Global warming, climate change, weather extremes

HELL AND HIGH WATER

GLOBAL WARMING – THE SOLUTION AND THE POLITICS – AND WHAT WE SHOULD DO

JOSEPH J. ROMM

WILLIAM MORROW                2007

PART II

Chapter 3: 2025-2050: Planetary Purgatory (continued)

The four (potential) sources of the apocalypse

• For the past few decades, nearly 60% of the carbon dioxide that we have been adding to the atmosphere has stayed there. The other 40% has been absorbed by four ‘sinks’.
• The oceans absorb less carbon dioxide as temperatures increase; warming can cause soils to release carbon dioxide; the carbon dioxide locked up in the tundra, Arctic permafrost, and frozen peat exceeds that currently in the atmosphere and is released as we defrost; and tropical forests store carbon while destroying them releases carbon.

Crossing the point of no return

• Global warming is on the verge of dramatically transforming the global carbon cycle, causing the release of carbon from some soils, tundra, and forests, while slowing the uptake of carbon by the ocean and other carbon sinks.
• While the threshold is not known precisely today, it appears to be somewhere between 450 ppm and 650 ppm. By 2025, we’ll know much better where it is.
• Unfortunately, on our current path, the world’s emissions and concentrations will be so high by 2025 that the easy technology-based strategy will not be able to stop us from crossing the very high end of the threshold range.
• Barring a major reversal in U.S. policies in the next decade, come the 2020s, most everyone will know the grim fate that awaits the next 50 generations.
• The only plausible way to avoid it will be an effort to cut global emissions by 75% in less than three decades – a massive, sustained government intervention into every aspect of our lives on a scale that surpasses what this country did during World War II. Failing that we will have passed the point of no return.

Chapter 4: 2050-2100: Hell and High Water

• Sea-level rise of 20 to 80 feet will be all but unstoppable by mid-century if current emissions trends continue. The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all of our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre-Katrina New Orleans – below sea level and facing super-hurricanes.
• For the past decade, sea levels have been rising about 1 inch a decade, double the rate of a few decades ago.

The end of the Arctic as we know it

• Global warming tends to occur faster at high latitudes, especially in the Arctic. This leads to more snow and ice melting, further decreasing Earth’s reflectivity (albedo), causing more heating. At the North Pole the summer ice cap has shrunk more than 25% from 1978 to 2005, a loss of 500,000 square miles of ice, an area twice the size of Texas.
• The Arctic winters were so warm in both 2005 and 2006 that sea ice did not refreeze enough to make up for the unprecedented amount of melting during recent summers.
• The summer Arctic could be ice-free far sooner than anyone ever imagined. The loss of Arctic ice has little effect on sea levels because the ice is floating on the Arctic Ocean.
• The accelerating warming of land, air, and ocean sets the stage for one of the severest impacts of climate change facing our country – extreme sea-level rise from the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The end of Greenland – and coastal life – as we know it

• The Greenland Ice Sheet extends over some 1.7 million square kilometers (more than 650,000 square miles). It is as large as the entire state of Alaska and almost as big as Mexico. It is 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) at its thickest.
• It contains nearly 3 million cubic kilometers (750,000 cubic miles) of ice. Unlike the Arctic ice cap, Greenland’s landlocked ice, when it returns to the ocean, causes sea levels to rise.
• Scientists reported in 2002 that the ice was flowing in parts of Greenland much faster during the summer melting season than the winter. They concluded that some of the water flows to the ice-bedrock interface at the bottom of the glacier and acts as a lubricant for the entire glacier to slide and glide on.
• Jakobshavn Isbrae is Greenland’s largest outlet glacier, draining 6.5% of the entire ice sheet’s area. From 1950 to 1996, the glacier’s terminal point, or calving front, was stable, fluctuating about 2.5 kilometers back and forth around its seasonal average.
• Satellite images found that “in October 2000, this pattern of stability changed when a progressive retreat began that resulted in nearly complete disintegration of the ice shelf by May 2003.”
• Freed from this barrier that had been holding it back, the glacier’s speed increased dramatically to 12.6 kilometers (7.8 miles) a year. Ice discharge doubled.
• A 2006 study found a similar change in two East Greenland outlet glaciers – Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim. The top surface of Helheim dropped more than 150 feet in two years. The surface of Kangerdlugssuaq dropped more than 250 feet. The two glaciers together drain about 8% of Greenland’s ice sheet.
• Using Global Positioning System equipment, researchers have clocked Helheim at speeds exceeding 14 kilometers per year, nearly triple its 2001 speed.
• While 2002 had been the record for surface-area melting in Greenland since 1979, 2005 topped that easily.
• Whereas glacier acceleration was widely found below 66° north latitude between 1996 and 2000, that line had shifted to 70° north by 2005.

The end of Antarctica – and civilization – as we know it

• Antarctica is bigger than the United States, and its ice sheet has locked away  more than eight times as much ice as Greenland’s. It holds 90% of Earth’s ice. It is 99% covered by ice that is on average about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick.
• A 2004 study noted that over the previous decade the grounded Amundsen Sea portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been losing 50 cubic kilometers of volume each year and that ice shelves in Pine Island Bay have been thinning by up to 5.5 meters per year. The reason appears to be ocean currents averaging 0.5°C warmer than freezing.
• A 2004 NASA study found that glaciers in this sector of the ice sheet are “discharging about 250 cubic kilometers of ice per year to the ocean,” much more ice than is accumulating in the areas that feed these glaciers.
• University of Colorado at Boulder researchers reported in 2006 that Antarctica as a whole was losing up to 150 cubic kilometers of ice annually.
• Since so much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheet, allowing more – and increasingly warmer – water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice-shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, further sea-level rise – another vicious cycle.
• If the planet warms enough, it could experience an even greater sea-level rise, since the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is about 8 times larger in volume than the WAIS.

2050-2100: The triple threat

• Most scientists have based their efforts to model climate impacts on a doubling of CO2 concentrations because they (and their funders) have expected the world to wake up and take action. And most climate scientists did not expect the kind of accelerated flow and disintegration of the ice sheets we are now witnessing.
• “Global Estimates of the Impact of a Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” a study led by the University of Southampton in England, is the first paper to consider the global impacts of a 5- to 6-meter (16- to 20-foot) sea level rise.
• A November 2005 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is one of the few to look at the extreme temperatures that a near tripling of carbon dioxide concentrations would have on the United States weather in the last quarter of this century (from 2071 to 2095).
• A vast swath of the country would see average summer temperatures rise by a blistering 9°F. Oklahoma would see temperatures above 110°F some 60 to 80 days a year. Summers will be accompanied by extreme droughts on a recurring basis, some in the West lasting for many years at a time, with two to five times the wildfire devastation.
• Temperatures would continue to rise relentlessly into the next century, accompanied by declines in soil moisture over much of this country. Much of the Southwest would be at risk of desertification.
• The IPCC process tends to produce an underestimation of worst-case scenarios for two reasons – because it is consensus-based and because it encompasses many greenhouse gas scenarios that assume far stronger action on emissions reduction than the United  States or the world seems prepared to embrace.

PART II: THE POLITICS AND THE SOLUTION

Chapter 5: How Climate Rhetoric Trumps Climate Reality

• Today, global warming is a problem of politics and political will. We lack the will to take the necessary actions – and many of the actions we are poised to take are either inadequate or ill conceived.

America versus the world

• The United States is almost alone in opposing mandatory action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The rest of the developed world (other than Australia) believes that the threat posed by warming is so great that they ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol reducing emissions to about 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.

The art of political persuasion

• Anyone who wants to understand/change the politics of global warming must understand why the Denyers are so persuasive in the public debate and why scientists are not.
• Science and logic are powerful systematic tools for understanding the world, but they are no match in the public realm for the 25-century-old art of verbal persuasion: rhetoric.
• While logic might be described as the art of influencing minds with the facts, rhetoric is the art of influencing both the hearts and minds of listeners with the figures of speech.
• Three rhetorical elements are essential to modern political persuasion: Simple language; Repetition, repetition, repetition; The skilful use of tropes that turn the meaning of a word away from its literal meaning, the two most important of which are metaphor and irony.

Science, climate, and rhetoric

• Few scientists are known for simple language. Most scientists do not like to repeat themselves because it implies that they aren’t sure of what they’re saying. Scientists like to focus on the things they don’t know, since that is the cutting edge of scientific research.
• Scientists don’t keep repeating the things they do know, which is one reason the public and the media often don’t hear from scientists about the strong areas of consensus on global warming.
• Scientific training emphasizes sticking to facts and speaking literally. Scientific debates are won by those whose theory best explains the facts, not by those who are gifted speakers. Scientists who are great public communicators, such as Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman, have grown scarcer as science has become increasingly specialized.
• The media likes the glib and the dramatic, which is the style most scientists, deliberately avoid. Scientists who do communicate effectively often find their colleagues responding with scorn, and even punishing them in ways that affect their careers.
• After Carl Sagan became famous, he was rejected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences in a special vote. Every scientist is capable of recognizing the obvious implications for his or her self-interest.
• Scientists who have been outspoken about global warming have been repeatedly attacked as having a “political agenda.” Not surprisingly, many climate scientists shy away from the public debate. At the same time, the Bush administration has muzzled many climate scientists working for the U.S. government.

The conservative battle plan

• The Denyers and Delayers do not just have messaging skills superior to scientists (and environmentalists and most progressive politicians), they also have a brilliant strategy, a poll-tested plan of attack.
• A 2002 memo from the Luntz Research Companies explains precisely how politicians can sound as if they care about global warming without actually doing anything about it.
• It focuses in particular on casting doubts about the science. The memo can be found on the web, and anyone who cares about the future of America should read it.

Deny, deny, delay, delay

• In a box labelled “Language That Works,” Luntz recommends lines for Republican speeches that have been repeated endlessly in various forms by the Delayers: “We must not rush to judgment before all the facts are in. We need to ask more questions. We deserve more answers. Until we learn more, we should not commit America to any international document that handcuffs us either now or into the future.”
• In science, the facts are never completely in, making this a highly effective rhetorical strategy in any scientific debate. If we must wait until the painful reality of mega-droughts and rapid sea-level rise are upon us, the point of no return will have long passed. The White House’s constant call for more research is nothing but a smokescreen.
• The Bush team has systematically worked to hold back the results of research, to censor the information about the real dangers of global warming that its own agencies are supposed to provide to the public.
• The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative think tank funded in part by ExxonMobil, sued the Bush White House, under the little-known Federal Data Quality Act, to remove a comprehensive peer-reviewed study from circulation, labelling the report “junk science.” In 2003 it was revealed that the White House had secretly asked CEI to sue it to get the nation’s premier climate assessment withdrawn.
• The White House heavily edited a 2003 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, removing several paragraphs that described the dangers posed by rising temperatures. Every substantial conclusion in the EPA report was gutted.
• Even the sentence “Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment” was considered too strong to be left in and it was removed.