I
grew up planning for my future, wondering which college I would attend,
what to study, and later on, where to work, which articles to write,
what my next book might be, how to pay a mortgage, and which
mountaineering trip I might like to take next.
Now, I wonder about
the future of our planet. During a recent visit with my eight-year-old
niece and 10- and 12-year-old nephews, I stopped myself from asking them
what they wanted to do when they grew up, or any of the future-oriented
questions I used to ask myself. I did so because the reality of their
generation may be that questions like where they will work could be
replaced by: Where will they get their fresh water? What food will be
available? And what parts of their country and the rest of the world
will still be habitable?
The reason, of course, is climate change —
and just how bad it might be came home to me in the summer of 2010. I
was climbing Mount Rainier in Washington State, taking the same route I
had used in a 1994 ascent. Instead of experiencing the metal tips of
the crampons attached to my boots crunching into the ice of a glacier, I
was aware that, at high altitudes, they were still scraping against
exposed volcanic rock. In the pre-dawn night, sparks shot from my steps.
The
route had changed dramatically enough to stun me. I paused at one point
to glance down the steep cliffs at a glacier bathed in soft moonlight
100 meters below. It took my breath away when I realized that I was
looking at what was left of the enormous glacier I’d climbed in 1994,
the one that — right at this spot — had left those crampons crunching on
ice. I stopped in my tracks, breathing the rarefied air of such
altitudes, my mind working hard to grasp the climate-change-induced
drama that had unfolded since I was last at that spot.
I haven’t
returned to Mount Rainier to see just how much further that glacier has
receded in the last few years, but recently I went on a search to find
out just how bad it might turn out to be. I discovered a set of
perfectly serious scientists — not the majority of all climate
scientists by any means, but thoughtful outliers — who suggest that it
isn’t just really, really bad; it’s catastrophic. Some of them even
think that, if the record ongoing releases of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, are aided and abetted
by massive releases of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas,
life as we humans have known it might be at an end on this planet. They
fear that we may be at — and over — a climate change precipice
hair-raisingly quickly.
Mind
you, the more conservative climate science types, represented by the
prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), paint
scenarios that are only modestly less hair-raising, but let’s spend a
little time, as I’ve done, with what might be called scientists at the
edge and hear just what they have to say.
“We’ve Never Been Here as a Species”
“We as a species have never experienced
400 parts
per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Guy McPherson,
professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and
ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of 25
years, told me. “We’ve never been on a planet with no Arctic ice, and we
will hit the average of 400 ppm… within the next couple of years. At
that time, we’ll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the summers… This
planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last
three million years.”
For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms,
here’s what an ice-free Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the
planet: minus the reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation
would be absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean. That would heat
those waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the
potential to change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and
even someday possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet
streams are fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the Earth’s
atmosphere that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical
role in determining the weather of our planet.
McPherson, who maintains the
blog Nature
Bats Last, added, “We’ve never been here as a species and the
implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of
the living planet.”
While his perspective is more extreme than
that of the mainstream scientific community, which sees true disaster
many decades into our future, he’s far from the only scientist
expressing such concerns. Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic
expert at Cambridge University, has been measuring Arctic ice for 40
years, and his findings underscore McPherson’s fears. “The fall-off in
ice volume is so fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly,”
Wadhams
tolda reporter.
According to current data, he estimates “with 95% confidence” that the
Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018. (U.S. Navy
researchers have
predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier — by 2016.)
British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (of which Wadhams is a member),
suggests that
if the summer sea ice loss passes “the point of no return,” and
“catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks” kick in, we’ll be in an “instant
planetary emergency.”
McPherson, Wadham, and Nissen represent
just the tip of a melting iceberg of scientists who are now warning us
about looming disaster, especially involving Arctic methane releases. In
the atmosphere, methane is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively
short-term time scale, is far more destructive than carbon dioxide
(CO2). It is 23 times as powerful as CO2 per molecule on a 100-year
timescale, 105 times more potent when it comes to heating the planet on a
20-year timescale — and the Arctic permafrost, onshore and off, is
packed with the stuff. “The seabed,” says Wadham, “is offshore
permafrost, but is now warming and melting. We are now seeing great
plumes of methane bubbling up in the Siberian Sea… millions of square
miles where methane cover is being released.”
According to a study just published in Nature Geoscience
, twice
as much methane as previously thought is being released from the East
Siberian Arctic Shelf, a two million square kilometer area off the coast
of Northern Siberia. Its researchers found that at least 17 teragrams
(one million tons) of methane are being released into the atmosphere
each year, whereas a 2010 study had
found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.
The day after
Nature Geoscience released its study, a group of scientists from Harvard and other leading academic institutions
published a report in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing
that the amount of methane being emitted in the U.S. both from oil and
agricultural operations could be 50% greater than previous estimates and
1.5 times higher than estimates of the Environmental Protection Agency.
How serious is the potential global methane build-up?
Not all scientists think
it’s an immediate threat or even the major threat we face, but Ira
Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the recent Arctic
Methane study pointed out to me that “the Permian mass extinction that
occurred 250 million years ago is related to methane and thought to be
the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet.” In
that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95% of all species were
wiped out.
Also known as “The Great Dying,” it was triggered by a
massive lava flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in
global temperatures of six degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the
melting of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the
atmosphere, it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this
occurred over a period of approximately 80,000 years.
We are
currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass
extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200
species going
extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or
“background” extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to,
or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass
extinction. The difference being that ours is human caused, isn’t going
to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries, and is now
gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.
It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in
record amounts yearly,
an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of the sort
of process that led to the Great Dying. Some scientists fear that the
situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing feedback
loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing our own
extinction. Worse yet, some are convinced that it could happen far more
quickly than generally believed possible — even in the course of just
the next few decades.
The Sleeping Giant Stirs
According to a
NASA research
report, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”: “Over
hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast
stores of organic carbon — an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it
(a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s
about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth’s soils.
In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all
fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this
carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable top soils within 10 feet (3 meters)
of the surface.”
NASA scientists, along with others, are learning
that the Arctic permafrost — and its stored carbon — may not be as
permanently frosted as its name implies. Research scientist Charles
Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator
of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a
five-year NASA-led field campaign to study how climate change is
affecting the Arctic’s carbon cycle. He told NASA, “Permafrost soils are
warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures — as much as 2.7 to
4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30
years. As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it
threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them
into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the
Arctic’s carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.”
He
fears the potential results should a full-scale permafrost melt take
place. As he points out, “Changes in climate may trigger transformations
that are simply not reversible within our lifetimes, potentially
causing rapid changes in the Earth system that will require adaptations
by people and ecosystems.”
The
recent NASA study highlights
the discovery of active and growing methane vents up to 150 kilometers
across. A scientist on a research ship in the area described this as a
bubbling as far as the eye can see in which the seawater looks like a
vast pool of seltzer. Between the summers of 2010 and 2011, in fact,
scientists found that in the course of a year methane vents only 30
centimeters across had grown a kilometer wide, a 3,333% increase and an
example of the non-linear rapidity with which parts of the planet are
responding to climate disruption.
Miller revealed another alarming
finding: “Some of the methane and carbon dioxide concentrations we’ve
measured have been large, and we’re seeing very different patterns from
what models suggest,” he
said of
some of CARVE’s earlier findings. “We saw large, regional-scale
episodic bursts of higher than normal carbon dioxide and methane in
interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and
they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in
July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness
that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels.
That’s similar to what you might find in a large city.”
Moving
beneath the Arctic Ocean where methane hydrates — often described as
methane gas surrounded by ice — exist, a March 2010 report in
Scienceindicated
that these cumulatively contain the equivalent of 1,000-10,000 gigatons
of carbon. Compare this total to the 240 gigatons of carbon humanity
has emitted into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began.
A study
published in the prestigious journal
Nature this
July suggested that a 50-gigaton “burp” of methane from thawing Arctic
permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is “highly possible at
anytime.” That would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of
carbon dioxide.
Even the relatively staid IPCC has
warned of
such a scenario: “The possibility of abrupt climate change and/or
abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with
potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out. Positive
feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from
the terrestrial biosphere and oceans.”
In the last two centuries,
the amount of methane in the atmosphere has increased from 0.7 parts per
million to 1.7 parts per million. The introduction of methane in such
quantities into the atmosphere may, some climate scientists fear, make
increases in the global temperature of four to six degrees Celsius
inevitable.
The ability of the human psyche to take in and grasp
such information is being tested. And while that is happening, yet more
data continues to pour in — and the news is not good.
Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire
Consider this timeline:
* Late 2007:The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)announces that the planet will see a one degree Celsius temperature increase due to climate change by 2100.
* Late 2008:The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C increase by 2100.
* Mid-2009:The U.N. Environment Programme predicts a
3.5C increase by 2100. Such an increase would remove habitat for human
beings on this planet, as nearly all the plankton in the oceans would be
destroyed, and associated temperature swings would kill off many land
plants. Humans have never lived on a planet at 3.5C above baseline.
* October 2009:The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research releases an updated prediction, suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060.
* November 2009:The Global Carbon Project, which monitors the global carbon cycle, and the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a climate science report, predict 6C and 7C temperature increases, respectively, by 2100.
* December 2010:The U.N. Environment Programme predicts up to a 5C increase by 2050.
* 2012: The conservative International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017.
* November 2013:The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035.
A
briefing provided to the failed U.N. Conference of the Parties in
Copenhagen in 2009 provided this summary: “The long-term sea level that
corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters above
today’s levels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more higher.
These estimates are based on real long-term climate records, not on
models.”
On December 3rd, a
study by
18 eminent scientists, including the former head of NASA’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, showed that the long-held,
internationally agreed upon target to limit rises in global average
temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius was in error and far above the 1C
threshold that would need to be maintained in order to avoid the effects
of catastrophic climate change.
And keep in mind that the various
major assessments of future global temperatures seldom assume the worst
about possible self-reinforcing climate feedback loops like the methane
one.
“Things Are Looking Really Dire”
Climate-change-related deaths are already
estimated at
five million annually, and the process seems to be accelerating more
rapidly than most climate models have suggested. Even without taking
into account the release of frozen methane in the Arctic, some
scientists are already painting a truly bleak picture of the human
future. Take Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Neil Dawe, who in
August
told a reporter that
he wouldn’t be surprised if the generation after him witnessed the
extinction of humanity. All around the estuary near his office on
Vancouver Island, he has been witnessing the unraveling of “the web of
life,” and “it’s happening very quickly.”
“Economic growth is the
biggest destroyer of the ecology,” Dawe says. “Those people who think
you can have a growing economy and a healthy environment are wrong. If
we don’t reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us.” And he isn’t
hopeful humans will be able to save themselves. “Everything is worse and
we’re still doing the same things. Because ecosystems are so resilient,
they don’t exact immediate punishment on the stupid.”
The
University of Arizona’s Guy McPherson has similar fears. “We will have
very few humans on the planet because of lack of habitat,” he says. Of
recent studies showing the toll temperature increases will take on that
habitat, he adds, “They are only looking at CO2 in the atmosphere.”
Here’s
the question: Could some version of extinction or near-extinction
overcome humanity, thanks to climate change — and possibly incredibly
fast? Similar things have happened in the past. Fifty-five million years
ago, a five degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures seems to
have occurred in just 13 years, according to a
study published in the October 2013 issue of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A
report in the August 2013 issue of
Science revealed
that in the near-term Earth’s climate will change 10 times faster than
at any other moment in the last 65 million years.
“The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet,” climate scientist James Hansen has
said.
“There are potential irreversible effects of melting the Arctic sea
ice. If it begins to allow the Arctic Ocean to warm up, and warm the
ocean floor, then we’ll begin to release methane hydrates. And if we let
that happen, that is a potential tipping point that we don’t want to
happen. If we burn all the fossil fuels then we certainly will cause the
methane hydrates, eventually, to come out and cause several degrees
more warming, and it’s not clear that civilization could survive that
extreme climate change.”
Yet, long before humanity has burned all
fossil fuel reserves on the planet, massive amounts of methane will be
released. While the human body is potentially capable of handling a six
to nine degree Celsius rise in the planetary temperature, the crops and
habitat we use for food production are not. As McPherson put it, “If we
see a 3.5 to 4C baseline increase, I see no way to have habitat. We are
at .85C above baseline and we’ve already triggered all these
self-reinforcing feedback loops.”
He adds: “All the evidence
points to a locked-in 3.5 to 5 degree C global temperature rise above
the 1850 ‘norm’ by mid-century, possibly much sooner. This guarantees a
positive feedback, already underway, leading to 4.5 to 6 or more degrees
above ‘norm’ and that is a level lethal to life. This is partly due to
the fact that humans have to eat and plants can’t adapt fast enough to
make that possible for the seven to nine billion of us — so we’ll die.”
If
you think McPherson’s comment about lack of adaptability goes over the
edge, consider that the rate of evolution trails the rate of climate
change by a factor of
10,000, according to a
paper in the August 2013 issue of
Ecology Letters.
Furthermore, David Wasdel, director of the Apollo-Gaia Project and an
expert on multiple feedback dynamics, says, “We are experiencing change
200 to 300 times faster than any of the previous major extinction
events.”
Wasdel cites with particular alarm scientific reports showing that the oceans have already
lost 40% of
their phytoplankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because
of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature
variations. (
According to the
Center for Ocean Solutions: “The oceans have absorbed almost one-half
of human-released CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
Although this has moderated the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, it
is chemically altering marine ecosystems 100 times more rapidly than it
has changed in at least the last 650,000 years.”)
“This is already
a mass extinction event,” Wasdel adds. “The question is, how far is it
going to go? How serious does it become? If we are not able to stop the
rate of increase of temperature itself, and get that back under control,
then a high temperature event, perhaps another 5-6 degrees [C], would
obliterate at least 60% to 80% of the populations and species of life on
Earth.”
What Comes Next?
In November 2012,
even Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group (an international
financial institution that provides loans to developing countries),
warned that
“a 4C warmer world can, and must be, avoided. Lack of action on climate
change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely
different world than we are living in today.”
A World Bank-
commissioned report warned that we are indeed on track to a “4C world” marked by extreme heat waves and life-threatening sea-level rise.
The three living diplomats who have led U.N. climate change talks
claim there
is little chance the next climate treaty, if it is ever approved, will
prevent the world from overheating. “There is nothing that can be agreed
in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees,” says Yvo de Boer,
who was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in
Copenhagen crumbled. “The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a
2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.”
Atmospheric and marine scientist Ira Leifer is particularly concerned about the changing rainfall patterns a recently
leaked IPCC
draft report suggested for our future: “When I look at what the models
predicted for a 4C world, I see very little rain over vast swaths of
populations. If Spain becomes like Algeria, where do all the Spaniards
get the water to survive? We have parts of the world which have high
populations which have high rainfall and crops that exist there, and
when that rainfall and those crops go away and the country starts
looking more like some of North Africa, what keeps the people alive?”
The
IPCC report suggests that we can expect a generalized shifting of
global rain patterns further north, robbing areas that now get plentiful
rain of future water supplies. History shows us that when food supplies
collapse, wars begin, while famine and disease spread. All of these
things, scientists now fear, could happen on an unprecedented scale,
especially given the interconnected nature of the global economy.
“Some
scientists are indicating we should make plans to adapt to a 4C world,”
Leifer comments. “While prudent, one wonders what portion of the living
population now could adapt to such a world, and my view is that it’s
just a few thousand people [seeking refuge] in the Arctic or
Antarctica.”
Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are
often not the most popular guys in the global room. McPherson, for
instance, has often been labeled “Guy McStinction” — to which he
responds, “I’m just reporting the results from other scientists. Nearly
all of these results are published in established, esteemed literature. I
don’t think anybody is taking issue with NASA, or
Nature, or
Science, or the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from
legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration], for example. I’m not making this information up, I’m
just connecting a couple of dots, and it’s something many people have
difficulty with.”
McPherson does not hold out much hope for the
future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the
radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream
media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because, as he
says, “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less
to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the
other hand, is a good bet, he believes, “because there is money in this,
and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue.”
Leifer,
however, is convinced that there is a moral obligation never to give up
and that the path to global destruction could be altered. “In the short
term, if you can make it in the economic interests of people to do the
right thing, it’ll happen very fast.” He offers an analogy when it comes
to whether humanity will be willing to act to mitigate the effects of
climate change: “People do all sorts of things to lower their risk of
cancer, not because you are guaranteed not to get it, but because you do
what you can and take out the health protections and insurance you need
in order to try to lower your risk of getting it.”
The signs of a
worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we allow ourselves
to see them or not. Certainly, the scientific community gets it. As do
countless communities across the globe where the effects of climate
change are already being experienced in striking ways and local
preparations for climatic disasters, including increasingly powerful floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and storms are
underway. Evacuations from low-lying South Pacific islands have already
begun.
People in such areas, out of necessity, are starting to try to teach
their children how to adapt to, and live in, what we are causing our
world to become.
My niece and nephews are doing something similar.
They are growing vegetables in a backyard garden and their eight
chickens provide more than enough eggs for the family. Their parents
are intent on teaching them how to be ever more self-sustaining. But
none of these heartfelt actions can mitigate what is already underway
when it comes to the global climate.
I am 45 years old, and I
often wonder how my generation will survive the impending climate
crisis. What will happen to our world if the summer Arctic waters are
indeed ice-free only a few years from now? What will my life look like
if I live to experience a 3.5 Celsius global temperature increase?
Above all, I wonder how coming generations will survive.
Dahr
Jamail has written extensively about climate change as well as the BP
oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a recipient of numerous
awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and the James
Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is the author of two
books: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He currently works for al-Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar.
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