Sept. 2023 climate extremes

William P. Hall on September 13, 2023

Notable observations and news items from the Web, with no processing and little in the way of comment. Make of them what you will.

Leading up to this September’s extremes

Firefighters flying over a controlled burn to fight wildfires in Canada’s Quebec Province. Photograph: Genevieve Poirier/Societe De Protection Des Forets/AFP/Getty Images (from the article)

The hottest summer in human history – a visual timeline

Jonathan Watts, Lucy Swan, Rich Cousins, Garry Blight, Harvey Symons and Paul Scruton
29/09/2023 in The Guardian

From June to August 2023, a series of extreme weather events exacerbated by climate breakdown caused death and destruction across the globe.

As the world sweltered through the hottest three month spell in human history this summer, extreme weather disasters took more than 18,000 lives, drove at least 150,000 people from their homes, affected hundreds of millions of others and caused billions of dollars of damage.

That is a conservative tally from the most widely covered disasters between early June and early September, which have been compiled in the timeline below as a reminder of how tough this period has been and what might lie ahead.

For details and the complete timeline, read the complete article….
July 2023 @ 16.95 °C – hottest ever, by far; August 2023 @ 16.82 °C – second hottest ever! New regime stuff!
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/datablog/2023/sep/22/eastern-australia-sweltered-under-heatwaves-this-week-how-unusual-were-they
https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1710675755452203079/photo/1

https://grist.org/extreme-heat/parts-of-the-world-have-already-grown-too-hot-for-human-survival/

How much are these extremes costing society. For an idea see the following graphic from Scientific American’s blog. Note: this graphic applies only to the US,

https://johnmenadue.com/environment-andrew-forrests-climate-message-to-biden-modi-and-xi/?fbclid=IwAR3u7tZWL_lLo4nFCfZeyumTlEnJEgCfRMGLXBEUsRcxWoaAvPQ3abeBNew
Click the thumbnail immediately below for a parsed transcript of this critically important speech.

https://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/plibersek-accused-of-failing-to-protect-environment-as-case-against-her-coal-decisions-begins-20230918-p5e5g0.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/28/crazy-off-the-charts-records-has-humanity-finally-broken-the-climate Warning: Data is provided for this article by climate scientists who suffer from the reticence causing academic and institutional scientists to downplay any overly ‘dramatic’ warnings in order to avoid alarming departmental colleagues, administrators, or governments influencing hiring, promotion, financial support for research, etc. Google “scientific reticence” and you will find lots of evidence on how it works.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/13/antartica-global-warming-sea-ice-caps-regime-shift

Pine Island Glacier

There is far worse to come as warming continues to increase https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/19/global-heating-made-mediterranean-floods-more-likely-study-says

Implications

The current extremely low sea ice will have a range of impacts. Changed ocean stratification and circulation will alter basal melting beneath ice shelves48. Greater coastal exposure will increase coastal erosion and reduce ice-shelf stability49. Changes in dense shelf water production will alter bottom water formation and deep ocean ventilation50. Sea ice changes will also have contrasting influences on Adélie and emperor penguin colonies51,52, and substantially alter human activities along the Antarctic coastline.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have been attributed as the primary cause of Southern Ocean warming, and here we suggest a potential link to a regime shift in Antarctic sea ice. While for many years, Antarctic sea ice increased despite increasing global temperatures6, it appears that we may now be seeing the inevitable decline, long projected by climate models53. The far-reaching implications of Antarctic sea ice loss highlight the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-poll-opinions-attitudes-extreme-weather-993c392ee57d023ca55600431a39a4be?fbclid=IwAR0u3oxtLL1R5hY0h_64cZA6MZDvGeEZNHUW66oghhmJgUPjo0je3_NyoWY

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-s-wildfire-crisis-was-forecast-but-it-arrived-decades-sooner-than-expected-1.6555309

https://www.livenowfox.com/news/canadas-supercharged-wildfire-forecast-could-mean-bad-air-quality-in-us-through-fall

Off the previous chart, again…. In 12 days another ~500,000 hectares have burned! Will the burning stop for winter? What does this portend for Australia’s upcoming El Nino summer?

Cumulative total land area burned to date

2023-09-25 17,850,290
2023-09-24 n.a.
2023-09-23 17,812,661
2023-09-22 17,100,899
2023-09-21 17,012,456

The record for the 23rd blew the Canadian system’s off the chart! The following chart from Copernicus, the EU’s equivalent of NASA, that operates the satellites, suggests the data from the 23d is probably a real record of what the satellites actually recorded. In most years the wildfires would have been more-or-less through for the year. Yet 23 Sept shows BY FAR the largest number of hotspots recorded for the year so far, previous highs being 9269 for June 22 and 9692 for July 13.

For the latest Natural Resources Canada tabulation, see https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/maps/fm3?type=arpt. Note 1: the current version of the total burned area chart can be seen by scrolling down to the bottom of the table accessed by this link.

Note 2: the following Guardian chart was PUBLISHED on 22 Sept.

https://twitter.com/yboulanger2/status/1707081494815027385
Yan Boulanger, @yboulanger2 Research scientist @NRCan CFS,
climate change impacts on forest landscapes, natural disturbances, wildlife habitat.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/22/canada-wildfires-forests-carbon-emissions – “This year’s out-of-control blazes released 2bn tonnes of CO2 – probably triple the country’s annual carbon footprint”.

Note: warmer winter temperatures allowed mountain pine beetle populations to grow explosively through this region due to additional reproduction of adult beetles that were normally killed off by hard freezing winters. I did several Facebook posts in 2016 and 2018 on the increasing fire hazard this would create until the dead biomass was removed. This year’s extreme temperatures facilitated this!

See Hall (2020) Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost.

Permafrost zones on brink of runaway GHG emissions(?)

Global permafrost now (2000-2020) likely to be a net emitter of greenhouse gases methane and N₂O – Ramage, et al. (September 11, 2023 unreviewed preprint) The net GHG balance and budget of the permafrost region (2000-2020) from ecosystem flux upscaling.

[Note that 2020- Siberian wildfires plus this years’ wildfires in the Canadian Arctic Zone probably produced massive increases in permafrost GHG emissions beyond what was happening during the years included in this survey.]

Map of northern permafrost extent (data from Obu et al. 2021) overlain with the spatial extent of the permafrost domain included (BAWLD-RECCAP2 regions). The spatial extent of the permafrost region de ned in this study as an overlap of permafrost extent and the Boreal Arctic Wetlands and Lakes Dataset (BAWLD, Olefeldt et al. 2021a,b
Scheme of annual atmospheric GHGs exchange (CO2, CH4, and N2O) for the ve terrestrial land cover classes (Boreal Forests, Non-permafrost Wetlands, Dry Tundra, Tundra Wetlands and Permafrost Bogs); inland water classes (Rivers and Lakes). Annual lateral
fluxes from coastal erosion and riverine fluxes are also reported in Tg C yr-1 and Tg N yr-1. Symbols for fluxes indicate high (x>Q3), medium (Q1<x<Q3), and low (<Q1) fluxes, in comparison the quartile (Q). Note that the magnitudes across three di erent GHG fluxes within each land cover class cannot be compared with each other.
ClimateReanalyzer
Stationary anomaly, somewhat hotter on 23rd than 22nd

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/11/us-record-billion-dollar-climate-disasters Note, as the frequency, extent, and ferocity of climate disasters continue to increase with accelerating global warming, newer disasters will overlap and add to destruction from previous disasters where there has not been enough time to complete repair and remediation leading to the accelerating accumulated climate damage — until society no longer has the resources to continue repairing and replacing what has already been repaired and replaced. At this point social collapse is inevitable…… We must stop and reverse the process of global warming that is causing this or face near-term extinction.

11 September 2023 – Coming out of winter — not a good look for the rest of the year in Australia!

Dwindling sea-ice reflects less solar energy away

Arctic sea ice 4th lowest on record 19 Sept 4.230 million km², with a lot of the remaining ice thin and broken. Animation 09/07-09/28 – https://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycomcice1-12/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/13/antartica-global-warming-sea-ice-caps-regime-shift

Shocking record low maximum sea-ice extent for Antarctica to 28/09/2023; also began net melting on 8 Sept. (https://seaice.visuals.earth/)

Antarctic sea-ice at ‘mind-blowing’ low alarms experts Excellent BBC article with good links to further research and discussions.

(13.09/2023) Nature Communications Earth & Environment. Record low Antarctic sea ice coverage indicates a new sea ice state.

In February 2023, Antarctic sea ice set a record minimum; there have now been three record-breaking low sea ice summers in seven years. Following the summer minimum, circumpolar Antarctic sea ice coverage remained exceptionally low during the autumn and winter advance, leading to the largest negative areal extent anomalies observed over the satellite era. Here, we show the confluence of Southern Ocean subsurface warming and record minima and suggest that ocean warming has played a role in pushing Antarctic sea ice into a new low-extent state. In addition, this new state exhibits different seasonal persistence characteristics, suggesting that the underlying processes controlling Antarctic sea ice coverage may have altered. [my emphasis]

a Antarctic monthly sea ice extent (SIE) anomaly time series from the National Snow and Ice Data Center over the satellite period, November 1978 to June 2023, in millions of square kilometres. Sea ice extent anomalies are calculated relative to the 1979–2022 climatology. Two change points are detected, separating the time series into three periods: November 1978 to August 2007 (grey), September 2007 to August 2016 (blue), and September 2016 to June 2023 (orange). The means of each period are shown by the horizontal lines and are statistically distinguishable. b Antarctic monthly SIE anomaly time series expressed as a percentage of the monthly climatology over 1979–2022. Periods are coloured as in (a). Record minima months occurring since 2016 are noted in (a, b). c Southern Ocean 50–65°S temperature anomaly time series from Argo over January 2004 to May 2023, in degrees Celsius. Ocean temperature anomalies are calculated relative to the 2004-2022 climatology. Dashed vertical lines show the sea ice extent change points. Stippling indicates values outside ± 1 standard deviation, where the standard deviation is calculated independently at each depth level to account for the change in magnitude of the variability with depth. Warm anomalies shown in orange and red are evident below 100 m from 2015, and at the surface from late 2016.
Antarctic five-day sea ice extent anomalies in millions of square kilometres for each year from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Sea ice extent anomalies are calculated relative to the 1979–2022 climatology. Anomalies are coloured by period as in Fig. 1: November 1978 to August 2007 (grey), September 2007 to August 2016 (blue), and September 2016 to June 2023 (orange). January to June 2023 is shown in bold orange, with the largest negative areal extent anomaly of the satellite era observed during June 2023.

Implications

The current extremely low [Antarctic] sea ice will have a range of impacts. Changed ocean stratification and circulation will alter basal melting beneath ice shelves48. Greater coastal exposure will increase coastal erosion and reduce ice-shelf stability49. Changes in dense shelf water production will alter bottom water formation and deep ocean ventilation50. Sea ice changes will also have contrasting influences on Adélie and emperor penguin colonies51,52, and substantially alter human activities along the Antarctic coastline.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have been attributed as the primary cause of Southern Ocean warming, and here we suggest a potential link to a regime shift in Antarctic sea ice. While for many years, Antarctic sea ice increased despite increasing global temperatures, it appears that we may now be seeing the inevitable decline, long projected by climate models. The far-reaching implications of Antarctic sea ice loss highlight the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [my emphasis]

End. For the complete article see Record low Antarctic sea ice coverage indicates a new sea ice state.

A very good summary of the state of global sea-ice to the end of September: https://www.carbonbrief.org/exceptional-antarctic-melt-drives-months-of-record-low-global-sea-ice-cover/

Storm Daniel comprehensively trashed several countries around the Eastern Mediterranean between 4 and 13 Sept.

Wikipedia tells the story and links to many of the news items. It was the deadliest Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone in recorded history

Greece

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/09/greek-rescuers-working-through-the-night-to-locate-villagers-trapped-by-flood: “The once fertile Thessaly plain, the nation’s breadbasket, now lies metres deep under mud and silt, with great swaths resembling a lake.” I read somewhere else that 1/3 of Greece’s TOTAL prime agricultural land was under water….

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/151807/a-deluge-in-greece

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/12/death-toll-in-libya-floods-reaches-3000-benghazi-administration

Key facts from CDR (Center for Disaster Recovery):

  • As of Sept. 15, the Libyan Red Crescent said the death toll had reached 11,300 people in Derna alone. Officials expect this figure to continue to rise, possibly as high as 20,000. About 170 people were also killed in other parts of eastern Libya, including in Susa, Marj, Bayda and Um Razaz. More than 7,000 people were injured and at least 10,100 people are still reported to be missing. Because of the lack of telecommunications, some may be displaced and unable to reach family, but due to the large-scale destruction, it is hard to confirm these figures.
  • According to Floodlist, Libya’s National Center of Meteorology reported, “in a 24 hour period to Sept. 10, a staggering 414.1 mm [16.2 inches] of rain was recorded in Bayda, while 240 mm [9.5 inches] of rain fell in Marawah in the District of Jabal al Akhdar, and 170 mm [6.7] fell in Al Abraq in the Derna District.”
https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disasters/2023-libya-floods/

I used publicly available satellite imagery to try assess the damage attributed largely due to the failure of two dams. My conclusion is that the dams were no more than momentary and relatively insignificant barriers to to the flow of an inconceivably large volume of water. The following satellite images from Google Earth, and Sentinel Hub’s EO Browser clearly demonstrate the power of our planet’s increasingly extreme weather events driven by global warming. As the oceans and atmosphere warm, the atmosphere is able to transport increasingly stupendous volumes of water (in the form of water vapor) over the land to be dropped when the air cools for any reason.

The following image is what appears to be the center of the city of Derna (pop ~100,000) immediately before Storm Daniel dropped part of its load of water in the watershed of Wadi Derna. The very dry stream bed of Wadi Derna crosses the center of the image. If you have access to Google Earth, you can zoom in to see shadows of the few individual people out in the mid-day sun.

Zooming in, note the large building on the NE side of the Wadi 3 blocks downstream from the bridge on the lower left corner of the picture. It is a high-rise, where the tallest part is 9 stories above the ground floor, and the rest five. I determined the number of floor by counting the sun shades visible on the downstream side of the building. This is one of the few structures left in this part of town that can be identified in the next image.

Immediately after it looked like this:

Note the conspicuous high-rise (10 stories) easily marked by its long shadow in this image. The image below images this building from the down-stream side. The image here is relatively low resolution, but the three lowest floors (facing AWAY from the flood) have clearly been gutted by the flood. The bridge referred to in the previous picture has vanished leaving only two supports (aligned with the stream flow) to show where it was. Rows of 4-6 story buildings (and even some 8 story buildings just off the left edge of this image) extending 3-4 and even more rows back from the Wadi have totally vanished or are only memorialized by a bit of concrete slab or trace of a foundation wall.

The next two pictures zoom in on the area between the vanished bridge in the above images and the next bridge upstream (just off the edge of the above).

The three buildings to the left of the Wadi at the bottom of the image were respectively 7, 4, and 7 stories high

The next two pictures show the site of the lower dam – 250 meters upstream from the inland edge of the city.

Note: the dam has no spillway. Overflow protection is provided by the flared drain pipe (circular structure) in the lower left of the picture. Using Google Earth’s measuring tool, the diameter of the drain as approximately 6m. On the upstream side the surface of the reed bed is ~24 m above sea level, and the level of the road over the top is 45 m, giving the dam height of 21 m. On the downstream side the base of the dam is at 26 m, with the outlet for the overflow drain at approx 22 m. The length of the dam across the top is ~115 m, across the bottom (at reed level) is 50 m; thickness at the bottom is ~74 m, 8.5 m at the roadway.

The next Google Earth image is of the upper dam (12.5 km upstream from the lower dam) from immediately before Storm David’s rain. There is no high resolution image available from after the flood.

The drain tube (right side upstream) seems to be 7m in diameter. The dam is ~10 m high and 270 m long. 143 m thick at the base and 6.5 m thick at the top.

The last composite graphic gives an impression of the amount of water held behind both dams in the days immediately prior to Storm David. All are sourced via Sentinel Hub’s EO Browser and all are at the same scale – close to the maximum resolution available. The left four images are of the upper dam and its lake, while those on the right are of the lower dam and its lake. The upper three images of each dam use the Normalized Difference Moisture Index NDMI – that basically highlights any moisture in the otherwise barren landscape. The bottom picture is the same view as the one immediately above, except that it displays “true colors”. On the left in the top picture, on 10/01/2023 there was some water backed up behind the dam, perhaps 2 m deep at the dam wall given that most of the upstream face is still dry. The second picture, on 02/09/2023 shortly before Storm Daniel shows essentially zero moisture behind the dam, except there is a tiny blue streak in the bottom of the bright yellow area that is too small to be resolved at the magnification shown here. The blue areas below the dam are well watered orchards and fields – not standing water. The dam is visible in both of the above pictures. The third picture, from 12/09/2023 immediately after Storm Daniel shows the Wadi Derna has been scraped clean of any sign of a dam or the well watered agricultural area below the dam save the blue area off to the side. Inspection of the area just downstream from the pictures here in the before and after show the complete obliteration of farms and vegetation together with the road to a height of 20+ meters above the bottom of the wadi. A little further upstream – a bit closer to the dam, the landscape has been scraped up to a height of 38 m! above the wadi bottom, where the width of the wadi is approximately 200 m across. The height of this point is ~215 m above sea level (at least 10 m higher than the top of the dam!).

A similar story can be constructed for the pictures of the lower dam in the right column. The dams were minor inconveniences to the flow of the total volume of the storm water.

The Wadi Derna drains a large and relatively barren plateau with some of the weirdest landforms I have seen, and could possibly be organized so it receives large volumes of water from a number of subsidiary drainages at the same time. Or, more likely, the insanely hot Mediterranean air was supersaturated with water, and the storm dynamics led to rapid cooling that squeezed all of the water out over a very short period of time….. And the barren plateau lacked soil and vegetation to slow the flow of the water once it hit the ground, and simply demonstrated what can happen when the Earth System has too much energy to dissipate all at once in the form of climate catastrophes.

Consequently….

Our planet is progressively becoming uninhabitable!

https://www.salon.com/2023/09/13/humans-are-dangerously-pushing-the-limits-of-our-planet-in-ways-other-than-climate-change/

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

We’ve already breached 1.5 °C above preindustrial global temperatures and worse to come is already in the pipeline

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-11/global-temperatures-pass-1-5c-above-pre-industrial-levels/102836304

Not yet getting back to anything as cool as last year’s near record highs after more than 3 months! – https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world
3+ months and the anomaly is still trending ever more extreme as the sub-solar point moves towards the Southern Hemisphere!
Global Average Sea Surface Temperature still above previous years ALL TIME RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE with trend line still widening the gap. 90% of excess solar heat is first absorbed into the oceans to heat the globe as a whole. – https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
Southern Hemisphere anomaly also in record extreme territory and rising rapidly. Antarctic rising and ~1 day from record daily high.
Sept. 13 and Antarctic sea ice already beginning to melt after 4+ months of record low freezing rate, to create a global average record low amounts of sea ice. At the southern summer low to come will there be ANY sea ice left around Antarctica? What does this mean for ice shelves and glacier fronts exposed to warm pounding waves and tides? – https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Sept. 19 and the ice is rapidly melting into ever more extreme low sea ice for the date.
Sept 19 and rapid Antarctic melting keeps global coverage more than 4 σ below any previous low for the date. Not good news for southern summer! https://seaice.visuals.earth/
Record high temperatures & reduced temperatures between polar and ‘temperate’ zones lead to crazy, weak and chaotic jet streams; in turn allowing stalled extreme heat domes, droughts and wildfires; lethally moist air masses, biblical flooding, and catastrophic storms.
OUR GOVERNMENTS ARE STILL PROMOTING AND SUBSIDIZING FOSSIL FUEL BURNING!

Forecast Image

https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=ws500-gph&ortho=5&wt=1

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-17/unusual-el-nino-development-bureau-of-meteorology-iod/102861886

https://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/spring-heat-records-shattered-as-australia-warms-towards-a-long-hot-summer-20230918-p5e5jd.html

South America mid Sept. — What about Australia this summer?

Biff Vernon – Facebook: Dangerous temperatures forecast for next week over a large part of South America.
Southern Hemisphere temperatures now: Brazil Max on Thursday 41 °C; 42 on Friday; Uruguay 43 on Saturday; 44 on Sunday.

Earth’s energy imbalance (solar radiant energy in – earth radiant energy out) = energy heating planet Earth.

https://twitter.com/askquantum/status/1704897991385964839

Simons puts the previous graphs in a geological context based on Shackleton et al’s reconstruction of variations of Earth’s energy balance determined from measurements of Oxygen isotope ratios in sediment cores from the seabeds.

The thread from https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1698413266421096893 explains in some detail how the following graph was inferred and extrapolated from the above. At first I found it difficult to make sense of this graph until I grasped that the vertical line defining the right-hand side of the graph was data, comparing the imbalance observed directly over the last 50 years, with the variation recorded over the last 150,000[!] years, not the border….

Simons was one of the coauthors of the above paper.

https://twitter.com/micefearboggis/status/1709173045913362507

Australia hasn’t escaped

https://twitter.com/joellegergis/status/1709024553048191389

Costs & Consequences

Note that the following X-Tweet is limited to the United States – based on a Scientific American article. The rest of the world is suffering at least as much! Total costs are adjusted for inflation. It isn’t clear whether this also applies to the individual “billion dollar” events in the graph below.

Jonathan Overpeck @GreatLakesPeck Environmental/Climate scientist for 30+ years; Samuel A. Graham Dean, @UMSEAS @UMICH . Tweets my own. Thinking grad school? Join me at @UMSEAS: http://myumi.ch/n8mM2

Given the rapidly growing accumulation of excess heat in Earth’s oceans, if we cannot stop and reverse global warming within the next few years the inevitable result will be ecological and social collapses, within a few decades, and likely global extinction of most complex organisms — including humans within a century or so….

We must act before it is too late!

Featured Image

Based on an image by Leon Simons, https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1698410404693594417 depicting the urgent existential problem facing humanity today: If we cannot reverse the heating spike forming the right-hand border of the graph and force it below the neutral line forming the graph’s X axis within a few years, most complex life on Earth will be extinct in a century or so.

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

Thawing permafrost: Big climate system danger

William P. Hall on April 4, 2022

Permafrost holds 2x more carbon than Earth’s atmosphere and 3x more than all forests. Thawing will hugely impact global climate warming

Science Session: Thawing Arctic Permafrost–Regional and Global Impacts

by US National Academy of Sciences, 12/05/2020

Science Session: Thawing Arctic Permafrost–Regional and Global Impacts

Temperatures across the Arctic are increasing two to four times faster than the global average. The dramatic consequences that are already apparent include reduction of sea-ice cover, accelerating loss of land ice from glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet, proliferating wildfires, and—the topic of this panel—ongoing heating and thawing of the permafrost that underlies most of the land area of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions across the globe. Permafrost thaw is a direct threat to buildings, roads, and pipelines, and it can greatly accelerate erosion along rivers and coastlines with severe consequences for communities located there. But an impact with much wider consequences is the release of carbon dioxide and methane by the decomposition of previously frozen organic matter, affecting the rate of growth of global warming and all of its impacts everywhere. (There is estimated to be something like 2.5 times as much carbon in the as in the entire global atmosphere; the key question is how fast it will come out.) The panelists, leading Arctic experts all, explain the complex science of thawing permafrost and elucidate the implications both regionally and globally.

Editors note: I have often mentioned the potential risk of rapid permafrost thawing serving as a source of powerful positive feedback on global warming from the abrupt emissions of greenhouse gases. The emissions include methane, which has a global warming potential more than 80 x that of CO. The video runs for almost 1½ hours. However, if you want to understand how science works in what are relatively conservative approaches and whether the risks that concern us in the Vote Climate One group are real, the whole video should be well worth watching.

In this pay particular attention to what is left out of the predictive models for future growth of emissions. The actual reality is likely to be even worse.

Finally, a lot of the discussion is based on the idea still common in 2020, that there is some kind of ’emissions budget’ that allows time to stop anthropogenic emissions. With more data, e.g., from the still conservative IPCC Sixth Assessment Report there is much less mention that there is no ‘safe’ emissions budget. Action to slow and reverse global warming is urgent! To be effective this will need global mobilization with cooperation at government levels as well as involving people. Here, our government in Australia has been quite hostile to any kind of action on global warming because of their apparently rusted-on allegiance to the fossil fuel industry and super-wealthy special interests associated with it.

In Scotty’s own words in one of his pet mediums – something to think about:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he supports Australia’s fossil fuel industry – and particularly coal, which he… says will be around for “decades to come”. “When it comes to the coal industry, it’s worth $35 billion to us every year in exports, and that’s money Australia needs to grow our economy,” Mr Morrison said. “What you need in today’s energy economy is you need to continue to run your coal-fired power stations for as long as you possibly can and that is our policy … we want them to run as long as they possibly can.” Coal-fired power stations will continue to run to back up renewable power sources, although Mr Morrison said gas would play a larger role in the energy mix in years to come. Mr Morrison added that building a new coal-fired power station would be difficult because of the state government planning powers, which would “probably never allow them to do it”. For the video see: The Australian, 14/03/2022, Commentary/coal-will-be-around-for-decades-to-come-scott-morrison/video. See also ‘We will keep mining’, says Australian prime minister Scott Morrison about the future of coal.

What can/must we do about this dreadful government and even worse situation?

We need to turn away from the the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with the kind of business as usual Scotty from Maketing and his fossil fuel puppets are spruiking!

It seems to take the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old autistic girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.

In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.

Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact they have expended considerable effort to deny the science, punish the institutions doing the science, misrepresent the facts, and try to divert interest to anything else but action on climate change. Beyond this they are continuing to support and subsidize continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry. Basically, all they doing is throwing coal on the fire and rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about.

In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.

Our young ones are walking into an unknown future. Give them hope and not the Ukraine.

Featured image: Tundra fire burning on permafrost along a 30 km long front (with even more burning out of the frame, dated 20/07/2022, Picture centered on lat=71.50116, lng=145.43701 at zoom 10, well north of the Arctic circle in Russia’s Siberian Sakha Republic. Image downloaded from European Space Agency’s Sentinel Hub EO Browser using False color, urban with RGB tweaking to emphasize currently burning area and the reddish burn scar. Fire burned for over 3 months / uploaded here by William Hall.. See https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/?zoom=10&lat=71.49244&lng=145.43839&themeId=DEFAULT-THEME&visualizationUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fservices.sentinel-hub.com%2Fogc%2Fwms%2Fbd86bcc0-f318-402b-a145-015f85b9427e&datasetId=S2L2A&fromTime=2020-07-22T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&toTime=2020-07-22T23%3A59%3A59.999Z&layerId=4-FALSE-COLOR-URBAN&redRange=%5B0.01%2C1%5D&greenRange=%5B0.22%2C1%5D&blueRange=%5B0.18%2C0.83%5D

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

Too late already? The frozen Arctic is burning now!

William P. Hall on February 27, 2022

The sensational title describes reality. World’s largest carbon store, peat covering permafrost, is now burning year-round through midwinter

The featured graphic above shows a false-color picture of an active fire burning on a forested area of permafrost in the drainage of the Lena River not far from Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Republic in Siberia. The video below, from the Siberian Times, documents that the Arctic is burning, even through the entire winter under snow cover in the peat layer covering permafrost. This is only one of many reports (e.g., see Burning the High Arctic: 2020 Spring and Summer Fire Season in Sakha Republic. A Precursor of Fire Seasons to Come?) in this source of the escalating frequency, area, and ferocity of the wildfires burning forests, tundra, and peaty organic soils covering permafrost in the Arctic (Alaska, Canada, and Eurasia (mostly Russia/Siberia). This is also a phenomenon I personally studied extensively last year using freely available access to NASA and European Space Agency satellite monitoring: “Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost“.

At least where the burning Arctic in Siberia is concerned, peaty soils covering permafrost are susceptible to prolonged burning from the the margins of the Arctic Ocean to the southern boundaries of the permanently frozen soils as just reported in the journal article here that matches ground truth reporting with the satellite monitoring results.

Figure 1. The study areas.

by Kuklina et al, 23/02/2022 in Land

Fires on Ice: Emerging Permafrost Peatlands Fire Regimes in Russia’s Subarctic Taiga

Abstract

Wildfires in permafrost areas, including smoldering fires (e.g., “zombie fires”), have increasingly become a concern in the Arctic and subarctic. Their detection is difficult and requires ground truthing. Local and Indigenous knowledge are becoming useful sources of information that could guide future research and wildfire management. This paper focuses on permafrost peatland fires in the Siberian subarctic taiga linked to local communities and their infrastructure. It presents the results of field studies in Evenki and old-settler communities of Tokma and Khanda in the Irkutsk region of Russia in conjunction with concurrent remote sensing data analysis. The study areas located in the discontinuous permafrost zone allow examination of the dynamics of wildfires in permafrost peatlands and adjacent forested areas. Interviews revealed an unusual prevalence and witness-observed characteristics of smoldering peatland fires over permafrost, such as longer than expected fire risk periods, impacts on community infrastructure, changes in migration of wild animals, and an increasing number of smoldering wildfires including overwintering “zombie fires” in the last five years. The analysis of concurrent satellite remote sensing data confirmed observations from communities, but demonstrated a limited capacity of satellite imagery to accurately capture changing wildfire activity in permafrost peatlands, which may have significant implications for global climate.

Keywords: smoldering fires; zombie fires; boreal forest; permafrost; Evenki; subarctic

Read the complete article….

What do I mean by “Too late already”? for a burning Arctic

It is still early days for an exact quantification of the amount of organic carbon sequestered in the Arctic and subarctic region (e.g., as organic matter in the form of living things, peaty soils, and frozen CO₂ and methane hydrates on, in and under the permafrost). However, our best estimate is that the permafrost region currently holds probably at least two times the total mass of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere. This is not the fossil carbon being released by human industries. According to the US NOAA Arctic Report Card article for 2019 on Permafrost and the Global Carbon Cycle by T. Schuur:

  • Northern permafrost region soils contain 1,460-1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon, about twice as much as currently contained in the atmosphere.
  • This pool of organic carbon is climate-sensitive. Warming conditions promote microbial conversion of permafrost carbon into the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane that are released to the atmosphere in an accelerating feedback to climate warming.
  • New regional and winter season measurements of ecosystem carbon dioxide flux independently indicate that permafrost region ecosystems are releasing net carbon (potentially 0.3 to 0.6 Pg C per year) to the atmosphere. These observations signify that the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway. [my emphasis].

Note that (1) positive feedbacks can grow exponentially (i.e., into ‘explosions’), and (2) a significant proportion of the permafrost carbon is sequestered in the form of frozen methane hydrates. Methane in the hydrate form is inert, but under heating it ‘melts’ and decomposes into water and methane gas – where for the first 20 years of its life in the atmosphere is around 85 TIMES more potent per molecule than CO₂. Even after 100 years is more than 20x potent (IPCC AR5 via Wikipedia). Thus, if global warming triggers an abrupt thawing of Arctic permafrost the rapidly increasing greenhouse could drive global temperatures substantially higher than if CO₂ was the only concern.

To me, the bulk of the evidence in my 2021 Portents for the Future graphical essay as placed in context in my subsequent January 2022 essay “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong” suggest that our planet has already passed tipping points where the “natural” positive feedbacks will continue warming the Earth even if we instantly stopped human generated carbon emissions. Note stopping our emissions should at least slow the rate of warming to give us some more time to actually stop the warming – so this remains a vital task! In other words not only do we have to stop carbon emissions from human activities, but we have to implement global scale projects to stop and reduce global heating, e.g., by capturing and sequestering atmospheric carbon by fertilizing and farming ocean deserts. In any event, if we don’t stop the warming feedbacks while we still have the possibility, we will soon pass the point of no return where near term global mass extinction becomes virtually certain.

I am not a near-term climate ‘doomer‘, although I see doom as inevitable if we don’t stop warming. Based on more than a decade studies of the co-evolution of the human species and our technological capabilities, I think if it took us 150 years to burn enough fossil carbon to trigger runaway global warming, we should be smart and capable enough to put that carbon back into safe storage before it kills us. The conclusion of that study in 2016 led me to where I am now rather than trying to finish the book for an audience that probably would not be there to ever read it.

William Hall, 2016

The deep cultural change needed to reach a sustainable future can only be achieved by political action to replace our puppet governments protecting their greedy puppet masters

The puppets show and tell
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)
Fossil fuel donations keep puppets in government.
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.”

In Australia the puppets, fools and knaves forming our LNP COALition government continue working assiduously to protect the fossil fuel and related industries’ abilities to burn fossil carbon and emit methane for unimaginable profits by doing everything they can to deny, delay, block, confuse, distract any effective action to stop these greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, to begin effective solutions for the climate emergency we must clearly recognize and act on the need to replace this government with capable and trustworthy representatives who if elected will put action on the climate emergency at the top of their Parliamentary agendas.

To do this we have to accept the facts that are enough to make any sane person panic. However, in the incredibly wise words of a 16 year old autistic child, Greta Thunberg, we need to recognize that the panic can be answered with prompt action.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.

In other words, wake up, smell the smoke, see the reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. All Capt. Humbug and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about. In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hope. She wants you to panic enough to wake up and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ futures.

Help give them the bright future they hope for!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Thawing permafrost is crossing several tipping points

William P. Hall on February 3, 2022

An EOS article published today puts exclamation marks around yesterday’s post: “Thawing permafrost in the Arctic warns we are probably crossing several critical tipping points on the road to runaway warming and near-term human extinction“.

“The increasing incidence of wildfire in the Arctic is not only thawing permafrost but also changing the entire underlying structure of the region.” The net result is to greatly increase the rate of thawing and the amount of greenhouse gases being released to the global atmosphere (which is why it concerns us here in Australia!)

The bottom line is that if we humans don’t stop the continuing increase in global temperature (global warming) it will soon be impossible to do so because of the exponentially increasing positive feedbacks from temperature sensitive greenhouse gas emissions like this. This is the threshold, or point of no return, beyond which our planetary climate system is fully committed to complete its flip into the hothouse hell state. (see Steffen et al. 2018, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene and my own 2021 research presentation, Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost.)

More Fires, More Problems

by Danielle Beurteaux, 1 February 2022 in EOS

The Anaktuvuk River Fire in 2007 tore through 100,000 hectares of Alaskan tundra in almost 3 months of continuous burning. This fire not only changed the area vegetation, but it also thawed permafrost and led to the formation of thermokarst. This is a dramatic example but may serve as a bellwether incident for climate to come.

“Almost everything hinges on permafrost in the Arctic ecosystem.”

Arctic permafrost stores 33% of Earth’s organic carbon, even though it covers only 20% of the planet. It also acts as the structural foundation, physically and ecologically, for the entire pan-Arctic region. Permafrost thawing has cascading effects on the hydrological conditions of the landscape and ice and also triggers changes in vegetation and releases stored carbon. “Almost everything hinges on permafrost in the Arctic ecosystem,” said Yaping Chen, a postdoctoral research associate at the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Yet there are still questions about how fires (the incidence of which is increasing in the Arctic) and climate change might increase the amount of thermokarst—the uneven land formed after permafrost melts. Thermokarst is the result of the degradation of permafrost and provides reduced carbon sequestration and fewer niche ecosystems than permafrost.

…

“Our major result is that although fire only burned about 3% of the Arctic landscape, it is responsible for more than 10% of thermokarst formation,” said Chen. “However, climate change remains the predominant regional consideration of thermokarst formation.”

Researchers also found that fires increased thermokarst formation for up to 80 years postfire, much longer, said Chen, than previously thought.

We have poor knowledge about the presence of permafrost, said Chen. We don’t know exactly where it is or how much there is of it. “These difficulties make it very hard to predict where thermokarst may start and how it will develop over time,” she said.

Read the complete article…

Earth on fire
It’s an Emergency!

Humanity has only a few years at the most to stop and reverse global warming. If we fail to do this our children and grandchildren will have no future in the global mass extinction in Earth’s Hothouse Hell. Currently stifled and mesmerized by the humbug, lies, blocking and misdirection of the LNP COALition’s fossil fuel puppets, Australians are doing nothing effective to fight the warming fire that is burning up our only planet.

To have any hope of contributing to the solution, we must replace Capt. Humbug (a.k.a., Scotty from Marketing), his deputy dunce, Blarny Bulldust (The Man with the Hat), and their troop of wooden headed puppets occupying our Parliament with sensible people committed to acting on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected to office. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to help you replace the special interest puppets with good people who will help put out the fire rather than trying to con us into believing that it doesn’t exist…., or if it does, that it isn’t important….

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

Thawing permafrost in the Arctic warns we are probably crossing several critical tipping points on the road to runaway warming and near-term human extinction

William P. Hall on February 2, 2022

Part 6 of David Spratt’s guidebook to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: Burning Siberian tundra, taiga forests and peat soils are all contributing to thawing permafrost and pushing greenhouse gas emissions past an important tipping point

Spratt focuses almost exclusively on the consequences of permafrost thawing without much consideration of the overall environment of which the thawing permafrost is only a part. Even looked at in isolation it is clear that greenhouse gases are being released sooner and in greater quantities that in earth system models and conservative IPCC reporting.

I spent several months last year researching the interacting dynamics of the 2020 Siberian wildfires (burning taiga forests, arctic tundra, and even the underlying peat soils) on the underlying permafrost and the likely impacts on greenhouse gas emissions from both the burning overburden and underlying permafrost. None of the modeling has the full complexities of the likely internal positive feedbacks within this permafrost system. In other words, although all authorities seem to accept that the Arctic permafrost is a dangerous threshold we could already be tripping over, I think most still badly underestimate the dangers it represents for flipping us past the point of no return on the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell climate state and global mass extinction.

Exposed ice wedge in slumping permafrost

31 January 2022

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (6) Permafrost: Beyond the models

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

Permafrost is permanently frozen ground. It covers one-quarter of the land mass of the northern hemisphere, and contains 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon, twice the amount currently in the atmosphere and triple the amount emitted by human activity since 1850.  Permafrost buried beneath the Arctic Ocean holds 60 billion tons of methane (in structures known as methane clathrates) and 560 billion tons of organic carbon.

Permafrost is releasing significant amounts of greenhouse gases, and feedbacks are under way, but the dynamics are not yet well enough understood to be able to judge whether tipping points have been reached or not.  As previously noted (in part 1 of this series), University of NSW researchers point out that: “We do not know exactly how close we are to a tipping point, or even whether we have already passed it… There are tipping points that while not yet triggered may already be fully committed to.” 

As permafrost thaws, soil microbes awaken and feast on the warming biomass, creating heat as they do so: a positive feedback that drives more defrosting. Russian permafrost scientist Trofim Maximov describes the global feedback: thawing permafrost releases greenhouse gases which cause warmer temperatures, melting the permafrost further: “It’s a natural process… which means that, unlike purely anthropogenic processes, once it starts, you can’t really stop it.”

A 2018 study estimated that stabilisation of the climate at 2°C may eventually result in release of 225–345 gigatonnes (GtC) of thawed permafrost carbon. That is equivalent to two-to-three decades of human emissions at the current rate. Some scientists consider that 1.5°C appears to be something of a “tipping point” for extensive permafrost thaw.

Read the complete article….

If rapidly thawing permafrost doesn’t sound the alarm that shouts, ‘Your house is on fire. If you don’t put it out your house will be gone!’ I don’t know what does. Unfortunately, in Australia we are living in a country whose national government seems to be a troop of wooden-headed puppets and knaves working for the fossil fuel industry. Here they are doing everything possible to drown out, stifle, and misdirect the alarm so it either won’t be heard at all, or will at least be ignored by the citizens they are supposed to protect and keep safe.

If we continue to follow the lead these puppets are trolling us with, nothing will be done to stop and reverse global warming until we are irrevocably committed to the Hell the fossil fuel industry is tipping us into. Think of the future when you decide who to vote for (and place last in your list of preferences) in the upcoming election. Hopefully, you will give your top preferences to candidates who can be trusted to put action on the global climate emergency at the top of their to do list if elected, and puppets of the fossil fuel and related special interests at the bottom of your list.

To help you, we are making available what we know about each candidate via our electorate specific Traffic Light Voting System.

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