Alberta Canada tar sand region before and after mining

This afternoon (Wednesday, January 18th, 2012), the Obama Administration announced that they are denying the permit for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. This news represents a great victory for the environment and our planetary future. In the last Congressional budget action, approval for a two month extension of payroll tax reductions and unemployment insurance was adopted, with a provision tacked onto the bill which forced the President to decide within 60 days whether he would approve the Keystone XL pipeline, presumably feeling confident that putting him in such a box during an election year would increase the likelihood that the project would move forward. The Keystone XL pipeline proposal was designed to carry tar sand oil from Alberta Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, where it was to be refined.  Since big oil supports construction of this pipeline and is used to getting their way through lobbying and campaign donations, it would not have been surprising to anyone if Obama had yielded and approved the 1700 mile pipeline for construction.  But massive demonstrations, largely orchestrated by Bill McKibben’s 350.org, encircling at one point the White House with demonstrators linking arms (attended by arrests),  the environmental opposition beat out the oil lobby and encouraged Obama to deny the permit, an act for which he will face stiff opposition in a re-election year. It is worth noting that our most prominent climate scientist, James Hansen, has termed the Albert Sands project “game over” meaning that with the excessive carbon introduced by burning the dirty tar sands, we will reach a point of no-return on future climate change and very likely see large increases in sea levels as the polar and Greenland ice melts. Although we won the battle, the war isn’t over and it won’t be over until the environment and greenhouse gas emissions are finally recognized as the serious threat they pose to our future climate safety. You can bet that by tomorrow if not sooner, Mitt Romney will jump on this as a major job killer and announce he will reverse the decision once he’s elected to the Presidency. But let’s pause for a few minutes to express our gratitude to Obama for showing the courage necessary to reject the pipeline. It’s a major victory for environmentalists who worked hard to prevent the pipeline from becoming a reality. You can thank him by signing a petition at the NRDC site.

RFM

Carbon Sequestration in Permafrost (right) by "Cryoturbination" from Charles Tarnocai

Permafrost (permanently frozen ground) has not been on the radar screen very often in the national conversation about global climate change (GCC). When I started reading about the science underlying GCC a few years ago, I came across brief, scattered descriptions about permafrost; my tendency then was to skip over the pages describing the problem, which wasn’t difficult, as there were few in number and fewer still were the number of scientists who considered the issue to be an emergency situation or a major component of GCC. Indeed, until recently, it was widely assumed that the warming of the permafrost would stimulate new plant growth, such that the net impact would be a sink for carbon, not a source and hence, a protective mechanism for absorbing the carbon hiccups of GCC.  The 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; Fourth Report: working group I: The Physical Science Basis, p 340) stated “The maximum extent of seasonally frozen ground has decreased by about 7% in the NH from 1901 to 2002, with a decrease in spring of up to 15%. Its maximum depth has decreased about 0.3 m in Eurasia since the mid-20th century. In addition, maximum seasonal thaw depth over permafrost has increased about 0.2 m in the Russian Arctic from 1956 to 1990. Onset dates of thaw in spring and freeze in autumn advanced five to seven days in Eurasia from 1988 to 2002, leading to an earlier growing season but no change in duration:” there was little hint from the report that permafrost was a serious, hidden threat anymore than that attributed to greenhouse gas emissions in general. Thus, until very recently, any special reference to permafrost as a problem seemed to be traveling under the radar screen.  Observers and scientists alike have all been rightly focused on the more significant issue of coal-burning power plants, the number one polluter and green house gas emitter and the single biggest danger to our planetary future.  But in the last few years, reports started to appear which suggested that permafrost could no longer be ignored in calculations and models about climate change, because more extensive measurements suggested that it is potentially a major source of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane and that permafrost may be a storage source for huge quantities of carbon, in the form of plant material that got buried long ago in the layers of permafrost–a source that is now in the process of being “liberated” through exposure to planetary warming. One of the revelations that changed our views on this topic came from recent studies that measured permafrost carbon content at soil depths deeper than 100 cm, revealing that for some permafrost regions, up to 2/3 of the carbon deposits in the soil were deeper than the 100 cm limit used in many previous studies. More measurements and additional studies of this problem are acutely needed to evaluate the significance of this newly revealed, potentially dangerous source of carbon. It could form another positive feedback mechanism for GCC, at a time when we have a hard time dealing with coal-burning power plants.

Recently, Justin Gillis wrote an article in the New York timeswhich provided  an excellent, fairly detailed front page story on permafrost, together with information about ongoing studies in Alaska, Canada and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. These studies are alarming because they indicate that the Northern Hemisphere could become a source of carbon rather than a sink (indeed, it may be there already, though we don’t know this with certainty), created by warming conditions which stimulate bacterial breakdown of dormant sources of carbon.

Permafrost of Circumpolar Region (from Charles Tarnocai)

When oxygen is plentiful, as in the bacterial breakdown of plant material in air,  the stored permafrost vegetation is generally broken down into carbon dioxide, but when the region is oxygen-poor, usually when it is submerged in water, bacteria can generate methane gas from this carbon source, which forms bubbles in lakes and ponds as it rises to the surface and ultimately into the atmosphere. Methane gas has been reported in locations in Alaska: once in the atmosphere, it is 33 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas when measured over a 100 year period. It is far better to burn it off into carbon dioxide than let it reach the atmosphere as methane, even though its half life in the atmosphere is less than that of carbon dioxide.  Recent estimates of the amount of carbon that currently exists in the permafrost is about twice the amount that’s in the atmosphere already and could eventually constitute up to 35 percent of today’s annual human emissions. The danger of this source, is that once the process of degradation begins, though it may take 100 years or more to biodegrade its way through the available sources of carbon, it will be impossible to stop. Now is the time to alertly invest in research to evaluate with more certainty the true impact of this new addition to the GCC orchestra. Is it a single instrument or a new section of the band!

The first question of interest of course is what is permafrost? A dictionary definition is that of a subsurface material that remains below zero degrees Centigrade (32 degrees Fahrenheit) for a least two consecutive years. More practically, it’s the area in the Northern Hemisphere that is largely frozen, but some regions of the permafrost have a surface layer which has seasonal plant growth. The permafrost areas, like the rest of the planet, are beginning to warm and there is new cause for concern about the consequences. The earth is heating up more rapidly in the Northern Hemisphere than any other region of the planet. As the reflective glaciers (albedo effect) retreat, the area exposes itself as a less reflective environment, in the form of water and land, and more of the sun ‘s energy is absorbed and accelerates the warming trend; this constitutes a positive feedback system which further accelerates the loss of snow and ice in the region–>more heat–>less ice–>more heat absorbed–>more melting of ice–>where will it all end?  Thus, GCC is already generating one positive feedback system in the form of the albedo effect, especially evident in the Northern Hemisphere. Though permafrost also exists within the Antarctic region, it has been less well studied. As glaciers and ice pack formation retreat, more  permafrost gets exposed, but the warming of the exposed permafrost appears to be adding another source of carbon that we should seriously worry about. This issue has become of interest lately because studies have shown that permafrost is a rich source of sequestered carbon that has been trapped in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years.

It is counter-intuitive to imagine that permafrost might be a type of soil that holds rich deposits of carbon. One’s first impression is that soils exposed to frozen conditions will  be poor in nutritional value and contain less vegetation than that of more temperate soils. But extensive measurements from many different regions of the permafrost indicate that overall, the permafrost can contain higher levels of carbon than more temperate soils and that deep down in the soil, rich carbon deposits can exist.  The first figure illustrates how the permafrost becomes increasingly carbonized by a process referred to as  “crytoturbination,” (right figure) as if a giant Hobart machine circulated plant deposits  (and a few dead animals) from near the surface deeper into the soil, such that very deep layers contain high levels of carbon when compared to soils from more temperate regions (left figure). This process of permafrost carbonation has been going on for thousands of years but it is still surprising that they contain such high levels and deep layers of carbon deposits.  The second figure shows, in a color-coded map, the areas of permafrost that presently exist in the Northern Circumpolar regions, based on carbon soil content derived from borehole analysis.  If the permafrost source of carbon dioxide/methane gains momentum, it will become another positive feedback mechanism with sufficient potential power to make a big contribution to global warming. Whereas climatologists and plant biologists once considered the exposure of the permafrost to have a positive influence through carbon sequestration, with the new higher estimates of the permafrost carbon content, the process may well have started and whatever benefit we might have derived may be turning into an additional problem for the future of the planet. When you look at it in the following way, you can appreciate the problem: for hundreds of millions of years, the earth accumulated carbon in the form of coal, oil and natural gas. Through man’s ingenious nature, a portion of this carbon  has been put into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but on a time scale of a few centuries. Since we now understand that the planet is in a delicate balance of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, with the Earth’s ice and snow content, shouldn’t it alarm all of us when we imagine that our actions cannot do anything other than change our planetary weather? What new philosophical form of inquiry is required for man to properly gaze into the future that he has created for himself? Scientific inquiry so far doesn’t seem to work.

RFM

UC Berkeley Earth Temperature Website

As reported in a NYT editorial this past week, University of California at Berkeley physicist Richard Muller accepted money from the Koch Foundation (funded by Charles and David Koch) to carry out research designed to challenge the issue about whether the Earth was really warming or not. Apparently Muller thought that those reading the huge array of temperature gauges around the world didn’t know how to read them, so he wanted to make sure that the numbers were right. To make a long story short, extensive measurements (1.6 billion readings from 39,000 instruments) resulted in confirmation of the idea that the Earth is heating up: since 1950, land temperatures have increased by about 1 degree Celsius or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, matching previous findings by the National Academy of Sciences, and numerous other federal agencies and independent American and British researchers.

The Berkeley group has a website that explains these data, how they were obtained, but not so much on what they mean. At this moment, the group has submitted four papers describing their results to peer-reviewed journals. The budget for this research project was $600,000 of which the Koch Foundation provided about 1/4 of the funding. Scientists are always deeply suspicious when resources from the oil and gas industry fund research related to global warming. Do the papers being submitted have to be reviewed by the Koch Foundation before they are submitted? The results of this investigation confirm measurements that we have been familiar with for a very long time–the planet is getting warmer.

I seriously doubt that this new information, precisely confirming what we have known for years, will influence the Koch Brothers, whose wealth comes from the oil and gas industry. This is not an issue about science–that issue has been resolved to the satisfaction of the best scientists on our planet. But, it is an issue of influence through train-wreck capitalism and whether the form of neoliberalism practiced by the Koch Brothers and the oil and gas industry, is willing to send the planet over a cliff, because, as capitalists, they need 3 percent profit each year to be comfortable. The Koch Brothers spent heavily to roll back California’s new environmental regulations through proposition 23,  voted on in the election of 2010. In that election, 61% of Californians voted against proposition 23 and thus in favor of a much tougher environmental regulatory reform. You can learn more about this victory for the environment here.

Although the leading author of this work, Richard Muller, a physicist from UC Berkeley has has credentials in astrophysics and nuclear physics, he is not a climatologist and an article in the Huffington Post seems to portray him as jumping on and off the band wagon of contrarianism. I was unable to find either his name or reference to his  papers in James Hansen’s book  “Storms of My Granchildren: the Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Change to Save Humanity,” about which I have written previously.  Hansen is the leading scientist in the world on global climate change and if he sometimes sounds as an alarmist, it’s because we should all be alarmed. The planet will be changed for what we have added to the atmosphere and the question we will have to address is whether we are going to leave for our children and grandchildren a planet that will be harder to live on or whether we can rationally address this issue and begin to do something about it. Right now the future looks bleak about our ability to respond. But, the issue is not about the science, it is about the vicious form of capitalism we have and whether we will allow this system to destroy our future. The longer this goes on the harder it will be to fix it.
RFM

Hydraulic Fracking Model

Many small communities in America are faced with decisions about whether to allow hydraulic fracking, the process of injecting, under high pressure, water sand and organic solvents into wells to free and collect natural gas for energy use. Thanks to GW Bush, this process has been removed from oversight function by the EPA, so there is virtually no regulatory control on this process and quite often we don’t even know the chemical composition of the slurry pressure ejected into the wells. We do know however, that much of it stays in the ground and carries with it a potential for a disastrous outcome, particularly to water supplies that are housed in adjacent aquafers. One report I read some time ago claimed that benzene derivatives, known carcinogens, were actually part of one analyzed injection cocktail. Interestingly, Governor Rick Perry of Texas just signed a bill (June 2011) that will force fracking companies operating in Texas to post the chemical composition of their fracking fluid beginning in 2012. No other state has passed a similar law. Neighborhood commitments to fracking often start when one member of a community leases drilling rights to one of the gas companies. An action by one person in a town can lead to an avalanche of others signing up to get the financial benefits, but often without understanding the risks or the threat imposed to the public water supply and the value of homes and neighborhoods that typically depreciate. I found it very enlightening to read Stanley Fish’s article in the NYT today, describing a town meeting on the subject of fracking that he attended in Andes, New York. A bunch of sensible people got together and decided their community and small town would be ruined by such drilling practices and resolved to ban the practice of allowing fracking leases in the town. Whether they can make this ban work or not remains to be seen, but the spirit is  willing. For more information on fracking you can visit here.   

RFM

Alberta Tar Sand Field

Last Saturday, a group of demonstrators in Washington DC began what may be the largest protest in decades for what is a combined  environmental and greenhouse gas emission issue. This protest is an effort to stop the transport of Alberta tar sands oil in the planned 1600 mile pipeline that will run all the way from Northern Alberta, Canada, across stretches of American farmland, to reach the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline will transport some 830,000 barrels of oil per day. This is not a traditional source of oil. The tar sands must be heated and then diluted with water to be suitable for pipeline transportation. It is an expensive process that adds to the carbon footprint of the project. The protest comes at a time when the State Department is assembling its final recommendation and report to President Obama, which will be completed by the end of this month. After that the Obama administration will have 90 days to decide whether it’s in the national interest to proceed with construction of the pipeline. This Keystone XL project has been the focus of concern for environmentalists and climatologists because, the burning of tar sand oil increases carbon emissions by 40 percent over that from more conventional petroleum sources. In addition, the mining of tar sands is destructive to the boreal forests  or Taiga of Northern Alberta (740,000 acres of forest land will be destroyed). The oil and gas industry is claiming that 20,000 jobs will be created, so Obama’s decision looks more difficult than it would have been if the economy had now been producing large numbers of jobs, something that will not happen anytime soon.

As of yesterday sixty five protestors have been arrested, including Bill McKibben, head of 350.org.  Although Congress has weakened the ability of the EPA to control greenhouse gas emissions, the pipeline call is exclusively Obama’s. It doesn’t go through Congress, so Obama’s promise in the campaign of 2008, to champion the reduction of greenhouse gases will be on the line with his decision. A few days ago, Bill Mckibben wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post summarizing the situation and reminded us about Obama’s words during the Presidential nomination process: this is “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Three years later this sounds a little hollow.

James Hansen, perhaps the best known climate scientist in the world, has warned us about the threat of greenhouse gases, and sent out a note on June 11, 2011 warning about the dangers of using the Alberta tar sands as a source of fuel. According to his analysis, the Alberta tar sands contain about 400 gigatons of carbon dioxide (once burned as fossil fuels), enough to raise the carbon dioxide level in

Before and After Alberta Tar Sand Mining

the atmosphere by 200 ppm. His projection is dire: if we allow the Alberta tar sand oil to be implemented as a fuel source, we run the danger of forcing the environment into a tipping point in which it won’t matter what we do in controlling greenhouse gas emissions in the future. As he says “game over.” In time, the polar ice caps and Greenland ice will melt, the sea levels will rise by 270 feet and the planet will become far more inhospitable to humans and most of the animals around us. So, does Obama hold the future of humanity in his hands with this decision? This issue is not structured like one in which a compromise can be reached–you either use the tar sands or you don’t and you either expose the planet to a riskier long-term carbon problem or you don’t. Quite understandably, these are not the kinds of decisions that any President would like to make, but Obama has shown a complete lack of zeal for stamping his Presidency with  an environmental component. We know exactly what Obama’s predecessor GW Bush would have done–he was in the “drill baby drill” corner. Obama is not the same kind of leader we had in Bush, so there is still some hope that this source of oil will not be tapped–that it will be left in the ground and instead use this moment to begin the process of developing alternative sources of energy as part of a new jobs program. What I find interesting about this event in Washington, is that I first saw news coverage of the protest through The Guardian, a British newspaper (they are often way ahead of the NYT in developing leading stories) followed by Common Dreams, who linked to that article and I have yet to see any television news coverage of the event. In today’s NYT an editorial appears that describes how the State Department has already delivered two flawed reports on the environmental impact of the pipeline plan. It seems the news media wants to regard this as a non-event and if so, that will make Obama’s decision that much easier. We are at a moment in history when environmentalism has virtually no political clout and it seems a serious attempt at job creation is without political momentum as well.

RFM

Fig. 1 Planet Earth (NASA)

Every educated person on the planet has heard about the threats to human existence imposed by Global Warming. Yet, few of us are knowledgeable enough to explain the basic mechanisms that determine our climate, especially when talking to those among whom are doubting members of the choir. Understanding the essential elements of Global Warming requires effort and an intellectual expenditure, but you can converse intelligently on the subject, while stopping short of explaining the situation on the basis of a thermodynamic theory of equilibrium. Besides, the earth’s climate has never truly been in any form of equilibrium–some positive or negative driving force or energy imbalance has always been trying to change our climate, though, until now, such changes have taken place over millenia, not over the two hundred plus years of the industrial revolution.  Our climate has always been changing, even though the time constants for change are way beyond a human lifetime, and lie properly scaled and recorded within the geological and paleoclimatological record, which gives up its secrets slowly. But once properly deciphered that record reveals a surprisingly coherent history for those willing to put the effort into interpreting the scrolls, or to be more accurate, deciphering the core drillings of oceans and glaciers. Of course, we don’t yet have a complete story. There are large gaps in our knowledge, but we know enough already to be mesmerized by our planetary history and the forces that have shaped our climate. And we should know enough to be alarmed and very wary about our future.

It is now clear that never before in our climate history have we witnessed the kind of experiment now underway–the forcing of our planet to go through something it has never experienced before–a sharp, man-made increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that is now taking place and pushing us towards a climatological precipice that we might not be able to escape. But if we act quickly, this experiment is still under our control, depending on whether we can muster the political will to curb our use of fossil fuels and restore energy balance to keep the planet as it was, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (ppm) or less ; it is now at 387 ppm and rising at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. The alternative is that we run the risk of higher levels of carbon dioxide that will trigger the melting of Greenland and the polar ice caps and eventually raise our sea level by 270 feet! We are probably not at risk for a sea level increase of that magnitude during this century, but we do run the risk of having this kind of sea level rise take place, and once it starts, there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Not only will this massive ice melting proceed out of our control, it will cool the local regions where the melting takes place, impact our weather systems and change the driving forces for oceanic currents. The emergency we must address now has been created by the fact that the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere has a very long half-life and its actions on our planet will be with us for a  very long time. Couple this reality to the fact that we are already seeing weather patterns that reflect Global Warming and you inescapably conclude that our short-term climate does not look good–it will inescapably be more violent. But, we can still do something for the long-term, by acting soon and now is not too early. There is little doubt that if we continue to burn fossil fuels through a business-as-usual mode, our planet will be markedly different and our planetary future will be seriously in doubt. In many ways, that’s the shock–not only that the climate is never in equilibrium, but that it is also super-sensitive to the very fuels we have chosen as our cheapest form of energy. For too long we have assumed constancy in our climate lives: that luxury has now gone, at least the assumption part of it.

Until Homo sapiens came along and started adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, climate change took place over thousands or millions of years and every hundred thousand years or so, we would go through another ice age, created by changes in the tilting of the planet on its axis and slight changes in the elliptical pattern of our annual trek around the sun. These two precession parameters change the amount of sun that radiates to earth (insolation), increasing with greater axis tilt and decreasing with less. Planetary alignments within our solar system create these different elliptical shapes and the axial rotational wobbling–the earth spins like a wobbly top–but wobbles on a very long time scale. The axis of the Earth’s rotation is actually becoming more vertical now, so we would normally expect to see another ice age, perhaps in 7,000 years or so. However, our carbon loading of the atmosphere precludes that possibility. Until humans brought the industrial revolution, the planetary environment changed on a very different time scale, usually thousands of years, even though cataclysmic events in our climate history have been known to happen. The question for our generation is whether we have put in motion a new and ultra-rapid set of events that we will not be able to control. Most climatologists say at best, it will be a close call if we are going to avoid a tipping point, after which it won’t matter what we do. But saving the planet as we have known it is still possible and the science is at a point where only non-scientists or discredited ones believe otherwise.

The value of knowing more about climate change is not to convince those like the Tea Party members, because they are beyond hope. The real function of becoming more knowledgeable about this issue is to convince ourselves and other like-minded colleagues that we are facing an imminent global catastrophe if we don’t act quickly. This is one branch of science we can’t afford to be cautious about. We have enough knowledge about our climate future that we should be ready to support a WW II-like mobilization strategy to begin shaping the new economy that will be required if we are going to ride this thing out and eventually reverse the 250 year trend of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  This dire need for a cooperative spirit to save the planet should greatly reduce the international barriers for interactive productivity towards this end.  And we need to get beyond simplicity. You can’t summarize the anticipated changes with simple phrases. Phraseology for climate change is dead–it’s silly to think in those terms. A warmer earth means a drier earth in some places and at some times, but also a wetter earth in some places at some times. And it means rising sea levels because the polar and Greenland ice pacts are melting, even though we don’t understand at what rate that will be happening and over what time–that’s the new threat! Almost none of the projections in our future are what we have been used to in the past and the threats that confront us all point to a fragility of our climate that, until now, completely escaped our attention. Fortunately, the science underlying our climate change has been advancing with new insights and theories appearing on a regular basis. This is still an intense on-going topic of investigation and insight. But, the science has passed judgment on our basic future and now it’s up to the public to catch up with their vision. Although it is already late, it is not too late to save the planet and preserve decent lives for our children and grandchildren. But it is in their future interests and well being that we must act now. So, an essential grasp of these concepts is increasingly important if we, as humans, are going to avoid falling off a cultural survival cliff that lies in our future if we don’t think and act more decisively to curb the new summers of our discontent.  The first person we have to mobilize is ourselves and after that, we can worry about our neighbors and friends. There are plenty of reasonable people out there that need to be convinced about the alarming situation that confronts us and the best way to do that is begin by developing our own educational skills about climate change and the emergency we face. We must quickly rid ourselves of coal-burning sources of electricity and put the kibosh on the use of Canadian tar sand sources. We need to reach a point where we leave the remaining energy in the ground and stop destroying mountain tops for coal.

Although it’s a common default cause for the media, we can no longer blame our current and future weather on El Nino/ La Nino or even a Super El Nino that climatologists talk about. There is some speculation that El Nino could become a permanent fixture to the environmental makeup. It used to be that these special events, which can bring about disastrous drought and flood conditions (depending on where you are), happened every ten years or so, but now they are more frequent, occurring about every four years. We have skewed the climate curve and most of us don’t know how or why, but increasingly we think it’s serious and we have to engage the rest of the world on a rational basis for believing that action needs to begin now and inaction will be a crime against humanity’s future.  Actually, we don’t have to convince the rest of the world–they already get it. We have to convince the rest of America and we have to begin to assume a leadership role in planetary revivalism. The new more violent weather patterns we have been seeing throughout the planet point an uncomfortable finger towards the unavoidable: there is more energy in the atmosphere and that excess energy needs to dissipate itself in some new, often more violent way. A small part of that expression will be in the form of dust storms that we have seen recently in the Phoenix Haboob and before that in the monstrous dust storm that moved across Australia (A NASA image of the Australian dust storm of 2009 is in the second figure). These dust storms are not unlike the dust bowl storms of the 1930s in the American and Canadian prairie lands, though they have a different origin this time around (dust storms of the 1930s have been attributed to soil erosion whereas global warming storms express increased energy in the atmosphere unleashed by condensation). Concurrent collisions between two storm centers can generate massive, uplifting air currents, scooping up dust and throwing it high enough into the atmosphere to be easily seen from satellites. More moisture in the air creates more storms and they will get more violent  In many ways, Australia and New Zealand are like Global Warming laboratories which illustrate both extremes of climate-warming weather gyrations, including severe droughts and record-breaking floods in 2010, in which a region the size of Germany and France combined, was under water, with the storm actions centered in Queensland. Global Warming weather is here and it will not go away.

The concepts that underlie Global Warming need to be learned and instilled among students in all of our public schools at all ages and we need to enlist the young  in experiments that can teach them about climate science and the emergency we find ourselves in. The students then need to bring this scientific knowledge into their homes and educate and invigorate their parents. The new generation needs to face the threats of climate change like no other generation before it. Until now we have assumed planetary constancy but the luxury of that assumption is gone. We need to have this topic constantly on the airways–it’s that serious. On the one hand, it’s like a modern iteration of Galileo telling us that the earth is not the center of the universe (as first suggested by Copernicus), but with one big difference–nothing changed when we learned the new rules of planetary rotations, although Galileo went into house arrest for blasphemy against the church and stayed there until his death.  But except for him and the impact his house arrest had on his young colleagues, the rest of contemporary society could just sit back and claim indifference or belief, without any action required.  The threat of Global Warming is at the opposite end of this analogy spectrum because if we don’t convert this new knowledge of climate change into action, to reduce our carbon emissions, we may be putting all species on the planet at increased risk for survival, including the one we have named  Homo sapiens. Indeed, for some species, such as the polar bear, the possibility of extinction through our greenhouse gas emissions has already been foretold and could be unavoidable; then too, coral reefs  are disappearing as the oceans become more acidic by absorbing more carbon dioxide. We can’t be neutral because the oceans no longer are and they are already talking back to us about we have done to them. Imagine the oceans without any coral reefs: where will all the fish go? We can’t wait to see if the science is wrong or whether some unknown force will emerge to wipe our carbon mess away.  Faux News will have to go–we need nothing but objectivity and action with an arrow pointing in the right direction. Those oars that are not pulling us all in the same direction need to be silenced or nullified. The world cries out for the return simple things like verifiable truth, not the muted information we get from our corporate news media. I agree with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now when she says that “mainstream media” is a misnomer, because they don’t really reflect the views of mainstream America at all. But that’s another story.

While I am a scientist (neuroscientist), I do not feel any special advantage over non-scientists when it comes to learning something about our climate and its history. The topic covers virtually all aspects of our scientific knowledge base, from physics to biology through paleontology,  evolution, geology, chemistry and astrophysics, while at least touching on everything in between. Hanging on the forces that created our climate is the tree of life itself. And increasingly there is the question of human ethics if we don’t act soon in the interest of protecting those that follow. I began reading and writing on this topic as I went along, expressing myself periodically in this forum, at the same time that I was assimilating some of the basics of our climate history and the essential mechanisms of climate change.  At one level, it’s all too simple: the carbon dioxide we have been dumping into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels from the beginning of the industrial revolution reflects heat energy from the earth that would normally go out into space (the shorter wavelengths of light coming from the sun do not interact with carbon dioxide–it’s the longer wavelengths that represent reflected heat (infrared) emission coming from the Earth that interacts with carbon dioxide molecules); part of the energy reflected by carbon dioxide heads back towards the earth and makes our planet warmer, just like what happens in a greenhouse and that’s why they call carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas. However, that’s the easy part–the hard part is understanding how the planet will react to this increased global warmth and those studies are still evolving and being refreshed and updated. But the basics are known–the planet is out of energy balance and it is beginning to speak back to us in predictable ways, few of which are desirable.

As I attempted to learn more about our climate, I took many diversions along the way, reading for example about foraminifera (forams) protists and their role in giving us information about our climate history and the importance of knowing the ratio of oxygen isotopes (O18 and O16) to measure ice and sea levels and ocean temperatures in the past. There is a giant literature on these topics and they all coalesce to give increasing confidence in the reliability of our knowledge about paleoclimatology–the science of knowing our past climate history. One thing seems clear to me: insights from paleoclimatology are essential for understanding our future, even though we have embarked on a climate experiment that is unlike anything that ever took place in the history of our planet. Two divergent methods give us information about the future of our climate. One is through modeling, using large-scale models to predict our climate future. These models are getting better, but they are still deficient in several important respects. The other method is through paleoclimatology, the idea that our climate has gone through many different changes in the past and the analytical techniques, largely applied to core drillings of ice sheets and the ocean floor, have provided us with an increasingly confident if incomplete understanding of our past environment and the factors that influenced our transitions through large climate excursions. It’s very fascinating stuff!

Fig. 2 Dust Storm Over Australia (September 2009)

What Are the Essential Questions? Early on, there was one over-riding question that I felt was an essential element to the core issues of global climate change and how I was going to address it. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate has seen fairly dramatic excursions of global temperatures over the documented history in which humans have provided some record of their presence and the question is what forces were responsible for those temperature excursions? How big were they and how did they happen? Are the same forces at work today?  Modern humans appeared about 200,00 years ago and human activity was observed about 130,000 years ago in Africa, where human evolution began. This time line of the fossil record took place during an interglacial period known as the Eemian, in which the average global temperature was only 1 degree Celsius warmer than what we have today. The warm Eemian period gave way to the last ice age, which developed over a period of thousands of years. However, the final descent into the last ice age happened about 70,000 years ago, was very rapid and coincided with the near extinction of humans. Genetic variance studies suggest that that as few as 1000 breeding pairs of humans survived the precipitous onset of the ice age and went on to procreate our contemporary human population. One theory for this rapid excursion into the ice age was the explosion of the Toba supervolcano which blocked the sun, significantly cooled the earth and challenged human survival by creating a long “nuclear winter.” So we know that our climate has changed quite dramatically, such that at one time it challenged the future of human existence, and perhaps it can change more dramatically than we think. But how do we know that the forces responsible for the last ice age won’t come along and create another one, rendering the issue of Global Warming as an irrelevant topic best left to climatologists and paleoclimatologists? One could ask is there really a need to learn something about climate change? Won’t the earth fix itself as some early climate doubters claimed?

The climate experiment we have embarked on has never been executed before. This is a new experiment. Whereas the Earth’s climate has typically evolved over millennia, we have, during the last two centuries, taken a giant syringe and injected our atmosphere with 130 ppm of additional carbon dioxide (along with some serious levels of methane and other atmospheric contaminants) and now we are waiting for the rest of the experiment to unfold. We finally recognize from early reports about this experiment, that we would like to stop it, remove the carbon dioxide we added and get back to the business of being humans again, but this time without the recent weather patterns that include giant floods, excessive droughts and global threats to our water supply. So that’s the message: how do we stop the experiment we started now that it’s going so badly? Stop the experiment–I want to get off. According to scientist James Hansen, if we eliminated all coal-burning sources of energy, and did so within decades, we would come very close to ending our carbon nightmare. But, right now, the world is building more coal-burning energy sources, so we are still moving in the wrong direction.Then too there is the problem of what we would use to replace this source of energy. Renewable energy sources? Unfortunately, we are a long way from having that as a reliable energy source, so we are left with a miracle biofuel or perhaps nuclear energy. Nuclear energy as we have known it is out of the question, because of our inability to handle the nuclear waste and the accident that took place earlier this year in Fukushima Japan. But fast breeder reactors, that have very little nuclear waste and can use up the nuclear waste we have stock piled, could emerge as an alternative. The plan to build one of those reactors was started under the Nixon administration, but killed under Clinton.

The Human Drive for Knowledge and the Best Way to Get it: The great beauty of the university classroom is that professors stand in front of you and condense vast knowledge into a small crystal that dissolves in your brain and creates an image of clarity, where before there was only confusion and uncertainty. Of course, as we all know, you can’t absorb all this by sitting  passively even if you are on the front row. Everyone who gains through this process has to study, read and ponder things, and all of us know that learning requires dedication to the task. Repetition breeds familiarity with the subject and stimulates the need to know more. We learn far more effectively from a knowledgeable person standing in front of us, engaging our brains on the topic of our mutual interest, when compared to any other forum of learning. Now that this form of learning is under threat, we realize that it has been both under appreciated and not well understood, though it requires human dialogue and interaction to work effectively. After forty years of being a university professor, I profess that this mechanism we have established to transmit knowledge by learned scholars standing in front of us, tickling our brains with integrated facts and a lifetime of research experience, is the highest standard of educational sophistication that we have attained in human history and any efforts to destroy this high form of learning will in turn destroy our culture. We should be expanding that experience not contracting it, as we are doing by such things as “distance learning” and “for profit” educational institutions. It is such a profound mode of learning that every human should have the opportunity to experience it and the intellectual stimulation it evokes; otherwise they are robbed of insight from the best form of education humans have ever developed. If expanding this form of didactic/Socratic learning became a more universal form of education, we might have hope of accommodating the 9 billion people on this planet, the expected population by the middle of this century. But even by then, there will still be more cells in a single human brain than humans on the planet and the lust for knowledge will pulsate within each of them.  It is up to us in the new culture to make sure that the innate thirst humans have for knowledge is met by teachers with expertise and enthusiasm for the work. As parents, all of us had to be teachers to our children and now the demand placed on us is to be a parent to the planet: it has been abused.

A First Among Us–the Tea Party Brain: Tea Party climate denial is hard to understand, for it is in this sector of humanity that the thirst for knowledge has died out, extinguished beyond any hope of repair. We might wonder whether this is a new stage in the human evolutionary experience. Someone must do an fMRI study on these Tea Party members to learn how it is possible for a member of our species to suppress frontal lobe function, when in fact that is what the human brain was designed to engage in–the need to figure things out. Normally, it carries out this function unavoidably–it’s human nature.  Until confronted by this group, I did not know that we as humans came with an off switch for this form of brain activity–I thought the use of frontal lobes for longitudinal thinking was obligatory, unavoidable and indigenous to our species. What surprises me even more, but seems consistent with the facts, is that once you turn that switch off and leave it in the off position for a while, it can’t be turned back to on–there’s no more light in that particular brain cavity. Apparently, for the Tea Party Republicans, energy for frontal lobe brain activity was permanently diverted to other centers that remain active, including brainstem functions. It follows that Tea Party members probably have excellent respiration. If so, they should be our first canary in the coal mine. Perhaps that will be their major contribution in the future. Climate denialists working to promote climate disaster, while steadfastly acquiring emphysema.

Creative Confusion: In the early phase of what I call “creative confusion” over my ignorance about climate mechanisms, I sat in on a class,  Mathematical Modeling of Climate Change directed by Professor Richard McGehee of the Mathematics Department at the University of Minnesota. A linked site provides references to some of the important publications in the field of climate science. If you go there you can get a copy of Jim Hansen’s 2008 paper  Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim. It will be a useful reference for his book which I describe below. The modeling course by McGehee was an excellent learning experience, aided by PowerPoint slides from major scientific studies, it was pivotal in getting me to realize how little I knew about Global Climate Change, even though it was not my first introduction to climatology, as I had read a number of scientific papers as well as some of the published reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is of course a massive literature on the topic of climate change and crystallizing it into a more manageable form is not really possible, so we have to settle for some of the major principles and focus at first on books that have tried to summarize and coalesce the science; then there is the question about how far you want to go, particularly if you still have a day job. I am still on that journey, but I write here to recommend a few books that I have read along the way that others might find useful.

Fig. 3 Mount Rongbuk glaciers in the Himalayas; top is 1968, botton is 2007 (from James Hansen)

Book One: Five different books have given me new insights on global climate change that you might find useful in understanding the problem, its origins, what we can do about it and what is being done today.  I have already reported on one, “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart, Harvard University Press, 2008. This is a short, highly readable book on the history of Global Warming and the mechanisms of climate change. Weart has a website where you can essentially download most of the book and other features, such as a timeline of Global Warming history. If you want to assist the cause, allowing your idle computer to work solving global climate models, you can do that as well by going here. Weart also offers advice on how to talk to a climate skeptic which I am not following in this posting.  His site is worth more than one visit. I always get something new each time I tune-in.

More work is being carried out on adaptation than you might realize and future possibilities might work out, but only if we soon begin to mitigate the carbon dioxide levels that we have been adding to our atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. One should no longer be thought of as an alarmist to suggest that the fate of civilization as we know it is at stake, with the serious possibility that our inaction could dramatically truncate the human population to a point where survival can occur but only under very primitive living conditions if at all. Perhaps the most important point that one can make, is that all those who have studied climate change for any significant period in their lives come away from that experience, believing as I do, that our planetary future is in peril and emergency, knowledgeable action is required.  “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet“ by Mark Lynas was published in 2008 by The National Geographic Society in collaboration with HarperCollins. I don’t see this book available on Kindle. To research this book,  Lynas went the to the Oxford library for months and took notes on tens of thousands of articles, reading original, peer-reviewed publications on global climate studies as he classified each paper, based on the degrees with which the study projected the global temperature increase during this century. He also relied on the IPCC report, which in 2007, based its predictions on probabilistic outcomes, and the use of phrases like “Virtually certain = greater than 99% probability” all the way to “Exceptionally unlikely as less 1% probability” and of course, many levels in between. The book is organized by chapters based on projections of the average global temperature increase during the 21st century. It is thus more futuristic and predictive than teasing apart the mechanisms of climate change, though some of that is touched upon. Separate chapters are devoted to (1) One Degree, (2) Two Degrees, (3) Three Degrees…all the way up to (6) Six Degrees. Each chapter describes the kind of climate changes expected if the mean global temperature should reach the degree predictions specified by the chapter title. Every chapter has references in the back “note” section to validate the author’s projections. Keep in mind that these are degrees Centigrade, so remember that 1 degree centigrade=1.8 degrees Fahrenheit; thus the outside projection of six degrees, where all hell breaks loose, would be 10.8 degrees F, a whopping change and one that is hard to imagine, but definitely achievable if we don’t act quickly. At those temperatures, human adjustment is not just a matter of turning up the air conditioner, its a matter that food won’t grow, deserts will get larger, sea levels will rise by more than 270 feet and the polar ice caps and Greenland ice will all be gone. We can’t let that happen, but we have to act now to make sure such a dire projection is avoided.

The One Degree Picture: The minimal One Degree picture for the Southwest United States is not pretty, as drought conditions are projected to increase. Humans have already experienced severe drought conditions in that region, both in the pre-industral era, as well as those taking place today. Lynas describes the Pueblo Indian society that lived in Chaco Canyon, located in New Mexico, where the inhabitants erected the largest stone building on the North American Continent before the European invasion–four stories high with 600 rooms. When a significant drought came to the region in AD 1130 the culture collapsed; many died, while  survivors  eked out a living within the steep cliffs nearby. There is evidence for a violent ending for many in Chaco canyon, attended by cannibalism. In the One Degree future for the Southwest, projections include 40% less rainfall, sustained over decades. The primary reason for drought conditions in these areas is that warmer air can hold more moisture, so that it can further dry the earth surface and make the region more vulnerable to fires and failed crop production. Other problems include water shortages interspersed with flooding and enhanced and more dangerous hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with more widespread, powerful storms that will make many regions of the country far less habitable and living conditions more uncertain. The places on the planet where humans can live comfortably will shrink.

Mount Kilimanjaro: Scientists are now rushing to Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, to obtain ice core samples that provide information about Africa’s geologic past, obtained by dissecting through the ice cores for layers of dust, oxygen isotopes and gas bubbles frozen in isolation within discrete layers. Studies estimate that 80% of the glacier on the top of Kilimanjaro melted during the 20th century and by roughly 2015, four years from now, it will all be gone. The only ice from the mountain that will still be in existence will be in the form of ice cores in the freezers of scientists’ laboratories. Glaciers are melting throughout the globe and cultures that depend on glacier melting for their water supply will face an increasing challenge for water as the glacier runoffs are reduced to a trickle (see figure above on Mt Rongbuck in the Himalayas)

Fig. 4 Surface Greenland Ice Flowing into a Moulin

More Than One Degree: From the one degree scenario things, as you might predict, get much worse and Lynas covers issues like polar bear extinction, which I have touched on previously and failed agriculture in China. At three degrees, an alarming result has been reported in a 2000 paper published in Nature–in which a massive positive carbon feedback forcing was modeled, involving release of huge amounts of carbon from land sources, adding 250 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2100 and adding an additional 1.5 degrees to the global temperature; this model resulted in the creation of a huge desert in the Amazon rain forest! Imagine that–from jungle to desert! According to this model global temperature could reach 4.0 to 5.5 degrees C by 2100 reaching close to the outer limits projected by the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. Lynas’ book does not have many positive outcomes, though there may be some regions that continue to have a climate where humans can survive and maintain the culture we have grown up in, minus of course the luxury of polluting our atmosphere with carbon fuels. The point of all this is that surviving humans need to have access to good technologies for generating heat and cooling while not adding to the carbon load and hopefully reducing it in time to prevent the full blown, worst case scenarios generated by climate science. It is up to us.

Six Degrees: When you reach the outer limits of projected global temperature change, that of six degrees, you can find a period when the earth was that warm to compare with what we might face under the same temperature conditions,  but you need to go all the way back to the Cretaceous period, some 65 to 144 million years ago. At that time the continents were still united into a single land mass (Pangaea), though the Atlantic Ocean was beginning to form–about as big as the Mediterranean–and sea levels were 200 or more meters higher than they are today; only 80% of the current land mass was above water and the average temperature was ten to fifteen degrees hotter than today. Africa, South America and southern portions of North America and Europe were dry and inhospitable, though the northern latitudes were warm and humid and, importantly,  no ice caps were evident at either pole. In the last chapter of his book, Lynas emphasizes that right now, perhaps for a period of only a few years, we have a choice about the world in which we want our children and grandchildren to live. The one degree scenario probably can’t be avoided, or if we did avoid it, we would have to get back to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide (right now we are at 387) and do so very quickly. Even then we would be faced with decades of an altered climate and if we returned to 350 ppm, at the very least there would be fewer non-human species.  The two degree scenario is fast approaching, with carbon dioxide at 400 ppm, a level projected for 2015. Beyond that, all bets are off because we could enter into the carbon-cycle feedback that might generate a potentially disastrous and irreversible climate change–a true tipping point to our climate future. On the whole this is an excellent book which properly frames our future insofar as we can make sound judgments derived from the science and models that are currently available. Lynas closes the introduction to his book by remarking, “Of this I have no doubt: Climate change is the canvas on which the history of the 21st century will be painted. Forewarned is forearmed.”

A Second Book: The second book I recommend is “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth“ by Mark Hertzgaard. This was published a few months ago (2011) and is available on Kindle. Hertzgaard has written extensively on climate change in articles published in The New Yorker, The Nation and Vanity Fair. He has covered global climate issues for years and has traveled throughout the world interviewing scientists, experts, city planners, hydrologists and farmers to learn more about the hardships we can expect from global climate change. He is doubtful that the Monsanto monoculture farming technique, that is widespread in America and China can succeed, and suggests that farmers must increasingly rely on using biodiversity/organic farming techniques. Otherwise there is a risk, like that of the potato famine in Ireland, of having crops wiped out because they are all the same, heat intolerant, drought susceptible, or disease prone. Many farmers are speaking out against the Monsanto strategy of genetically altered crops that are resistant to Roundup, so that the herbicide can be used more effectively against weeds.   One of the positive achievements taking place is that farmers in the Sahel region of Africa, including Kenya, Sudan and Uganda increasingly use a method referred to as “farmer-managed natural regeneration” (FMNR) in which they are recapturing and creating fertile, farmable soil by planting trees to help them push back the desert. The mulch generated by the leaves of trees retains more moisture and improves the nurturing quality of the soil, leading to improved productivity of the land. Time will tell whether the pressure of climate change can be overcome with FMNR. It is one of the many fascinating issues currently evolving as one component to the world’s food supply. Manage the unavoidable and avoid the unimaginable is the guiding paradigm of those trying to adapt, but all the while keeping up the pressure for mitigation to reduce greenhouse gases. Without the latter, avoiding the unimaginable is not possible. Right now we are witnessing a human catastrophe in Africa where the most intense drought conditions in decades are forcing mass movements of people attended by widespread starvation. This too is a consequence of Global Warming which works by exaggerating conditions, including desertification,  that have taken place before.

This is a fascinating book and quite different from “Six Degrees.” This book presents an early summary of some of the changes that are shaping our climate, but Hertzgaard quickly moves on to discuss how his daughter Chiara, now five, must adapt successfully and survive the climate changes that are in her future. His thesis is that the intensity of Global Warming has arrived nearly a century before projections and that even if our global society is smart enough to get busy and reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere, we will still have to contend with an excessively warm planet for at least fifty years, because of the long half-life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Much of his book covers the success and attempts that others have and are making to adjust to the expected climate change and his book is focused on what his daughter must do to live through what is hopefully a temporary glitch, before our atmosphere returns to the conditions under which we and all other species have evolved and currently survive. The personal touch of looking towards the future, trying to protect a young daughter who is just beginning life and had nothing to do with creating climate change, gives the book a tone of emergency and sensitivity that  would otherwise be lacking. Discussing the impact of our climate future through the eyes of someone trying to protect their child, gives emphasis to the idea that Hertzgaard does not shy away from–those who oppose immediate action on our greenhouse emissions are guilty of crimes, serious crimes against the future of humanity.

Global Warming vs Global Climate Change: like many others, Hertzgaard distinguishes between Global Warming and Global Climate Change. The former is the actual increase in the mean global temperature as a result of greenhouse gases and the latter refers to the planet’s reaction to the increased temperature, or in other words, just about everything else. He also separates the concept of “adaptation,” meaning the things we must do to live through the next fifty years and “mitigation,” the international efforts that must be expanded to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so that the period of adaptation will be confined to fifty years and not much longer. This terminology and distinction is also part of the most recent IPCC report (2007). Many scientists are leery of  adaptation because they fear it will relax the serious efforts we must take to mitigate the problem by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Adaptation by itself will not prevent the problem, in fact, it will get far worse if it leaves us with a false sense of security, feeling that we have done enough and we don’t have to deal further with the problem. Then it will truly get worse and may spin out of control.

Fig. 5 Greenland Ice Breakup

One issue which Hertzgaard addresses is the failure of the fourth IPCC to undertake serious recommendations about sea level rise. When he interviewed one of the reports’ authors, he found out that the fourth IPCC report committee  knew that the models they had been relying on for insights into sea level changes were wrong, so they minimized those aspects of the report and emphasized the need to await better modeling results, which would take into account the new realities of polar ice cap melting and the melting of Greenland’s vast ice stores (Figs 4 & 5). Climate models are furiously being revised to more accurately project sea level rise based on the new realities of massive melting conditions in the three regions of the globe that hold most of the ice and could impose an entirely different future for us if they melt more quickly that we presently assume. In other words, the IPCC fourth report of 2007 is flawed and its projections for sea level changes (which were less than the previous report) cannot be taken seriously. That issue is where James Hansen’s work comes in more forcefully (see below).

This is an informative book that speaks passionately about how it is too late to avoid climate change, so we have to learn to live through decades of these anticipated alterations in our climate, but we can still avoid the full throttle of these effects, unless we reach a tipping point beyond which we cannot escape and, should that turn out to be true, we will watch helplessly as things we do then will have no meaning for our climate future.  Nevertheless, the tone and outlook of Hertzgaard’s message is upbeat: we can adapt, but we have to increase the public pressure for mitigating carbon dioxide down to levels commensurate with a full life, like the one we used to be able to promise to our children and grandchildren. Right now, that promise is up for grabs.

A Third Book: Global climate scientist James Hansen has written a very readable book, “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity”, published in 2009 by Bloomsbury. It’s available on Kindle and was reviewed in the LA Times If you read no other book, this is the one I would recommend because it blends the science of climatology together with Hansen’s personal history in bringing the attention of this threat into the public arena: it combines science with a personal narrative and some of it shamefully recreates how the Bush administration suppressed scientific information that Hansen tried to promote as a climate scientist.  I have commented many times on how the Republican Party and GW Bush have suppressed science to favor their own political interpretation over those generated through the laboratory. I have also provided a little slide show illustrating how we veered off course. Although it is written by an expert, it is done in such a way that you feel well informed and not intimidated by an overwhelming level of science and technogarble. No one in the world is in a better position to write on this topic and use this kind of title than James Hansen. He was the first to testify before Congress in 1988 and warn of the coming weather hardships if we don’t address the issue of greenhouse gases. He has written numerous articles on this topic and has been a leader, both scientifically and sociologically for a good part of his career. Bill McKibben, coordinator of 350.org, has referred to Hansen at “the planet’s great hero.” As the most outspoken advocate of immediate action to avert planetary disaster from climate change, you can imagine that Hansen is one of the prime targets of the climate change denial community. But, to our great benefit, Hansen is fearless in asserting what the science tells him needs to be done.

No scientist feels comfortable predicting and projecting the future, especially if it is something as complex as our global climate and a subject which is likely to attract international attention. We admonish meteorologists who don’t accurately predict the weather a few days in advance, so imagine what many reserve for a climatologist who can’t explain today’s weather hardly at all, but then has no doubt about the future weather trends. So what’s missing? Whereas many climatologists rely on computer models for projecting the future, Hansen instead is committed to paleoclimatology which he feels is on firmer ground, though he does not shy away from climate modeling and his worked has involved both approaches to the problem. However, he is cautious about modeling because models, while getting better, still leave out many important details. One of the model deficiencies that has come to light recently is that of the failure of such models to deal effectively with melting the polar ice caps and Greenland ice. Until recently the models treated these giant structures as ice cubes melting in a glass of water, but it is clear that the these ice sheets are disappearing much faster than this kind of model projects. The moulin figure on the right shows surface melt water that carved a hole into the ice and allows melt water to fall to the bottom, accelerating the ice melting process, including ice sheets that normally resist the flow of a glacier. The elimination of deeply buried ice sheets leads to an accelerated movement and melting of glaciers. As far as models of major ice pack melting goes, it’s back to the drawing board for this aspect of modeling, and while they are still trying to get those models up and running properly, Hansen maintains that the science of paleoclimatology is sufficiently well understood that we can look backwards in order for us to project our future. Although we have been there before, the promise is that the trip we have embarked upon is unlike any trip we have been on before.

Fig. 6 Forest Fires Are Increasing in Frequency and Magnitude

In 1750, the carbon dioxide levels in the air were 280 ppm or .028%; in 2009 the carbon dioxide was 387 ppm or .039%; by 2015 we are expected to hit the magic 400 mark. Imagine that a small change in our atmospheric carbon dioxide could potentially threaten the future of the planet. But that small % change in carbon dioxide, coupled with some of the other greenhouse emissions (such as methane), means that a new net forcing from this factor alone accounts for 1.5 to 2.0 watts of additional energy/for every square meter of the planet, with an error of perhaps a watt. That amounts to turning on a couple of Christmas tree lights for each square meter of the earth’s surface, which seems like a trivial force; in the short run, it cannot interrupt a storm or change a storm path and yet that seemingly minuscule change in net energy is sufficient over a long period of time to effect our climate future. Such an effect pushes the earth’s climate further out of balance. Right now, we are being saved further warming of the planet from greenhouse gases by another factor, also a product of our industrial age, but one whose impact we don’t know a lot about–aerosols. These are man made dust particles, including soot, sulfur dioxide, chlorofluorcarbons and many other particulates. Their effect, when put into the atmosphere is to reflect sunlight and in a way protect us from further warming. They do this in a manner similar to what happens when a volcano erupts and spreads ash into the atmosphere. This will tend to cool the air by reflecting sunlight and can do so for a few years depending on the tonnage of ash delivered by the explosion. But, unless replenished (as we are doing with our fossil fuel usage), the ash will be removed from the atmosphere and lead to restoration from the climate trends that were ongoing at the time. So the efforts that are being generated to reduce particulates as part of our overall atmosphere cleanup, may give rise to a new shift in the global warming cycle and that has led some scientists to suggest that we add reflective particles to the atmosphere to achieve cooling by reflection. Many scientists, including this one, do not see this as a sensible way out of our carbon dilemma.

Hansen’s strategy to deal with our carbon footprint is to analyze the carbon levels that are being added to the atmosphere and then ask where they go? His analysis tells us that global emissions of carbon dioxide increased from less than 2 gigatons (GtC) a year in 1950 to more than 8GtC per year in the last few years. Oddly enough, there are two measurable features to the carbon emission pattern, one of which is the global amount of carbon dioxide emission and the other is the carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere–two known quantities. Divide the annual increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the fossil fuel emissions and you get another parameter known as the airborne fraction or the fraction of the emission that is in the atmosphere. Oddly enough, that quantity has remained constant from 1950 to 2010, meaning that a constant fraction of what we are adding to the environment is going into a carbon sink. Carbon sinks include the ocean, forests and soils. Without these sinks our carbon loading of the atmosphere would be much greater that it is today. It has been estimated that the ocean takes up about 3 GtC per year; thus a fossil fuel load of 8.5 GtC per year, which leads to an average 4.5 GtC per year in the atmosphere,  add the ocean sink of 3 GtC per year and we get a net carbon sink for vegetation and soil of about 1 GtC per year. It is encouraging that this land sink for carbon dioxide exists despite the massive deforestation our planet has undergone during the last several hundred years. In the United States, 99% of the old growth forest has been cut down, reducing considerably the contribution from forests which would ordinarily form another large carbon sink. If we continue to use fossil fuels, the land sink for carbon dioxide could become saturated, leading to a much larger atmospheric carbon loading. It is important that we help reforest the planet, for better carbon balance.

Hansen’s book is an educational experience embedded in a fascinating narrative of his scientific life, with stories of his grandchildren added to invoke a proper sense of urgency to our current climate crisis. Hansen travels as a kind of international celebrity and the gold standard for frank discussion of our global threat. He has written letters to leaders of the world, imploring them to take climate issues seriously and begin by eliminating the use of coal. He insists that we must give up on the use of coal immediately–no more mountain tops removed–coal is the worst form of  polluting energy we have. Not only does it heavily pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, but coal mining creates huge levels of polluted water and adds toxins such as mercury to our global air supply and the oceans.  Hansen’s idea is that if we could eliminate the use of coal, we would solve the carbon dioxide problem and begin to head back to 350 ppm carbon dioxide by the latter half of this century. He believes that a carbon tax needs to be applied at the source of each form of fossil fuel, with the money generated given back to the public as a dividend.  In that way the “fee-and-dividend strategy,” as models suggest, could reduce carbon emissions by 28 percent compared to what we have today. Hansen is forcefully opposed to cap-and-trade, which he believes is unworkable and nothing more than a political scam. Tragically, cap-and-trade is the basis of the law that is likely to be passed by Congress, though don’t hold your breath when that might happen.

In case you remain skeptical about Hansen’s sense of urgency concerning our planetary future and the need to act quickly, one of his later chapters (10) is titled “The Venus Syndrome,” in which he lays out how Venus, whose surface temperature is currently  +450 degrees C was once a planet, that like Mars and Earth, probably had oceans. At the time Venus was formed, the sun was 30 percent dimmer, so Venus was probably cool enough to have oceans. Mars on the other hand had its water frozen with a surface temperature of -50 degrees C, as its orbit is further out. But as the sun got brighter, the surface of Venus got hotter and the oceans became water vapor while carbon dioxide, from carbon sources of the planet, became the dominant gas, currently constituting about 97 percent of the atmosphere. Hansen argues that the earth could replicate the sequence of events that made Venus uninhabitable by going through a runaway greenhouse gas emission levels that reach 10 to 20 watts per square meter. This level could be achieved with a relatively small increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, though the exact levels required are unknown. But, such levels are in the ballpark of what we might get to by burning every last stitch of our fossil fuel supply and may be unavoidable if we don’t stop emitting greenhouse gases before we reach a tipping point where this planetary scenario is unavoidable. Right now we are “enjoying” a minimal period of solar radiation, based on the historical record from satellite data that was first obtained in the 1970s. Should the sun pull out of its current minimum in radiation, it could serve to further accelerate our date with a climate disaster.

Hansen’s final chapter describes the kinds of storms that our children and grandchildren are likely to experience, as he emphasizes that we are already going through these kinds of changes in our weather patterns; he uses concrete examples of past storms to illustrate the connection. Not every storm we see will have an obvious Global Warming signature. But collisions between warm, moist air and cool dry air will increasingly reflect the new energy stored in our atmosphere and released through condensation. His point is that the increase in the violence of the storms we have encountered so far pales in comparison to what we can expect in the near future. The additional energy in the atmosphere will drive larger storms, with more moisture, higher winds, more violent hail storms and give rise to larger and more deadly tornadoes. A mere 10 percent increase in wind speed increases the destructive potential of the storm by one-third. These supercell storms will increase in frequency and magnitude. The devastating tornadoes,  such as those that horrified us this year in Oklahoma, Alabama and Joplin Missouri will only increase in magnitude and destructive force. Thundersnow storms such as the giant cyclonic blizzard  Superstorm that struck the East Coast in mid-March 1993 had 100 mile per hour winds and stretched from Central America to Nova Scotia, Canada. Once the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers begin serious melting, north-south temperature gradients will further increase and likely change the ocean currents with yet more devastating storms like the Superstorm of 1993.  Now add the rise in sea levels anticipated and you have the additional capacity of windstorm floods reaching into new regions, not storm-flooded before. In America, we are not even remotely prepared to face these kinds of forces or admit to their origin.This is a special tragedy, since this country has supported much of the science that went into discovering these man-made threats to our future.

This book is Hansen’s clarion call for action. He advises those alarmed by these environmental threats to join Bill McKibben’s 350.org and participate in the events that are needed to change the way we live and revert the planet to one we can live on in the absence of a man-made threat that will make life on earth virtually impossible if we do nothing about atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite the alarmist nature of Hansen’s message, he remains an optimist about our future and continues to give lectures and advise governments on what lies ahead if we don’t act now. He also has grandchildren that he hopes to help protect from a future that none of us want, but few of us are prepared to help prevent.

RFM

Hurricane Katrina

There is broad agreement among climatologists that hurricanes are related to global warming, because their strength and size can be correlated with ocean temperature. But, what about tornadoes? What about the recent tornadoes that we have witnessed in Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Massachusetts?  These tornadoes seem like a new virulent species, with mile-wide funnel clouds and tens or hundreds of miles of complete destruction. It is natural to ask whether tornadoes are also related to global climate change. For the most part, climate scientists hesitate to make any suggestions that global warming and tornado ferocity/frequency might be linked by the rapid warming of the planet. For one thing, global climate change modeling does not generally divide the earth up into a fine enough matrix or grid to predict or simulate behavior in sufficient regional detail, such that tornado simulations can be reliably modeled: if they made their modeling grids using much finer resolution, simulations would take much longer to run and perhaps be  computationally overwhelming (though improvements in modeling are making this task more tractable). Climate modeling as been more focused on long-term climate changes, not the short-term episodes of thunder storms and tornadoes. The second factor that dissuades scientists from speculating about tornadoes is that they are always associated with thunderstorms and there seems to be no way to predict whether a single storm might begin to produce the circular cloud motions that can lead to a tornado, or a funnel cloud.  What appears to be exactly the same storm conditions may or may not give rise to tornadoes and, at the present time, there is no reliable way of predicting the outcome of any single severe thunderstorm event. It’s still the case that the best friend we have for our protection is the siren that goes off when tornado conditions are forming in our area.  However, it is well known that when hurricanes come onto land, they very often give rise to tornadoes; furthermore, the collision between cool air and warm moist air is also correlated with storm conditions ripe for spawning tornadoes.

Tornado in Texas

The violent and deadly tornadoes we have already experienced this year have been correlated with a lower than normal trajectory of the jet stream, bringing cool air down into the southern region of the country, combined with warm moist air coming up from the gulf. The collision of these two contrasting air masses is known to give rise to the kinds of violent thunderstorms that can generate tornadoes. A correlation between climate change and tornadoes seems sensible or at least plausible: global warming means that our planet is getting warmer because of a man-made increase in greenhouse gases. There is no longer any doubt about this.  A warmer atmosphere means that it can hold more moisture. The ability to hold more moisture means that areas that are dry and hot will become drier and hotter because the air can remove more moisture. Regions that routinely get moisture, will get more and areas such as the mountains of California and the Northwest, will face winter rain instead of snow, providing flooding during winter and water shortages during the summer. These kinds of events are already in play. Doesn’t it stand to reason that more moisture in the air is more likely to generate a higher frequency of thunderstorm conditions and hence more likely to generate tornadoes? It makes sense to me and Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of 350.org, has cleverly stated as much in a recent opinion article in the Washington Post, “A link between climate change and Joplin Tornadoes? Never!” This idea gets my vote–even if climate scientists do not feel prepared to advocate such a relationship.

Although one feels comfortable in making this kind of assertion, it will be virtually impossible to prove, particularly if you are still carrying around a bias against the concept of global climate change: in America too much political power is in the hands of global cranks. But with atmospheric carbon dioxide rapidly increasing, the only tool we have for our predictive powers is through modeling: we cannot run a planetary experiment that includes a proper control, though we can model the planet with and without elevated carbon dioxide.  Thus “proof” however you want to define it is not really possible, especially if you already view global climate change as a hoax, as some Congressional leaders do, or at least they say that to protect the interests of the oil and gas lobby. In my opinion, these naysayers are committing crimes against humanity. We must act on the imperfect science that is available and use it as a probabilistic guide to do what we can do to both adapt to our changing world and begin to mitigate greenhouse gases, bringing them back to levels compatible with the species (including us) that evolved under the planetary conditions that existed before the industrial revolution, or as close to it as we can get. It is far too late to get back to those levels tomorrow. We face at least fifty years of a warmer globe and more ferocious weather, including flooding, desertification, droughts, hurricanes and rising sea levels that can destroy cities and impact on virtually all species. Diseases that we consider tropical today, will affect many of us tomorrow. What climatologists are asking of us is that we get back to a carbon dioxide level of 350 ppm; right now we are at about 390 ppm, meaning we have to not only stop producing vast new quantities of atmospheric carbon, but we must also find ways to reduce it by removing some of it from the atmosphere, because the half-life of carbon dioxide is decades  long.  That means we have to act by using the kind of frontal lobe, long-term thinking that was recently outlawed by a failed resolution in the House of Representatives, who voted 240 to 184 defeating a bill that said “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.”  Given the complete failure of our national government to act sensibly, adaptation to global climate change will have to begin at the local level, and slowly migrate up the political ladder. But we cannot do mitigation of atmospheric carbon dioxide without governments getting together, agreeing and enforcing meaningful emission reduction standards. We are already too late to avoid serious global climate change, including a significant increase in ocean levels by 2100. Many European countries are far ahead of us and the Netherlands has already started to implement a 200 year plan to protect against rising ocean waters, while continuing to produce sufficient food for consumption. In case you haven’t realized it yet, the increased cost we are paying for food is related to global climate change. This year, because of the enormous flooding along the Mississippi, there are places in the Midwest that will not be able to plant corn.  If we realize that focusing on planetary survival for the future of our children will also lead to a new and much more dynamic economy, we might conclude that we should get started on this project tomorrow. We should use this new challenge as a means to revitalize our economy and save the planet at the same time. Anyone out there ready to become a farmer?

RFM

So, if we wanted to conduct an experiment on the environmental impact of a major oil spill–now is our chance. But BP is attempting to silence the scientists who are examining the impact of the spill, as I wrote earlier. Whatever we have done to the ecology of the region will not be known for decades and many issues will probably never be fully understood. Right now, thanks to the use of Corexit, there is a layer of oil on the bottom of the Gulf, the magnitude and distribution of which is presently unknown: I seriously doubt there is any method that can measure it.  But that is the area where many fish breed (including some species of blue fin tuna), so the future of fish that spawn in the gulf is unknown and since the number of fish caught is rapidly diminishing world wide (virtually all Atlantic salmon that we buy in the store is farmed fish), it will be hard to pin any change in fish numbers on the Gulf oil spill of 2010.  Not entirely unrelated is how we destroyed the cod fishing in the North Atlantic: once fishing trawlers came along that could reach with their nets down to the bottom of the ocean, the cod started to disappear because that’s where the big cod go down to breed and where the newly hatched cod stay to grow. So, while cod was once considered to be an inexhaustible source of seafood, and built the early economy of New England, the major cod fisheries have been closed since the early 1990s. Will oil on the bottom of the gulf achieve what the trawlers did to the cod fishing industry in the Atlantic?   Williams’ article also reveals that many residents of the Gulf region have been tested for contamination and show up with elevated levels of benzene and cadmium. So, we haven’t just intoxicated the wild life of the region, we must also think about the long-term impact on humans. Williams adds another point that should spark instantaneous sobriety: the five million barrels of oil spilled into the gulf would have provided the United States with about four hours of our daily oil diet. It is government collusion with the oil industry that produces this kind of outcome, though many feel that BP is an outlier when it comes to safety issues. The PBS program FRONTLINE did a major documentary on the safety record of BP and its convoluted history. You can watch it here. I have also commented on BP and the Gulf oil spill in articles here and here.

Who can lead us out of this toxic quagmire of excessive, American-style capitalism that puts humans below profits and stock values over human safety and protection of the environment? It is as if our frontal lobes, the region of our brain where we stand the best chance of evoking some longitudinal thinking and perhaps realizing that we are on an unsustainable path–that region of the brain has died of the atrophy of disuse, especially by our government and its collusion with international corporate objectives. But, as the saying goes, “we have met the enemy and it is us.” If we demanded a change and forced refocus of our culture on a sustainable path, compatible with the environment and the other animals that live within it, we could change things beginning now. We are too late to avoid impact from global climate change and we are too late to avoid a rise in sea levels, but we are not too late to save the planet from an insurmountable catastrophe that lies in our path if we do nothing. If we should lose the Greenland, Antarctic and Arctic ice, the ocean levels will rise by about 70 meters, Florida will be completely underwater and the Mississippi River will drain into the Gulf at Tennessee. While the earlier projections did not foresee this kind of catastrophe during the 21st century, the ice is melting faster than we thought, by mechanisms we cannot yet model, nor do we understand. So, while it is still true that we control our own destiny, that is probably only true today for a subset of the global population. It doesn’t mean we can’t improve, but we are already late.

RFM

A recent  NYT article describes a possible major breakthrough in the disovering the etiology of CCD.  The Times article was based on an extensive study described in the on-line science journal Plos One (public access is available). The combined force of academic researchers and a group of army researchers studying proteomics, extensively analyzed  and compared stable, unstable and collapsed bee colonies. They used a very powerful method of mass-spectrometry based proteomics. With this approach, instead of looking for genomic evidence, they were able to analyze thousands of different proteins and infer back to identify the organisms that generated them. The field of proteomics has exploded in the last decade and is becoming an increasingly powerful way of looking at gene control through analysis of the proteins they generate. Although many pathogens have already been detected in bees and many were also discovered in the Plos One study, two different organisms seemed to consistently track one another and correlate best with CCD, including a large DNA virus, not described in bees previously, and referred to as the invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV; Iridoviridae); however samples also consistently contained a microsporidia Nosema apis (fungus); the co-localization of these two pathogens was more consistent with CCD than either one alone. Once a hive was infected, forager flights began to decline, as dead honey bee samples showed increasingly high peptide counts from the two pathogens. Using pathogen injections into single bees (see figure), they were able to show that bee toxicity was far more evident when both pathogens were injected as opposed to either one alone.

Injection of single bees

The take home message from this study is twofold: first MSP is a powerful tool for studying the pathogenic origins of bee infections and secondly, perhaps a dual infection with a previously unknown (in bees) large DNA virus (Iridoviridae) and a  fungal agent (Nosema apis) accounts for beehive collapse in America. The authors are quick to point out that  CCD in other countries may be attributed to different pathogens and that their analysis may only account for the problem in North America. It is still not clear whether the dual infection is the cause of CCD or whether it is a sign of imminent colony collapse, but the injection studies certainly point to these two pathogens as the cause rather than an indicator. The obvious question is that if the double pathogen theory is correct, how can CCD be treated and can beehives be restored to centers of industry and productivity? Many workers in the field seem to believe that treating the fungus may be the best approach, but as the graph shows, fungus control alone may not solve the entire problem. Iinjections with either pathogen reduced bee lifespan over controls. Perhaps on the way to recovering normal beehive function, we may have a period in which beehive lifespan is reduced, while still serving a pollinating function. The other possibility that is difficult to eliminate is that healthy bees can effectively fight off these infections, while bees that are environmentally intoxicated through other means cannot. Thus, one can ask whether CCD in North American bee colonies reflects the globalization of pathogen exposure or have these pathogens always been in the environment and now have opportune moments for bee infection, because their hosts decline in health through other mechanisms? Only time and a lot more research can answer these questions. The good thing about the Plos One report is that a new bee pathogen has been discovered and it may hold important clues to the future of pollination and the security of our own food supply.

Let’s see now, how would the free market  respond to the pollination problem we are facing in America? No, they would not invest in the development of electronic pollinators because the development time is too long (remember that the lifespan of a CEO is about five years, so investment must yield something substantial within that time frame).  Only the shaky and uncertain thrust of venture capitalism would respond with long-term investments and the hope of a payoff down the road. That sector of our financial repertoire  is about the only healthy element  that remains, but it is too small to be a broadly effective source of financing.  In the meantime, thank God we have a government who will support these studies, though I find it worrisome that a U.S. Army MSD apparatus was necessary, rather than having one available to the scientists on their own, together with the expertise required to run the machine and interpret the data. This is what happens when grants get cut to the bone and research is limited because of limited funding. I counted eighteen authors on the Plos One article and thirteen different institutional locations. A problem of the depth and magnitude of CCD can only be approached through highly collaborative scientific efforts.  CCD is truly one of the more profoundly disturbing components of our modern culture and, in my view,  should be ranked with global climate change as a looming threat for which we need to mobilize a strong research effort, preferably one that doesn’t require the American military. On the other hand this story represents a good union of vital resources and technologies that proved essential to unravel this part of what remains as a serious whodunit problem.

RFM

Fig 1. A description of this figure is found at the bottom of this posting

Recently I was reading about the Oregon coast and discovered that, since 2002, the region has experienced sudden periods during the summer months in which the shallow ocean water dramatically loses oxygen levels below those required to sustain normal marine life. The first occurrence of this event took place between Newport and Florence along the Oregon coast, and included Yachats, the small town where we stayed. Though I did not personally see any evidence of fish or invertebrate kills, these surges of hypoxic coastal ocean water take place further out in the shallow ocean water beyond the shores and are evident at depths up to about 50 meters or so: because of the intense wave action, tidal pools probably get effective oxygenation through wave aeration; its an excellent mechanism for mixing water and air and the Pacific ocean seems very adept at creating intense wave activity. I have always appreciated how much better the Pacific ocean is at generating large, strong waves when compared to its Atlantic cousin.

When hypoxic events occur, many fish are able to swim out of oxygen depleted regions into more sustainable water, whereas the slower invertebrates are stuck, and in the case of the Oregon coast, thousands of invertebrates have been dying every summer when the ocean becomes intolerably hypoxic. You can view a Quick Time video clip of a fish/invertebrate kill photographed underwater along the Oregon coast here: it amounts to a massive kill.

Marine biologists tell us that normal ocean surface water contains 5 to 8 ml of oxygen per liter of ocean. But during these anoxic spells in Oregon, the measured oxygen level was as low as 1.4 ml/l, too low for most fish and invertebrate survival. Many regions of the world have hypoxic ocean waters, some of which have been created by eutrophication, or fertilizer runoff from intense agriculture, which produces blooms of plankton that reduce the oxygen content of the water. But the scientists who initially investigated the Oregon coast hypoxia knew that it was unlikely to be caused by eutrophication, simply because farming along the Oregon coast didn’t seem sufficient to generate significant fertilizer runoff.  Initially, marine biologists thought that they were viewing a once-in-a-lifetime event, but anoxic waters along the coast of Oregon are now an annual event and have been detected each summer since the first large scale fish and invertebrate kills of 2002. From as early as mid-April to mid-October, hypoxic water has been the rule, though fluctuations in the intensity of oxygen depletion give variance to its magnitude. To this day, the cause of this phasic oxygen deprivation is unknown, though several theories seem to be prominent among oceanographers and marine biologists. Some have even considered this phenomenon to be part of a natural, long-term cycle of ocean behavior.  But, no significant letup has occurred and in 2006, the most extreme case of anoxia took place in which coastal waters lost all detectable oxygen levels for four weeks. In that instance starfish, mussels and rockfish died in large numbers, while other, more mobile fish were able to flee the hypoxic zone, which grew to 3,000 square kilometers. Furthermore the region has been monitored for oxygen content at different depths going back to 1950 and from 1950 to 1999, no anoxic events were recorded (see Fig 1).

The fishing industry along the coast of Oregon has been understandably alarmed about this recurrent hypoxic condition, as fishing brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year into the economy. But Oregon’s hypoxic summer coastal waters are part a global problem, though the causes of ocean hypoxia vary for each region and always have a local component as well. Increasingly the oxygen content of our ocean waters has been receiving more attention and there is broad agreement on the impact that global climate change may have on ocean oxygenation levels, including i)  a failure to properly mix the water column through changes in oceanic currents, that could be seriously impacted by global climate change and its effect on the natural oceanic currents which exchange cool norther waters with warmer waters near the equatorial zones and ii) the warming of the ocean water itself reduces its capacity to dissolve oxygen, a strict reality of chemical reactions.  According to the 2007 IPCC report, from the period 1961 to 2003, global ocean temperature have risen by 0.10°C from the surface to a depth of 700 meters.

Biologists believe that the magic number for oxygen comes in at about 2 ml/l, below which much of the ocean fauna cannot exist; there are now large regions of our ocean, particularly those near tropical areas, where the intermediate depths of the water have reached this level of incompatibility.  While there is plenty of evidence for an increase in the temperature of the ocean over the last fifty years, so far, there is no evidence that the normal ocean currents have been altered by global climate change conditions, at least not for the major currents we concern ourselves with. If there is a compensatory side to global climate change, it is that tropical storms, whose frequency and magnitude can be correlated with ocean water temperature, help to force mixing of the ocean water with the more oxygen rich air, serving to overcome other tendencies to form oxygen-depleted zones, though the significance of this so called “benefit” has been hard to guesstimate. Who wants to be on the sidelines cheering on another Katrina?

The Oregon coast is part of a large West Coast ocean ecosystem, in which shallow, oxygen-rich ocean water, found at depths up to about 50 meters, leads to much deeper, oxygen deficient water found beyond the continental shelf, where depths become hundreds of meters or more. Those deeper regions are poor in oxygen but rich in nutrients. Measurements of oxygen levels as deep as 600 meters have been ongoing in the Oregon region for decades, which, until 2002, did not reveal coastal water hypoxia (Fig 1, left). So, if eutrophication doesn’t explain Oregon’s coastal oxygen deficiency, what does?

The most parsimonious explanation for Oregon’s summer anoxia seems to be that the deeper oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) has been upwelling at higher rates than normal and mixing with the more superficial oxygen-enriched waters in disproportionate ways that did not happen before, but might still be part of a very long periodic cycle that could last for decades or more. Others suggest the more obvious,  that what’s going on in Oregon is a perfect storm created by changes in weather, climate and ocean currents. If so, this should alarm all of us, because it illustrates how quickly the ocean environment can change. We must remember that 71% of the surface of the earth is covered by ocean water.

This new mixing between the two pools of ocean water not only tells us that the oceans can change quickly, but that they can do so with a surprisingly quick lethal outcome. There is clearly a balance force at work here in nature with ocean water mixing that is difficult to comprehend, but mind-numbing to appreciate when it doesn’t work to its historic perfection. It’s hard not to get analytical about this observation without thinking how finely tuned it all is, how interdependent the global system is and then wonder how badly out of tune we have forced mother nature’s engine for sustaining life on the land as well as the ocean. Surely we need to learn better than we ever have that land and ocean are joined at the hip. Excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is acidifying the ocean, but doing so much more and in so many different ways, most of which we cannot yet articulate. Perhaps our very survival is the biological experiment. But for this experiment, mother nature is sitting on the sidelines, as we started the ball rolling on this one.

We use models to predict the impact of global climate change, but with the oceans, we have a laboratory. We should all be jumping into the oceans and making measurements! If we can’t save the country, let’s put everyone to work saving the planet!

RFM

(below is a copy of the figure illustration taken from the Chan et al Science article (note: hydrocasts are water samples obtained from a group bottles that are coupled to one another and sunk to get samples of water at different depths)

Fig. 1. Taken from a Science Brevia paper by Chan et al (Science, 319, 920, 2008). Dissolved oxygen profiles during the upwelling season (mid-April to mid-October) in the upper 800 m of the continental shelf and slope of Oregon (42.00°N to 46.00°N). (A) 1950 to 1999 from the World Ocean Database and Oregon State University archives (n = 3101 hydrocasts, blue). (B) (A) with additional data for 2000 to 2005 (n = 834 hydrocasts, green). (C) (A) and (B) plus data for 2006 (n = 220 hydrocasts,red). The black vertical line denotes the 0.5 ml/l threshold. (Insets) Overlapping locations of hydrographic (blue, green, and red) and remotely operated vehicle (black) stations through time and the 100-m and 1000-m isobaths.