AdamB wrote:Tanada wrote:[b]Average Carbon Dioxide Levels Increasing Faster Than Ever, NOAA Says
And here I thought COP21 was going to save the world? Imagine that...selfie taking opportunities to yack it up and create no change still is the norm, even when it is important.
The very large majority of human beings are a short sighted very tribal in outlook species. If what I do today helps me and doesn't harm my tribe in a way that will make the tribe punish me then all is sunshine and lollipops and we will let next week/month/year/generation look after themselves.
Every year we are more and more committed to flipping the climate so the Northern Hemisphere goes into greenhouse mode. The earth persisted in this climate state for a span of 30 million years aka 30,000,000,000 or about 500,000 times the adult average lifespan before modern medicine made us live past 50. Something to remember, all those statistics that mumble on and on about how people only lived to 36 years old on average are including the 40% of humans who died before the age of 5 when there were no vaccinations for childhood illnesses. It must have been really horrible to be a parent knowing that half of your children would die before reaching the official age of adulthood at 21. But when you add in all those childhood and teen deaths in a pre modern society to the statistics it really drops the overall average lifespan, which is very deceptive. If you made it to age 21 you had a good chance of making it to 42 and a fair chance of making it to 63, which is why when Social Security was created in the USA you could get partial benefits at 62 as a way of making your last year or so of life less desperate. The whole system was never intended for people like my parents who lived to be 85 and 89 respectively. My father drew social security for 18 years after retiring at 67 and my mother drew funds 27 years having started at 62 and living months past her 89th birthday.
My great concern as I approach those years is that some time between now and 62 the climate flip will take place and when it does the economy might come all the way unraveled eliminating all my savings and eliminating my meager hopes for drawing SSI. I think humanity is going to do fine in the Miocene Anthropocene climate condition. If all else fails we know from paleoclimate records that the southern hemisphere including Australia, about 80% of South America and about 40% of Africa will have a climate pretty much the same as it is today. Unfortunately all told only about 25% of the land surface of the planet is in the southern hemisphere and a good chunk of that is Antarctica which will still be pretty cold and ice covered for centuries. Europe-Asia-North America is the vast bulk of land on the planet and currently also the vast bulk of the population. If it turns out like the pessimists keep screaming and the lowlands become uninhabitable so you have to live up in the mountains or die of heat stroke then Denver will be fine but everyone in NYC and LA is going to be looking for a new place to live ASAP. That will fill up the mountains from Colorado to California with lots of humans still looking for a place to live which means a scenario where China relocates as many as possible to Australia after doing whatever is necessary and the teeming millions now living in the Nile Valley migrating up stream to Uganda where the Central African Plateau is at high enough elevation to make the lowland climate shift barely noticeable.
I don't believe that will happen but heck I never though I would end up divorced from my spouse deciding that having affairs was better than solving interpersonal problems. Twice. Anyhow, the point remains the same. I think we are dead set on full speed ahead to the climate flip and it could happen any time in the next two decades. The preponderance of scenario predictions that are based on hemispheric instead of global models predict the flip will happen in two phases. First phase will be very mild winters from the arctic circle south and the tropical/sub-tropical zones up to around 30 degrees north of the equator will become even warmer also mostly during the winter months. Then after from 7-14 years the second phase kicks in as the soil south of the Arctic Circle has spent that long absorbing solar energy in summers and the Arctic phase kicks in where Greenland and the Arctic Ocean reset to an ice free condition. Before anyone freaks out that means Greenland in summer has extreme melting but still the ice cap persists for as much as a century because winter temperatures aided by very low solar energy in the months of November through February refreezes the surface and accumulates fresh bright white snow that reflects sunlight until it melts in late spring. Given the freeze thaw cycle and massive volume of ice it could take as long as 300 years or as little as 90 years for the ice cap to completely melt away. A great deal depends on how accurate the sonar maps are that show Greenland being below sea level through the vast center of the island with Fjords that extend all the way to the sea. If those maps are correct then the cap could destabilize of be gone in 90 years. If those maps are correct and nothing is done to combat the situation I should say because in theory humans could place dams across each Fjord as it is exposed and prevent the ocean water from being able to undermine the ice cap. If the maps are wrong or humans effectively intervene then the melt should take around 300 years after the climate flips. No matter how you slice it though with a Northern Hemisphere Greenhouse climate state Greenland will all be ice free sooner or later which will bring up sea levels around 7 meters or 23 feet whichever measure you are more comfortable with. The naughty little secret that isn't talked about much is, once Greenland starts seriously melting and sea levels rise a meter or so that rise is likely to destabilize the West Antarctic Ice Sheet which we are fairly certain does have deep water channels right into its main mass that will cause a rapid collapse on the order of 90 years to drain the West Antarctic Basin.
If you are a climate refugee that might be good news, plant your flag ASAP in the Antarctic Peninsula and as the ice cap collapses you have a toe in the door to claim all those much less ice covered bits that are in the zone currently claimed by Chile and Argentina, the UK and Norway. The Chile/Argentina/UK claims are mostly an overlapping set of zones and it is no longer certain the UK could defeat the other two nations in forcing its claims forward in 2050 when it might actually be important. .
https://discoveringantarctica.org.uk/wp ... laims1.pngNo matter how you slice it though I am not likely to live long enough for Antarctica to be viable living space so it is for me at least purely idle speculation. What concerns me is condition in North America between say 34 and 54 degrees north which is the zone where I have spent my whole life including a summer in New Mexico as a teen. I firmly believe this area will still be quite livable in the post flip climate, if I thought otherwise I would have moved somewhere else. I did not take it on faith either, I poured through every paleoclimate study I could access for information about this stripe of land across North America. The Great Plains are quite possibly destined to become a desert while the shifting wind patterns may turn southern California, Arizona and New Mexico green as rainfall patterns shift from moving most west to east to moving in a north by northwest angled directions which will carry the rain up the long valleys between the mountain ranges and drop that moisture where today we have rain shadow deserts caused by the western mountain ranges. Arizona and New Mexico would actually be substantially cooler than today in summer because there would be heavy cloud cover instead of the endless relentless blue desert sky they experience today. Lake Powell and Lake Meade will be at a constant near full pool condition which will allow a steady flow of electric power generation where today the lack of rainfall causes considerable periods of lower than optimal generation because the lake levels are too low to generate their full potential current.
In the south east Louisiana will be swamped fastest but Florida won't be too far behind. All of the Florida Keyes are former coral reef structures meaning they used to be from one to fifteen meters below sea level and the same is true of communities like Coral Gables and Miami that are actually built on bedrock that was formed as coral reef structures during the Pliocene when world sea levels were substantially higher than today.
If we survive as a technological culture through the climate flip and the bulk of the population survives the changes then I expect those folks and their descendants to decide climate flip was not the death spiral nightmare some people predict. Therefore they will look at the world that resulted and decide life is better with cheap electricity and resume burning coal without CO2 restriction even being contemplated. That would in turn lead to a world that would shoot past the 800 ppmv level where event the deep East Antarctic Ice Sheet will not longer be a feature. What I mean is, the Antarctic only started developing its ice sheet when world CO2 levels fell below 800 ppmv. In a world where no powerful people fear anything about Global Warming because they or their parents survived the climate flip there would be no reason to restrict CO2 generating activities like burning whatever fossil fuels you can access. Given the vast supplies of coal and very heavy oil that could be extracted if we had no hesitation to burn everything flammable our species could easily push CO2 levels up as high as 3,000 ppmv aka 3% of the atmosphere being CO2. We couldn't do this overnight of course, but without the fear of global warming to slow us down even the little bit that it has we will probably see increase rates of 3 ppmv to 5 ppmv by 2050. At those rates the change from 450 and flip north to 800 and flip southern hemisphere as well would take under a century. This means ultimately by 2150 all the damage is done because at that point further CO2 increases have very little impact meaning there is no real incentive to stop until fuel grows short and prices grow extreme.
And as unlikely as I am to see 2050 I am a hundred times less likely to see 2150 so this also is I suppose best called idle speculation. Greer wrote about this world in his Star's Reach novel except his belief is civilization would collapse at the first flip around 2050 into a kind of lawless era of warlords fighting over territory across North America and by the time things start to recover technology wise Antarctica has melted and the GOM extends all the way to Memphis, Tennessee as it did millions of years ago.