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<td>[SCORAI] Climate breakdown is here.</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap valign="BASELINE">Date: </th>
<td>Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:29:39 +0000</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap valign="BASELINE">From: </th>
<td>Freund, Jim <a href="mailto:j.freund@lancaster.ac.uk" target="_blank"><j.freund@lancaster.ac.uk></a></td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap valign="BASELINE">To: </th>
<td><a href="mailto:scorai@listserver.njit.edu" target="_blank">scorai@listserver.njit.edu</a>
<a href="mailto:scorai@listserver.njit.edu" target="_blank"><scorai@listserver.njit.edu></a></td>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span><a href="http://www.monbiot.com" title="(http://www.monbiot.com)" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight:normal">Monbiot.com</span></a>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="1396f0116fed1391_1396eff2d00954ea_1396efb172fec02c_1"></a><a href="http://www.monbiot.com/2012/08/27/the-heat-of-the-moment/" target="_blank"><b><span>The Heat of
the Moment</span></b></a><span>
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Posted: 27 Aug
2012 10:11 AM PDT<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Climate breakdown
is right here, right now.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>By George
Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th August 2012<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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. <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span><a href="http://www.monbiot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Sea_Ice_Extent.png" target="_blank"><b><span><img src="cid:part6.02030704.07050808@indiana.edu" alt="Description:
http://www.monbiot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Sea_Ice_Extent.png" border="0" height="450" width="720"></span></b></a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>(Image taken from
<a href="http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm" target="_blank"><b>Arctic
Sea-ice Monitor</b></a>)<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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).
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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. <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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).
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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). <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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. <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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. <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span><a href="http://www.monbiot.com" target="_blank">www.monbiot.com</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>References:
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>1.
<a href="http://nsidc.org/news/press/20120827_2012extentbreaks2007record.html" target="_blank">http://nsidc.org/news/press/20120827_2012extentbreaks2007record.html</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>2.
<a href="http://bit.ly/SIb9mU" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/SIb9mU</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>3.
<a href="http://bit.ly/RgnWYb" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/RgnWYb</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>4.
<a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains3-2-2.html" target="_blank">http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains3-2-2.html</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>5. eg Wieslaw
Maslowski, 2009. State and Future Projections of
Arctic Sea Ice. Presentation to Nuuk Climate Days,
Nuuk, Greenland.
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/9d84x34" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/9d84x34</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>6.
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9744000/9744378.stm" target="_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9744000/9744378.stm</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>7.
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/8877491/Arctic-sea-ice-to-melt-by-2015.html" target="_blank">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/8877491/Arctic-sea-ice-to-melt-by-2015.html</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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. <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>9. Some of the
extremes and their attribution are documented here:
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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 <a href="http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf" target="_blank">http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>10 and here:
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>James Hansen,
Makiko Satoa, Reto Ruedy, 2012. Perception of
climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, in press.
<a href="http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.1286.pdf" target="_blank">http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.1286.pdf</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>11.
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-shell-arctic-chukchi-20120826,0,6093682.story" target="_blank">http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-shell-arctic-chukchi-20120826,0,6093682.story</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>12.
<a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/arctic-impacts/The-dangers-of-Arctic-oil/Black-ice%3FRussian-oil-spill-disaster/" target="_blank">http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/arctic-impacts/The-dangers-of-Arctic-oil/Black-ice–Russian-oil-spill-disaster/</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>13.
<a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/gazprom-russia-arctic-oil-action/blog/41887/" target="_blank">http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/gazprom-russia-arctic-oil-action/blog/41887/</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>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.
<a href="http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn12_072/pn12_072.aspx" target="_blank">
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn12_072/pn12_072.aspx</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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