indication of a coming Canfield Ocean? (A a deadly hothouse ocean state implicated in 5 of 6 major mass extinction events)

     No, something much more mundane, -  a top scientist at Woods Hole suggesting that the threat of catastophic permafrost thaw is "real and imminent".    Is this something to worry about?  After all, the permafrost is pretty far away. Its way up north.   A lot father than Neskowin anyway.  And "real and imminent"    That's pretty vague. But it's that word "catastrophic"  that is troublesome-it  seems like it might be worth paying attention.

     So, lets take a look.  As we know, the permafost is frozen soil located in arctic and subarctic regions, and it contains a lot of carbon (1,300 billion tons!   - or twice as much carbon as is already in the atmosphere).  Happily that carbon is frozen, so it can't get into the atmosphere.   So far anyway.  Of course if it does get warm up there, warm enough to melt this frozen stuff, the carbon released could start a sort of chain reaction, creating more warming, which melts more permafrost.    Et cetera    Its one of those nasty "tipping points"  that could put the whole mess on autopilot and out of human control.  Here is a nice article from Nature - good bed time reading

    All that carbon.    And here's the weird part.  None of that carbon is included in the IPCC projections.   It seems that they were concerned that there weren't enough scientific papers on it yet.

       So, when would this happen?  What would it take?    One study says it might start once the average temperature of the earth rises above 1.5 degrees above per industrial levels.   Perhaps 2 degrees?   In 2011, Dr Kevin Shaefer of the US Snow and Ice Data Center, suggested it could start in 20 years.    But that was before the discovery that the permafrost was also being warmed by microbes.!!!

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Top Scientist — Threat of Catastrophic Permafrost Thaw is “Real and Imminent”

There’s a lot of carbon stored in the Arctic’s thawing permafrost. According to our best estimates, it’s in the range of 1,300 billion tons (see Climate Change and the Permafrost Feedback). That’s more than twice the amount of carbon already emitted by fossil fuels globally since the 1880s. And the sad irony is that continuing to burn fossil fuels risks passing a tipping point beyond which rapid destabilization and release of those carbon stores becomes locked in.

(Global permafrost coverage as recorded by the World Meteorological Organization. A 2 C global warming threshold is generally thought to be the point at which enough of the Arctic permafrost will go into catastrophic destabilization, to result in a global warming amplifying feedback that then thaws all or most of the rest. The 2 C threshold was chosen because it is the bottom boundary of the Pliocene — a time when this permafrost store formation began. However, there may be some risk that enough of the store could become unstable at lesser levels of warming — crossing the tipping point sooner than expected. Image source: WMO.)

At issue is the fact that most of this carbon has been stored during the past 2 million year period of ice ages and interglacials. Due to human fossil fuel burning, we are now entering a period in which the Arctic is becoming warmer than at any time in at least the past 110,000 years. And with atmospheric CO2 levels now hitting and exceeding concentrations last seen during the Pliocene of 2-3 million years ago, large swaths of that carbon store may be in jeopardy of rapidly thawing. Such a thaw would release yet more CO2 and heat trapping methane into the atmosphere.

It’s something to worry over even if you’re not one of those, like Sam Carana, who’s concerned about a potential catastrophic methane release. And it doesn’t take a climate scientist to tell you that we’ve already seen some disturbing increases in methane emissions from thermokarst lakes, from permafrost regions themselves, through the permafrost and duff-destroying mechanisms of Arctic wildfires, from submerged seabed tundra in the ESS, and from the odd new features we’re now calling methane blowholes.

(Are large Siberian fires like this outbreak on August 1 of 2014 indicative that the Arctic permafrost carbon stores are nearing a critical tipping point? Top scientists think we should find out as quickly as possible. Image source: LANCE-MODIS.)

Top Woods Hole Scientist Calls for Tipping Points Investigation

With so much carbon stored in the permafrost, any level of warming that begins to unlock significant volumes of its massive store can result in passing a climate change point of no return. Setting off amplifying feedbacks that do not stop until much or all of that carbon is released and we’ve been propelled into new, much hotter, climate states. Given the fact that we are already starting to enter the range of Eemian temperatures — a period in which the world was as warm or warmer than now, but the Arctic stayed reasonably cooler — it’s more than reasonable to assume that such a danger is already upon us.

Today, a noted Woods Hole Scientist by the name of Dr. Max Holmes called such a threat “real and imminent” stating:

“The release of greenhouse gasses resulting from thawing Arctic permafrost could have catastrophic global consequences. The United States must lead a large-scale effort to find the tipping point – at what level of warming will the cycle of warming and permafrost thawing become impossible to stop. The real and imminent threat posed by permafrost thawing must be communicated clearly and broadly to the general public and the policy community.”

Dr. Holmes was joined by other Woods Hole scientists in issuing this call for more research into what they now consider a growing and immediate threat (see full press release here).

The generally accepted ‘tipping point’ for large permafrost store release tends to be in the range of 2 degrees Celsius. The problem is we’ve already emitted enough CO2, methane and other greenhouse gasses to warm the Earth by 2-4 degrees Celsius long term and by around 1.4 to 1.9 degrees Celsius this Century. So it appears we already have a good deal of momentum toward the accepted permafrost thaw and related carbon release tipping point. Dr. Holmes’  and his Woods Hole colleagues are calling for a focused effort to more accurately nail down that tipping point. To give us a better idea how close we really are and to provide a sense of urgency for avoiding what could best be described as a terrible brand of trouble.

http://robertscribbler.com/2015/08/27/top-scientist-threat-of-catastrophic-permafrost-thaw-is-real-and-imminent/

   

Wile E Coyote

Same as it ever was

    -Talking Heads

The song remains the same

      -Led Zeppelin

Greetings

    Here's a nice crystallization of our current conundrum from NPR (h/t Mark H) .  A California farmer runs out of surface water so digs a well.  So do his neighbors.  The water level drops , he needs to go deeper.  But can only afford to go deeper if he grows a high value crop like pistachios.  High value crops, like pistachios take a lot of water.  And so on.      Meanwhile, the neighbors who grow low water crops, like fava beans can't afford to chase the water.   Over pumping causes ground to sink 1/2 in a month in the Central Valley) 

      Here's another strange one.  As we reached peak conventional oil, the price rose.  The rising price made fracking economically worthwhile.   The frackers create a glut and the price drops.  The vehicle customers respond to the price signal, and buy trucks and SUV's, instead of hybrids and EV's.  Andf trucks and SUV's last a long time

  

        .We all make certain assumptions about the future.  It appears that Americans are assuming that gas price will remain low.  It reminds me of my rough and reday weather forecasting technique, I call "same as it ever was".  If I am trying to decide weather to wear a coat, I assume that today's weather will be the same as yesterday..    It works more often than it does't.     But if, I were to extend that logic, and assume that in six month the weather would be same?   Not so good.  

        The UN recently updated its projections about population.  see here

  "Over all, the report said, the world’s current population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, slightly more than the 9.6 billion forecast two years ago. The number could reach 11.2 billion by the end of the century."

I found this a bit puzzling.   What assumptions went into this projection?   That things will remain basically as they are now?   According to the Footprint folks

"Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year.

"Moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. And of course, we only have one.

"Turning resources into waste faster than waste can be turned back into resources puts us in global ecological overshoot, depleting the very resources on which human life and biodiversity depend.

So, if  at 7 billion, we are already in overshoot by 50%, then the carrying capacity is about 4-5 billion.  And every day, the carrying capacity grows smaller,  as we deplete soils  (soil, (soil lost a 10 to 40 times rate of creation. water, (see unsustainable use may threaten food security  fisheries (UNEP -commercial fishery gone by 2050),    Add to that peak oil, (2015?)   and peak natural gas in 10 years? - David Hughes .  What will the carrying capacity be in 2050?    

     Of course, it's only natural that we would yearn for things to remain "same as it ever was", and as a result grasp for future visions that might supports such a view.    This could explain the current  view of Elon Musk as a cultural hero, a Savior, one whose inventiveness will allow us to continue on our high energy path.   Thus, we have this type of reflexive sigh of relief :

"S]uddenly a post-carbon future that does not require a diminution of our standard of living seems within reach. While being able to maintain a relatively upscale lifestyle in the absence of fossil fuels may sound frivolous, it performs the psychological trick that has so far eluded environmentalists, that of making a fossil-free world sound appealing and familiar and not reflexively scary.from here

      Is this likely?  Or just wishful thinking?   I recently found a useful blog called "Beyond the Brief Anomaly",  which is an attempt to look at the energy situation , objectively, using a number of lenses and tools - financial, energetic, cultural, EROI, and systems thinking,   see Energy Descent Transition and Alternatives to 2050

       With respect to a cultural baggage. the author notes the prevalence of the "myth of progress", and the assumptions that go with it can blind us to the nature of our situation:

"Within this myth, our present high energy civilisation is seen as an inevitable consequence of the forward march of human ingenuity. An entailment of this way of understanding the pathways by which we arrived in our current situation is that further progress is primarily a matter of further growth in ingenuity. If we’re faced with the limits of our current energy sources, the default assumption becomes one in which those limits will inevitably be transcended by innovations in energy conversion systems. Living within this myth, it is essentially unthinkable that our present era of energy abundance might be an historical anomaly and that the energy available to us—along with the industrial civilisation that it makes possible—might be headed towards decline. We see this reflected in much conventional economic thinking, in which technological innovation driven by price signals is often regarded as the primary determinant of resource limits: if a resource becomes scarce, the price goes up, and this drives innovation leading to the expansion of the economic reserves associate with the particular resource. " from here

Of course progress isn't really a myth.  Human culture has gone through various changes -"revolutions"  The agricultural revolution,  industrial revolution, the green revolution, and so on.  As Ronald Wright points out in his "Short History of Progress", (highly recommended)  each change has contained its own "progress trap" , where the solution to one problem creates a bigger problem later on 

    

"In a progress trap, those in positions of authority are unwilling to make changes necessary for future survival. To do so they would need to sacrifice their current status and political power at the top of a hierarchy. They may also be unable to raise public support and the necessary economic resources, even if they try."

Thus we reach our current Wile E. Coyote moment.  It seems that we are standing in the air looking down.  Our unwillingness to see our situation objectively seems to make us unable to take useful actions - like drilling ever deeper for water, or buying low mpg vehicles. : Interestingly Rule #3 for Wile  E Coyote is as follows    

   

The Coyote could stop anytime if he were not a fanatic. (A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."- George Santayana)