2/19/2009

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Our Climate Fix Must Be Big and Quick.

William H. CalvinUniversity of Washington

Seattle, Washington USA

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Mountain glaciers gone by 2050

William H. CalvinUniversity of Washington

Seattle, Washington USA

Black & White Mtn.

What everyone knows by now…

1. Slowly overheating1. due to greenhouse gases like CO2,

2. mostly from burning coal and oil.

2. Promises to get much worse1. Someday.

3. Unless we reduce emissions1. clean cars

2. clean electricity

3. reformed agriculture and forestry.

1. But abrupt climate change may preempt.

2.Tomorrow?

3. Totally inadequate except to speed up a real fix.

• The Diagnosis:– Global Fever

– ocean acidity buildup

– and Complications such as desertification,heavy weather, fires

• The Treatments– Too Little, Too Late, Too Local

– Insufficiently Ambitious

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The climate optimist pp.274-5 in Global Fever

In the 1960s and 1970s, we1. discovered the genetic code,

continental drift, and chaos theory,

2. put communication satellites in geosynchronous orbits,

3. went to the moon,

4. did heart transplants,

5. invented the Internet, personal computers, email and spreadsheets. 6

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The climate optimist pp.274-5 in Global Fever

• Much can happen in only twenty years.

• With our current scientific momentum, the Third Industrial Revolution has likely started — but now it needs to be fast and focused.

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The 2003 heat wave in Europekilled 35,000 people.

Salvador Dalí The Persistence of Memory. 1931

REFLECTS most sunlight ABSORBS most sunlight

The ice-albedo feedback can cause rapid warming.

Arctic overheating from 1999 to 2008

Permafrost researcherKaty Walter

igniting methane trapped beneath the surface of a

frozen pond.

23X as potent as CO2

World methane distributionmining

permafrostventing

Where cattle methane ought to be

Where cattle methane ought to be

Natural gas pipelines are very dense here

Oil production is very dense here

Mining and permafrost are the major sources.

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Strip mining brown coal near Grevenbroich, Germany

High Winds1

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3

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Cyclone Nargis hit Burma in May 2008 with winds of 200 to 250 km/h (120 to 150 mph).

Authorities have reported over 22,500 dead, with a further 41,000 people still missing

Floodwaters from Hurricane Ike were reportedly as high as eight feet in some areas, causing widespread damage along the coast of Texas.

A single home is left standing among debris from Hurricane Ike September 14, 2008 in Gilchrist, Texas.

David J. Phillip Boston.com

Garbage truck flip

eastside

Blown-over garbage truck in Bill Gates’ neighborhood of Seattle in 1999

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Wider extremes in climate get us closer to flip thresholds.

Heavy Weather

(US government photo)The heavens opened

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Logged hillside collapseChehalis WA flood 2007

Floods have been increasing for 50 years.

So it is a global climate change,not merely local trouble that moves around.

Wildfires

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Fire managers predict bad year for blazesSat May 10, 2008 2:37pm EDT

David S. Roberts, San Diego County 2007

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1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Wildfires in US West: millions of acres per year

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4

3

2

1

10xin 20

years

Americas only now catching up to the rest of the world’s fire problem.

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60 years of climate change

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The new extremes do the damage, not shifts in the average.

Don’t need a thermometer or models to see the trouble and extrapolate to big trouble ahead.

Howhot

is it?

William H. CalvinUniversity of Washington

Global-Fever.org

Climate

Briefings

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1976 shift

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a, Extent (dark red) of mountain pine beetle. b, The study area includes 98% of the current outbreak area. c, A photograph taken in 2006 showing an example of recent mortality: pine trees turn red in the first year after beetle k ill, and grey in subsequent years. Photo credit: Joan Westfall, Entopath Management Ltd.

Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change

a, Extent (dark red) of mountain pine beetle.

W. A. Kurz et al.doi:10.1038/nature06777

Warmer winters

Heat waves are already killing coral. Caribbean 2005 coral disaster

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reef loss-70 m

Nighttime infrared satellite measures of sea surface temperature, plotted as excess degree weeks.

GREEN areas bleaching only

YELLOW-VIOLET areas have increasing mortality

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Since NOAA's last report in 2005, the Caribbean region has lost at least 50 percent of its corals, largely because sea temperatures have risen, said Timothy Keeney, NOAA's deputy assistant secretary for oceans and atmo-sphere, and 25 percent of all marine species need coral reefs to live and grow, while 40 percent of the fish caught commercially use reefs to breed.

(NO

AA

pre

ss r

elea

se,

Ju

ly 2

00

8)

Drought

Dorothea Lange, Dust Bowl 1930s

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hot moist air rises

comes down dry

comes down dry

hot moist air rises

comes down dry

comes down dry

EXPANDED TROPICSNORMAL TROPICS

Areas with Mediterranean Climates are in drought trouble

The expansion of the overheated tropics

32°N32°N

The two most severe drought stages are plotted next, averaged over all of the global land surface except where ice sheets live.

Maybe 15-20% of U.S. land in extreme+ drought stages

The 1983 stepwise doubling of global drought when CO2 was at 342 ppm (62 ppm excess)

when CO2 wasat 342 ppm

15%

35%

25%

CO2 now at 387 ppm (107 ppm excess)

Big

El N

iño

Big

El N

iño

Big

El N

iño

We have been in the danger

zone since 1976 and have doubled the excess CO2

since then.

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It isn’t just the signposted dangers that we must worry about.

We need a safety margin for the surprises.

Abrupt Changes in Climate

• [on time scale of a drought but widespread]

• Nuclear Winter• North Atlantic Current decline rearranges winds and rains worldwide.• El Niño has done two limited versions already.•

The Amazon is drying & burning under the influence of deforestation & climate-change-induced drought

Just after 1998 El Niño Nepstad et al., Forest Ecology & Management 154, 2001

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40 ppm increase in excess CO2

within a few years

On top of that, a 50% increasein the rate of CO2 growth thereafter, due to loss of carbon sinks.

Burn locally,crash globally

How to rearrange atmospheric circulation in only a few months

All it takes is a big El Niño.

If a big one lasted two years instead of one….

The Big Burn also causes a mass extinction event: about half of all Amazon species will go extinct.

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Three of the six species of apes live in SE Asia forests.

Here, orangutan and siamang.

Imagine yourself during some future El Niño, watching the forest flammability index for the Amazon or SE Asia, contemplating that in the next few months you might see:

1. the Big Burn;2. its 50% step up in excess CO2; 50% speedup3. a jump in our global fever, drought, and heavy weather

problems;4. the mass extinction of species in two of the world’s

three major tropical rain forests; and5. collapsing governments, mass migrations, and the ―four

horsemen‖ wave of famine, pestilence, war, and genocide.

Albrecht DürerThe Revelation of St John: The Four Riders of the Apocalypse, 1497-98, Woodcut, 39 x 28 cm,

Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

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1. Famine2. Pestilence3. War4. Genocide

Any major downsizing usually involves

The path not taken.

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We could lose our maneuvering room and go into a tailspin.

We must front-load our response. Matt Collins in Scientific American 2008

Perfect storm:Any event where a combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically.

Seattle 12-19-2008

2nd bus almostrear-ended 1st

and launched it.

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Coral reef crumbles as skeleton is reabsorbed into seawater.

OCEAN pH: The coral and shell problem

If only address fever per se, we still get into big trouble with the food chain.

We must remove enough carbon from that circulating in the carbon cycle to get [CO2] back down to the old maximum, 280 ppm. And quickly.

The mess we’re in1. Two big threats from excess CO2

1. Global fever and its knock-on climate effects

2. Ocean acidification’s threat to the food chain

2. It does not follow that reducing emissions will save us, as natural decay of CO2 is too slow (and it acidifiesoceans even more).

3. Until we remove the excess CO2, things will get worse (even with zero emissions).

The mess we’re in4. We are already in the danger zone for

abrupt climate change. It could cause a mass extinction of species and a very messy human population crash.

5. TIME FRAME: Fix in a decade or two—beware of long-term thinking.

6. The strategy should be toa. cancel out annual emissions with new sinks

b. compensate for permanently lost leaves

c. quickly sequester the excess CO2 from all fossil fuels burned so far.

Finally,climate starts improving.

Carbon emissions each year since 1950

4X

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So rate of carbon burial must be 32 GtC /yr The mess we’re in7. Compensating for current annual

emissions, and delayed effects of past ones, requires at least 10 Gt of carbon to be sequestered each year.

8. Drawing down [CO2] within several decades requires an additional 22 Gt C each year.

9. Sequestering crop residues might total 0.2 Gt C, and global sewage is similar—which suggests growing biomass on land will prove far too small for 32 GtC/yr.

The mess we’re in10. Only algae has the needed growing

space, the ocean surface.

11. The requirement is growing and then sequestering enough algae each year.

12. Emission reductions will allow us to reduce both big threats more quickly.

a. But without the means to sequester such massive amounts of circulating carbon, emission reductions merely slow the disease.

The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and goodwill would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.

– Edmund Burke

Our climate fix must be big and quick.

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My books and talksmay be found at:

WilliamCalvin.org

The End

Edvard Munch, The Scream