COP 17 President Maite Nkoana-Mashabane speaks during a press conference with Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC Christiana Figueres at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban.

DURBAN –  “Do you think we’ll actually get anything done this time around?” asked the elderly man sitting at the head of the community table at our bed and breakfast.

This was my first conversation in South Africa with someone other than my colleagues. And almost immediately after introducing himself as a senior delegate with a major U.N. agency, the man summed up the debate over the UN climate negotiations at the Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Durban with one simple, blunt question.

“That depends on how you define success,” said our colleague Andrew Light, an international climate expert at the Center for American Progress. “A lot has already been done.”

Light’s answer sparked an incredulous response from the man, who argued that the feeble, incremental response to the global climate crisis by negotiators over the years in the U.N. climate talks was in no way a success. The conversation quickly escalated into a heated debate over how to judge progress at the Durban climate talks.

Without binding targets for aggressive emissions reductions, said the man, we are simply treading water as it continues to rise around us.

Of course, we all agreed. We wouldn’t be at the COP conference if we didn’t think bold action on climate is needed. But even with such a strong moral imperative, getting 194 countries with competing interests to craft a binding framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has proven extraordinarily difficult.

Given that reality, Light argued the importance of celebrating incremental victories that allow parties to take steps toward a larger agreement. That’s the lens in which he sees the Durban negotiations. And as hard as it is to admit that we’ll probably only see marginal victories in the foreseeable future, those victories could add up to something meaningful.

So what does Light mean by “a lot has already been done?” Hasn’t everyone declared the process dead after the implosion of the much-hyped 2009 conference in Copenhagen?

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Upwelling seawater along parts of Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf has carved out caves in the ice. A new study links CO2 and Antarctica glaciation.

The news release for a new Science study, “The Role of Carbon Dioxide During the Onset of Antarctic Glaciation” (subs. req’d), explains:

A drop in carbon dioxide appears to be the driving force that led to the Antarctic ice sheet’s formation, according to a recent study led by scientists at Yale and Purdue universities of molecules from ancient algae found in deep-sea core samples.The key role of the greenhouse gas in one of the biggest climate events in Earth’s history supports carbon dioxide’s importance in past climate change and implicates it as a significant force in present and future climate….

“The evidence falls in line with what we would expect if carbon dioxide is the main dial that governs global climate; if we crank it up or down there are dramatic changes,” [co-author Matthew} Huber said. “We went from a warm world without ice to a cooler world with an ice sheet overnight, in geologic terms, because of fluctuations in carbon dioxide levels.”

We know from earlier study this year led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up and on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050:

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.

Recent modeling work suggests we are approaching the tipping point for irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would, ultimately, represent 20 feet of sea level rise (see New study of Greenland under “more realistic forcings” concludes “collapse of the ice-sheet was found to occur between 400 and 560 ppm” of CO2).

And we know from paleoclimate studies that the Antarctic ice sheet (which contains 90% of the ice on the planet) is vulnerable to modest warming from current levels, particularly the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm”).

While the new study  firms up our understanding that CO2 is the “main dial that governs global climate,” it does not appear to tell us what the tipping point is for full deglaciation:

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A new study “Peer Effects in the Diffusion of Solar Photovoltaic Panels” looks at how solar power spreads like a “contagion.”  Here’s an analysis of an early draft.

by John Farrell

The study notes that for every 1 percent increase in the number of installations in a single ZIP code, there’s a commensurate 1 percent decrease in the amount of time until the next solar installation.  As [Adam Browning] writes, “solar is contagious!”

I’m a data lover, so I thought it would be interesting to see what this looks like over time.  If you start with a neighborhood with 25 solar installations, where it was 100 days between the 24th and 25th installation, this peer pressure effect will reduce the time between installations to just 10 days by the 250th PV project. (see chart)

Of course, this process takes a while to unfold.  In fact, if solar PV was being installed only once every 100 days at the outset, the peer pressure effect will take over 15 years to reduce the time between neighborhood installs to 10 days.

The second line on the chart (red) looks at the change if you start with 25 solar installations but with a time between installs of just 30 days.  By the 250th PV project, the time between installs has dropped to 3 days.  And because the lag time between installations started so much lower, the 10-fold drop in lag time takes less than 5 years.

The basic formula – written another way – seems to be that a 10-fold increase in local solar installations will result in a 10-fold drop in the time between installations. This will hold true through the second iteration, as well.  In the neighborhood with an initial 100-day lag between installations, it will take another 15 years for the lag to drop to 1 day from 10 days, reaching this level when there are 2,500 local PV projects installed.

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Bruce Sterling, the science-fiction author and futurist whose book Distraction foreshadowed the Occupy Wall Street movement, spoke about the “melancholy and tiresome reality” of climate change at the 2011 Art + Environment Conference in Reno, Nevada this October. Sterling described the catastrophic drought and wildfires that have consumed his home state of Texas. He went on to explain how we now live in the Anthropocene, a term first coined in 2000 by Paul Cruetzen to describe a new geologic era in which the predominant factor on the Earth’s surface is human activity. Sterling’s 30-minute talk is a must-watch tour-de-force of sober acceptance of the world we have created, and what the future holds:

A few quotations from Sterling’s speech:

Climate change has lost all its sci-fi tinge in my lifetime and is now a melancholy and tiresome reality.

There hasn’t been a year when I haven’t written about climate change. It’s one of the most obvious things to predict.

It’s just kind of a blunt reality that the fossil-fuel enterprise has done a regulatory capture of the entire planet, and we’re involved in a war for oil, and it’s the curse of oil, and it’s a war for a curse that’s endless and happening. You know, it gets boring running around being a Cassandra. Starting Earth Day in 1970 was a pretty late start considering the multicentury scope of this problem.

I will pass the rest of my lifetime in the shadow of climate change. It’s not about warning people in 2011, or trying to avert or defuse a misfortune. The wolf is beyond the door. The wolf is in the living room. This is the anthropocenic condition. This is how we live. This is force majeure. It’s here. It’s very obvious.

There are no national forests. You cannot protect a forest with a nation. There are forests that protect nations.

The global climate crisis is the climate crisis and it’s global because the globe is an externality. “Don’t pollute you, don’t pollute me, pollute that fellow behind me.” Just throw that into the atmosphere because the atmosphere is somebody else’s problem.

The thing that encourages me or sort of offers daylight is there’s no pro-climate crisis party. There’s no government that actually likes the idea of wrecking the climate. It doesn’t really benefit anybody. It really is an externality. It’s just something that’s entropic.

He closed with a stirring defense of the role of art, to confront the hard truths of the human condition in ways that other enterprises cannot do.

(HT Boing Boing)

“The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover.”

That grim prognosis is from the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including ours.  It’s highly likely the Arctic will be virtually ice free in the summer within about two decades, if not one (see “Arctic sea ice volume: The death spiral continues”).

Rear Admiral David Titley, the Oceanographer of the Navy, testified last year that  “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower” in the last several thousand years.” Titley, who is also the Director of Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, told the Chief of Naval Operations that “we expect to see four weeks of basically ice free conditions in the mid to late 2030s.”

So the polar bear is in a losing battle.  Humanity, sadly, isn’t in any battle at all to stop its own self-inflicted devastation. When will we wake up to the challenge?

Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This is a NatGeo photo (12/10) via Grist (12/11)