[Greenbuilding] Fwd: [SCORAI] Climate breakdown is here.

Wed Aug 29 10:16:22 CDT 2012

-------- Original Message --------
 Subject: [SCORAI] Climate breakdown is here.  Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2012
15:29:39 +0000  From: Freund, Jim
<j.freund at lancaster.ac.uk><j.freund at lancaster.ac.uk>  To:
scorai at listserver.njit.edu
<scorai at listserver.njit.edu><scorai at listserver.njit.edu>

   *Monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com>
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*The Heat of the
Moment*<http://www.monbiot.com/2012/08/27/the-heat-of-the-moment/>
****

Posted: 27 Aug 2012 10:11 AM PDT****

Climate breakdown is right here, right now. ****

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th August 2012****

There are no comparisons to be made. This is not like war or plague or a
stockmarket crash. We are ill-equipped, historically and psychologically,
to understand it, which is one of the reasons why so many refuse to accept
that it is happening. ****

What we are seeing, here and now, is the transformation of the atmospheric
physics of this planet. Three weeks before the likely minimum, the melting
of Arctic sea ice has already broken the record set in 2007(1). The daily
rate of loss is now 50% higher than it was that year(2). The daily sense of
loss – of the world we loved and knew – cannot be quantified so easily. ****

*[image: Description:
http://www.monbiot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Sea_Ice_Extent.png]*<http://www.monbiot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Sea_Ice_Extent.png>
****

(Image taken from *Arctic Sea-ice
Monitor*<http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm>
)****

The Arctic has been warming roughly twice as quickly as the rest of the
northern hemisphere. This is partly because climate breakdown there is
self-perpetuating. As the ice melts, for example, exposing the darker sea
beneath, heat which would previously have been reflected back into space is
absorbed. ****

This great dissolution, of ice and certainties, is happening so much faster
than most climate scientists predicted that, one of them reports, “it feels
as if everything I’ve learned has become obsolete.”(3) In its last
assessment, published in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change noted that “in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice
disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century.”(4)
These were the most extreme forecasts in the panel’s range. Some scientists
now forecast that the disappearance of Arctic sea ice in late summer could
occur in this decade or the next(5,6,7). ****

As I’ve warned repeatedly, but to little effect, the IPCC’s assessments
tend to be conservative. This is unsurprising when you see how many people
have to approve them before they are published. There have been a few
occasions – such as its estimate of the speed at which glaciers would be
lost in the Himalayas – on which the panel has overstated the case. But it
looks as if these will be greatly outnumbered by the occasions on which the
panel has understated it. ****

The melting disperses another belief: that the temperate parts of the world
– where most of the rich nations are located – will be hit last and least,
while the poorer nations will be hit first and worst. New knowledge of the
way in which the destruction of the Arctic sea ice affects northern Europe
and North America suggests that this is no longer true. A paper published
earlier this year in Geophysical Research Letters shows that Arctic warming
is likely to be responsible for the extremes now hammering the
once-temperate nations(8). ****

The north polar jet stream is an air current several hundred kilometres
wide, travelling eastwards around the hemisphere. It functions as a
barrier, separating the cold, wet weather to the north from the warmer,
drier weather to the south. Many of the variations in our weather are
caused by great travelling meanders – or Rossby waves – in the jet stream. *
***

Arctic heating, the paper shows, both slows the Rossby waves and makes them
steeper and wider. Instead of moving on rapidly, the weather gets stuck.
Regions to the south of the stalled meander wait for weeks or months for
rain; regions to the north (or underneath it) wait for weeks or months for
a break from the rain. Instead of a benign succession of sunshine and
showers, we get droughts or floods. During the winter a slow, steep meander
can connect us directly to the polar weather, dragging severe ice and snow
far to the south of its usual range. This mechanism goes a long way towards
explaining the shift to sustained – and therefore extreme – weather
patterns around the northern hemisphere(9,10). ****

I have no idea what is coming to Europe and North America this winter and
next summer, in the wake of the record ice melt, but it’s unlikely to be
pleasant. Please note that this record represents a loss of around 30% of
Arctic sea ice, against the long-term average. When that climbs to 50 or 70
or 90%, the impacts are likely to be worse. ****

Our governments do nothing. Having abandoned any pretence of responding to
the environmental crisis during the earth summit in June, now they stare
stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves. Nothing – or worse than
nothing. Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to
facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes. ****

The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it.
On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period
in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska(11). This would push
its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills
they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the
great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk.
After turning its Arctic lands in the Komi Republic into the Niger Delta of
the north (repeated oil spills are left unremediated in the tundra)(12),
Russia wants to extend this industry into one of the world’s most fragile
ecosystems, where ice, storms and darkness make decontamination almost
impossible. ****

As I write, activists from Greenpeace, whom I regard as heroes, are chained
to Gazprom’s supply vessel, preventing the rig from operating(13). These
people are stepping in where all governments have failed. David Cameron,
who still claims to lead the greenest government ever, is no longer hugging
huskies. In June he struck an agreement with the Norwegian prime minister
“to enable sustainable development of Arctic energy.”(14) Sustainable
development, of course, means drilling for oil. ****

Is this how our children will see it: that we destroyed the benign
conditions which made our world of wonders possible, then used the
opportunity to amplify the damage? All of us, of course, can claim to have
acted with other aims in mind, or not to have acted at all, as the other
immediacies of life seemed more important. But – unless we respond at last
– the results follow as surely as if we had sought to engineer them.****

Stupidity, greed, passivity? Just as comparisons evaporate, so do these
words. The ice, that solid platform on which, we now discover, so much
rested, melts into air. Our pretensions to peace, prosperity and progress
are likely to follow. “And like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The
cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great
globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.”****

www.monbiot.com****

References: ****

1. http://nsidc.org/news/press/20120827_2012extentbreaks2007record.html****

2. http://bit.ly/SIb9mU****

3. http://bit.ly/RgnWYb****

4. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains3-2-2.html****

5. eg Wieslaw Maslowski, 2009. State and Future Projections of Arctic Sea
Ice. Presentation to Nuuk Climate Days, Nuuk, Greenland.
http://tinyurl.com/9d84x34****

6. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9744000/9744378.stm****

7.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/8877491/Arctic-sea-ice-to-melt-by-2015.html
****

8. Jennifer A. Francis and Stephen J. Vavrus, 2012. Evidence linking Arctic
amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes. Geophysical Research
Letters, Vol. 39, L06801, doi:10.1029/2012GL051000. ****

9. Some of the extremes and their attribution are documented here: ****

Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stotttt and Stephanie Herring, Eds, July 2012.
Explaining Extreme Events Of 2011 >From A Climate Perspective. Bulletin of
the American Meteorological Society, Supplement.
DOI:10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00021.1
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf****

10 and here: ****

James Hansen, Makiko Satoa, Reto Ruedy, 2012. Perception of climate change.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.1286.pdf****

11.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-shell-arctic-chukchi-20120826,0,6093682.story
****

12.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/arctic-impacts/The-dangers-of-Arctic-oil/Black-ice–Russian-oil-spill-disaster/<http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/arctic-impacts/The-dangers-of-Arctic-oil/Black-ice%3FRussian-oil-spill-disaster/>
****

13.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/gazprom-russia-arctic-oil-action/blog/41887/
****

14. Joint Statement by the British Prime Minister David Cameron and
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, 7th June 2012. Norway and the
United Kingdom: energy partnership for sustainable growth.
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn12_072/pn12_072.aspx****

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