Last Hours

This is a ten minute video which has been circulating recently on global warming. It is narrated by radio host Thom Hartmann, and the science in it is very, very solid. Sad to say.

http://lasthours.org/

Flustercluck, part deux

The oil rig Kulluk is now aground on Sitkalidak Island, just off of Kodiak AK. Here's a map. Not sure where on the island it's aground.

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(CNN) -- A Royal Dutch Shell oil drilling barge remained grounded Tuesday on an island off southern Alaska amid a fierce winter storm that hindered recovery efforts, Coast Guard and Alaskan authorities reported.

The Shell-owned rig Kulluk was being towed to Seattle when it began encountering trouble Sunday, the Coast Guard said. One tug needed help after its engines failed; a replacement had to cut the rig loose Monday night during a storm that whipped up 24-foot waves in the Gulf of Alaska.

The 266-foot rig ran aground off Sitkalidak Island, about 200 miles south of Anchorage, on Monday night. A joint command was set up to head off any possible environmental damage, but crews had not been able to confirm the Kulluk's condition Tuesday morning, those authorities reported.

The Kulluk had 139,000 gallons (4,400 barrels) of diesel fuel and 12,000 gallons of combined lube oil and hydraulic fluid on board; no leaks had been detected early Tuesday.

Weather conditions were expected to improve through the rest of the week, with seas subsiding from 24 feet Tuesday to 11 feet by Friday, according to the National Weather Service.

Susan Childs, Shell's incident commander, said more than 250 people were working on the response. The rig grounded in an area of Ocean Bay, where water depth is 32 feet to 48 feet, according to a release from the response team.

The Kulluk is part of Shell's controversial effort to drill for oil in the remote Arctic, a project that caused widespread concern among environmentalists and was held up after BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It finished drilling operations in October, and its 18-person crew was evacuated Saturday.

The rig was being used to drill in the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska's North Slope. Shell says it's working at far less depth and lower pressures than the BP well that erupted off Louisiana, killing 11 men aboard and unleashing an undersea gusher that took three months to cap.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates more than 90 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may be recoverable by drilling. And the shrinking of the region's sea ice -- which hit record lows in 2012 -- has created new opportunities for energy exploration in the region.

Climate researchers say that a decrease in sea ice is a symptom of a warming climate, caused largely by the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels. The science is politically controversial but generally accepted as fact by most scientists.

Daisy and the Trillion Trees

In 1983 James Lovelock and Andrew Watson created a computer simulation called "Daisyworld". The premise was an ultra-simplified ecosystem, a world inhabited by only two species, white daisies and black daisies. Affecting this world's climate was the single factor of its sun's heat. The high-albedo white daisies reflect sunlight and the low-albedo black daisies absorb sunlight. The "monkey wrench" in the system is that the sun is actually slowly becoming hotter.

So, as the simulation begins, the sun's radiation is too small to germinate either the white or black daisies, but the surface of the planet is covered with evenly distributed seeds of both black and white daisies. As the sun becomes hotter and the world heats up, eventually the world becomes warm enough for the black daisies to germinate and bloom. The black flowers absorb the sun's heat, causing the world to warm even more rapidly, until it is warm enough for the white daisies to also germinate and bloom. The white flowers reflect the sunlight and begin to lower the world's temperature. As the sun continues to heat up to a level which is uncomfortable for the daisies, the white flowers, which are better able to cool themselves, out-compete the black flowers. The greater the surface-area of the world that is covered by white daisies, the greater the cooling effect of the white flowers. In this way, the white and black flowers work in tandem to regulate the temperature to a level which is comfortable for all daisies. Eventually the sun heats up beyond the ability of the white daisies to regulate it, and all of the daisies die. If, however, the sun's heat remains more or less constant, the populations of white and black daisies will equilibrate in such a way as to maintain an optimum climate for the daisies. In this way, rather than naturally selecting to adapt to the environment, the daisies modify their environment to fit their own needs.

Later generations of the Daisyworld program added many more layers of complexity (atmosphere, herbivorous and carnivorous animals, etc), but each iteration of complexity actually increases the world's ability to self-regulate.

Here is a diagram of this first Daisyworld test, in 1983:

It is serendipitous, only, that this model happens to address global warming. Lovelock and Watson could have chosen any number of variables, and the problem of anthropogenic climate change was only vaguely understood at the time. Nonetheless, it serves admirably to illustrate a possible solution to the current global warming crisis.

There are four things we know for certain about the current global warming situation.

1) It is happening, and it is the largest and fastest increase in global temperatures since eukaryotic life has existed on earth.

2) It is happening mostly as the result of human activity, especially the combination of the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

3) If left unmitigated, it is the single most likely cause of the extinction of the human species. If current trends continue, earth will be uninhabitable by human life by the end of this century. More importantly, there is a very real possibility that anthropogenic global warming will (if it has not done so already) trigger a runaway climatological feedback-loop which will continue to increase global temperatures long after humans are extinct. The worst-case scenario, which is unfortunately quite plausible, would result in earth becoming a hellishly hot Venus-like world devoid of all liquid water and all life, within about 600 years.

4) There are three foreseeable outcomes for the human population from this; mitigation, outmigration or extinction.

This blog has spent a lot of time exploring the possibility of outmigration, and I do believe that this is a critical step to ensure the survival of our species, and other terrestrial species. However, in the very short amount of time we have before this planet is no longer habitable, we would only be able to successfully evacuate a tiny fraction of our population. In order for the majority of humans to survive, we must directly and immediately mitigate the increase in global temperatures.

The good news is, we can. And we don't have to wait for governments or corporations to take the lead; we can do it ourselves, right now, easily and inexpensively.

As a very quick summary, the problem is this. Short-wave radiation from the sun (insolation, with an "o") enters the atmosphere, heating both the atmosphere and the earth's surface. Some of this is reflected directly back into space, both by the earth's surface or by clouds. Some of it is re-radiated as long-wave radiation from the earth and air back into space as well. Some of it, however, is trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses ("insulation", with a "u") such as carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane. For a very long time, this insolation/insulation cycle was in a state of equilibrium. Now, however, the combination of an extraordinary amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution by the burning of fossil fuels, and the diminished ability of trees to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere due to deforestation, has created an overabundance of CO2 in our atmosphere. This increases the greenhouse effect, which raises temperatures, which evaporates water which increases the greenhouse effect even more which further raises temperatures, which kills off trees which reduces the ability of forests to scrub CO2 out of the system which increases greenhouse CO2 which increases temperatures, etc.

Freeman Dyson, the same brilliant mind who invented a starship to reach Alpha Centauri in 88 years time back in 1957 (the Orion nuclear-pulse starship, I've written quite a bit about it in this blog) has proposed a simple and elegant solution to this problem.

In order to stop catastrophic global warming, we simply need to plant one trillion trees.

Right now.

Really.

Yes, it sounds like a lot. But we have over seven billion people on the planet. That works out to just under 143 trees per person. If every man, woman and child on planet earth were to plant just two trees every five days for one year, even with no reduction in our usage of fossil fuels we would actually be in some danger of shocking the climate into a mini ice-age.

Our planet has a remarkable ability to self-regulate its ecosystems. But it only works if all the "daisies" are there to do their part of the regulating.

Yes, it would actually be more helpful to plant all 143 trees at an optimal time for planting them. You can start them from seeds, just pick up a couple handfuls of seeds of some kind of tree which is indigenous to your area, and plant them in an place that they are likely to grow. If you are ridiculously slow about it, it might take you a couple of hours to do so. Then, walk away and forget about them. This isn't difficult. Entire forests have been successfully planted by a single individual.

Of course, the very best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. Barring that, "today" is an awfully good second best.

Happy Arbor Day, whenever that happens to be where you are.

June Too Soon

Not anymore.

NASA Research Finds 2010 Tied for Warmest Year on Record

I could have posted about how this, combined with the previous post, debunks the Pastafarian notion that a decrease in global piracy is the cause of global warming. But the truth of global piracy isn't at all humorous, and the truth of global warming is downright ugly. That 2010, which was a La Niña for the last six months or so, tied the hottest year on record is just about as bad as the news could get. The worse news, that no-one really wants to talk about, is that the last time atmospheric CO2 levels spiked this high it took some 20,000 years before global temperatures came back down to normal. So, I'm just not able to make any funny comments about this one. Even gallows humor doesn't seem appropriate.

NASA -- Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. The difference is smaller than the uncertainty in comparing the temperatures of recent years, putting them into a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2009, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880.

The analysis found 2010 approximately 1.34 F warmer than the average global surface temperature from 1951 to 1980. To measure climate change, scientists look at long-term trends. The temperature trend, including data from 2010, shows the climate has warmed by approximately 0.36 F per decade since the late 1970s.

"If the warming trend continues, as is expected, if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the 2010 record will not stand for long," said James Hansen, the director of GISS.

Full Article

Global warming blamed for melting the horizon as sun comes up 48 hours too soon in Greenland

I'd like to take a quick moment to debunk the idea at the bottom of this article, which I've seen in other places, that what was seen was actually a "sun dog".  A sun dog is a refraction of sunlight in cirrostratus ice crystals; there are typically two of them, which are brighter spots in a ring around the sun at the same altitude as the sun. Here are the failures of the "sun dog" argument:

1) The sun rose two days early, not one. If there had been a sun dog on the first day which was somehow mistaken for the sun, it would have almost certainly not been seen in the same location the second day. If the sun had risen on the 11th but not on the 12th, then a lowered horizon would be less likely. But that isn't what happened.

2) Sun dogs are always at the same apparent altitude as the sun, so if the sun dogs were above the horizon the sun was as well.

3) It's Greenland, sun dogs are hardly a rare occurrence there. Neither the residents of Ilulissat or the dozens of scientists who are already there studying other effects of global warming are likely to mistake sun dogs for the actual sun.

4) It's already been reported that Ilulissat suffered massive deglaciation earlier in 2010.

5) One mile south of Ilulissat (the direction the sun would briefly rise) are rocky hills about 100 meters high, which would constitute the visible horizon. The hills would appear about 2° (or 2 cm by kamal) higher than the mathematical horizon, so in order for the previous year's ice to obscure the sun (at 30' arc diameter) the ice the previous years would have had to have been 25 meters thicker than this year. That's a big loss of ice in one year, but consistent with the deglaciation event this past summer, and given a typical annual snowfall of 5 meters which never usually melts it's actually surprisingly small.

Conclusion: Yes the sun really did rise two days early, and yes it is probably the result of global warming. And yes, global warming is the direct result of humans burning fossil fuels. There's no politics to this, it's just physics. If one's politics do not happen to agree with simple physics, then it's probably time to turn off Fox News and pick up a science text book.

Sun Dogs in Fargo North Dakota

FIRST POST (www.thefirstpost.co.uk) -- Scientists claim to have discovered more evidence of global warming after the sun rose two days early in Greenland, apparently because melting glaciers have lowered the horizon.

The polar night usually ends on January 13, but this year residents of Ilulissat, the third largest settlement in Greenland, were surprised to see dawn arrive just before 1pm on January 11 after six weeks of perpetual darkness.
Astronomers have ruled out the possibility of the early dawn being a result of a shift of the earth's axis and Thomas Posch, of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Vienna, says a change in the horizon is "by far the most obvious explanation".
According to to the National Climatic Data Centre in North Carolina, 2010 was the warmest year on record and a separate report from the World Meteorology Organisation found that temperatures in Greenland were 3C above average last year.
However, not everyone accepts the explanation that melting glaciers are to blame. Message-boards are full of posts from conspiracy theorists blaming everything from chemtrails to a build-up of methane in the atmosphere or a shift in the earth's axis.
That last idea has been pooh-poohed by Wolfgang Lenhardt, director of the department of geophysics at the Central Institute for Meteorology in Vienna, who explains: "The data of the earth's axis and rotation are monitored continuously and meticulously and we would know if that had happened... there would have been an outcry around the world."
However he does suggest one other possible explanation - that ice crystals in the air had refracted the sun's light creating a mirage, known as a sun-dog, which appeared above the horizon.

Cancún 2010 (the Maginot Line revisted)

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún Mexico completed today, resulting in a broad multinational (non-binding) agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally. Given the lack of success of previous climate change conferences, the participants are to be lauded for coming to any agreement with this broad of a platform. Also given that as recently as 10 years ago some scientists were still skeptical about the impact of fossil-fuel carbon emissions on global climate change, from a political standpoint, what the UN accomplished at Cancún these past three weeks is actually pretty huge. And realistically, given the global economy right now, they probably could not have achieved any more than they did, at this point.

Unfortunately, what they achieved is still probably too little and too late to accomplish much more than slightly delaying the inevitable. The cornerstone of the agreement calls upon industrially developed and developing nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions and modify forestry practices to ultimately limit global temperatures to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The problem is that global temperatures have already risen more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels, and we are both burning fossil fuels and deforesting at a far higher rate now than at any time since the industrial revolution. So while limiting global warming to 2°C is a noble goal, at this point it's frankly unrealistic.

Let's do a quick review of how the earth's temperature cycle works, and why it is that carbon emissions are such a problem for maintaining its equilibrium.

We start with the total amount of short-wave insolation (INcoming SOLar radiATION) entering the earth's atmosphere as 100%. About 36% of that is reflected back into space by clouds, the atmosphere or the land and water. Another 13% is absorbed into the atmosphere, and another 51% is absorbed into the earth and water. Subsequently, 56% of the toal insolation is re-radiated back to space from the atmosphere, and the remaining 8% is re-radiated directly from the land and sea back to space as long-wave radiation. So long as these numbers balance, temperatures on earth remain more or less constant. But even a tiny change in the amount of radiation entering or leaving the earth will slowly but continually increase or decrease the temperatures on earth's surface.

Greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide allow short-wave insolation to enter the earth's atmosphere and surface, but limit the amount of long-wave radiation re-radiated from the earth's surface to escape. Some amount of geenhouse effect is critical for human life on earth: without it,  average surface temperatures on earth would be around -20°C (-4°F), as opposed to the 15°C (59°F) we currently enjoy.

However, the industrial revolution and the subsequent burning of fossil fuels has altered the balance of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, and has also increased the heat input into our atmosphere at the same time. Since 1750 the concentrations of CO₂  in our atmosphere have increased by 36%, and the concentrations of methane have increased by 148%. Increase the greenhouse gasses and you decrease the amount of radiation which can escape from earth back to outer space, without decreasing the radiation coming in from space. Equilibrium is disrupted, and the earth warms. The best projections based on the best modeling we have right now indicate that global temperatures by the end of the 21st century will be between 2°C and 5°C higher than what they are in 2010.

Which means that the UNCCC's goal of a "mere" 1°C increase is probably unobtainable.

All of this reminds me of the French reliance on the Maginot Line during the lead-up to World War II. Subsequent to the lessons in trench warfare learned in the first World War, France built a substantial network of fortifications along the French/German border to repel or at least delay a German invasion. Lesser fortifications were also built along France's border with Belgium. On 10 May 1940 Germany successfully attacked Fort Eben-Emael on the Belgian/Dutch border, and proceeded from there to breach the lesser fortifications on the Belgian/French border, effectively circumventing the Maginot Line altogether. The invasion of France was bloody and swift, and Paris fell on 14 June 1940. Even when flanked and attacked from behind the line, the Maginot held; only 10 of the 58 major fortifications of the Maginot Line were captured or destroyed. But the nation it was built to defend fell quickly to Nazi occupation.

The Cancún conference seems an awful lot like the Maginot Line. It's a fairly robust "fortification" to reduce the rate of increase of carbon emissions. But the existing levels of CO₂  and methane have already exceeded the threshold necessary to cause runaway global warming. Unless we work aggressively to mitigate the damage which has already been done as well as drastically reducing future emissions, all of the work done at Cancún is just whistling in the graveyard.

The complete texts of the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun (COP 16 / CMP 6) are available here:

COP 16 / CMP 6