Tropical forests are turning into net greenhouse gas emitters, pushing us closer to the precipice of no return on the way to Hothouse extinction.

William P. Hall on January 29, 2022

Part 4 of David Spratt’s guidebook to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: Overheated tropical forests are turning from carbon sinks into net greenhouse gas emitters.

In this part of his narrative, David Spratt leaves the polar regions he discussed in Part 3, to see what is happening to tropical forests (and other habitats). Tropical forests, notably including the Amazon Rainforest, are switching from sinks removing greenhouse carbon from the atmosphere to emitting greenhouse gases as they struggle to adapt to increasing temperatures.

Photosynthesis, the biochemical process that uses energy from light to shift electrons around to combine 6 CO₂ and 6 H₂O (water) molecules to make sugar (C₆H₁₂O₆, the basic carbohydrate that both fuels and forms the basis of most living matter) involves a complex cycle of enzymatic and electron transfer steps that are temperature sensitive. For most plants living in moderate climates, the rate of photosynthetic carbon capture increases as they get warmer, until, inescapably, there is a point (called the thermal maximum) when steps in the process begin to fail, causing the the rate of carbon capture to decline rapidly as temperature rises further. Also as the plant is increasingly stressed by rising temperature it burns more carbohydrate to fuel repair and maintenance so its CO₂ emissions also begin to rise rapidly. Spratt explains:

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon [dark green].
Image: Chatham House

26 January 2022

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (4) Forests and the Amazon: A faltering carbon sink

by David Spratt in Climate Code Red
Fourth in a series.   
Read 1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7

The plant-based terrestrial biosphere may be understood as including the world’s land-based plants, soils, derived dead organic matter, such as litter, and soil organic matter. 

Plants photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and water to produce sugar (glucose) and oxygen. Around 30% of the additional carbon dioxide (CO₂) produced by human actions has been drawn down from the atmosphere (mitigated) by increased plant photosynthesis. This adds to the land-based sink of stored carbon. But plants also respire, for example at night and in winter, by converting oxygen and stored glucose back into water and carbon dioxide. 

As the planet continues to warm, a point of warming is reached — the “thermal maximum for photosynthesis” — after which combination of the rate of photosynthesis decreasing and the rate of respiration increasing results in the net flux of CO₂ from the atmosphere decreasing.

Together with more severe droughts and wildfires that also add to plant-based CO₂ emissions, the total amount of carbon stored in the terrestrial biosphere (the land sink) then starts to fall. This may be understood as a tipping point, a threshold beyond which large change is initiated in the terrestrial biosphere.

…

Brazil’s Amazon basin forest emitted more CO₂ than it has absorbed between 2010 and 2019: it gave off 16.6 billion tonnes of CO₂, while drawing down only 13.9 billion tonnes. “We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter,” said study co-author Jean-Pierre Wigneron. Another study concluded that southeastern Amazonia, in particular, is acting as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere.


Read the complete article…..

Spratt’s article here refers mainly to tropical forests flipping from net GHG carbon sinks to net GHG emitters. The added GHGs then serve as positive feedback to increase the planetary greenhouse effect and thus force global average temperatures higher. What he does not discuss here (but may cover in subsequent parts of this series) is that boreal forests from the temperate to arctic zones are also flipping from being major carbon sinks to being even more potent emitters. This is due to the increasing number, extent, and ferocity of wildfires turning living and dead biomass into GHGs, combined with setting on fire especially carbon rich peat soils, releasing still more GHGs; and in the Arctic, contributing to the thawing of permafrost releasing still more GHGs including methane from the decomposition of methane hydrates stored in and under permafrost. These flips from sink to emitter begin slowly, but because of feedback amplification the flip may go to completion quite abruptly. (Last year I researched and wrote in some detail about how these processes work in the Siberian permafrost region: Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost).

This is scary stuff. There is a large and rapidly accumulating body of evidence showing that humans started global warming started with the carbon emissions of our Industrial Revolution. We have probably reached a point where positive feedbacks will continue driving global temperatures higher even if we achieve zero emissions. At this point there is no evidence that anything we have done to reduce anthropogenic emissions is slowing the accelerating rise of any of the three major greenhouse gases, or that we are reversing the growth of global average temperatures. If we do not actually stop and reverse the warming, continuing positive feedbacks over the next few decades will drive us and the biosphere we need for our survival through the gates of Hell to a world that will be too hot for most species of life (including us) to survive.

I have said many times, and will undoubtedly say many times more that the fossil fuel industry special interests, its puppet representatives in many of the world’s governments, and friends in the print and social media have over the last 40 or so years until now managed quite successfully to deny, mislead, misrepresent, distract, delay, or block any effective action against their greenhouse gas emissions or their profits from thermal power generation. In Australia, beginning with the Abbott Government the LNP COALition and a few fellow-traveling independents & minor parties have been almost totally effective in preventing ANY very effective action to stop global warming (i.e., by doing everything they can think of to keep us on the downhill road to mass extinction and the end of the human species.

If we are to leave our only planet in a state where our children and grandchildren will have a future, Capt. Humbug and his wooden headed puppets must be removed from Parliament and replaced by trustworthy people who have committed if they are elected, to place action on the global climate emergency as their first priority in office.

Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System explains how you can use australia’s preferential voting system to do this.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Abrupt Arctic changes warn that we are slipping faster towards the precipice on the road where we cannot avoid the Hothouse Hell and extinction

William P. Hall on January 28, 2022

Part 3 of David Spratt’s guidebook to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: Collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Continuing from David Spratt’s look in Part 2 of his guidebook at evidence that the West Australian Ice Sheet is beginning to collapse; here, in Part 3 he turns his attention north, to signs that Greenland’s Ice Sheet is also beginning to collapse. As before, we are looking at the impacts of a probable sequence of events along the global warming road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell. These are leading us to what Steffen et al. described as the Earth System’s Hothouse (see the featured graphic above) in their 2018 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science paper, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. The potentially cascading impacts of these events were also summarized in Lenton et al’s 2019 comment paper in Nature, Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. An additional danger is that these may also cascade rapidly to cause a large change abruptly. The bottom line is that if we cannot stop the warming and backtrack to a lower temperature world, we cannot avoid the Hothouse and the road will end in the mass extinction of most species of complex life on our only planet, including ourselves.

There is no evidence that anything other than a rapidly mobilized war effort by humans will stop the cascade passing the point of no return to runaway warming and global mass extinction. If we want to leave any kind of future to our children and grandchildren, we had better pay heed to the warning signs that Spratt is pointing out, and start mobilizing and acting NOW!

Broken-up Arctic ice

24 January 2022

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (3) Greenland and the Arctic: Abrupt change

by David Spratt in Climate Code Red

Third in a series.
Read 1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7

“The Arctic is screaming”, says Mark Serreze, Arctic climate expert at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Arctic warming is racing ahead of the worst-case estimates, now heating four times faster than the global average, and the region is undergoing abrupt climate change, understood as a transition of the climate system into a different mode on a time scale that is faster than the responsible forcing. In other words, it has passed a tipping point for rapid, system-level change. 

Researchers say that the Arctic “is currently experiencing an abrupt climate change event …  climate models underestimate the abruptness of the recent changes observed in the Arctic (and) climate models underestimate this ongoing warming”. [Models do not account well for warming due to sea-ice loss, but losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice in the summer months would advance the 2ºC threshold by 25 years”.]

Read the complete article…..

If we do nothing to stop the inexorable warming process we started with the proliferating carbon burning used to fuel the Industrial Revolution and our continuing competition to control the world the Climate System will complete its flip into Earth’s Hothouse Hell state. It will be very unlikely that we can avoid the hothouse and extinction along with the rest of the biosphere that supports our lives.

From the time the Abbott Government was elected in 2013 the LNP COALition Governments (currently under Capt. Humbug, (a.k.a. Scotty from Marketing) and his henchman Blarny Bulldust (The Man with the Hat) have worked hard to protect and and advance the interests of their patrons with special interests in the fossil fuel and related resource exploitation industries. Thus, for nearly a decade, The COALition’s humbug, denial, parliamentary blocking, disinformation, distraction and stupidity has successfully disrupted virtually every attempt to act against greenhouse gas emissions or even to slow the continued expansion of these lethal industries. Every year the COALition has been in power we are that much closer to the point of no return where our extinction is the only plausible outcome.

So what can Australians do to begin improving our odds to avoid the Hothouse Hell? One very obvious action is to replace the COALition government with people we can trust to put action on the climate emergency at the top of their goals in office and who have the capacity to organize and lead Australia’s mobilization of a global effort to stop and reverse global warming.

Our Traffic Light Voting System explains how we can help you do this without telling you how to vote.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Another $billion diverted from the most needed protection of the Reef – stopping GHG emissions

William P. Hall on January 27, 2022

Rob Harris 27/01/2022 in The Age
Morrison promises extra $1 billion to save the Great Barrier Reef

Added comment: Another $billion distraction by the COALition puppets in Parliament to divert attention from the fact that they are protecting their special interest patrons by doing nothing to solve the existentially dangerous climate emergency. Vote them out of office!

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

A Canadian take on Don’t Look Up and the need to influence their Parliament

William P. Hall on January 27, 2022

Kathryn Harrison & Simon Donner, 26/01/2022 in The Conversation
The climate crisis demands courage not optimism

Added comment: The authors seem to take the IPCC’s complacent assumptions that reaching zero emissions will be enough to solve the climate crisis. There are strong reasons for thinking the situation is actually far more serious – multiply emphasizing their conclusion that the Canadian Parliament must recognize the need to mount a global war effort if our species is to survive.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Another step down the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and extinction

William P. Hall on January 27, 2022

Part 2 of David Spratt’s guide-book to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: collapse of the West-Antarctic Ice Sheet

This post continues David Spratt’s account of how we humans seem to be passing critical tipping points in the dynamics of Earth’s Climate System initiating the positive feedbacks of runaway global warming to Earth’s Hothouse Hell. Steffen et al. described the dynamics and existential consequences of this process in their 2018 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science paper, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. The feature graphic above from that paper maps out alternative destinations we can reach from where we are now. There are two roads,

  • a wide easy one leading to the cliff of no return, where we can no longer stop Earth’s runaway warming to global average temperatures 10 – 15 °C hotter than present that will be lethal to most species of complex organisms, and
  • an already hard to reach path where we climb back up the hill through effective “stewardship” (Steffen et al’s word), and reverse the warming process to stabilize the climate system in a way that will give humans and what remains of a probably already tattered biosphere a long term future.

Thanks to the technologies we began developing in the Industrial Revolution we have fueled our endless competition with one-another to control our one world with the increasingly profligate burning of fossil carbon to increase greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Rising temperatures are then initiating a variety of other temperature-related positive-feedback processes emitting more greenhouse gases or having other effects to increase the rate of temperate rise that has started us down the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell.

When the positive feedback reaches a point where it can sustain further temperature increases, it can be said that it has passed a tipping point, that may begin a rapid cascade of further tipping points as described in Lenton et al’s 2019 comment paper in Nature, Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. There is no evidence that anything other than a rapidly mobilized war effort by humans will be able to stop the cascade passing the point of no return to runaway warming and global mass extinction. If we want to leave a future to our children and grandchildren, we had better pay heed to the warning signs that Spratt is pointing out, and start mobilizing and acting now.

Where Thwaits Glacier meets the Antarctic Ocean

20 January 2022

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (2) West Antarctica and the “doomsday” glacier

by David Spratt in Climate Code Red

Second in a series.    Read  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5

The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has an eastern ice shelf 45 kilometres wide as it flows into the Amundsen Sea. On 13 December 2021, scientists announced that the ice shelf is likely to break apart in the next five years or so, resulting in a speeding up of the glacier’s flow and ice discharge, possibly heralding the collapse of the glacier itself, and triggering similar increases across the Amundsen Sea glaciers.

The researchers explain: “Over the last several years, satellite radar imagery shows many new fractures opening up… which like a growing crack in the windshield of a car [can] suddenly break apart into hundreds of panes of glass. We have mapped [the] pathway the fractures might take through the ice [and conclude] the final collapse of Thwaites Glacier’s last remaining ice shelf may be initiated … within as little as five years” (emphasis added).

… 

The fracturing of the ice shelf means more warm water will penetrate under the ice sheet, helping to free the underbelly of the glacier from the grounding line rock underneath, and allowing water to flow into the deep basin under the glacier, causing the glacier’s collapse. This would raise sea levels by 65 centimetres, though the timing of such collapse — the “doomsday” scenario — is highly uncertain. Since neighbouring glaciers flow into the same basin, the demise of Thwaites could eventually lead to the loss of all of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), resulting in more than three metres of sea level rise, and putting at risk the lives and livelihoods of 250 million people.

Read the complete article…

There is no doubt that observable and understandable evidence from the real world that Spratt, I and others point out is telling us that we are on the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and the current climate emergency is already dire and getting worse. In the face of this truly existential crisis, Australia is governed by Captain Humbug’s LNP COALition. Based on watching and listening to them in action, they are a troop of wooden-headed puppets, charlatans, knaves and pathological liars.

Their COALition’s focus in Parliament seems to be protecting the special interests of their patrons in the greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuel industries and related exploiters of Australia’s resources. Beginning with the holier than thou Abbott and currently led by Capt. Humbug (Scotty from marketing) and Blarney Bulldust (the man with the hat), as long as the COALition has been in government, their constant flow of humbug, legislative blocking, denial, disinformation, disruption, distraction etc., has effectively protected their patrons by stifling the mobilization of any real action on the climate emergency (e.g.., stopping GHG emissions cold).

Vote Climate One understands and accepts the real world evidence that humanity faces a genuinely existential crisis: we’ll soon become extinct if we do not stop and reverse global warming. Our group was formed with the single goal – to create some hope for the future by helping the Australian people remove Capt. Humbug and his nasty and evil troop from our Federal Parliament by replacing the puppets and knaves with honest parties and individuals who have convinced us that they can be trusted to place acting on climate change as their first order of business in Parliament.

Our Traffic Light Voting System explains how we can help you do this without telling you how to vote.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Climate emergency: using systems analysis and systems thinking to solve it

William P. Hall on January 26, 2022

Systems thinking helps make sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships. Mella thinks this will help us navigate through the complexity to working solutions

If the accelerating global warming continues for longer than a few more years, it is highly likely we will be trapped on a planet committed to runaway warming. The accumulating daily evidence on the accelerating rates of rising greenhouse gas concentrations paint an appalling picture. If the resulting warming cannot be stopped and reversed, this will lead to global mass extinction within two or three human generations (if not sooner). We will need systems thinking to help us find paths to solutions..

Australia has a large and potentially quite capable academic and institutional infrastructure for understanding and developing solutions for climate problems. However, given the unique and complex nature of Earth’s Climate System and the rapid changes that are taking place the usual reductionist approaches of normal science are unlikely to find a navigable pathway through the problems. A more holistic systems thinking approach helps to identify and map out the major areas and levels of organization where problems need to be solved. Systems engineers are a lot more comfortable working this way than are ‘normal’ scientists. Teams integrating both normal science and systems engineering should be able to navigate the rapidly changing shoals to bring escalating problem situations under control.

Unfortunately, Australia’s current LNP COALition Governments primary aim in power seems to be preventing any action on climate change that might impair their patrons in the fossil fuel and related industries. The resulting humbug, denial, disinformation, distraction and outright blocking and withdrawal of support for high level climate science has effectively stifled any significant progress towards solving the climate emergency. The fact that certain elements of the (mostly Murdoch) press also continue polluting the press and social media with all kinds of fake news, alternative facts and blather, works further to hide the lack of serious progress towards doing anything effective about the climate emergency.

Social alarm and the removal–consumption–production strategy.To highlight the components of this strategy, it is useful to group the multiple specific levers that can be implemented by different governments into only three macro-levers of control, indicated in the box on the left-hand side of the model

Global Warming: Is It (Im)Possible to Stop It? The Systems Thinking Approach

by Pierro Mella – Energies2022, 15(3), 705

Abstract: For some time, there has been a slow but gradual rise in the average temperature of the entire globe, a “global warming”, in fact, the result of human and natural processes that have been producing this phenomenon for decades. Since they are not directly perceived by individuals, these processes and their effects have been ignored for a long time, or at least not considered to be immediately harmful and dangerous.

Global warming does not depend so much on solar radiation as it does on the greenhouse effect deriving from the continuous emission, by human activities and natural events, of greenhouse gases that accumulate in the atmosphere and form a barrier to the dispersion of heat produced by solar radiation. A good number of models exists to explain how global warming is produced, which are technical in nature and consider the production of greenhouse gases as the most important cause; however, they do not always analyze and justify the reasons for such emissions.

Following the logic, language and methods of Senge’s systems thinking, the paper aims to present a general model, the GEAM—qualitative in nature, but rational and coherent—for highlighting the interacting factors that give rise to and maintain global warming. This model constitutes a reference framework to identify possible “strategic areas” within which to identify man-made “artificial” and “natural” factors that can control the phenomenon and to order the countless ideas and interventions that different nations carry out individually to control global warming.

Read the complete article….

What Mella outlines in his article should not be that difficult to implement – particularly if supported by a government that puts a high priority on acting on the climate emergency. Clearly, re-electing the LNP COALition will not provide that kind of support. If were are to leave a planet capable of providing a long-term future for our children and grandchildren we must replace the COALition fossil fuel industry puppets with trustworthy people who have committed themselves to put solving the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected.

To help you do this, the Vote Climate One group will provide Traffic Light Voting guides for every Federal Electorate that will help you preference candidates in an order that should avoid the risk that your most preferred candidates preferences will not flow to the fossil fuel puppets if they are not elected. We don’t tell you how to vote, but you will know that any candidate designated with a green light has convinced us that they will put action on the climate emergency as their first priority in Parliament. Amber light candidates might have other first priorities, but we think they can be counted on to cooperate with action on the emergency.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Managing resources to reduce battery costs for zero emissions

William P. Hall on January 26, 2022

Davide Castelvecchi – 17/08/2021 in Nature
Electric cars and batteries: how will the world produce enough?

Added comment: Good review of how to reduce battery costs costs for electrifying fossil fuel driven private transport. Not discussed here is that the fabrication of private vehicles consumes way more resources than just what is required for the power train. If we are serious about stopping and reversing global warming we will need to do more than just stop carbon emissions. Major savings on all sorts of resource requirements can be made by replacing private vehicles with electric bicycles and public transport and delivery. A good project for someone who is good with numbers would be to calculate the global footprint required to produce a private car for a person/family vs how many people/families without a private car could occupy that same footprint.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.