I wish I had a river I could skate away on

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear

   - The Beatles, 

Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin' thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning, and I, I live by the river

   -The Clash

Dates to remember

September 4 CNN Candidate Town Hall on Climate

September 20-27  Climate Strike

Greetings

It was about 100 degrees here yesterday. 

And the Amazon, Siberia, and Indonesia are all on fire 

 So, maybe its a good to think about ice.   The melting ice in Greenland is getting a lot of attention, with good reason

Glaciers just aren't acting the way they should. see here  and here

Now, however, a team of researchers has figured out how to directly probe these melt processes and has tested the method out on one glacier in Alaska. What it found, published this week in Science, is worrying: the glacier is melting far faster than current theories had suggested “The melt rates that we measured were about 10 to 100 times larger than what theory predicted,” says lead study author David A. Sutherland, an oceanographer at the University of Ore

But it's not just the arctic .  In fact, Antarctica is also melting rapidly.

GRADUAL ANTARCTIC SEA ICE INCREASES [HAVE BEEN] FOLLOWED BY DECREASES AT RATES FAR EXCEEDING THE RATES SEEN IN THE ARCTIC

“A newly completed 40-y record of satellite observations is used to quantify changes in Antarctic sea ice coverage since the late 1970s. Sea ice spreads over vast areas and has major impacts on the rest of the climate system, reflecting solar radiation and restricting ocean/atmosphere exchanges. The satellite record reveals that a gradual, decades-long overall increase in Antarctic sea ice extents reversed in 2014, with subsequent rates of decrease in 2014–2017 far exceeding the more widely publicized decay rates experienced in the Arctic. The rapid decreases reduced the Antarctic sea ice extents to their lowest values in the 40-y record, both on a yearly average basis (record low in 2017) and on a monthly basis (record low in February 2017).”

Of course one effect of ice melting is sea level rise.   

Here's a recent presentation on sea-level rise, by John Englander

He makes the point that the melting of the glaciers is now unstoppable.  There is so much heat in the ocean and the air that it is just a matter of time before all melts and the sea rises 120 meters.  We just don't know when. 

 Portland has an elevation of 50 feet, less than 20 meters, Salem is 154 around 30 meters. 

He says he expects around 1 meter by 2050. But who knows?  It moves by fits and starts, slow for a while fast for a while. 

    

And here's a nice summary from Counterpunch

Englander’s key points:

1. Sea level never rises smoothly. It’s not a straight line or a curved line. There are inflection points when it suddenly rises. So far, that has not been experienced. In fact, over the past 100 years, temps are up 1°C and sea-level rise is only up 4 inches.

2. Sea level has been stable, at current levels, throughout human recorded history for 5,000+ years.

3. Thus, it’s very difficult for people to imagine a change in sea level, especially after 5,000 years of rock-solid stability.

Today’s big problem: Sea levels are now (today) at an early stage of exponential growth, meaning, the rate of growth is doubling, cycle-by-cycle, for the first time in known history. Based upon satellite recordings since 1993: sea-level rise 1993-98 +1.5MM/yr. 1998-2011 +3.2MM/yr. 2011-2018 5.0MM/yr. That’s nearly double every cycle, which is an exponential function, and it’s trouble, very-very big trouble.

Exponential.   As Professor Al Bartlett has said

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

So, suppose sea level rise were to double every ten years.  So 5 MM in 2020.  10 MM in 2030. etc   By 2080 its 3 meters. 2100 its 12 meters. Portland goes under in 2110, when it hits 24 M

Melting floating ice doesn't affect sea level, but does increase the amount of blue water.  A new study from Scripps tells us the likely impact

Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will lead to warming equivalent to one trillion tons of CO2 and advance the 2ºC threshold by 25 years. Any rational policy would make preventing this a top climate priority for world leaders,” said Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at Scripps.

 2 degrees 25 years sooner than currently predicted?  Hmmm...  

This means that after the blue ocean event, temperatures rise quickly.   A recent study has linked sea ice melting to abrupt climate change such as a spike in temperature .

..from this they determined that sea ice changes were massively significant in past climate change events in the North Atlantic. These periods, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events2, are some of the fastest and largest abrupt climate changes ever recorded. During some of these events, Greenland temperatures are likely to have increased by 16 degrees Celsius in less than a decade.

 Here's one scenario that incorporates a blue ocean event.  see here (PDF)

  2030–2050: Emissions peak in 2030, and start to fall consistent with an 80 percent reduction in fossil-fuel energy intensity by 2100 compared to 2010 energy intensity. This leads to warming of 2.4°C by 2050, consistent with the Xu and Ramanathan “baseline-fast” scenario. However, another 0.6°C of warming occurs  taking the total to 3°C by 2050 — due to the activation of a number of carbon-cycle feedbacks and higher levels of ice albedo and cloud feedbacks than current models assume. [It should be noted that this is far from an extreme scenario: the low-probability, high-impact warming (five percent probability) can exceed 3.5–4°C by 2050 in the Xu and Ramanathan scheme.]   

You can track air  temperature  rising here.   As you can see the same issue of exponential curve arises here.

According to this smoothed estimate, the trend — which is where we look for climate change (man-made or not) — has shown two episodes of warming since the year 1900. The first, from about 1910 to 1945, it rose roughly 0.43°C, while from about 1975 to now it has risen around 0.84°C. That’s basically twice as much.

So, when will we see a blue ocean event ?  

Current models say between 2030 and 3050,  closer to  2030 being more likely

So, whats the plan?

Dave Roberts put out a nice post explaining that what it will take is not evolutionary but revolutionary.  No pain no gain.  He says

"The facts of climate change mean that there is no such thing as a 'moderate' position on it. You do the radical things necessary to meet IPCC targets or you sit back & let radical impacts unfold."

"Most Americans say they want the U.S. to take “aggressive” action to stop climate change, yet only a minority would put up with even small increases in their taxes or electricity bills to do so.

Bernie's Green New Deal.?  $ 16 trillion

Hmmm......

So, its probably going to get hotter

 For a view into our future see  "Can we survive extreme heat?" . here.  " It starts with a blackout "  

“Hurricane Katrina caused a cascading failure of urban infrastructure in New Orleans that no one really predicted,” Chester explains. “Levees broke. People were stranded. Rescue operations failed. Extreme heat could lead to a similar cascading failure in Phoenix, exposing vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the region’s infrastructure that are difficult to foresee.”

In Chester’s view, a Phoenix heat catastrophe begins with a blackout. It could be triggered any number of ways. During periods of extreme heat, power demand surges, straining the system. Inevitably, something will fail. A wildfire will knock out a power line. A substation will blow. A hacker might crash the grid. In 2011, a utility worker doing routine maintenance near Yuma knocked out a 500-kilovolt power line that shut off power to millions of people for up to 12 hours, including virtually the entire city of San Diego, causing economic losses of $100 million. A major blackout in Phoenix could easily cost much more, says Chester.

But it’s not just about money. When the city goes dark, the order and convenience of modern life begin to fray. Without air conditioning, temperatures in homes and office buildings soar. (Ironically, new, energy-efficient buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps.) Traffic signals go out. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the city. Without power, gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded with empty tanks. Water pipes crack from the heat, and water pumps fail, leaving people scrounging for fresh water. Hospitals overflow with people suffering from heat exhaustion and heatstroke. If there are wildfires, the air will become hazy and difficult to breathe. If a blackout during extreme heat continues for long, rioting, looting, and arson could begin.