This 50th Anniversary interview with a “Limits to Growth” author puts the work in context and shows more to do than just stopping warming
by Richard Heinberg & Dennis Meadows, 22/02/2022 in Resilience.org Dennis Meadows on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth: Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth. Not only did this best-selling 1972 publication help spur the environmental movement, but it showed that the underlying dynamics of the modern industrial world are unsustainable on the timescale of a couple of human lifetimes.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The world’s oceans offer important and effective natural means to capture carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the ocean depths
There is significant evidence that the rate of global warming is already showing signs that it is at least partially being driven upward by positive feedbacks from temperature sensitive natural sources of carbon emissions. If so, it is unlikely that achieving zero emissions from human sources will be enough to do more than slow the rate of warming for a few years. To actually stop and reverse global warming we will have to actively remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere (i.e., sequester them) at global scales. Ocean sinks for carbon might turn this task from a hopeful dream into reality.
My own unpublished studies of the literature relating to possible mitigation strategies to stop global warming prior to taking on my present VC1 role, suggested that fertilizing and farming the ocean deserts over abyssal depths should have the capacity to capture and sequester a significant fraction of the CO₂ in the atmosphere today. The recent research linked here suggests that significant carbon sequestration might be achieved by facilitating the growth of plankton with carbonate shells:
Carbonaceous shells of phytoplankton
by Rupert Sutherland and Laia Alegret, 14/02/2022 in The Conversation
We think of trees and soil as carbon sinks, but the world’s oceans hold far larger carbon stocks and are more effective at storing carbon permanently.
In new research published today, we investigate the long-term rate of permanent carbon removal by seashells of plankton in the ocean near New Zealand.
We show that seashells have drawn down about the same amount of carbon as regional emissions of carbon dioxide, and this process was even higher during ancient periods of climate warming.
Humans are taking carbon out of the ground by burning fossil fuels deposited millions of years ago and putting it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The current rate of new fossil fuel formation is very low. Instead, the main geological (long-term) mechanism of carbon storage today is the formation of seashells that become preserved as sediment on the ocean floor. [VC1 Editor’s emphasis]
Read the complete article….
The full scientific report on which the above article is based is also linked here for your easy access. There are also a number of scientific reports and observations indicating that runaway warming might be avoided if we can increase sequestration of excess atmospheric carbon soon enough.
Generalized map of active global ocean currents (blue arrows; after data from www.noaa.gov) and seabed covered in sediment that contains high calcium carbonate content (blue shade; calcareous ooze, mixed calcareous/siliceous ooze, shells and coral fragments, and fine-grained calcareous sediment; Dutkiewicz, Müller, et al., 2015)
by Sutherland, et al., 26/01/2020 in Paleooceanography and Paleoclimatology
Global climate is likely to get warmer, and we want to know what will happen to marine life. We can study ancient warm periods to better predict the future. The ocean is a global carbon sink, because some organisms form shells by combining calcium with carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. Once dead, their calcium carbonate shells sink to the seabed. Over millions of years, the southwest Pacific accumulated huge deposits. We used geophysical surveying and drilling to measure this history of deposition, which is a proxy for ancient biological productivity (how much marine life existed). A warm period 18–14 million years ago had high atmospheric carbon dioxide (2–4 times preindustrial levels) and slightly lower ocean productivity. In contrast, 8–4 million years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide was similar to predicted 21st century levels and productivity was much higher: more than double recent values. Rates of calcium carbonate deposition in the past do not correlate with ocean acidity or atmospheric carbon dioxide; but they were mostly higher than today. Hence, long-term biological productivity and carbon sequestration in the southwest Pacific might increase in future, but computer models that fit our observations are needed to test this idea.
Sequestration of excess atmospheric carbon under the ocean is one of the very few technologies I have seen that plausibly scales up enough to cleanse Earth’s entire atmosphere. Some further evidence supporting this conclusion is discussed and linked here.
Only biological rather than engineered carbon capture and sequestration technologies have the potential to scale up to planetary level solutions
Direct air capture
Stopping anthropogenic carbon emissions probably will not be enough to stop the continually increase in the rate of global warming because of the natural positive feedbacks already triggered. This has led to substantial work to find ways to capture/’draw-down’ atmospheric CO₂ for safe sequestration underground. Over the last year or so there has been a considerable buzz in the clean-tech industry to engineer and construct technological solutions under the name of ‘direct air capture’ for doing this. These are physical/chemical devices looking a lot like air-conditioning units, but a lot more complicated in the way they work.
Wearing the hat from the near life-long physics and engineering thread in my diverse background, I have to say that despite all the hype, the idea that this type of technology could be scaled up to have any significant impact on the planetary amount of atmospheric CO₂ has to be pure bulldust and fairy-floss from the fossil fuel industry. The ABC article where I found this illustration makes it clear, “The greatest challenge … is processing enough air to capture a significant amount of CO2, given the gas makes up just 0.04 per cent of the air we breathe.” Physically, it takes a lot of energy expensive ‘work’ to gather widely separated gas molecules and compress them into a small space where they can be packaged and stored. No matter how the compression is achieved, according to the universal and fundamental physical Second Law of Thermodynamics, this energy cost cannot be avoided. This is before considering the additional costs of mining, refining, or otherwise gathering and processing the materials required to build the technology, assembling the devices, and all the related transport and logistics of distributing them, processing the resulting compressed carbon into a sequesterable form and the placing it in some form of safe long-term storage. As implied in the ABC article, a lot of people will make loads of money that will be far more needed elsewhere, to implement this absurdly costly technology to make a microscopic contribution (assuming there is actually any net benefit at all) to solving the global problem.
Other examples of the hype I have discussed in my Facebook account include:
Biological systems capture and sequester carbon as a fundamental process of life
The biological and evolutionary thread in my life that began even before I learned to read. Wearing this hat, I can explain the absolute difference between the necessarily piece-rate and energy intensive processes required to produce engineered products, versus the intrinsic processes living systems use to reproduce and multiply themselves. They do this without any need for external instruction by self-harvesting the resources and energy they need from their surroundings. As such, living things also have the intrinsic capacity to adapt and evolve at least to some degree to meet changing aspects in their environments.
Plants (i.e., all types of photosynthesizing organisms) use energy from photons of light to capture CO₂ from their environments and combine this with water (H₂O) to produce the sugars that provide the starting point for synthesizing all of the other carbon-based organic molecules constructing the organism. Ultimately, all of this carbon is drawn down from the atmosphere (perhaps by way of first being dissolved in water). Thus, to live, grow, reproduce and multiply, plants MUST capture and hold onto carbon atoms for as long as they live. How and where they die determines how long this organic carbon remains sequestered away from the atmosphere.
Earth’s abyssal ocean depths are by far its largest repositories for carbon sequestration
The featured image heading up this post shows an equal area map of the extent of the oceans compared to land masses. Oceans cover around 70% of the total surface area of the globe. Land occupies the other 30%, but not all of this is remotely arable (e.g., the whole of Antarctica and many desert areas). The map is based on a “chlorophyll-based” model that estimates net primary production from chlorophyll using a temperature-dependent description of chlorophyll-specific photosynthetic efficiency. Net primary production is a function of chlorophyll, available light, and photosynthetic efficiency. The dark blue areas of the oceans away from the land are ‘ocean deserts’ where there is essentially no photosynthesis because there is an almost total absence of particular micronutrients phytoplankton need for building their photosynthetic apparatus.
I am certainly not the only person to have seen the potential importance of using the oceans as the major carbon sink for excess atmospheric CO₂. Committees of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have published several reviews of potential carbon capture and sequestration technologies meriting funding for further research and development. The latest of these focuses specially on various kinds of ocean sequestraton (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2021. A Research Strategy for Ocean-based Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
).
The race track has already been laid out, so we could hit the ground running if anyone gets really serious about solving the climate emergency
To me, it is the areas of marine deserts (~ half the surface of the world’s oceans) that are the most interesting, because this is where the potential should be greatest to use fertilization and farming to establish and control ecosystems optimized to capture and sequester carbon while causing minimal disturbance to already established ecosystems in more fertile areas of the world’s oceans. Chapter 3, Nutrient Fertilization in the National Academy’s review covers many general issues relating to this approach. There are also a number of recent scientific reports and observations that are relevant:
Collectively, together with many others I have seen, these references provide more than enough evidence to indicate that we should be able to seed and fertilize phytoplankton blooms over large areas of ocean desert to begin fixing globally significant amounts of atmospheric carbon into biomass. What remains to be worked out is how to optimize the growth and ‘packaging’ of this biomass carbon into relatively inert forms that will drop down into the abyssal depths to be incorporated in the bottom sediment.
This is the ‘farming’ aspect of the process involving the selection and seeding of appropriate phytoplankton species, and the selection, seeding, and husbanding of appropriate ‘consumer’ species to harvest and package a large proportion of the carbon in the phytoplankton as feces (i.e., ‘droppings’) or in the consumers own dead bodies that are dense enough to fall to the bottom out of the photic zone where the phytoplankton photosynthesize. Consumers may be shelled zooplankton, other invertebrates with dense carbonaceous components, or various kinds of fish, mammals or birds that can be counted on to take a significant mass of carbon to the bottom of the ocean when they die.
In principle, it should be possible to scale up such processes rapidly enough to begin drawing down carbon from the atmosphere before runaway warming has passed the point beyond which the positive feedbacks have become unstoppable. Once we have good recipes, given the propensity of biological systems to MULTIPLY autonomously, the processes should be rapidly expandable to the planetary scale. However, there are all kinds of presently unqualified risks and benefits to be faced from putting such activities into practice that need to be studied and qualified before implementation begins. Given the hints and evidence in the scientific literature, there should be hundreds and thousands of research studies working out the uncertainties to the point where large-scale pilot projects can be put to work as required to begin implementing global solutions.
Unfortunately, I am unaware that anything remotely close to the required volume of research has even been contemplated, let alone set to work…..
Why?????????
Australia’s COALition Government has relatively stifled climate science and the institutes and universities where such research would normally be carried out.
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
In my opinion the LNP COALition and the collection of egocentric clowns and knaves also owned by the same puppet masters in the fossil fuel and other despoiling industries have made their denial of climate science and support of their puppet masters unambiguously loud and clear. There seems to be no mistaking their intent to go on doing this until the final collapse of society under the rising impacts of the climate emergency.
If humanity is to survive on Earth much beyond the 21st Century we Australians and citizens of other governments around the world must remove the special interest puppets from their governments and replace these greedy clowns and knaves with clear-headed people who are committed to put fighting the climate emergency at the top of their to-do lists when elected.
In Australia, Vote Climate One was formed by a team of volunteers to provide citizens in every Federal electorate with the information and knowledge they need to make wise decisions when filling out their ballot papers in the next election. Climate Sentinel News provides the scientific evidence and daily reports that have so motivated our group to try to do something to help cleanse our Parliament of the puppets. Our Traffic Light Voting System shows you what we know about each candidate in your electorate and will provide a blank ballot you can use at home to list candidates in the order of your preferences. We also give each candidate a traffic light showing where we think they stand on the spectrum from putting climate first (green traffic light) to putting fossil fuel first (red stop light). Amber lights are used for those candidates we trust to vote with green light MPs in hung Parliament or ‘greenish’ minority government. If you trust us, you can use the traffic lights to make it easier to give your preferences on the ballot.
Hopefully we can elect a new Government that will give our offspring a bright future rather than a dying planet.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
In a new Nature News article scientists consider a dangerously fast rise in atmospheric methane (= methane spike) from natural rather than human sources
The physical observations in this article present us with a very important choice, accept the evidence that continued global warming may trigger a methane spike that represents a truly existentially catastrophic risk to continued human existence, and do whatever is needed to stop and reverse the warming process, or to accept the risk by hiding from reality and continuing with business as usual. My colleagues and I on the Vote Climate One are optimists who think that if we fight the risk we can mitigate its dangers.
By way of providing some background to the Nature News article, methane spikes are potentially dangerous global warming phenomena where some scientists think abrupt processes in polar permafrost and continental shelves may release enough methane to boost global temperatures by several degrees over only a few decades — probably enough to cause global mass extinction in the near term — a real, high, and truly existential risk. Because of methane’s strength as a greenhouse gas, its strikingly non-linear physical responses to small changes ambient temperature and pressure around 0 °C, and its heavy involvement in a number of bio/geochemical processes, attempts to model its behavior mathematically tend to be chaotic. Mathematical simulation is made even more difficult due uncertainties in the total amount of methane potentially in play for a spike event. Thus, the observational record as discussed in the news item, combined with methane’s basic physics and chemistry is our best guide to the potential risks it represents in the evolution of our changing climate. The underlying science of methane’s behavior is solid, and thanks to its importance to the petrochemical industry, we know a lot about how methane behaves. “Natural gas” is the marketing name given to most methane found in Nature. And even in this industry its weird behavior can have catastrophic results.
However, it should also be noted that many scientists who accept that the IPCC’s reports represent the ‘best available’ science are still not convinced that that the ‘methane spike’ scenario is likely. Last month, I explored in a detailed presentation “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong“, how the IPCC’s structure and policies cause it to downplay and minimize ‘sensational’ findings. If you are disinclined to accept the view that a global warming triggered methane spike is a genuine danger to humanity’s continued survival, please at least read and think about the sources of the controversy.
Tropical wetlands, such as the Pantanal in Brazil, are a major source of methane emissions.Credit: Carl De Souza/AFP via Getty, via Nature
As global methane concentrations soar over 1,900 parts per billion, some researchers fear that global warming itself is behind the rapid rise.
Methane concentrations in the atmosphere raced past 1,900 parts per billion last year, nearly triple preindustrial levels, according to data released in January by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Scientists says the grim milestone underscores the importance of a pledge made at last year’s COP26 climate summit to curb emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas at least 28 times as potent as CO2.
The growth of methane emissions slowed around the turn of the millennium, but began a rapid and mysterious uptick around 2007. The spike has caused many researchers to worry that global warming is creating a feedback mechanism that will cause ever more methane to be released, making it even harder to rein in rising temperatures. [my emphasis].
Why the evidence from the NOAA (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) tables presented in the above article is so worrisome is discussed in detail in the 15 minute video by Prof. Eliot Jacobsin (a retired prof. computer science from UC Santa Barbara, Methane growth is accelerating, that includes the following graph shown on Biff Vernon’s Climate Geek Facebook post.
As explained in the video Jacobson uses the NOAA data to calculate the annual mean growth in atmospheric methane which is the difference between the net increase in methane emitted over a year (total emitted over the year minus amount consumed by environmental sinks) minus the amount remaining in the atmosphere that will have decayed over the course of the year. The NOAA link details how the basic measurements are made.
The following graphic from the Nature News item postulates where the increasing amount of methane is being emitted. The evidence suggests that the substantial majority of the emissions are from organic sources rather than fossil-fuel related resources (the article’s bibliography provides links to the sources for the numbers presented here).
The Nature article is sensational enough, but the actual reality is probably even worse because they have said virtually nothing about the huge reserves of potentially easily released organically produced methane stored in Arctic soils. I explored this risk in June last year in a detailed presentation: “Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost“. Here I showed how rapidly escalating wildfires may lead to rapid permafrost thawing that causes an abrupt methane spike by releasing massive reserves of methane currently locked away in ice-like frozen hydrates.
To me, this is a loud and clear fire alarm that says that if we have any hopes for an optimistic future, it is time to unite and begin working all-out to fight the fire that is burning down our only house – the global ecosystem that feeds us and provides the oxygen we breathe. Even a 16 year-old child could see the danger and what we need to do.
Stark alternatives face the Australian Electorate in our upcoming federal election: accept the fearsome reality and fight the fire for our future … or … believe the con and continue with business as usual
Unfortunately, in Australia and many other areas of the developed world, irrespective of the science, deciding to fight the fire is intensely political. In Australia we are currently governed by a LNP COALition administration whose first priority is protecting and even subsidizing already immensely wealthy special interests in the fossil fuel and other environmentally exploitative industries. In his own words and actions on the front bench of Parliament our current PM made his priorities abundantly clear. Most of his COALition partners are more than willing to support and promote these same special interests.
Captain Humbug (A.K.A. Scotty from Marketing) showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about behind his then PM, ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – Picture from The Conversation (15-02-2017). See also Katherine Murphy in The Guardian on 09/02/2017 for the live video — “Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? What a bunch of clowns, hamming it up – while out in the real world an ominous and oppressive heat just won’t let up.”
On 20/12/2019 while on his secret Hawaiian holiday in the midst of Australia’s Black Summer wildfires, he also made it loud and clear that he doesn’t fight fires! As printed in black and white in an official transcript from the PM’s own office commenting on the deaths of two fire fighters, Scotty made it abundantly clear to John Stanley on 2GB Radio that HE doesn’t fight fires… “But I know Australians understand… that, you know, I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room. That’s the brave people who do that are doing that job. But I know that Australians would want me back at this time out of these fatalities. So I’ll happily come back and do that.”
As a marketeer Scotty’s principle occupation along with his fellow LNP puppets has been CONvincing people to believe in whatever his clients want him to sell, which the evidence suggests is currently to protect and support the fossil fuel industry above any other consideration. Following on from Tony Abbott’s earlier denials and diatribes about global warming, Scotty and his puppet mates in the Parliament have with considerable success maintained a fog of humbuggery (i.e., denials, lies, misrepresentations, legislative action, blocking, misdirection) preventing any effective actions towards reaching net zero emissions that are considered detrimental to interests of the fossil fuel industry. Beyond this, they actively promote and subsidize the industry to help its continued growth. Not only does Scotty not hold a hose himself, but he and his puppets have done a bloody good job keeping other people from using hoses.
Clearly, If we are to successfully do anything in Australia to stop the carbon emissions contributing to increasing the risk our own species’ extinction we must first rid ourselves of the LNP Government that has blocked and stifled any real progress against the climate emergency.
Vote Climate One was formed to help Australians elect those candidate in their individual electorates who if elected can be trusted to focus on reality and put action on the climate emergency at the top of their Parliamentary priority lists. Our election information team is focused on contacting every formal candidate in each electorate for a statement on how they intend to address the climate issues and combining this with additional evidence from voting records (for existing and previous MPs), additional evidence from social media statements, press reports, and so on. Following our Traffic Light Voting System voters will have access to a complete list of candidates for their House and Senate electorates with stoplights indicating where we think they stand on the climate issue. Those marked with the green traffic light are those we trust to give priority to the climate issues. Those marked with the red traffic light LNP members and micro parties who clearly prioritize supporting special interests ahead of stopping carbon emissions, and other micro parties and independents who are likely to give their preferences to special interest supporters. The amber lights are used for the Labor Party and others who have not clearly stated that the climate is their first priority, but can at least be trusted to work on climate issues where Labor is in a minority government or in coalition with Greens and green light independents.
If enough people follow this guide, we should be able to elect a new government that will give our children and grand children a foreseeable and hopeful future.
Will you help us give our kids a bright future?
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Global warming threatens human survival. Scotty from Marketing does nothing to help mobilize climate action but everything to stop it….
Katharine Murphy’s list of political liabilities Scotty from Marketing is trying make disappear with blather, smoke and mirrors, and endless humbug is already awesome – even without Blarney Bulldust’s apparently heart-felt honesty as expressed to Brittany Higgins last year when on the back-bench.
And, all of this is before considering how Capt. Humbug has so honestly [not] responded to help Australians deal with/mitigate the accelerating growth of the existential global climate emergency driven by global warming. Humbug’s solution is the make the whole problem invisible in a cloud of smoke and fairy dust so that the COALition’s patrons in the fossil fuel and related industries have not been shut down by the time the electorate fully wakes up to oncoming catastrophic collapse of human civilization on the way to extinction.
As Scott Morrison spoke at the National Press Club on Tuesday, sporadic bursts of fury were audible from a convoy of rightwing grievance outside. Photograph: Bianca de March/AAP
The bushfire in the Coalition’s base also burned through to Canberra. Protesters opposed to vaccine mandates – Australians who feel economically and culturally dispossessed by the creep of government during pandemic – spilled up the forecourt of Parliament House. There were sovereign citizens, anti-vaxxers, doomsday preppers, Trumpers and enraged owner-drivers, yes; but also grey nomads with packed lunches, Thermos flasks and sunsmart hats. …
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Morrison on Tuesday was sorry, not sorry – sorry enough to soften the edges of prime ministerial arrogance, but not sorry enough to accept any serious liability. He was sorry he was too optimistic before the summer. He had got people’s hopes up, and Omicron had dashed them. He was sorry he hadn’t sent in the army sooner to correct the infamous vaccine “strollout”.
Following on from Tony Abbott’s almost religious commitment to denying climate science, Scotty’s marketing backed up by his troop of puppets, buffoons, and knaves in Parliament have been for years almost totally successful in blocking any effective action against the climate emergency. This has been achieved through a rich mix of humbug, denial, lying, misrepresentation, blocking, delaying, and distracting smoke and mirrors.
If our children and grandchildren are to have any hope of surviving into the future, we have to remove the humbug troop from Parliament and replace them with sensible people who can be trusted to put action against the climate emergency at the top of their priority lists if elected. Vote Climate One’s, Traffic Light Voting System is designed to help you rank your preferences to do this, without telling you who you should vote for. With a new Parliament focused on what needs to be done to protect our burning house, we might be able to offer our families a viable future in a still functional biosphere.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Part 7 – concluding David Spratt’s guidebook to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: Have we triggered so many tipping points already that we are already at or past the point of no return?
Clearly, we wont know if we have passed the point of no return until it is too late to do anything about it. Spratt’s concluding comments to his guidebook need no embellishment from me. He lists 7 points. Basically I agree with all of him, except that I would state several of them even more strongly than he does:
Seventh in a series. Read 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Reflecting on the evidence presented in this tipping point series, a number of conclusions may be drawn:
1. At just 1.2°C of warming, tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. At just 1.2°C of global average warming, tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, The Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems. The world will warm to 1.5°C by around 2030, with additional warming well beyond 1.5°C in the system after that. Yet even at the current level of warming, these systems will continue to move to qualitatively different states. In most cases, strong positive feedbacks are driving abrupt change. At higher levels of warming, the rate of change will quicken. The meme that “we have eight years to avoid 1.5°C and tipping points” should be deleted from the climate advocacy vocabulary. It is simply wrong. 2. System-level change is happening faster than forecast. In each case surveyed above, abrupt change is happening earlier and/or faster than projected only two decades ago. The 2007 Arctic sea-ice collapse was “100 years ahead of schedule”; in 2014 the tipping point for Amundsen Basin glaciers was one that “none of us thought would pass so quickly”. It was said that the guardrail for coral reefs was warming under 2°C, then 1.5°C; it is now clear that it is under 0.5°C. In 1995, the IPCC projected “little change in the extent of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets… over the next 50-100 years”. The 2001 IPCC report suggested that the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets would not lose significant mass by 2100. Both have now passed their tipping points. The effect of the permafrost carbon feedback has not been included in the IPCC scenarios, including the 2014 report. And on it goes.
In this now completed series of posts, Spratt has done an excellent job of summarizing the scientific observations that sound the klaxon fire alarm warning us that our planet is on fire. If we don’t wake up, smell the smoke, and mobilize global action to fight the fire, it will consume us humans along with most other complex life who share the still green(ish) planet with us.
Captain Humbug (a.k.a. Scotty from Marketing) behind his then leader’s back, showing Barney Bulldust and the parliamentary puppet troop what he is promoting. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017). Note: The fourth man — the holy ghost – later stabbed in the back by Scotty, was also previously a marketeer of the merchant banking type, by and for the special interests.
Following on from Tony Abbott’s almost religious commitment to denying climate science, Scotty’s marketing backed up by his troop of puppets, buffoons, and knaves in Parliament have been for years almost totally successful in blocking any effective action against the climate emergency. This has been achieved through a rich mix of humbug, denial, lying, misrepresentation, blocking, delaying, and distracting smoke and mirrors.
If our children and grandchildren are to have any hope of surviving into the future, we have to remove the humbug troop from Parliament and replace them with sensible people who can be trusted to put action against the climate emergency at the top of their priority lists if elected. Vote Climate Ones, Traffic Light Voting System is designed to help you rank your preferences to do this, without telling you who you should vote for. With a new Parliament focused on what needs to be done to protect our burning house, we might be able to offer our families a viable future in a still functional biosphere.
Will they have a future in the world we leave them? That is up to us. If we get it wrong, it will be too late for them…..
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Part 5 of David Spratt’s guidebook to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: Increasingly frequent and stronger marine heatwaves are bleaching and killing corals, architects of reef ecosystems. Rotting organic matter emits GHGs
Coral polyps are the primary architects of the remarkably diverse coral reef ecosystems that border lands and islands in tropical oceans around the world. As such coral reefs provide shelter and sustenance for a significant fraction of our ocean’s biomass for at least part of their lives. Coral polyps are colonial animals related to jellyfish and sea anemones. However, thanks to symbiotic algae that live in their bodies, they are sinks for capturing and sequestering CO₂ in forming the limestone reefs. Over the last 10,000 years or so, they have thrived in waters close to the maximum temperatures their photosynthetic algae can tolerate. However, as the world begins to warm beyond temperatures observed for many 10s of thousands of years corals have had to expel their algae and become bleached. As Spratt describes, bleaching is becoming common event for the Great Barrier Reef, and is leading to dying coral reefs and collapsing reef ecosystems around the world.
As masses of polyps die and rot they become net greenhouse gas emitters (CO₂, methane, hydrogen sulfide – H₂S – where the H₂S is also highly toxic) and end up covered by slimes of bacteria and algae. The dead reef becomes quite toxic, and loses many of the species that originally thrived there through starvation, poisoning, or loss of habitat. Thus, the rising greenhouse gas emissions from dying and decomposing reef ecosystems adds yet another source of positive feedback to drive global temperatures (including ocean temperatures) higher yet.
by David Spratt in Climate Code Red Fifth in a series. Read 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves and kelp forests in Australia, are degrading fast as the world’s sixth mass extinction gathers pace.
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Corals survive within a narrow water temperature band, and suffer heat stress and expel zooxanthellae if the ocean temperature gets too high. Bleaching events vary in intensity; in the extreme case, all zooxanthellae are expelled and the living colony will appear totally white (hence “bleaching”). As elevated sea temperatures persist, coral mortality rates increase: corals may recover, if there are any zooxanthellae left in their tissues, but if not, death appears to be inevitable.
The bottom line: If severe bleaching events occur regularly at shorter than 10–15 year intervals, then reefs face a death spiral of coral mortality followed by inadequate recovery periods. And that is what is happening now. Along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the frequency of mass bleaching is increasing, with events occurring in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017 and 2020. The 2016-17 events severely bleached half the reef, whose extent has been reduced by three-quarters over the last 40 years. Coral reproduction on the Great Barrier Reef has fallen 89% after repeated recent bleachings. [My emphasis]
Analyses published yesterday shows that it is probably already too late to save dying coral reefs and reef ecosystems (including the Great Barrier Reef) from terminal collapse in the next decade or two
One of these articles is referenced in today’s The Age newspapers.
James Cook University marine biologist Jodie Rummer at work on the Great Barrier Reef. She has witnessed previous bleaching and described it as “scary and disturbing”.Credit:Grumpy Turtle
Global warming of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels will be catastrophic for almost all coral reefs, including those that scientists once hoped would act as refuges during climate change.
Only 0.2 per cent of coral reefs globally are likely to avoid frequent heat stress if temperatures warm, according to new research from an international team of universities, including James Cook University in Townsville.
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Even thermal refuges, which experts assumed would be more able to endure warming oceans owing to factors such as the consistent upwelling of cool deep waters, would provide almost no protection to reef animals, the study found. It is published today in PLOS Climate.
Actually, there were two articles on rapidly rising sea surface temperatures (SST) published yesterday in the science journal, PLOS Climate. Together they seem to seal the fate of most of our planet’s coral reef ecosystems:
Global distribution of exposure category in the 1986–2019 climate and at 1.5 and 2.0°C of future global warming. [DHW is the sum of SST anomalies 1°C higher than the long-term maximum monthly mean (MMM) over a 12-week period] Exposure categories are thermal refugia (probability of DHW events > 4°C-weeks less than 0.1 yr‒1), intermediate (probability of DHW events > 4°C-weeks from 0.1–0.2 yr‒1) and exposed (probability of DHW events > 4°C-weeks greater than 0.2 yr‒1). Percentages indicate the regional (on map) and global (right of map) proportion of thermal refugia (blue) and exposed reefs (red). The 12 coral reef regions are outlined in light blue. The base map is made with Natural Earth.
ABSTRACT: Thermal refugia underpin climate-smart management of coral reefs, but whether current thermal refugia will remain so under future warming is uncertain…. We confirm that warming of 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels will be catastrophic for coral reefs….
Decadal evolution of frequency of extreme marine heat from 1980–2019. Extreme heat defined as exceeding the localized (1° × 1°), monthly, 98th percentile of sea surface temperatures (SST) observed during 1870–1919, averaged from HadISSTv1.1 and COBESSTv2 products. Extreme heat, resolved for boreal winter (Jan-Mar) and summer (Jul-Sep), accumulates steadily over time beginning in the Southern, South Atlantic, and Indian basins. Regions of the mid North Atlantic and eastern South Pacific indicate a low occurrence. The base map layer was drawn using the “rworldmap” R package (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rworldmap/index.html:
ABSTRACT: Climate change exposes marine ecosystems to extreme conditions with increasing frequency…. For the year 2019, our index reports that 57% of the global ocean surface recorded extreme heat, which was comparatively rare (approximately 2%) during the period of the second industrial revolution. Significant increases in the extent of extreme marine events over the past century resulted in many local climates to have shifted out of their historical SST bounds across many economically and ecologically important marine regions. For the global ocean, 2014 was the first year to exceed the 50% threshold of extreme heat thereby becoming “normal”….
The bottom line: It is almost certainly too late to save the Great Barrier Reef we know from ecological collapse, but we might be able to save keystone species able to rebuild it if we can stop and reverse global warming
Given that we have probably already crossed several tipping points such as permafrost thawing on the road to runaway global warming where natural positive feedbacks will continue working to drive global temperatures ever higher, the Great Barrier Reef as we know it seems to be unavoidably doomed. However, as long as a majority of the keystone architect coral species survive somewhere, they may be able to recolonize their previous ranges and begin building new reefs over subsequent centuries.
Unfortunately, when we should be working all-out to stop anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, our present Australian Government lead by Capt. Humbug (AKA Scotty from Marketing) and his deputy Blarny Barney (the Man with the Hat) is working hard to grow and maintain the healthy capacity of the fossil fuel industry to produce and burn carbon for energy. Also, not only are they doing nothing practical to stop and reverse global warming, but they just promised to spend a billion dollars on the Reef (over 9 years) to cloak the fact that they are doing nothing that counts to save the Reef (or for that matter our own human species).
The rapidly approaching Federal Election gives us the opportunity to remove Capt. Humbug and his wooden headed puppets from office and replace them with trustworthy, thinking people who have committed themselves to put work to solve the climate crisis as their first order of business if elected to Parliament. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to help you do this.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
IPCC’s guidance is dangerous in rapidly evolving climate emergency due to time lost for peer review between observing and reporting reality
Introduction: Year by year we are seeing increases in both the basic readings for global warming and in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events attributed to the warming that show we are in the midst of a climate emergency. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is considered by many scientists (and politicians claiming to be guided by the science) to be the ultimate authority on the likely evolution of global warming and the future risks we face from it. However, the IPCC’s guidance in forecasts and predictions has consistently ignored or underestimated the rising levels of catastrophic and existential risk associated with the accelerating increases.
I don’t dispute the IPCC’s science, as the work leading to it is usually meticulous. But, at the same time, their processes add years of bureaucratic and political delay between the observations of reality and the eventually publications of conclusions from those observations. This means that any guidance offered in IPCC reports and assessments is likely to considerably understate the risks, impacts and rates of global warming. The peer review process and sociological factors in the academic/institutional environments most IPCC authors work in lead authors to minimize dramatic and scary risks irrespective of minimal they might be. These thoughts and their implications are detailed in a January 2022 presentation of mine, “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong” on the Researchgate repository .
Slide 3 from my January 2022 presentation.
The article discussed here is an example of recent observations that should greatly change many presumptions in even the most recent IPCC AR6 report.
Carbonate rocks (e.g., limestone, dolomite) in permafrost zones may be global warming time-bombs for methane release.
The article linked here describes an unexpected observation from satellite scans of methane gas concentrations in the atmosphere over Siberia. As the frozen land warms in spring and summer remarkably high concentrations of methane are associated with geological outcroppings of common calcium carbonate rocks such as limestone and dolomite. Carbon is a significant component of these kinds of rock. Ordinarily this carbon is considered to be quite inert in relationship to short-term climate change. The authors were surprised to discover that largest releases of methane (~ 85 times the greenhouse potential of CO₂ over 20 years) in Siberia — not associated with fossil fuel production — were from these rocky areas. The observed behavior of the methane releases suggests these areas represented a risk of becoming global warming time bombs.
ABSTRACT: Anthropogenic global warming may be accelerated by a positive feedback from the mobilization of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost. There are large uncertainties about the size of carbon stocks and the magnitude of possible methane emissions. … Two elongated areas of increased atmospheric methane concentration that appeared during summer coincide with two stripes of Paleozoic carbonates exposed at the southern and northern borders of the Yenisey-Khatanga Basin, a hydrocarbon-bearing sedimentary basin between the Siberian Craton to the south and the Taymyr Fold Belt to the north. [see featured image above] Over the carbonates, soils are thin to nonexistent and wetlands are scarce. The maxima are thus unlikely to be caused by microbial methane from soils or wetlands. We suggest that gas hydrates in fractures and pockets of the carbonate rocks in the permafrost zone became unstable due to warming from the surface. This process may add unknown quantities of methane to the atmosphere in the near future [my emphasis].
When the IPCC’s AR6 was being drafted its authors never encountered or even contemplated many of the discoveries made like the above, or the kinds of NB4 extreme weather events observed over the last 4-6 years (they were “unknown unknowns”)
The IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 6th Assessment Report that informed COP26 totally missed this risk — the abrupt release of prodigious amounts of greenhouse methane gas from permafrost. They also missed or downplayed many other risks that have only begun to appear as the climate emergency accelerates. My graphical essay, “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong“, documents the fact that the IPCC’s claim to provide the best and most stringently peer reviewed scientific understanding of basic physics of Earth’s Climate System is true. However, their scientific methodology is deeply flawed when applied to predicting the rapidly evolving and changing behavior of the large and complexly dynamical Climate System:
By the time the IPCC’s deeply bureaucratic and political review processes result in publication, the work is based on the reality of a world that existed several years ago, not the reality of today’s increasingly rapidly changing world
Research and publishing in academic and institutional environments are deeply (but most subliminally) constrained from publishing novel ideas and scary stuff. This is called “scientific reticence” — a situation that can only be amplified by the requirements that publications are approved by their political sponsors.
Finally, the Climate System involves non-linear and often chaotic feedback interactions of many variables – some of them not at all well understood. Many climatologists come from backgrounds in physics and mathematical modeling is very helpful for understanding the behaviors of mostly linear systems. Climate behavior in the antithesis to this kind of system. Where climate is concerned, modeling is useful for understand what can happen under specific circumstances where most of the variables are controlled. It is inappropriate for long term forecasting.
However, even taking the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report at face value: “The best peer-reviewed science we have” shows unambiguously that if we don’t stop and reverse global warming very soon, human life on the planet will be faced with a growing crescendo of extreme weather events and climate hell within a few decades at the most.
Today, we are already seeing the beginnings of this crescendo! But there is only one mention of a few sentences in the entire 3949 pages of the full IPCC report of the realistic possibility that if we fail to stop the warming, that runaway global warming will lead to the global mass extinction of most complex life.
The point raised here is that the scientific methodology underlying IPCC reports cannot help but underestimate and down play the full range and magnitudes of risks humans face from the rapidly accelerating climate emergency. This also provides great cover for the fossil fuel industry special interests, the humbugging puppets in our governments that keep spruiking the message that we shouldn’t look up, because there is noting there to see, and the much too compliant press.
To conclude, if we are to find and execute any way to stop and reverse the still accelerating warming of our only planet, we have to begin by replacing all the humbugging puppets in our Federal Government with people able to rationally understand the risks we face who also have the gumption to put acting on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected to Parliament.
Our Vote Climate One Traffic Light Voting Guide will help you elect candidates in your electorate who are most likely to meet these critria, and equally identify LNP Coalition Members and fellow travelers and those whose preferences might flow in a way that would elect/reelect one of the humbuggers.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Amongst many other growing perils resulting from global warming, as long as we allow our only Earth to go on warming urban firestorms will become more frequent, fiercer, and deadlier. Many of Australia’s close packed and leafy suburbs would also be susceptible to this kind of urban firestorm.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
