Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms….

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2015/20150723_IceMeltCommunication.pdf

Received: 11 Jun 2015 – Accepted: 09 Jul 2015 – Published: 23 Jul 2015

Abstract. There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today.

Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings, but much can be learned by combining insights from paleoclimate, climate modeling, and on-going observations. We argue that ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration in response to ocean warming, and we posit that ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters. Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years. Paleoclimate data reveal that subsurface ocean warming causes ice shelf melt and ice sheet discharge.

Our climate model exposes amplifying feedbacks in the Southern Ocean that slow Antarctic bottom water formation and increase ocean temperature near ice shelf grounding lines, while cooling the surface ocean and increasing sea ice cover and water column stability. Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms. We focus attention on the Southern Ocean’s role in affecting atmospheric CO₂ amount, which in turn is a tight control knob on global climate.

The millennial (500–2000 year) time scale of deep ocean ventilation affects the time scale for natural CO₂ change, thus the time scale for paleo global climate, ice sheet and sea level changes. This millennial carbon cycle time scale should not be misinterpreted as the ice sheet time scale for response to a rapid human-made climate forcing.

Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2 °C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous. Earth’s energy imbalance, which must be eliminated to stabilize climate, provides a crucial metric.

Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 15, 20059-20179, 2015
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/20059/2015/
doi:10.5194/acpd-15-20059-2015

…(read article)

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/20059/2015/acpd-15-20059-2015.pdf

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Fossil Fuels Must Be Phased Out to Avoid Drowned Coastlines – Scientific American

New research suggests rising oceans could swamp the world’s coasts by the end of the century—sooner than previously anticipated

By David Biello | July 20, 2015

The world’s ice is in trouble. Based on paleoclimate records, observations of the world today and computer models, a warming ocean is speeding the meltdown of massive ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. This new finding, by climatologist James Hansen of Columbia University and colleagues, suggests that sea levels could rise at least five meters—and possibly as much as nine meters—within 50 to 100 years, a rate both faster than and six times as deep as previous estimates. And such dramatically rising seas and stronger storms followed during past periods when the global annual average temperature was only roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer than today, the team found. An outcome of that magnitude could doom most of the megalopolises lining today’s coastlines, the team says. And the extent of current efforts to combat climate change are nowhere near what will be required to prevent the submersion of thousands of kilometers of coastline.

…(read more).

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Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines: Richard Heinberg

The twentieth century saw unprecedented growth in population, energy consumption, and food production. As the population shifted from rural to urban, human impacts on the environment increased dramatically.

The twenty-first century ushered in an era of declines, including:

• Oil, natural gas, and coal extraction
• Yearly grain harvests
• Climate stability
• Economic growth
• Fresh water
• Minerals and ores such as copper and platinum

To adapt to this profoundly different world, we must begin now to make radical changes to our attitudes, behaviors, and expectations.

Now in paperback and featuring a new author preface and discussion guide, Peak Everything addresses many of the cultural, psychological, and practical changes we will have to make as nature dictates our new limits. This landmark book from Richard Heinberg, author of three of the most important books on Peak Oil, touches on the vital aspects of the human condition at this unique moment in time.

A combination of wry commentary and sober forecasting on subjects as diverse as farming and industrial design, this book describes how to make the transition from The Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty with grace and satisfaction, while preserving the best of our collective achievements. Peak Everything is a must-read for individuals, business leaders, and policy makers serious about effecting real change.

Richard Heinberg is a journalist, lecturer, senior fellow-in-residence at the Post Carbon Institute, and the author of nine books, including Blackout and The Party’s Over. He is one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators.

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Documenting California’s Epic Drought

A reporter and photographer on a road trip across California, looking at how the drought has reshaped lives there.

Maybe el Nino will bail California out. Dump enough water in the right places this winter to pull the Golden State back from the brink of drought disaster. But there is no guarantee. And no single season of rain is going to cure the state of its long, parched descent into bone dry. Diana Marcum won the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on California’s drought. She’s back on the road right now, witnessing with photographer Robert Gauthier just how bad it is. How Californians are adjusting – or not. Looking at lives and futures. This hour On Point: we’re on the road in drought-stricken California.

– Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Diana Marcum, Pulitzer Prize-winning Central Valley reporter for the Los Angeles Times. (@DianaMarcum)

Robert Gauthier, staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times. (@rgaut999)

Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center. Professor emeritus at the University of California Davis’ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

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Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress: Charles T. Rubin

Tomorrow has never looked better. Breakthroughs in fields like genetic engineering and nanotechnology promise to give us unprecedented power to redesign our bodies and our world. Futurists and activists tell us that we are drawing ever closer to a day when we will be as smart as computers, will be able to link our minds telepathically, and will live for centuries—or maybe forever. The perfection of a “posthuman” future awaits us.

Or so the story goes. In reality, the rush toward a posthuman destiny amounts to an ideology of human extinction, an ideology that sees little of value in humanity except the raw material for producing whatever might come next.

In Eclipse of Man, Charles T. Rubin traces the intellectual origins of the movement to perfect and replace the human race. He shows how today’s advocates of radical enhancement are—like their forebears—deeply dissatisfied with given human nature and fixated on grand visions of a future shaped by technological progress.

Moreover, Rubin argues that this myopic vision of the future is not confined to charlatans and cheerleaders promoting this or that technology: it also runs through much of modern science and contemporary progressivism. By exploring and criticizing the dreams of post humanity, Rubin defends a more modest vision of the future, one that takes seriously both the limitations and the inherent dignity of our given nature.

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Raw: Thousands Flee Floodwaters in China

Associated Press

Published on Jul 23, 2015

Heavy downpours over Fujian Province in China forced thousands to evacuate from rising flood waters. Local firefighers and police mobilized in rescue effort. (July 23)

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Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life: George Monbiot

To be an environmentalist early in the twenty-first century is always to be defending, arguing, acknowledging the hurdles we face in our efforts to protect wild places and fight climate change. But let’s be honest: hedging has never inspired anyone.

So what if we stopped hedging? What if we grounded our efforts to solve environmental problems in hope instead, and let nature make our case for us? That’s what George Monbiot does in Feral, a lyrical, unabashedly romantic vision of how, by inviting nature back into our lives, we can simultaneously cure our “ecological boredom” and begin repairing centuries of environmental damage. Monbiot takes readers on an enchanting journey around the world to explore ecosystems that have been “rewilded”: freed from human intervention and allowed—in some cases for the first time in millennia—to resume their natural ecological processes. We share his awe, and wonder, as he kayaks among dolphins and seabirds off the coast of Wales and wanders the forests of Eastern Europe, where lynx and wolf packs are reclaiming their ancient hunting grounds. Through his eyes, we see environmental success—and begin to envision a future world where humans and nature are no longer separate and antagonistic, but are together part of a single, healing world.

Monbiot’s commitment is fierce, his passion infectious, his writing compelling. Readers willing to leave the confines of civilization and join him on his bewitching journey will emerge changed—and ready to change our world for the better.

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The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm: Lewis Dartnell

How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch?

If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible—a guide for rebooting the world?

Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, accurately tell time, weave fibers into clothing, or even how to produce food for yourself?

Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. This would allow survivors to learn technological advances not explicitly explored in The Knowledge as well as things we have yet to discover.

The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

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POV: Making Climate Change a Moral Issue

Why we should listen to Pope Francis

07.23.2015 By Henrik Selin

Photo courtesy of the Malacanang Photo Bureau

For too long, ideologues, deniers, and vested interests have prevented an appropriate, righteous response to the grave dangers of climate change. Now, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy, has a retort to those who still question if climate change is real: is the Pope Catholic? Pope Francis, through his recent 184-page encyclical on the environment, speaks in a strong voice about the seriousness of humans altering natural systems. All people, irrespective of their personal faith (as well as agnostics and staunch atheists), should reflect on the pope’s fundamental message.

The Catholic Church has a checkered past when it comes to embracing new scientific arguments, especially those that are seen to challenge deeply held beliefs (see Galileo’s work on the heliocentric solar system model). But Pope Francis takes a position right in the middle of the scientific community when he describes the basic drivers and consequences of human-induced climate change. On this issue, members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, including world-renowned Nobel laureates and climate scientists such as Mario Molina, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, guided the pope. The Vatican is debating whether to divest from fossil fuel companies.

…(read more).

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Earth Repair – Homegrown Healing of Toxic Lands

peakmoment

Published on Mar 8, 2015

“Nature has been healing itself for a very long time, [but] there are ways for us as human beings to ally with the different organisms and try to facilitate their work.” Leila Darwish, author of Earth Repair, provides a grassroots guide to healing toxic and damaged landscapes. She talks about involving the local community, getting the soil and/or water tested periodically, and approaching the work with humility rather than “humans know best.” Healers can use plants, microbes and fungi like mushrooms to extract, bind or break down contaminants. She is excited by the experimentation done by grassroots remediators, who are openly sharing their successes and failures. “It shouldn’t be on the [local] people to do the cleanup work, but if you have healing work that needs to be done, it should be with people who have the heart to do it.” Episode 284. [earthrepair.ca]

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Part 2:

peakmoment

Published on Mar 27, 2015

In her book Earth Repair, Leila Darwish provides a grassroots guide to healing toxic and damaged landscapes emphasizing local solutions. “You want to work first with plants, microbes and mushroom indigenous to a site if you can. Those will be the most resilient healers.” She encourages bioremediators to protect themselves physically, and counsels patience: “What took decades to create is not going to be healed in one round. It might take several years or longer depending on what the contamination is and how many types are present.” She encourages experimenting and sharing the results, and believes that “plants and mushrooms are not only healing the land in their own ways and on their own timeframe…they also are healers of people.” Episode 285. [earthrepair.ca]. Watch episode 284 at  http://peakmoment.tv/videos/earth-rep…

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Subscribe to peakmoment channel on YouTube for more great shows on grass roots pioneers forging a post-growth culture.

Subscribe to email news or donate at http://www.peakmoment.tv.

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