Climate Change - More New Problems

Phill Parsons

Research by another of the paper’s authors, Professor Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institute for Science, in Stanford, California, adds another alarming twist to the story. He was surprised to find that even after the pollution stops, the Earth’s temperature will not start to fall but will settle at a new, higher level.

Seriously bad news when combined with the fact that a hotter planet will add to its own greenhouse gases, regardless of the changes humans make to their activities, making demands on science much greater as the need to trap and store or use the methane leaking from the frozen arctic is needed to offset this huge volume of gas, much more powerful in warming terms than CO2 but also shorter lived.
Climate Change – More New Problems

A STATE in dangerous environmental decline may also be in denial.

Australians would, were their lifestyle adopted by the whole world, require 2 Earths to meet their demands.

Changing from greed to need and avoiding a declining quality of life, followed by closely by a decline in quantity as the natural systems fail to provide for a population too demanding of those systems services, is the challenge facing all of us but especially those who wish to wear the mantle of community leaders.

Avoiding an abrupt, irreversible and deadly climate catastrophe may still be possible although we only have the less than perfect climate models to indicate that such a catastrophe may not occur, its timing or indeed its precursors.

Resolute action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is what is necessary and the Rudd government will align itself with the Howard in the historical records, if there are any, if it wilts and fails to set a high target for Australian reductions.

Given the nature of Australia’s climate every resident will be able to relate to such a failure on a daily basis as temperature rises, water restrictions tighten and the actions the government has set in place seem more and more remote from real-time solutions proposed by the conservation movement in and outside of the parliaments.

International investors such as AMP Capital, Goldman Sachs JB Were, Colonial First State Global Asset Management, BT Financial Group and Merrill Lynch have urged developed countries such as Australia to adopt targeted cuts of at least 25 per cent because they understand the costs and impacts of a failure to act resolutely.

At the negotiation for the Second Round Protocol Australia has lobbied to have any reference to a 25 to 40% reduction in emissions of the developed countries by 2020 omitted from the conference statement leaving open the door for the Rudd government to wilt.

The Climate Institute, who failed Australians over the matter of climate, by putting their trust in Labor instead of the Greens last election.

They are yet to admit their error along with the other mainstream conservation organizations, who pay lip service to the ideals of the movement but when push comes to shove, are unable to stand up for what they espouse.

A new study shows the effects of Carbon [CO2] pollution will be felt for hundreds of thousands of years. Professor David Archer of Chicago University warns that “the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than the age of human civilization [+-10,000 years BP] so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.” [becoming safe].

These new findings, like others on the accelerating rate of change in the behavior of the climate, will come as a shock because most governments and many scientists, who have assumed that carbon dioxide emissions would work their way out of the atmosphere in about a century, enabling it to clean itself fairly rapidly once the world switched to clean sources of energy.

Carbon dioxide mainly leaves the atmosphere by being soaked up by the oceans, but Professor Archer says that “the pervasive notion in the climate science community and in the public at large” that this happens relatively quickly is no longer valid. He and other leading scientists spell out why in a paper to be published in the journal Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

“The ocean is getting fed up with absorbing our CO2,” he says. The surface waters, about 100 metres deep, which used to sop up the gas quite fast, are now getting saturated with it, turning acid in the process, and so decreasing their uptake. They need to be replaced with fresh water from deep down, but this overturning circulation “takes centuries or a millennium”. And global warming is expected to slow this down: the hotter the surface layer becomes, the longer the replenishment takes.

Concomitant with this acidification is the death of sea life as we know it. The ability of the basis of the food chain to make calcium in an acidified sea is reduced adding to the threat of simple heating destabilizing the distribution of ocean ecosystems. This acidification is evidence of the immutability of the laws of chemistry of physics, their judgment blind and compassionless.

The paper will add that research shows even this renewing process will not be enough to remove all the vast amounts of carbon dioxide that humanity is now adding to the atmosphere.

Much of it will have to wait hundreds of thousands of years before being removed by another, infinitely slower, process: the natural weathering of rocks, which incorporates the gas into other substances.

The more pollution that is emitted now, the longer the time span for a return to the climate range upon which human activity evolved besides the worse the instabilty of the climate will become.

Have a look at methane on Wikipaedia and then the external link to the Goddard Institute of Space Science.

The only way to prevent release from the Arctic bogs is to return to the temperatures of some decades ago, an apparently impossible task given the above findings.

One diabolical part of the problem is coal. The World Coal Institute represent the industry and king coal is demanding global financial support to develop carbon capture and storage.

Perhaps this technology can be made to work, although the coal industry has had 11 years since Kyoto to make substantial progress there are no pilot plants anywhere despite cross my heart and hope to kill you all before I have to give up a penny of profit promises.

Australia, along with many other countries and a lot of coal in the ground and investment in it, supported these moves whilst Brazil opposed them, claiming the Clean development mechanism was to assist the less developed countries, not prop up unproved technologies.

Whilst those who aspire to be recognized as leaders fail to understand that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment we can only slide toward a dismal future.

phill Parsons advocate for the avoidance of further dangerous climate instability beyond that we have already ensured through our ignorance of the evidence.

Only massive protest about a low target will have any chance of impacting on the government if it sets a low goal and they can feel fairly safe given the disinformation and confusion sown in the minds of the community by the short term beneficiaries of such a failure.

Note: The second large scale, relatively rapid carbon, sink is terrestrial plants and they too are failing to be as effective with declining rainfall and rising temperatures affecting plant longevity and species density. A major agent of changes, fire, is also releasing some of the stored carbon, expanding the impacts of forestry disturbance of carbon stores through degradation and deforestation through management.

Further degradation and destruction of natural vegetation systems including forests by human activity is reducing their ability to remove and store carbon.