State Of Extreme Emergency

by Malcolm Light

PRESIDENT OBAMA MUST DECLARE A STATE OF EXTREME NATIONAL EMERGENCY AND CEASE ORCHESTRATING A WAR WITH RUSSIA. HE MUST RECALL HIS ENTIRE ARMY AND NAVY PERSONNEL TO THE UNITED STATES TO BEGIN A MASSIVE CONVERSION OF THE US ENERGY SYSTEM TO SOLAR AND WIND POWER. THIS CONVERSION MUST RESULT IN ALL 600 COAL POWER STATIONS AND NUCLEAR STATIONS BEING COMPLETELY SHUT DOWN IN THE NEXT 5 TO 10 YEARS. ALL SURFACE TRANSPORT BOTH PRIVATE AND PUBLIC MUST BE ENTIRELY ELECTRIFIED AND AIR TRANSPORT CONVERTED TO METHANE OR HYDROGEN FUEL. IF THIS IS NOT DONE, HUMANITY WILL BE FACING TOTAL EXTINCTION IN AN ARCTIC METHANE FIRESTORM BETWEEN 2040 AND 2050.

The US and Canada must cut their global emissions of carbon dioxide by 90% in the next 10 to 15 years, otherwise they will be become an instrument of mass destruction of the Earth and its entire human population. Recovery of the United States economy from the financial crisis has been very unsoundly based by the present Administration on an extremely hazardous "all of the above" energy policy that has allowed continent wide gas fracking, coal and oil sand oil mining and the return of widespread drilling to the Gulf. Coast. This large amount of fossil fuel has to be transported and sold which has caused extensive spills, explosions and confrontations with US citizens over fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline. Gas fracking is in the process of destroying the entire aquifer systems of the United States and causing widespread earthquakes. The oil spills are doing the same to the surface river run off.

We are now facing a devastating final show down with Mother Nature, which is being massively accelerated by the filthy extraction of fossil fuels by US and Canada by gas fracking, coal and tar sand mining and continent wide bitumen transport. The United States and other developed nations made a fatal mistake by refusing to sign the original Kyoto protocols. The United States and Canada must now cease all their fossil fuel extraction and go entirely onto renewable energy in the next 10 to 15 years otherwise they will be guilty of planetary ecocide - genocide by the 2050's.

The volume transport of the Gulf Stream has increased by three times since the 1940's due to the rising atmospheric pressure difference set up between the polluted, greenhouse gas rich air above North America and the marine Atlantic Air. The increasingly heated Gulf Stream with its associated high winds and energy rich weather systems then flows NE to Europe where it recently pummeled Great Britain with catastrophic storms. Other branches of the Gulf Stream then enter the Arctic and disassociate the subsea Arctic methane hydrate seals on subsea and deep high - pressure mantle methane reservoirs below the Eurasian Basin- Laptev Sea transition. This is releasing increasing amounts of methane into the atmosphere producing anomalous temperatures, greater than 20°C above average. Over very short time periods of a few days to a few months the atmospheric methane has a global warming potential from 1000 to 100 times that of carbon dioxide.

There are such massive reserves of methane in the subsea Arctic methane hydrates, that if only a few percent of them are disassociated, they will lead to a jump in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere by 10°C and produce a "Permian" style major extinction event which will kill us all. The whole northern hemisphere is now covered by a thickening atmospheric methane global warming veil that is spreading southwards at about 1 km a day and it already totally envelopes the United States. A giant hole in the equatorial ozone layer has also been discovered in the west Pacific which acts like an elevator transferring methane from lower altitudes to the stratosphere where it already forms a dense equatorial global warming stratospheric band that is spreading into the Polar regions.

During the last winter, the high Arctic winter temperatures and pressures have displaced the normal freezing Arctic Air south into Canada and the United States producing never before seen, freezing winter storms and massive power failures. When the Arctic ice cap finally melts towards the end of next year, the Arctic sea will be aggressively heated by the sun and the Gulf Stream. The cold Arctic air will then be confined to the Greenland Ice cap and the hot globally warmed Arctic air with its methane will flow south to the United States to further heat up the Gulf Stream, setting up an anticlockwise circulation around Greenland. Under these circumstances Great Britain and Europe must expect even more catastrophic storm systems, hurricane force winds and massive flooding after the end of next year due to a further acceleration in the energy transport of the Gulf Stream. If this process continues unchecked the mean temperature of the atmosphere will rise a further 8° centigrade and we will be facing global deglaciation, a more than 200 feet rise in sea level rise and a major terminal extinction event by the 2050's.

Post by Zaven Ohannessian.

Comprehensive and Effective Climate Plan

President Obama's Climate Action Plan doesn't look much like a shift to genuinely clean energy. As discussed in a recent post by Peter Carter, the President's Plan sadly supports fossil fuel in many ways.

The plan supports natural gas very prominently. Indeed, how clean is natural gas? Years ago, a Cornell University study (image below) concluded that emissions caused by natural gas can be even worse than coal and diesel oil, especially when looked at over a relatively short period.

At the time, I wrote that this kind of support for natural gas - as if that was supposedly "clean energy" - would only perpetuate the government's support for fuel, while doing little or nothing to help genuinely clean energy. Moreover, continued support for fossil fuel comes at the expensive of growth in genuinely clean energy that we need instead.

EIA figures also show that, over the period from 1990 to 2010, the average amount of carbon dioxide produced in the United States for each unit of energy generated has remained much the same as the world average, while the situation in China has grown even worse.

IEA figures further show that the world's energy-related carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise rapidly and that they, for the period 1900 - 2012, add up to a staggering amount of 1257 Gt.

As the image below shows, from a recent IEA report, the carbon intensity of global energy has hardly improved over the decades.

The colored lines on the right correspond with scenarios in which global temperatures are projected to increase by, respectively, 6 degrees Celsius, 4 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius.

What are the chances that it will be possible to avoid the worst-case scenario?  The IEA elaborates that an extension of current trends would result in an average global temperature rise of at least 6 degrees Celsius in the long term. To have an 80% chance of limiting the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions need to be cut by more than half in 2050 compared with 2009. They would need to continue to fall thereafter.

While the IEA adds that the goal of limiting the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius can only be achieved if greenhouse gas emissions in non-energy sectors are also reduced, the IEA does not elaborate on what further action will be needed and whether emission reductions alone will suffice to avoid climate catastrophe.

[click to enlarge]

As said, the world's cumulative energy-related carbon dioxide emissions add up, for the period 1900 - 2012, to a staggering amount of 1257 Gt. As the graph on the right shows, methane's global warming potential for the first decade since its release into the atmosphere will be more than 130 times as much as carbon dioxide.

Abrupt release of just 10 Gt of methane will - during the first decade since entering into the atmosphere - have a stronger greenhouse effect globally than all cumulative energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from 1900 to 2012.

Note that above calculation applies to methane as it's typically released at present, i.e. gradually and spread out over the world, mostly originating from cattle, wetlands, biowaste, energy, forest fires, etc. Things will be much worse in case of abrupt release of methane from the Arctic seabed, when much of the methane will initially remain concentrated in the Arctic, where hydroxyl levels are also very low.

After 5 years, a methane cloud 20% the size of its original abrupt release of methane in the Arctic will still have more than 1000 times the warming potency locally that the same mass of carbon dioxide has globally.

Look at it this way; an abrupt release in the Arctic Ocean will initially remain concentrated locally. The Arctic Ocean covers 2.8% of the Earth's surface, while there's currently about 0.14 Gt of methane in the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean. Abrupt release of 1 Gt methane from the Arctic seabed will thus initially multiply methane levels in the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean by 8, trapping much more heat from sunlight, especially during the June solstice when solar radiation received by the Arctic is higher than anywhere else on Earth.

This comes on top of warming that is already accelerated in the Arctic. Albedo changes alone could cause more warming than all emissions by people globally, according to calculations by Prof. Peter Wadhams, who also describes things in the video below.

The resulting temperature rises in the Arctic threaten to trigger further methane releases from the seabed and wildfires on land in the Arctic, further driving up temperatures in an exponential spiral of runaway global warming.

In conclusion, what's needed is a climate plan that will genuinely produce the necessary action, i.e. a comprehensive and effective climate plan as described at
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/climateplan.html

Runaway Global Warming

If you like, you can order prints of above image at Shutterfly (8 x 10 size works best).

Video and poster - methane in the Arctic

Methane in the Arctic threatens to escalate into runaway global warming.

The poster shown in the video is added below. 

Click on the poster to view a higher-resolution version, for printing out and hanging it on the wall.

Methane in the Arctic

Methane is often said to have a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 21 times as strong as carbon dioxide, a figure based on IPCC assessment reports that date back to the 1990s. However, the IPCC has updated methane's GWP several times since, as illustrated in Table 1. below.

In its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4, 2007), the IPCC gives methane a GWP of 25 as much as carbon dioxide over 100 years and 72 as much as carbon dioxide over 20 years.

Furthermore, a 2009 study, by Drew Shindell et al., points out that the IPCC figures do not include direct+indirect radiative effects of aerosol responses to methane releases that increase methane's GWP to 105 over 20 years when included

Moreover, in the context of tipping points, which seems appropriate regarding methane releases in the Arctic, it makes sense to focus on a short time horizon, possibly as short as a few years.

Accordingly, methane's GWP can best be visualized as in the image below, which is also displayed mid-right on the poster above.

The image on the left shows methane's global warming potential (GWP) for different time horizons, pointing out that methane's GWP is more than 130 times that of carbon dioxide over a period of ten years.

IPCC¹ figures were used to create the blue line. The red line is based on figures in a study by Shindell et al.², which are higher as they include more effects. This study concludes that methane's GWP would likely be further increased by including ecosystem responses.

The ecosystem response can be particularly strong in the Arctic, where the seabed contains huge amounts of methane. Continued warming in the Arctic can cause large abrupt methane releases which in turn can trigger further methane releases from sediments under the sea.

This is particularly worrying, not only because of the presence of huge amounts of methane, but also because the sea is quite shallow in areas such as the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), which in the case of large abrupt releases can soon lead to oxygen depletion in the water and make that much of the methane will enter the atmosphere without being oxidized in the water.

Additionally, low water temperatures and long sea currents in the Arctic Ocean are not very friendly toward bacteria that might otherwise break down methane in the water.

For further background, also see the post The potential impact of large abrupt release of methane in the Arctic at the Arctic Methane blog³, and the FAQ page at that blog.

References:

1. IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Table 2.14 (2007)
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-10-2.html

2. D.T. Shindell et al., "Improved Attribution of Climate Forcing to Emissions". Science vol 326: pp. 716-718 (2009)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5953/716.abstract

3. Sam Carana, The potential impact of large abrupt release of methane in the Arctic (2012)
http://arcticmethane.blogspot.com/2012/05/potential-impact-of-large-abrupt.html