Go with the floe towards Malthusian catastrophe

Phill Parsons reporting on the early stages of climate chaos
“And in the White House everything remains as normal as it can be with President Bush in denial. The natural world demonstrates its subtle and irresistible power. No crowd control barriers will stop the black comedy that will be the failure of natural services to deliver as we have come to expect.”

Howard’s APEC Sydney Declaration on addressing climate chaos includes an agreement that the correct place to address climate is through the United Nations. By the time Howard’s proposed carbon trading is introduced, the melting of Greenland is likely to be at a point predicted for 2100. This dramatic warming is being felt across the Arctic region. In Alaska, earthquakes are rocking the seabed as tectonic plates – subdued for centuries by the weight of the glaciers on top of them – are now moving against each other again. What else will have shifted under such massive changes to the systems that determine climate?

HOWARD’S APEC Sydney Declaration on addressing climate chaos includes an agreement that the correct place to address climate is through the United Nations, currently that is its Framework Climate Convention, what we call the Kyoto Agreement, the one Howard refuses to sign.

Still looking through the wool, Australians are being asked to believe that reforestation will significantly address climate chaos. Sorry gals but it needs the temperature and rainfall to remain within certain parameters and, with the business as usual approach to greenhouse gas emissions, that is questionable.

The Amazon rainforest is modeled as collapsing by mid-century as the rainfall band that supports it ceases to be as productive. One of the hopes for the mismanagers of the response to climate chaos is that the changes will be a relatively smooth slow progression and therefore that time is on their side.

Let’s look at Greenland and then transfer that behavior to the southern ice mass we know as Antarctica. Ilulissat is home to the most active glacier in Greenland and it was one of the immense icebergs that calve from it on a daily basis that is believed to have sunk the Titanic. Scientists monitoring the glaciers have revealed that movements of gigantic pieces of ice are creating shockwaves that register up to three on the Richter scale.

The speed of the arctic ice melt has accelerated to such an extent that a UN report issued earlier this year is now thought to be out of date by its own authors. The Arctic is acknowledged as the fastest warming place on earth. Many scientists insist that the new data collected since the IPCC report suggested a sea level rise closer to two metres. There is now a new “consensus” that a significant acceleration in the loss of ice mass has occurred since the IPCC report based on 2 year old data and released earlier this year.

Greenland’s ice cap is immense, the second largest in the world, and its break-up would raise sea levels by seven metres.

At the Ilulissat Icefjord, 250km north of the Arctic Circle, the advance of the glacier into the sea is now visible to the naked eye, moving toward the sea at a rate of two metres an hour, exuding like toothpaste at 15 km per year. One day’s worth of the Ilulissat ice would provide enough fresh water to supply the largest cities in the world for a whole year – and yet it amounts to only 7 per cent of Greenland’s total melt. That’s how out of kilter we are at the moment where the longest drought in Australia since 1788.

As the glaciers thaw, pools of water are forming, feeding fractures in the ice, down which the water flows until it hits the bedrock. Remarkably scarce in 1968, now they are like rivers 10 or 15m in diameter and there are thousands of them lubricating the ice to flow move forward faster, outstripping the capacity of scientific models to predict it. As the reality of the unprecedented thaw becomes apparent, the consequences are earthquakes, or glacial ice quakes, among the latest ominous signs that an unprecedented step change is under way.

Glacial earthquakes in north-west Greenland did not exist until three years ago. The accelerating thaw and the earthquakes are intimately connected as immense slabs of ice are sheared from the bed rock by melt water. Those blocks of ice, often more than 800m deep and 1500m long, contain immense rocks as well and move against geological faults with seismic consequences. The study of these ice quakes is still in its infancy but their occurence is in itself disturbing.

Predictions made by the Arctic Council, a working group of regional scientists, have been hopelessly overrun by the extent of the thaw. The models predicting how the ice would melt, made only 5 years ago, are now at the stage predicted for 2040 and in one year, if current rates do not accelerate, will be at the stage predicted for 2050. By the time Howard’s proposed carbon trading is introduced the melting of Greenland is likely to be at a point predicted for 2100. What else will have shifted under such massive changes to the systems that determine climate?

This dramatic warming is being felt across the Arctic region. In Alaska, earthquakes are rocking the seabed as tectonic plates – subdued for centuries by the weight of the glaciers on top of them – are now moving against each other again. In the north of Sweden, mean temperatures have risen above zero for the first time on record. Norway’s northern fjiords remained ice-free all last winter.

Antarctica may be a little behind in exhibiting the effects of warming, the size of the ice mass and being surrounded by ocean assist in keeping temperatures lower. However, unless carbon emissions are rapidly scaled back, it too will melt and that’s an 80m sea level rise along with greatly increased tectonic plate activity due to the changes in weight on the crust.

And in the White House everything remains as normal as it can, with President Bush in denial. The natural world demonstrates its subtle and irresistible power. No crowd control barriers will stop the black comedy that will be the failure of natural services to deliver as we have come to expect.

Wildfires are flaring in Alaska, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. In Glacier National Park, where glacier numbers have fallen from 150 to 26 since 1850, the habitat of bighorn sheep, mountain goats and grizzly bears is vanishing.

Meanwhile, sea levels are rising around the low-lying Florida Keys and global warming is killing off the nation’s trees. Spruce bark beetles are chewing their way through Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and the Chugach National Forest, while pine beetles are destroying red spruce woodlands. Non-native grasses have replaced native shrubs in the Mojave Desert, fuelling longer-lasting wildfires.

This week, the Government Accountability Office criticised the President for failing to show leadership in tackling the problems. “Without such guidance, the ability to address climate change and effectively manage resources is constrained,” it warned. But the White House insisted: “President Bush is committed to providing the agencies with the tools they need to address this issue.”

And for the polar bear…

Two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will disappear by 2050, even under the moderate projections for shrinking summer sea ice caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to US Geological Survey scientists.

The finding is part of a year-long review of the effects of climate and ice changes on polar bears to help determine whether they should be protected under the Endangered Species Act. Scientists estimate the current polar bear population at 22,000.

Biologists and climate scientists conclude in the report that under middle-of-the road projections for warming, the bears will by 2050 be largely relegated to the Arctic archipelago of Canada and spots off the northern Greenland coast, where summer sea ice tends to persist even in warm summers, like this one, a shrinking that could be enough to reduce the bear population by two-thirds.

The bears would disappear entirely from Alaska, the study said.

The momentum to a warmer world with less Arctic sea ice — and fewer bears — would be largely unavoidable at least for decades, no matter what happened with emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. The amount of warming already built into the system will see further declines in suitable polar bear habitat for several decades even if large scale mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions started soon

In other words, even in the unlikely event that all the major economies were to agree to rapid and drastic reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, the floating Arctic ice cap will continue to shrink at a rapid pace for the next 50 years, wiping out much of the bears’ habitat and engendering further climate chaos.

The report makes no recommendation on listing the bears as a threatened species or taking any action to slow ice cap damage. Such decisions are up to another Interior Department agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, which enforces the Endangered Species Act. That decision is due in January, officials have said. The wildlife agency had to make a determination on the status of a threatened species because of a suit by environmental groups like Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Separate studies of trends in Arctic sea ice by academic and government teams have solidified a picture of shrinking area in summers for decades to come. A fresh analysis by scientists of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to be published Saturday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, says sea-ice coverage of the Arctic Ocean will decline by more than 40 percent before the summer of 2050, compared with the average ice extent from 1979 to 1999. This summer the ice retreated much farther and faster than in any year since satellite tracking began in 1979, several Arctic research groups said.

A spokeswoman for the White House declined to comment on the report, saying it was part of decision making at the Interior Department, parent of the survey.

————————————————————-

On another note, the Lennon government continues its miserable record on addressing climate chaos, this time through interdepartmental inefficiencies.

When will the state government changes its planning processes so that the operator of a building has control over the design so operating costs are considered when it is designed? This would address costs over the life of a building, allowing sustainability measures that are cost-effective to be built in.

My advice: sell your seaside property now before people realise it’s likely to become valueless. Invest in low carbon technologies, they will have excellent growth – or else we will have to eat money.