Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team, in a repost.  The research brief by Hansen et al is here.

A new NASA study underscores the fact that greenhouse gases generated by human activity — not changes in solar activity — are the primary force driving global warming.

The study offers an updated calculation of the Earth’s energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth’s surface and the amount returned to space as heat. The researchers’ calculations show that, despite unusually low solar activity between 2005 and 2010, the planet continued to absorb more energy than it returned to space.

A graph of the sun’s total solar irradiance shows that in recent years irradiance dipped to the lowest levels recorded during the satellite era. The resulting reduction in the amount of solar energy available to affect Earth’s climate was about .25 Watts per square meter, less than half of Earth’s total energy imbalance. (Credit: NASA/James Hansen)

Total solar irradiance, the amount of energy produced by the sun that reaches the top of each square meter of the Earth’s atmosphere, typically declines by about a tenth of a percent during cyclical lulls in solar activity caused by shifts in the sun’s magnetic field. Usually solar minimums occur about every eleven years and last a year or so, but the most recent minimum persisted more than two years longer than normal, making it the longest minimum recorded during the satellite era.

Pinpointing the magnitude of Earth’s energy imbalance is fundamental to climate science because it offers a direct measure of the state of the climate. Energy imbalance calculations also serve as the foundation for projections of future climate change. If the imbalance is positive and more energy enters the system than exits, Earth grows warmer. If the imbalance is negative, the planet grows cooler.

James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led the research. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics published the study last December.

Hansen’s team concluded that Earth has absorbed more than half a Watt more solar energy per square meter than it let off throughout the six year study period. The calculated value of the imbalance (0.58 Watts of excess energy per square meter) is more than twice as much as the reduction in the amount of solar energy supplied to the planet between maximum and minimum solar activity (0.25 Watts per square meter).

“The fact that we still see a positive imbalance despite the prolonged solar minimum isn’t a surprise given what we’ve learned about the climate system, but it’s worth noting because this provides unequivocal evidence that the sun is not the dominant driver of global warming,” Hansen said.

According to calculations conducted by Hansen and his colleagues, the 0.58 Watts per square meter imbalance implies that carbon dioxide levels need to be reduced to about 350 parts per million to restore the energy budget to equilibrium. The most recent measurements show that carbon dioxide levels are currently 392 parts per million and scientists expect that concentration to continue to rise in the future.

A prolonged solar minimum left the sun’s surface nearly free of sunspots and accompanying bright areas called faculae between 2005 and 2010. Total solar irradiance declined slightly as a result, but the Earth continued to absorb more energy than it emit throughout the minimum. An animation of a full solar cycle is available here. (Credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio)

Climate scientists have been refining calculations of the Earth’s energy imbalance for many years, but this newest estimate is an improvement over previous attempts because the scientists had access to better measurements of ocean temperature than researchers have had in the past.

The improved measurements came from free-floating instruments that directly monitor the temperature, pressure and salinity of the upper ocean to a depth of 2,000 meters (6,560 feet). The network of instruments, known collectively as Argo, has grown dramatically in recent years since researchers first began deploying the floats a decade ago. Today, more than 3,400 Argo floats actively take measurements and provide data to the public, mostly within 24 hours.

The updated energy imbalance calculation has important implications for climate modeling. Its value, which is slightly lower than previous estimates, suggests that most climate models overestimate how readily heat mixes deeply into the ocean and significantly underestimates the cooling effect of small airborne particles called aerosols, which along with greenhouse gases and solar irradiance are critical factors in energy imbalance calculations.

“Climate models simulate observed changes in global temperatures quite accurately, so if the models mix heat into the deep ocean too aggressively, it follows that they underestimate the magnitude of the aerosol cooling effect,” Hansen said.

Aerosols, which can either warm or cool the atmosphere depending on their composition and how they interact with clouds, are thought to have a net cooling effect. But estimates of their overall impact on climate are quite uncertain given how difficult it is to measure the distribution of the particles on a broad scale. The new study suggests that the overall cooling effect from aerosols could be about twice as strong as current climate models suggest, largely because few models account for how the particles affect clouds.

A chart shows the global reach of the network of Argo floats. (Credit: Argo Project Office)

Reference

Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, and K. von Schuckmann, 2011: Earth’s energy imbalance and implications. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 13421-13449, doi:10.5194/acp-11-13421-2011.

Related Links

+ Science Brief: Earth’s Energy Imbalance

+ James Hansen Biography

+ Argo Project Office

+ NASA-led Study Solves Case of Earth’s ‘Missing Energy’

+ World of Change: Solar Activity

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Texas Climate News has published disturbing excerpts of the frightening, hate-filled messages she received as a result of this intimidation campaign:

– you are nothing but a liar; you lie

– AGW is a hoax […] Where are the facts? Prove your unproven hypothesis. Prove it. Show the world. You can’t. You are a fraud. […] Your name and the names of the other warming alarmists will be mud as the years go forward. You are a disgrace. You are a nut.

– DUMPED FROM GINGRICH’S BOOK HA HA HA […] IT’S A GREAT START!!! SEE YA, FRAUDSTER – GET A REAL JOB, MCDONALD’S IS HIRING

– Nazi Bitch Whore Climatebecile […] You stupid bitch, You are a mass murderer and will be convicted at the Reality TV Grand Jury in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania. AGW has never been anything but a Rockefeller depopulationary eugenical scam. […] After the Grand Jury indicts you, I would like to see you convicted and beheaded by guillotine in the public square, to show women that if they are going to take a man’s job, they have to take the heat for mass murder, just like the men do when they get caught. If you have a child, then women in the future will be even more leery of lying to get ahead, when they see your baby crying next to the basket next to the guillotine.

– I read your whiney comments about researching for a rejected book chapter instead of spending time playing with your baby. Perhaps you should take responsiblility how you choose to use your time. In my opinion, the problem with America is women refuse to stay at home taking care and nurturing their offspring while prioritizing their selfish ambitions attempting to carve out a career for themselves. Be a good mother or be a good researcher.

– I am afraid [blogger Anthony Watts] has exposed you as something of an academic fool. Try using actual data next time.

– Stop using Jesus to justify your wacko ideas about global warming. First, it is an insult to the Lord Jesus. Second, it is insulting to those of us who actually take our Christianity seriously. Third, it is juvenile.

– Do you believe in God? If you do, then you must believe that He is all powerful. But believing in AGW contradicts that, because to be able to change the climate in such a manner as you prescribe to would mean that we are more powerful than He is. I know better than that, but it would appear that you and your husband don’t. Maybe you should both take another look at your belief system. I think it needs some adjusting.

These attacks on climate scientists have been a troubling problem for years. In 2010, ABC News reported on death threats received by scientist Michael Mann. MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel received threats against his family for appearing at a recent forum with Republicans who want action on climate change. Morano published an attack on Emanuel’s wife at his website.

This kind of bile has a marked chilling effect on the decision by climate scientists whether to engage with the public. “I think that there is no question that much of this is intended to intimidate,” Hayhoe explained to Climate Crocks’ Peter Sinclair in a video interview.

In response to the campaigns of legal persecution, scientists have established the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

That the WSJ would publish an amateurish collection of falsehoods and half truths is no surprise.   The entire global Murdoch enterprise is designed to advance the pollutocrat do-nothing agenda (see Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change”).  As National Academy of Sciences member Peter Gleick explains in his evisceration of the piece, “Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal“:

But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

Science magazine – perhaps the nation’s most important journal on scientific issues – published the letter from the NAS members after the Journal turned it down.

A tad more surprising is that 16 admittedly non-leading scientists would choose to soil their reputations by stringing together a collection of long-debunked falsehoods.  What is surprising is that these falsehoods are more easily debunked than the typical disinformer clap-trap because they are so out-of-date!

Guys, if you’re going to push disinformation, you have to do better than this:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.  This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”….

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.

Well, as the chart above shows, the last 10 years were easily the hottest on record.  As the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking notes, “2011 was the 35^th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.”  Doh!

And apparently these guys missed the news that last year’s Koch-Funded and Skeptic-Led Study Finds Recent Warming “On the High End” and Speeding Up.  The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) concluded:

… we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s….  our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.

Double Doh!

Then again, what do you expect from a list of 16 scientists that include:

• Richard Lindzen, one of the most debunked  climate scientists in the world (see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”:  Trenberth: The flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got”).  See also Kerry Emanuel slams media, asserts Lindzen charge in Boston Globe is “pure fabrication.”
• William Happer, physicist, Chairman of the Board of a leading disinformer think-tank George Marshall Institute, heavily funded by Exxon Mobil and other anti-science funders.
• Roger Cohen, Former manager for Strategic Planning and Programs ExxonMobil Corporation, now a George Marshall Institute ‘expert’.
• Harrison H. Schmitt, geologist and astronaut, who believes enviros and climate scientists like Holdren are communists.

This gang that couldn’t shoot straight assert “it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.” In fact, as Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency explained last year, the world is on pace for 11°F warming, and “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.”

Yes, even school children know more than these guys!

They utterly misrepresent the work of serious climatologists like Kevin Trenberth.  Anybody who is actually paying attention to real science knows Trenberth explained 2 years ago that the way the disinformers were quoting him was nonsense, and they know recent analysis has done a good job of identifying where the “missing” warming went — the deep oceans (see my 9/11 post “Hottest Decade on Record Would Have Been Even Hotter But for Deep Oceans — Accelerated Warming May Be On Its Way“).  Let’s go through this one more time.

As Trenberth explained back in 2009, we have a vast amount of evidence that “global warming is continuing”:

But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it. That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (.pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.

“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.

In the paper, Trenberth posited the very recent surface temperature data might not be keeping up with the other data showing global warming because of a variety of reasons,  most  significantly “Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface?”  The answer to that appears to be “yes.”

The key point from recent observation is that whatever slight slowing in global warming some groups may have observed in the past decade, it was primarily in the surface temperature data set.  The oceans kept warming (see “Sorry Deniers, the Oceans are Still Warming as Predicted“):

Figure 1:   Revised estimate of global ocean heat content (10-1500 mtrs deep) for 2005-2010 derived from Argo measurements. The 6-yr trend accounts for 0.55±0.10Wm−2. Error bars and trend uncertainties exclude errors induced by remaining systematic errors in the global observing system. See Von Schuckmann & Le Traon (2011).  Via Skeptical Science.

It is worth adding that Trenberth signed the Must Read Bali Climate Declaration by Leading Scientists, which opens:

The 2007 IPCC report, compiled by several hundred climate scientists, has unequivocally concluded that our climate is warming rapidly, and that we are now at least 90% certain that this is mostly due to human activities. The amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere now far exceeds the natural range of the past 650,000 years, and it is rising very quickly due to human activity. If this trend is not halted soon, many millions of people will be at risk from extreme events such as heat waves, drought, floods and storms, our coasts and cities will be threatened by rising sea levels, and many ecosystems, plants and animal species will be in serious danger of extinction.

One can only dream that we lived in a world where that important declaration by more than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists would get more attention than either stolen emails or the silly sixteen.

The thing about these 16 scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom have no background whatsoever in climate science, is that because they don’t know the scientific literature, they are forced to cling to out-of-date claptrap:

In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years.

A nine-year-old paper?  Really guys?  If you want to know about de Freitas, DeSmogBlog has a great piece, “Skeptics Prefer Pal Review Over Peer Review: Chris de Freitas, Pat Michaels And Their Pals, 1997-2003.”

But the key point is that in the past 9 years,  there has been a National Academy of Sciences review of the literature and over a dozen  independent studies making clear that “Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause.”  Here are a few:

1. GRL:  “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.“
2. JGR:  “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.”
3. Unprecedented warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity (2010)
4. Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds (2009):
5. Sorry disinformers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years (2008)
6. Arctic Sea Ice Hockey Stick: Melt Unprecedented in Last 1,450 Years (2011)

The entire op-ed is just a laughable collection of out of date and debunked disinformer talking points.

Or, rather, it would be laughable if it worked for the fact that the Murdoch outlet is using these 16 scientists  to help push its do-nothing agenda.  Here is the key argument:

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere….

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls….  And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

In short, let’s do nothing and it’ll probably all work out for the best.  [I'll deal with Nordhaus in a later post, though it is worth noting now that Nordhaus's most recent paper finds "“Oil and Coal-Fired Power Plants Have Air Pollution Damages Larger Than Their Value Added” and Natural Gas generation damage is larger than its value added for even low CO2 prices.]

In fact, this perspective has  already been quite well debunked in the literature.  First off, we now know that the  totality of impacts of  global warming — warming, acidification, extreme weather, Dust-Bowlification — is already  showing evidence of harm to the biosphere, biodiversity, and  agriculture in particular:

• Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World.
• Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security
• NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path

Second, the only way we could  have modest warming is if we acted aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting now.  Ironically, or, rather, tragically, the one way to  be absolutely certain of high levels of warming and  catastrophic impacts is to do nothing for the next several decades, which  is clearly what these 16 scientists are promoting.  A  review of 50 recent studies makes that clear — see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces.”

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

Rather than quoting one economist, Nordhaus, we should listen to the  traditionally staid and conservative International Energy Agency in its recent IEA’s 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO]:

“On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change”….

“Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

I started by saying this piece had a counterfactual headline, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”

Panic is a sudden sensation of fear which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking….

It is the authors of the WSJ piece who are panicked because they have allowed their fear of climate action to “dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking.”  They have abandoned science.  Climate scientists and other climate realists like the IEA are not urging panic — quite the opposite, we are urging a reasoned and logical science-based policy response.

The tragedy is that if we listen to Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets and the handful of scientists willing to push anti-scientific nonsense, if we keep taking no serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then we make it far more likely that future generations will in fact panic, when they wake up sometime in the 2020s and realize how dire the situation is but how the disinformers have all but ended the possibility for averting catastrophe.

Murphy plays Dr. Tom Buckley, an assistant professor who works with famed hoax debunker Dr. Margaret Matheson (Weaver). As their departmental budget crumbles and they lose ground to Dr. Shackleton (Toby Jones), a “parapsychologist” who believes in paranormal phenomena, Tom pushes Margaret both to take on a pair of student research assistants, sexy Sally (a woefully underused Elizabeth Olsen) and Ben, and to investigate a famous blind psychic, Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro). As the pair proceed, they’re plagued by creepy phone calls, birds flying into windows fast enough to kill themselves, and mysteriously bent spoons. Ultimately, Silver agrees to undergo trials run by the friendly Dr. Shackleton with Tom as an observer, and as the results are released, Tom confronts him at a show in a packed theater.

When the movie explores the horrors of academia, all is well. No self-respecting university would put this much muscle behind paranormal research, but no matter. Watching Margaret make a fool of Shackleton by beating his tests is tremendous fun, even if it doesn’t do any good. “There only way they could make it clearer they don’t want us is a marching band,” Tom grumbles as their position relative to Shackleton’s erodes further. Later, he forces Shackleton to at least let him observe Silver’s trials, shoving him up against a wall and screaming “I want to be on that committee, Shackleton! Don’t give me more excuses! Just do it!” Silly stuff, but it conveys some of the desperation of being shut out. I can imagine graduate students struggling to keep their funding will empathize. Ultimately, it’s Sally and Ben who make a critical discovery, rather than Tom, and their revelation turns out not to matter very much anyway. While I won’t reveal it, Tom ends up meeting a more dramatic fate that suggests whatever time and money he spent on his PhD may have been a waste. Academia has rarely looked worse.

Red Lights is also, briefly, a promising movie about doubt that brings some novel perspectives to common decisions. “If I thought there was something else, I’d turn off all that crap and let my son go,” Margaret says of her son, who has spent years in a coma in an interesting inversion of the rationalist’s approach to brain death. Other times, it’s less convincing: at one point, Tom compares acupuncture and homeopathy to belief in the paranormal despite the fact that the former is in use by military doctors. It’s a weird little slip that suggests the movie isn’t very serious about the line between hoax and scientific validation. And the movie’s twist ending ultimately undermines any commitment or rigor the movie has to the ideas it spends much of its time exploring.

It’s a perfect example of reaching for something more than human and coming away with junk. It’s too bad Rodrigo Cortés, who wrote and directed Red Lights, didn’t trust Tom and Margaret to be interesting enough on their own.

RealClimate Commenter:  Methane alarmism will not be dissuaded by any reasonable means. But nice try David. ;)

Response [by geophysicist David Archer]: Well, to be honest, sometimes I do get spooked myself. There is a lot of carbon up there. David. PS: On further reflection, I don’t think I want to be fighting being alarmed about methane bubbles in the Arctic. I am alarmed too, but perhaps I’m alarmed for a longer time frame than some. David]

Whether or not you should be alarmed by Arctic methane depends on your definition of “alarmed.”  And it depends on how much you follow the other areas of climate science, many of which are, for me, considerably more “alarming” (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“):

Something truly alarming (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (our current “no policy” strategy) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions — fatally rejected by deniers, the breakthrough bunch, and the ignorati — dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.   Concern about methane emissions has risen in recent years because methane levels have been risen in recent years after a decade of little growth and because there have been reports of massive methane plumes of the Arctic coast and because the carbon-rich permafrost is thawing.

Fortunately, the best NOAA analysis “suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH₄ hydrates,” a finding Climate Progress first reported 3 years ago.

But much more rapid ice loss in the Arctic than expected, accompanied by rapid permafrost warming, has convinced leading experts now say that frozen carbon is likely to start being released at a large-scale in the next few decades –  some of it in the form of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 — causing 2.5 times the warming of deforestation.  That would complicate any efforts by humanity to reduce emissions and avert multiple, simultaneous catastrophes (see below).  This largely unmodeled amplifying carbon-cycle feedback is, obviously, worrisome and even alarming.

As an aside, the word “alarm” literally meant “a call to arms” — as in, there is imminent danger folks, saddle up.  So we have “alarm” defined as “a sudden fear caused by the realization of danger” or “a warning of existing or approaching danger.”

An another aside, the do-little crowd and their enablers/stenographers — you know who they are — have two big tricks to poo-pooh “alarmists.”  First, they attack alarmists as predicting “certain doom,” pointing out that the models are filled with uncertainty and predict a large range of impacts.  But they don’t tell you that their preferred course of action — doing very little — cuts out most of the uncertainty, sharply narrows the impact range, and thus dramatically increases the probability of the catastrophe (see MIT’s wheel of misfortune above).

Second, the snooze button pushers attack alarmists for supposedly saying we are experiencing a real-time catastrophe, but they are really hiding behind the lags in the energy and climate system.  The climate realists are alarmed not because the doom hits in the next few years, but because if we don’t act aggressively in the next few years, the “doom” becomes exceedingly difficult to avoid.

In short, the do-little crowd and their enablers/stenographers have won the day politically, which means the alarmists have “won the day” scientifically.  Put another way, anyone who isn’t alarmed right now, simply doesn’t know what they are talking about.  As but one piece of proof:  The historically staid and conservative International Energy Agency has joined the ranks of the “alarmists” — see IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy.”

The notion it’s alarmist to say that where we are headed is catastrophic is, well, just laughable … or cryable.  As the chief economist for the IEA said in November about the fact that the world is on pace for 6°C (11 F) warming “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.”

Darn you alarmist school children!

So we should retire the term “alarmist” and its variations.  We are climate realists — or climate hawks, if you prefer.  The snooze button pushers, well, they are still asleep at the wheel, which I wish were a mixed metaphor, but I guess those warning in the ads for Ambien are right — those pill-popping politicians and pundits driving the national and global SUV are sound asleep but don’t know it.  And that’s not even counting the disinformers, who I guess in this extended metaphor are working desperately to unplug the alarm clock or encase it in tar sands.  I digress.

Recently, geophysicist David Archer, an expert on the carbon cycle and methane hydrates, wrote three pieces on Arctic methane for the must-read website RealClimate.  The first is titled, “Much ado about methane,” though it would have been better titled “Much ado about methane hydrates.”  The second is “An Arctic methane worst-case scenario.” The third post discusses a model he created that you can play around with if you want an even worse case or a better one.

I am generally a fan of analyzing worst-case scenarios for two reasons.  First, in real life, individuals base a considerable amount of their planning and spending on worst-case scenarios (fire burning down your house,  catastrophic  healthcare problem) and so do governments:  Just think about how much money and material and manpower the U.S. has devoted since 1945 over the possibility of a Russian nuclear attack or tank invasion of West Europe or the need to fight two wars  simultaneously, and so on.  Second, many of those pesky worst-case scenarios somehow seem to keep happening where humans are involved — Fukushima being a classic example — which isn’t a big surprise given that ignoring warnings, which are sometimes called alarms, pretty much guarantees things are going to be worse than folks thought.

So here is what Archer finds in his worst-case scenario — if “the Arctic started to degas methane 100 times faster than it is today”:

… methane is a reactive gas and its presence leads to other greenhouse forcings, like the water vapor it decomposes into. Hansen estimates the “efficacy” of methane radiative forcing to be 1.4 (Hansen et al, 2005, Shindell et al, 2009), so that puts us to 4 or even 5 Watts/m².

This is about twice the radiative forcing today from all anthropogenic greenhouse gases today, or (again according to Modtran) it would translate to an equivalent CO₂ at today’s methane concentration of about 750 ppm. That seems significant, for sure.

Or, trying to “correct” for the different lifetimes of the gases using Global Warming Potentials, over a 100-year time horizon (which still way under-represents the lifetime of the CO₂), you get that the methane would be equivalent to increasing CO₂ to about 500 ppm, lower than 750 because the CO₂forcing lasts longer than the methane, which the GWP calculation tries in its own myopic way to account for.

But the methane worst case does not suddenly spell the extinction of human life on Earth. It does not lead to a runaway greenhouse. The worst-case methane scenario stands comparable to what CO₂ can do. What CO₂ will do, under business-as-usual, not in a wild blow-the-doors-off unpleasant surprise, but just in the absence of any pleasant surprises (like emission controls). At worst comparable to CO₂ except that CO₂ lasts essentially forever.

Fair enough. Archer says in the comments of the second post:

On further reflection, I don’t think I want to be fighting being alarmed about methane bubbles in the Arctic. I am alarmed too, but perhaps I’m alarmed for a longer time frame than some.

The thing is, we don’t need no stinking methane bubbles to be alarmed hawks.  Business as usual is beyond catastrophic according to the recent scientific literature (see Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!)

I go through about 50 recent studies here.  They make clear the key impacts we face in the coming decades if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
• Permanent Dust Bowl conditions over the U.S. Southwest and many other heavily populated and arable regions around the globe
• Sea level rise of around 1 foot by 2050, then 4 to 6 feet (or more) by 2100, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Massive species loss on land and sea — perhaps 50% or more of all biodiversity
• Much more extreme weather
• Food insecurity — the increasingly difficulty task of feeding 7 billion, then 8 billion, and then 9 billion people in a world with an ever-worsening climate.
• Myriad direct health impacts

Remember, these will all be happening simultaneously and getting worse decade after decade.  Equally tragic, a 2009 NOAA-led study found the worst impacts would be “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”

The single biggest failure of messaging by climate scientists (until very recently) has been the failure to explain to the public, opinion makers, and the media that business-as-usual warming results in simultaneous, ever-worsening impacts that, individually, are each beyond catastrophic, but combined are unimaginablly horrific.

By virtue of their success in promoting doubt and inaction, the snooze button pushers have, tragically and ironically, turned the worst-case scenario into business as usual.

If “the extinction of human life on Earth” or “a runaway greenhouse” are your criteria for being alarmed, then, you need methane hydrates.

If desperately trying to feed 9 billion people by mid-century in a world with a ruined, yet ever-worsening climate is your criterion — as I argued it should be in my recent Nature piece — then CO2 is more than sufficient to wake anyone up, sadly.  Well, it’s sufficient to wake them up until they join the Obama administration — see Steven Chu on climate change (2/09): “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

Put another way, we’ve already got a 9-alarm fire we’re ignoring.  One more alarm won’t wake up the Ambien crowd.

For the record, the worst-case scenario without methane hydrates is, well, pretty friggin’ bad:

• Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming Details ‘Hellish Vision’ of 7°F (4°C) World — Which We May Face as early as the 2060s! “In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.”



This is indeed 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic.  The question isn’t if it will happen on our current emissions path but when will it happen:  On the 2060s, 2090s, 0r 2120s?

Finally, I do think most of the people looking at the emissions from a defrosting tundra along with the potential for methane hydrate releases are probably not looking at the current business-as-usual warming cases, since those were the IPCC’s worst-case scenarios just a few years ago.

But it’s pretty clear that on business as usual, the Arctic is going to get very, very, very warm this decade (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“).

And that it will ultimately get even warmer than that:

• Science stunner — On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter:  Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 “may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models.”

But, of course, modern civilization as we know it today can’t survive anywhere near such warming.  Surely humanity wouldn’t be so self-destructively unalarmed as to let this happen?

by Peter Gleick

The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now. Yet on the policy front, once again, national leaders did little to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe consequences of climate changes, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and much more.

Why the failure to act? In part because climate change is a truly difficult challenge. But in part because of a concerted, well-funded, and aggressive anti-science campaign by climate change deniers and contrarians. These are mostly groups focused on protecting narrow financial interests, ideologues fearful of any government regulation, or scientific contrarians who cling to outdated, long-refuted interpretations of science. While much of the opposition to addressing the issue of climate change is political, it often hides behind pseudo-scientific claims, with persistent efforts to intentionally mislead the public and policymakers with bad science about climate change. Much of this effort is based on intentional falsehoods, misrepresentations, inflated uncertainties, or pure and utter B.S. – the same tactics that delayed efforts to tackle tobacco’s health risks long after the science was understood (as documented in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book, Merchants of Doubt).

Last year, we issued the first ever “Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards.” I am now pleased to present the 2nd Annual (2011) Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards. In preparing the 2011 list of nominees, suggestions were received from around the world and a panel of reviewers — all climate scientists or climate communicators — waded through them. We present here the top nominees and the winner of the 2011 Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards.

The 2011 Winner:

Climate B.S.* from all of the Republican candidates for President of the United States

Is it really necessary to be anti-science in general, and anti-climate science in particular, in order to be nominated to lead the Republican Party in the United States? Apparently, yes, at least in the minds of the Republican presidential candidates or their advisors. These candidates can be split into three groups: those ignorant or uninterested in science and its role in informing policy; those who intentionally distort science because it conflicts with deeply held political or religious ideology; and those who blow with the wind, giving their allegiance to whatever ideology seems most expedient at any given moment. There is some overlap, of course: some candidates, such as Rick Perry, have been in all three groups at various times. The third group includes candidates who have at one time or another held positions more or less consistent with scientific understanding but who in 2011 adopted anti-scientific positions during their primary campaigns. For example, Gingrich, Romney, and Huntsman, at some point in the past, all expressed at least a partial understanding about the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change. Yet all three have now retreated from the scientific evidence to faulty but ideological safe positions demanded by the conservative wing of the Republican Party. In October, Romney caved in to conservative pressure and changed his stance on the issue. Just days ago, after pressure from anti-climate-science activists, Gingrich cut a chapter on climate science from a book of environmental essays he had agreed to produce. Ironically, that chapter was to have been written by an atmospheric scientist (Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University) who happens to be an evangelical and speaks regularly to conservative groups. She was also targeted by these activists for personal abuse – a tactic often pursued by climate deniers and contrarians.  (For a few of the craziest things the top GOP candidates have said on climate change, see Joe Romm’s recent essay at Think Progress.)

In short, the choice among the Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, disdain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency, any one of which would make the Republican candidates strong contenders for the 2011 Climate B.S. Award. Combined? They win hands down.

[For comparison, while the Obama Administration has made little progress (and some would argue insufficient effort) on climate change, the President’s stated position on climate change is clear and in line with scientific evidence. And here is his unequivocal comment on scientific integrity:

“Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world’s leader in science and technology…the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources. It’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient. Especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth, and a greater understanding of the world around us…” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFsB1Jk1OQ0]

Second Place: Disinformation from Fox News and Murdoch’s News Corporation

In this year’s competition, we award Fox News second place – up from their fifth place finish last year. This year, the award is extended to the entire News Corporation empire of Rupert Murdoch because of its apparent efforts to synchronize anti-climate science reporting among the different Murdoch outlets in the UK, the U.S., and Australia. Among the bad climate science promoted by Fox News is that snowy weather disproves global warming (while ignoring or inaccurately reporting record high temperatures recorded around the world); biased and misleading reporting about the content of emails stolen from climate scientists; incorrect claims that El Niños are responsible for global warming; and inaccurate reporting about fundamental scientific principles.

Other Murdoch empire assaults on climate science?

The editorial page editors of the Wall Street Journal routinely dismiss or ignore all climate change science. Glenn Beck incorrectly tells viewers that there has been no warming in the past decade – the hottest decade in over a century. Sean Hannity says “global warming doesn’t exist.” Fox Washington managing editor Bill Sammon officially directed his journalists to cast doubt on climate science. Brian Kilmeade, of Fox & Friends, joked, “Sorry global warming people, we have too many polar bears.” And of course, Bill O’Reilly has stated incorrectly, “For every scientist who says there is [climate change], there’s one that says there isn’t.” [Thanks to MediaMatters for tracking these statements.] As a 2011 story in Rolling Stone noted, “[n]o one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch.”

In an analysis of network news reporting on climate change, Feldman, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, and Leiserowitz concluded that Fox News is consistently the most dismissive about climate change and is highly biased toward choosing climate change doubters to interview. Nearly half of their guests dismiss climate change compared to 9 and 15% at CNN and MSNBC. In the scientific community, 97 to 98% of climate scientists accept human-caused climate change. This misinformation has an effect: a study from Stanford University shows that Fox viewers are far more likely to be fundamentally misinformed about climate change than others. In short, frequent exposure to Murdoch news reporting can be hazardous to your understanding and knowledge of the real world.

Third Place: Spencer, Braswell, and Christy for their lack of climate “sensitivity”

Third place goes to Roy Spencer and William (Danny) Braswell for a research paper on climate sensitivity, and John Christy, for an astounding piece of misleading testimony at a Congressional climate change hearing. Both the paper and the testimony received lavish attention from climate contrarians (including an especially absurd piece from the Heartland Institute, published as a Forbes blog post) and both were extensively and surgically debunked by the scientific community. The key scientific issue here is “climate sensitivity” – how much the climate will change in response to natural and human influences. Spencer and Christy have argued for many years that the sensitivity of the climate is low, and their science has been constantly, regularly, and convincingly disputed. In 2011, Spencer and Braswell published a paper in the journal Remote Sensing that turned out to contain serious scientific errors according to experts working in this field. What makes a scientific paper ‘bad’?  A bad paper makes substantive errors in the analysis, misrepresents or ignores conflicting data or conflicting research, fails to address alternative explanations, or draws conclusions logically inconsistent with the results. Critics argued that this paper suffered from all of these problems (see the Dessler analysis, a video describing the flaws, the Trenberth and Fasullo assessment, and a formal response published in Remote Sensing).

In an astounding event, Wolfgang Wagner, the editor of the journal that published the Spencer and Braswell paper, resigned for having failed to spot the paper’s scientific flaws during peer review. As he stated in his resignation letter:

“After having become aware of the situation, and studying the various pro and contra arguments, I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing… With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements.”

Similar flawed scientific arguments about climate sensitivity made in the paper were repeated, along with other incorrect or misleading arguments about climate science, in testimony of John Christy at the March 8, 2011 hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, called by the Republicans to try to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas pollution. In Christy’s testimony, he repeats arguments that many in the climate science community consider to be myths and errors, including continued reliance on a scientific article that other climate scientists have argued is flawed. Here is a comprehensive summary of Christy’s errors. Finally, two new studies (here and upcoming by Po-Chedley and Fu in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology) also identify analytical errors in papers and pronouncements by Spencer and Christy – adding to a long line of errors that have required corrections to their work for more than a decade.

Fourth Place: The Koch Brothers for funding the promotion of bad climate science

Fourth place goes to fossil-fuel billionaires Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, Inc., who provide substantial funding to groups and politicians who deny the science of climate change. As noted in a New Yorker story, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outspent even ExxonMobil in funding a network of anti-climate science groups. A partial list of groups funded by the Koch brothers includes a veritable who’s who of groups that put out misleading science or tout bad science on climate change. Tim Phillips, president of the super-PAC funded by the Kochs, Americans for Prosperity, brags outright about their political influence on Republican candidates: “If you look at where the situation was three years ago and where it is today, there’s been a dramatic turnaround. Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political. We’ve made great headway.” This may be good for their business, but it is bad for America, bad for science, and bad for our climate.

Fifth Place: Anthony Watts for his BEST, and worst, climate hypocrisy

Anthony Watts runs a blog popular with the anti-climate science crowd. He ran into a brick wall this year when he voiced support for an ongoing climate study (the “Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature” or “BEST” study) that he thought would prove his anti-warming beliefs to be right because it was being done by someone he thought was in his camp (“… I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”). Unfortunately for him, that study proved his premise wrong and instead reconfirmed what climate scientists have been saying for decades: the Earth’s surface is warming and at just the rate that numerous previous studies had shown. Watts then proceeded to tear down the paper, ostensibly because it hadn’t been through peer-review, despite the fact that Watts, his guest posters, and commenters routinely and consistently produce or cite non-peer-reviewed science (often later shown to be wrong) to support their claims.

Runners Up: Other Noteworthy Climate B.S. of 2011

Some voters felt that the following entries submitted for the 2011 Climate B.S. competition deserve recognition though they win no awards from us.

Harrison Schmitt and the Heartland Institute for “Arcticgate”

As the Arctic ice disappears before our eyes, we must call attention to former Senator Harrison Schmitt’s refusal to correct persistent errors and “cherry picking” of data in denying the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and for the Heartland Institute’s promulgation of – and refusal to correct – those errors when they were uncovered.

Rush Limbaugh for his consistent falsehoods about climate science

We would acknowledge Rush Limbaugh for his blatant and stunningly high level of climate B.S., but he has already been awarded the “Climate Change Misinformer of the Year” award at MediaMatters.org.

Steve McIntyre

And finally, the “dishonorable” mention of the year goes to Steve McIntyre for his despicable smear of climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University (and to Anthony Watts for amplifying that smear) by drawing a parallel between the Penn State pedophilia investigation and their separate scientific investigation of questions about climate research (in which Professor Mann has been completely and repeatedly exonerated). Joe Romm discusses this disgusting case here.

The 2011 Climate B.S. of the Year Award was prepared by Peter Gleick with an independent group of climate scientists and communicators serving as nominators, reviewer, and voters. Thanks to all who participated this year. See you next year.

– Dr. Peter H. Gleick is co-founder and President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. He is an internationally recognized climate and water expert and works at the intersection of science and policy, including issues related to the integrity of science. Dr. Gleick received a B.S. from Yale University in Engineering and Applied Science, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California, Berkeley. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, among them the prestigious MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 2003. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Unlike Scrooge, we don’t get a spirit to show us what the future holds if we don’t change our ways.

In the past two years, though, we have gotten the tiniest glimpse of climate gone wild (see “Masters: “The stunning extremes we witnessed [in 2010] gives me concern that our climate is showing the early signs of instability” and A New Record: 14 U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters in 2011).  And we did get dozens of scientific papers warning us of what is to come (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces).

M.I.T. laid out the choice in its 2009 analysis:

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

Yes, it is increasingly unlikely that we will adopt the aggressive but low-net-cost policies needed to stabilize at 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and then quickly come back to 350 — thanks in large part to the deniers, along with their political pals and media enablers.  But when reporters ask me if it’s “too late,” — or, as one did recently, “have we crossed a tipping point?” — I have to explain that the question doesn’t have a purely scientific answer.

It does seem clear that the most dangerous carbon-cycle feedback — the defrosting permafrost — hasn’t kicked in yet but is likely to with two decades (see “Carbon Time Bomb in the Arctic“).

If humanity gets truly serious about emissions reduction — and by serious I mean “World War II serious” in both scale and urgency — we could go to near-zero global emissions in, say, 2 decades and then quickly go carbon negative.  It wouldn’t be easy, far from it (see “The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm“).  But even in the 2020s it would be vastly cheaper and preferable to the alternative (see Scientists find “net present value of climate change impacts” of $1240 TRILLION on current emissions path, making mitigation to under 450 ppm a must).

Delay is very risky and expensive.  In releasing its 2009 Energy Outloook, the International Energy Agency explained, “we need to act urgently and now. Every year of delay adds an extra USD 500 billion to the investment needed between 2010 and 2030 in the energy sector”. In releasing its 2011 Energy Outloook, the IEA said “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change” and “we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F].” They concluded:

Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

This is all by way of introduction to a holiday rerun repost. Three years ago I wrote about a NOAA led paper, which found:

…the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop…. Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the “dust bowl” era and inexorable sea level rise.

And we know that large parts of the currently habited and arable land are at risk of turning into Dust Bowls, gravely threatening global food security.

We most certainly do not want to significantly exceed 450 ppm for any length of time, as Dust-Bowlification isn’t the only impact that is irreversible:

• 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
• 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.”
• Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred
• 2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”

That said, RealClimate made a good point with the title of its 2009 post, “Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable“:

We at Realclimate have been getting a lot of calls from journalists about this paper, and some of them seem to have gone all doomsday on us.

Indeed, the NOAA-led study was the perfect paper for someone, like say, Lou Dobbs, who went from hard-core doubt/denial to credulous hopelessness in one breath, as he did January 30, 2009 [(h/t ClimateScienceWatch)]:

Let’s assume, for right now, that there is such a thing as climate change, let’s assume it’s manmade. What indication-what evidence do we have, what reason do we have to believe that mankind can do anything significantly to reverse it because a number of people, as you know in the last two weeks, are reported that, that, this is a 1,000-year trend irrespective of what we do.

Yeah, let’s assume, for right now, there is climate change and let’s further assume its manmade since there’s like no factual basis for actually knowing those things (see U.S. National Academy of Sciences labels as “settled facts” that “the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities”).  Then let’s tell the public the latest research means if there is manmade climate change, the situation is now hopeless — when in fact the latest research makes it all the more urgent to keep total emissions and concentrations as low as possible.

Seriously. This guy had his own hour TV show on a major cable network … albeit one that fired its staff covering science and environment and hired a psychic to cover climate change (OK, let’s assume, for right now, that I made up that last part).

The whole world has become Dickensian (see “A Tale of Two Disasters“), which just happens to remind me of another Dickens story relevant to the theme that irreversible does not mean unstoppable:

“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.”

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.

“Am I that man who lay upon the bed?” he cried, upon his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

“No, Spirit! Oh no, no!”

The finger still was there.

“Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?”

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life.”

The kind hand trembled.

Or, as RealClimate put it less poetically:

But you have to remember that the climate changes so far, both observed and committed to, are minor compared with the business-as-usual forecast for the end of the century. It’s further emissions we need to worry about. Climate change is like a ratchet, which we wind up by releasing CO₂. Once we turn the crank, there’s no easy turning back to the natural climate. But we can still decide to stop turning the crank, and the sooner the better.

Indeed, we are only committed to about 2°C total warming so far, which is a probably manageable — and even more probably, if we did keep CO2 concentrations from peaking below 450 ppm, the small amount of CO2 we are likely to be able to remove from the atmosphere this century could well take us below the danger zone.

But if we don’t reverse emissions trends soon, we will probably triple that temperature rise, most likely negating any practical strategy to undo the impacts for hundreds of years:

• Hadley Center: Catastrophic 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path
• Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!“
• Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world — which we may face in the 2060s!
• Science stunner — On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter.

Such is the climate change yet to come.

Projected carbon emission (in billions of tons of carbon a year) from thawing permafrost.  From a 2011 NOAA/NSIDC study with moderate warming and other conservative assumptions.

The good news:  The best NOAA analysis “suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH₄ hydrates.” Climate Progress first reported that finding 2 years ago.  The lead author of that work confirms to CP it still remains true — despite the fact that methane levels have been rising for the past 5 years after a decade of little growth.

The bad news:  Leading experts at NOAA, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and around the world now expect the permafrost to become a major source of atmospheric carbon in the next few decades (see “NSIDC/NOAA: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100″ and “Nature:  Climate Experts Warn Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation!“)

NY Times science reporter Justin Gillis has just published an excellent overview article, “As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks.”  The piece makes clear we may be near a tipping point, citing University of Alaska scientist Vladimir Romanovsky:

In northern Alaska, Dr. Romanovsky said, permafrost is warming rapidly but is still quite cold. In the central part of the state, much of it is hovering just below the freezing point and may be no more than a decade or two from widespread thawing.

That thawing is of great concern because the permafrost contains a staggering amount of carbon, as Nature reported:

The latest estimate is that some 18.8 million square kilometres of northern soils hold about 1,700 billion tonnes of organic carbon⁴ — the remains of plants and animals that have been accumulating in the soil over thousands of years. That is about four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity in modern times and twice as much as is present in the atmosphere now.

The permafrost carbon thus represents a dangerous amplifying feedback or vicious cycle whereby warming leads to accelerated emissions, which leads to further warming.  And that could lead to a point of no return, as Gillis reports:

In the minds of most experts, the chief worry is not that the carbon in the permafrost will break down quickly — typical estimates say that will take more than a century, perhaps several — but that once the decomposition starts, it will be impossible to stop….

That’s especially true since sea ice loss in the Arctic is happening faster than every major climate model projected — and accelerated Arctic warming and permafrost loss was linked to ice loss in a 2008 study by leading tundra experts, “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss“:

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland and is apparent throughout most of the year, peaking in autumn. Idealized experiments using the Community Land Model, with improved permafrost dynamics, indicate that an accelerated warming period substantially increases ground heat accumulation. Enhanced heat accumulation leads to rapid degradation of warm permafrost and may increase the vulnerability of colder permafrost to degradation under continued warming. Taken together, these results imply a link between rapid sea ice loss and permafrost health.

And, of course, recent analysis suggests that our current “no policy” approach to climate will lead to staggering Arctic warming this century (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F).

So by any objective measure, the recent science and observations of the permafrost are increasingly worrisome.

While the NY Times‘ Gillis gets this right in the print edition, NYT blogger Andy Revkin asserts in a post published 3 days earlier focused on sea-based methane hydrates, “There’s an entirely different set of questions, also with relatively reassuring answers, about the vast amounts of methane locked in permafrost on land.”  Not!

The NYT would seem to be schizophrenic on this crucial topic, but Gillis clearly has the story right and it isn’t reassuring at all.

Indeed, Gillis adds some new reporting that is very un-reassuring:

A troubling trend has emerged recently: Wildfires are increasing across much of the north, and early research suggests that extensive burning could lead to a more rapid thaw of permafrost.

Let’s look at the highlights of the important Gillis piece before returning to the sea-based issue:

Preliminary computer analyses, made only recently, suggest that the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions could eventually become an annual source of carbon equal to 15 percent or so of today’s yearly emissions from human activities.But those calculations were deliberately cautious. A recent survey drew on the expertise of 41 permafrost scientists to offer more informal projections. They estimated that if human fossil-fuel burning remained high and the planet warmed sharply, the gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of today’s annual human emissions.

The experts also said that if humanity began getting its own emissions under control soon, the greenhouse gases emerging from permafrost could be kept to a much lower level, perhaps equivalent to 10 percent of today’s human emissions.

Even at the low end, these numbers mean that the long-running international negotiations over greenhouse gases are likely to become more difficult, with less room for countries to continue burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

In the minds of most experts, the chief worry is not that the carbon in the permafrost will break down quickly — typical estimates say that will take more than a century, perhaps several — but that once the decomposition starts, it will be impossible to stop.

“Even if it’s 5 or 10 percent of today’s emissions, it’s exceptionally worrying, and 30 percent is humongous,” said Josep G. Canadell, a scientist in Australia who runs a global program to monitor greenhouse gases. “It will be a chronic source of emissions that will last hundreds of years.”

Are you relatively reassured yet?

The article has a nice graphic (click to enlarge).

When the Tundra Burns

Gillis has some important reporting on a related amplifying feedback

One day in 2007, on the plain in northern Alaska, a lightning strike set the tundra on fire.

Historically, tundra, a landscape of lichens, mosses and delicate plants, was too damp to burn. But the climate in the area is warming and drying, and fires in both the tundra and forest regions of Alaska are increasing.

The Anaktuvuk River fire burned about 400 square miles of tundra, and work on lake sediments showed that no fire of that scale had occurred in the region in at least 5,000 years.

Scientists have calculated that the fire and its aftermath sent a huge pulse of carbon into the air — as much as would be emitted in two years by a city the size of Miami. Scientists say the fire thawed the upper layer of permafrost and set off what they fear will be permanent shifts in the landscape.

Up to now, the Arctic has been absorbing carbon, on balance, and was once expected to keep doing so throughout this century. But recent analyses suggest that the permafrost thaw could turn the Arctic into a net source of carbon, possibly within a decade or two, and those studies did not account for fire.

“I maintain that the fastest way you’re going to lose permafrost and release permafrost carbon to the atmosphere is increasing fire frequency,” said Michelle C. Mack, a University of Florida scientist who is studying the Anaktuvuk fire. “It’s a rapid and catastrophic way you could completely change everything.”

Gillis points outs:

The essential question scientists need to answer is whether the many factors they do not yet understand could speed the release of carbon from permafrost — or, possibly, slow it more than they expect.

For instance, nutrients released from thawing permafrost could spur denser plant growth in the Arctic, and the plants would take up some carbon dioxide. Conversely, should fires like the one at Anaktuvuk River race across warming northern landscapes, immense amounts of organic material in vegetation, soils, peat deposits and thawed permafrost could burn.

I’ve written about the peat issue recently (see “Stunning Peatlands Amplifying Feedback — Drying Wetlands and Intensifying Wildfires Boost Carbon Release Ninefold: “Drying of northern wetlands has led to much more severe peatland wildfires and nine times as much carbon released into the atmosphere, according to new research“).

I would add that denser plant growth in the Arctic might not actually be such a good thing — because of reduced snow cover and albedo (reflectivity).  According to a 2008 Science article:  “Continuation of current trends in shrub and tree expansion could further amplify [Arctic] atmospheric heating 2-7 times.”  The point is that if you convert a white landscape to a boreal forest, the surface suddenly starts collecting a lot more solar energy (see “Tundra 3: Forests and fires foster feedbacks“).

The point is that if you convert a white landscape to a boreal forest, the surface suddenly starts collecting a lot more solar energy.

And then we have the study, “Frequent Fires in Ancient Shrub Tundra: Implications of Paleorecords for Arctic Environmental Change,” which finds:

… greater fire activity will likely accompany temperature-related increases in shrub-dominated tundra predicted for the 21^st century and beyond. Increased tundra burning will have broad impacts on physical and biological systems as well as on land-atmosphere interactions in the Arctic, including the potential to release stored organic carbon to the atmosphere.

The concern is not so much the direct emissions from burning tundra. As the article concludes:  “studies of modern tundra fires suggest the possibility for both short- and long-term impacts from increased summer soil temperatures and moisture levels from altered surface albedo and roughness, and the release soil carbon through increased permafrost thaw depths and the consumption of the organic layer.”

Gillis ends his piece:

Edward A. G. Schuur, a University of Florida researcher who has done extensive field work in Alaska, is worried by the changes he already sees, including the discovery that carbon buried since before the dawn of civilization is now escaping.

“To me, it’s a spine-tingling feeling, if it’s really old carbon that hasn’t been in the air for a long time, and now it’s entering the air,” Dr. Schuur said. “That’s the fingerprint of a major disruption, and we aren’t going to be able to turn it off someday.”

There is nothing reassuring in the least about recent permafrost research and observation.

Methane Emissions

It is widely believe that some of the carbon locked away in the tundra will be released as methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.  Gillis notes:

If a substantial amount of the carbon should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming. An especially worrisome possibility is that a significant proportion will emerge not as carbon dioxide, the gas that usually forms when organic material breaks down, but as methane, produced when the breakdown occurs in lakes or wetlands. Methane is especially potent at trapping the sun’s heat, and the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science.

Methane is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times to 100 times as potent over 20 years!  The new Nature study found:

Across all the warming scenarios, we project that most of the released carbon will be in the form of CO₂, with only about 2.7% in the form of CH₄. However, because CH₄ has a higher global-warming potential, almost half the effect of future permafrost-zone carbon emissions on climate forcing is likely to be from CH₄. That is roughly consistent with the tens of billions of tonnes of CH₄ thought to have come from oxygen-limited environments in northern ecosystems after the end of the last glacial period.

And because of the much higher warming impact of methane over shorter time frames, even this low percentage level of methane means that over a 20 year period, the warming from CH₄ will actually be higher than that of CO₂.

Because methane is so potent and because of the recent literature on the Arctic warming and tundra melt, many have wondered whether the Arctic is responsible for the recent  resurgence in global methane levels.  Here is the latest data from The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index:

As you can see, methane levels  are on the march again after almost a decade.

Back in 2009, I wrote about a NOAA-led study, Dlugokencky et al., “Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH₄ burden” (subs. req’d, NOAA online news story here), which found:

The most likely drivers of the CH₄ anomalies observed during 2007 and 2008 are anomalously high temperatures in the Arctic and greater than average precipitation in the tropics. Near-zero CH₄ growth in the Arctic during 2008 suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH₄ hydrates.

But then we seemed to get some reports that suggested that Arctic methane hydrates could be a source of the continuing surge (see my March 2010 post here).  The lead author of an NSF-funded study said on the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf said, “Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already.  If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”  The NSF warned, ““Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

And then this month, we had the UK’s Independent writing a story on the work of Russian scientist Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbank, “Shock As Retreat of Arctic Sea Ice Releases Deadly Methane Gas Levels.”

But Dlugokencky emails that his work through 2010 confirms:

There is no evidence from our atmospheric measurements that there has been a significant increase in emissions during the past 20 years from natural methane sources in the Arctic so far.

And, as Revkin notes, a new study finds, “Siberian shelf methane emissions not tied to modern warming” (subs. req’d).  That study suggests the offshore methane hydrates are unlikely to be a big contributor to methane emissions this century.

I tend to think all bets are off after 2100 if we are idiotic enough  to stay on our current emissions path (see Science stunner — On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter).

I wanted to probe further, so I interviewed Stephen Wofsy of Harvard University.  He has been flying on NSF’s research plane HIAPER (for High Performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research) as part of the HIPPO (for HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations) pollution mapping program.

Science News had written this back in September:

Something too new to fully understand (although a report on it is being prepared for publication), Wofsy says, is a finding of notable concentrations of methane in the Arctic’s atmosphere that trace back to the sea.

“Oceanographers have known for some time that there is production of methane in surface waters of the Arctic,” he says, but “it’s never been observed in the atmosphere.” Those oceanographic data, he says, suggest a source for this methane other than sediments or the melting of icy gas hydrates.

The phenomenon also appears very widespread. “We observed that the ocean surface releases methane to the atmosphere all over the whole of the Arctic Ocean,” Wofsy says.

Climate scientists have been concerned about whether the Arctic Ocean’s loss of summer ice cover might lead, through some feedback mechanisms, to boosting the release of methane. Concludes Wofsy: Thanks to HIPPO, “This hypothesized feedback has been observed for the first time.” And there are hints, he adds, that methane’s source may be something other than melting of gas hydrates.

Tantalizing, no?

According to Wofsy, HIPPO saw significant methane fluxes over the Arctic ocean away from the shore — but this “wasn’t seen where the ice is solid.”  He thinks it is probably due to micro-organisims munching anaerobically.  And he thinks that the retreat of the ice increases the productivity of the micro-organisims and allows more of the methane to escape.

He doesn’t think this will “blow the world up,” but he does think it is a significant effect and could increase as the ice retreats.  He’ll be describing his findings in more detail in a forthcoming Journal article.

BOTTOM LINE

The key conclusion remains unchanged from my October 2009 post, “Is it just too damn late?“  We have not crossed a tipping point or point of no return with methane releases in the Arctic.  It’s not too late to avert the worst impacts of human-caused global warming.

But what we now know that wasn’t so clear back then is that the best science and the leading scientists say we are likely to see large releases of carbon from the permafrost this century –  particularly if we don’t  aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting ASAP.

The stunning conclusion of the NOAA/NSIDC paper was:

The thaw and release of carbon currently frozen in permafrost will increase atmospheric CO2 concentrations and amplify surface warming to initiate a positive permafrost carbon feedback (PCF) on climate…. [Our] estimate may be low because it does not account for amplified surface warming due to the PCF itself….

We predict that the PCF will change the arctic from a carbon sink to a source after the mid-2020s and is strong enough to cancel 42-88% of the total global land sink. The thaw and decay of permafrost carbon is irreversible and accounting for the PCF will require larger reductions in fossil fuel emissions to reach a target atmospheric CO2 concentration.

The Nature article concludes:

Our group’s estimate for carbon release under the lowest warming scenario, although still quite sizeable, is about one-third of that predicted under the strongest warming scenario.

… our survey outlines the additional risk to society caused by thawing of the frozen north, and underscores the urgent need to reduce atmospheric emissions from fossil-fuel use and deforestation. This will help to keep permafrost carbon frozen in the ground.

The only thing recent research on the Arctic reassures us about is the urgent need to cut emissions sharply and quickly.

This post has been updated (to replace “algae” with “micro-organisms”).

Amounts of warming previously thought to be safe may instead trigger widespread melting of the world’s ice sheets and other catastrophic impacts, scientists said….

“There’s evidence that climate sensitivity may be quite a bit higher than what the models are suggesting,” said Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution for Science.

That’s from a Daily Climate piece on this panel discussion at last weeks AGU meeting:

The sensitivity issue is a complicated one, as I’ve discussed.  The AGU discussion certainly helps clarify key issues and suggests that some effort is being put into a reconciliation of the different ways of  calculating.

Don’t miss the back and forth on whether we are headed toward 25 meters of sea level rise or 70 meters at the end.  For some of the science, 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”.

If you’re interested on Caldeira’s work on a very high sensitivity –  5.5°C to 8°C (10 to 14 F) — click here.  It is based on the PETM 55 million years ago and “having strong functioning methane feedbacks.” Thankfully we’ve got nothing to worry about in the Anthropocene (see”NSIDC : Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100).

Here’s more of the Daily Climate piece:

Accelerating melting on the world’s ice sheets and other new observations have scientists concluding that even a two-degree Celsius rise in temperatures – a benchmark long seen as safe in global climate talks and other emissions reductions scenarios – could lead to an 80-foot rise in sea levels.

“The dangerous level of global warming is less than what we thought a few years ago,” said James Hansen, director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “It was natural to think that a few degrees wasn’t so bad…. (But) a target of two degrees is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.”

Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice at a surprising clip, Hansen said, and methane hydrates – a potent source of greenhouse gas frozen beneath the seas – are starting to bubble up.

The key question for climatologists: How sensitive is the climate to increasing amounts of fossil fuel emissions. Last year humanity pumped almost 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a half-billion tons more than 2009 and the largest jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, according to the Global Carbon Project.

See also Biggest Jump Ever in Global Warming Pollution in 2010, Chinese CO2 Emissions Now Exceed U.S.’s By 50%.

The problem, those researchers said, is the “hang time” for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, “climatically important” amounts of carbon dioxide and other compounds emitted today would continue to influence the atmosphere for thousands of years, Caldeira said.

See also Fossil CO2 impacts will outlast Stonehenge and nuclear waste

That kind of pressure, or “forcing,” on the atmosphere could be devastating, he cautioned.

About 55 million years ago a tremendous amount of methane was released into the atmosphere over a period of about 1 million years, and the planet heated by five degrees to eight degrees Celsius, or 10 degrees to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The result was an ice-free planet with sea levels 230 feet higher than they are today.

In the eons since, carbon dioxide levels dropped and the ice reformed. But humanity’s emissions have the potential to send the globe back to those conditions, Caldeira and Hansen said.

“If you doubled CO2, which practically all governments assume we’re going to do, that would eventually get us to the ice-free state,” Hansen said.

Scientists don’t expect that ice to melt quickly. Assuming the current accelerated melting continues on the world’s ice sheets and glaciers, various climate models predict the ocean would rise between 1.5 feet and 2.3 feet by century’s end, said Tad Pfeffer, a glaciologist with the University of Colorado.

But the ice melted with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at about 1,000 parts per million, Caldeira said. And he suspects that even 750 ppm, or about double today’s levels, could send the globe spiraling toward an ice-free state. Current emissions trends suggest the globe could reach that by the end of the century.

“We can’t double CO2,” Hansen added. “We would be sending our climate back to a state we haven’t adjusted to as a species.”

The time to act was a while ago, but now is much, much better than later.

Related Posts:

• A detailed look at climate sensitivity
• Climate Experts Warn Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation

Related Posts:

• WashPost: “The Scientific Finding that Settles the Climate-Change Debate” and “Confirms” the Hockey Stick Graph
• Score Another Victory for Scientists, Michael Mann and the Freedom of Inquiry
• Much-vindicated Michael Mann and Hockey Stick get final exoneration

• Two more independent studies back the Hockey Stick: Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause

Over the past 10 years, the death of forest trees due to drought and increased temperatures has been documented on all continents except Antarctica. This can in turn drive global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by trees and by releasing carbon locked up in their wood.

That’s from the news release for a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, “Roles of hydraulic and carbon stress in a widespread climate-induced forest die-off.”

A common myth is that higher levels of CO2 will be good for all vegetation.  Unfortunately, those higher levels of CO2 are accompanied by higher temperatures and, in many places, drought and bark beetle infestation, which are bad news for trees — as study after study has documented (see links below).

The new study spells this out for the trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides), which goes by many other names, including the white poplar, though, as it turns out, the aspens apparently now have reason to tremble — manmade global warming.  Fittingly, the aspen die-off is “called Sudden Aspen Decline or SAD.”

The study has a nice overview and notes with the key recent studies:

Forests are important carbon sinks, yet they are threatened by global change (1, 2). In the past decade, widespread forest mortality related to drought or temperature stress has been documented in multiple biomes and on all vegetated continents (3–6). In temperate North America, some of these events have been linked to “global change-type droughts,” defined as severe drought coupled with elevated summer temperatures (6–9). Such mortality events can radically transform regional land cover and effect biodiversity, fire risk, ecosystem function, land–atmosphere interactions, and ecosystem services (10–12). Furthermore, forest diebacks can lead to dramatic decreases in net primary production and carbon sequestration, driving these ecosystems to become CO2 sources and to have a positive feedback to climate warming (11, 13–17). Climate-mediated die-off of pine forests caused by insect outbreak in Canada led to estimated carbon emissions of 990 Mt CO2e (CO2 equivalent) over a 20-y period, equivalent to 5 y of Canada’s annual transportation sector emissions (200 Mt CO2e/y) (15)

There is every reason to think things will get much worse if we stay on our current emissions path (see Science: Second ’100-year’ Amazon drought in 5 years caused huge CO2 emissions. If this pattern continues, the forest would become a warming source).

This PNAS study explores the cause of the climate-induced forest die-off, and explains how droughts kill trees:

New research led by Carnegie researcher and Stanford University PhD student William Anderegg offers evidence for the physiological mechanism governing tree death in a drought….

Forests store about 45 percent of the carbon found on land. Their mortality can radically transform ecosystems, affect biodiversity, harm local economies, and pose fire risks, as well as increase to global warming.

Scientists had two competing theories for how forest trees die during a drought. One hypothesis proposed that the trees starved due to decreased photosynthetic activity. The other proposed that the system for transporting water within a tree was damaged beyond repair due to the stresses of the drought.

Without knowing which theory was correct, it was difficult for researchers to build models and make projections about the larger impact of drought-induced forest mortality.

The team focused their efforts on climate-induced die offs of trembling aspen trees in North America. They looked directly at both carbon starvation and water-transportation stress on ongoing forest deaths….

The aspen die-off, called Sudden Aspen Decline or SAD, began after severe droughts between 2000 and 2004 and affects about 17 percent of aspen forests in Colorado, as well as parts of the western United States and Canada. SAD continued through 2010, when the research was conducted.

“Large scale mortality events, such as we see with aspens, are the dynamite in ecosystem responses to climate change.  We know that when they occur, they make a huge difference. But we are at the early stages of being able to predict occurrence,” said Field, director of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology and professor of biology and of environmental Earth systems science at Stanford.

The team found no evidence of significantly decreased carbon reserves in SAD-affected aspens. This undercuts the starvation theory, although it is possible that carbon starvation had occurred and already been rectified.

By contrast they did find notable losses of function in the tree’s water-transportation systems, especially in the roots. SAD-affected trees showed about a 70 percent loss of water conductivity. Potted trees exposed to a summer’s-worth of drought exhibited significant root mortality.

“Our study provides a snapshot of what future droughts could hold for the emblematic tree of the American West. Our results indicate an impaired ability to transport water due to drought damage plays an important role in the recent die-off of aspens,” William Anderegg said.

What’s particularly worrisome about this drought-induced tree mortality is that droughts — and especially the hot weather “global change-type droughts” — are projected to get considerably more frequent and intense (see “Must-read NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path“).

Now that’s SAD.

Related Posts:

• Is human-caused climate change killing the great forests of the American West?
• Science: Global warming is killing U.S. trees, a dangerous carbon-cycle feedback
• Nature on stunning new climate feedback: Beetle tree kill releases more carbon than fires
• Climate Change Blamed for Dead Trees in Africa

• Science: Drought drives decade-long decline in plant growth; NASA news release:

“These results are extraordinarily significant because they show that the global net effect of climatic warming on the productivity of terrestrial vegetation need not be positive “” as was documented for the 1980′s and 1990′s,” said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters and manager of NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology research program”….

“This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth,” Running said”….

“The potential that future warming would cause additional declines does not bode well for the ability of the biosphere to support multiple societal demands for agricultural production, fiber needs, and increasingly, biofuel production,” Zhao said.

• Nature review of 20 years of field studies finds soils emitting more CO2 as planet warms

In a recent article in National Journal, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) President Tim Phillips said there is no question that AFP and others like it have been instrumental in the rise of Republican candidates who question or deny climate science: “We’ve made great headway. What it means for candidates on the Republican side is, if you … buy into green energy or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your political peril.”

AFP is a section 501(c)(4) organization, meaning it does not have to disclose its donors, but has been tied to significant funding from the Koch Family Foundations – founded by the billionaire Koch brothers of Koch Industries – as well as smaller donations from companies like ExxonMobil. Koch Industries and ExxonMobil are among the largest funders of studies questioning climate change science, often drawn upon by conservative politicians to legitimize their view that regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is not needed because the science is still under debate.

These organizations and their supporters say they are just funding their own independent studies of climate change science. Yet these studies almost all go against observable scientific data to question global warming – so much so that one study funded in part by the Kochs that confirmed a rise in average world land temperature was regarded as an anomaly. Which raises the question: if these studies are largely designed not to shed light on climate change, but to create doubt and confusion to delay greenhouse gas regulations, why is it legal, and do those deliberately spreading misinformation face liability?

The first question, as far as I can tell, apparently boils down to: it’s legal because we have yet to make the deliberate manipulation of science illegal.

Yet while people and companies enjoy the First Amendment right to free speech, legal scholars have argued that right does not extend to influencing people under false pretenses. According to former tobacco industry lawyer Stephen Susman, when it comes to fossil fuel companies and supporters funding their own research on climate change, if “they knew the information they were spreading was false and being used to deliberately influence public opinion—that would override their First Amendment rights.”

This question may soon be playing out in the courts.

History of the science

Research on climate change goes back over a century. Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming lays out the long trajectory: from realizing GHGs trap heat and help warm the planet, to identifying them, to tracking GHG emissions into the atmosphere and oceans from the burning of fossil fuels, to measuring the effects.

The research was developed enough that a 1965 report to the Johnson administration, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, discussed the increase in global carbon dioxide emissions and the possible dire effects. In a 1969 memo, President Nixon’s Democratic adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote that it was “pretty clearly agreed” that carbon dioxide levels were rising fast and would increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface, and that such dangers justified government action.

Attempts to water down the implications of the science soon followed. Science historian Naomi Oreskes and others found that, in 1983, a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences chaired by physicist William Nierenberg reframed the growing consensus around anthropogenic warming as a “nonproblem” that would have limited effects humans could adapt to, as with past changes in human history. Nierenberg was cofounder of the conservative George C. Marshall Institute, and – as documented in Oreskes and Eric Conways’s Merchants of Doubt (2010) – part of a group of government scientific advisers that went from Cold War warriors supporting nuclear weapons to staunch corporate defenders questioning the science on tobacco smoke, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, and eventually climate change science, among other issues.

Yet the science marched on. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Congress that he believed with 99 percent confidence that substantial global warming was under way, and would rise significantly unless greenhouse gas emissions were reduced. That same year, the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of about 2,500 international climate scientists who evaluate the research on climate change (which often end up being conservative estimates of likely effects, arguably because of the need for agreement among government representatives).

In 1990, IPCC scientists completed their first assessment report for policymakers, stating they were certain human activities were increasing greenhouse gas emissions and warming, with the second report, in 1995, concluding there was a discernible human influence on climate.

The stage seemed set for an international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

History of the nonscience

That’s when fossil fuel companies and their supporters sprang in to fund their own research. In 1988 the coal industry founded the Western Fuels Association (WFA), headed by Fred Palmer, who later became vice president of Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world. As outlined in Ross Gelbspan’s The Heat Is On (1998), the WFA actively sought to refute the growing consensus on climate change, stating in its report that “when [the climate change] controversy first erupted at the peak of summer in 1988, Western Fuels Association decided it was important to take a stand.… [S]cientists were found who are skeptical about the potential for climate change.”

A 1998 memo leaked from the National Environmental Trust to the New York Times detailed that a dozen people working for big oil companies, trade associations, and conservative think tanks had been meeting at the American Petroleum Institute’s Washington headquarters to propose a $5 million campaign to convince people that global warming science was riddled with controversy and uncertainty.

Industries like oil and large manufacturers created the lobbying group Global Climate Coalition (GCC) in 1989, with the stated purpose of “cast[ing] doubt on the theory of global warming.” A Freedom of Information Act request unearthed 2001 U.S. State Department documents to the GCC suggesting former President George W. Bush’s decision to pull out of UN international negotiations on climate change had been shaped in part by GCC and Exxon.

The George W. Bush Administration not only resisted GHG regulations, but actively edited government reports to question the science of climate change, one time drawing upon research funded in part by ExxonMobil. As documented by Greenpeace and others, ExxonMobil and Koch Industries went on to become major donors of such research, finding a platform in conservative think tanks and media.

The result? The U.S. perception of scientific consensus about climate change went down in line with the growth of corporate-funded research, particularly among Republicans, even as the science became more clear and the effects more apparent. While the awareness of a consensus is inching back up (although there is still much more confusion than there arguably should be over whether humans are a factor), the U.S. has yet to regulate greenhouse gases, even as the International Energy Agency warns that we may be five years away from being deadlocked into runaway warming.

Social scientists have noted internal barriers to action on climate change – that even people who acknowledge the science may not necessarily alter how they live to match that knowledge. In other words, accepting the consensus on climate change science might not have been enough for swift, immediate action.

Yet the evidence also seems clear that comprehensive understanding of the issue for the nation was muddled, and deliberately so: in 2009, an internal Global Climate Coalition document was leaked to the New York Times – a primer written in 1995 for coalition members admitting that the “scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

Yet we are now at the stage where denying climate change, or at least the human factor, is apparently a prerequisite for being the Republican nominee for President, as Phillips has bragged. This stance would be completely unacceptable if not for the studies funded by fossil fuel industries and supporters. And it has been disastrous for creating U.S. policies to address climate change.

Liability?

In 2008, the small Inupiat nation and city of Kivalina, Alaska, filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil and 23 other fossil fuel companies for federal public nuisance – the damage of their homeland, which will be uninhabitable within a few decades, as sea ice no longer sufficiently buffers the barrier reef island against erosion from fall storms. Their claim argues that Kivalina has an identifiable, discrete harm, traceable to greenhouse gas emissions, of which the defendant companies are among the world’s largest contributors. They seek damages: their relocation costs.

Kivalina also charged a smaller subset of companies with secondary claims of conspiracy and concert of action for creating a false debate about climate change science. In other words, these companies knew they were contributing to harm, but rather than change their practices, they instead funded a false debate about climate change science.

The lawsuit was dismissed one year later as a “political question” – the district court ruled that climate change was a matter for the executive and legislative branches, not the judicial branch, which is how three prior global warming public nuisance cases had been ruled. The judge also denied Kivalina’s legal standing to bring the suit. The secondary claims involving the misinformation campaigns of defendant companies went unaddressed.

Kivalina appealed the decision, with oral arguments heard in November of this year. If the claim is allowed to move forward, it could reach the discovery phase, which may unearth more documents similar to that leaked to the New York Times, suggesting deliberate intent to deceive.

Defendant companies argue that climate change is not a matter for the courts – the problem is too big, and we are all responsible. Yet we have not all embarked on multi-million dollar campaigns to fund our own research and prevent change. It is these secondary claims that could be the crux of establishing whether fossil fuel companies will eventually bear liability for harm from greenhouse gas emissions. As prior cases involving lead, asbestos, and tobacco lawsuits show, people seem to think it is one thing to do your own research, but it quite another to deliberately deceive people, contributing to widespread harm primarily to retain profits.

Over the last 40 or so years, natural drivers would have caused cooling, and so the warming there has been … caused by a combination of human drivers and some degree of internal variability. I would judge the maximum amplitude of the internal variability to be roughly 0.1 deg C over that time period, and so given the warming of ~0.5 deg C, I’d say somewhere between 80% to 120% of the warming. Slightly larger range if you want a large range for the internal stuff.

Turns out he was spot on.

A new study in Nature Geoscience, “Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance” (subs. req’d) finds:

Our results show that it is extremely likely that at least 74% of the observed warming since 1950 was caused by radiative forcings, and less than 26% by unforced internal variability. Of the forced signal during that particular period, 102% (90–116%) is due to anthropogenic and 1% (−10 to 13%) due to natural forcing….  The combination of those results with attribution studies based on optimal fingerprinting, with independent constraints on the magnitude of climate feedbacks, with process understanding, as well as palaeoclimate evidence leads to an even higher confidence about human influence dominating the observed temperature increase since pre-industrial times.

Here’s a figure from the study comparing the magnitude of different “forcing agents” or contributors to warming since the 1950s:

Contributions of different forcing agents to the total observed temperature change. Error bars denote the 5–95% uncertainty range. The grey shading shows the estimated 5–95% range for internal variability. Observations are shown as dashed lines.

The Nature News and Scientific American stories have had misleading headlines:

Three-Quarters of Climate Change Is Man-Made

That’s not a good headline.

The 74% or “three quarters” probability is where the 95% confidence level is for this one study.  As climatologist Kevin Trenberth put it in an email, it is “highly likely” that all of the warming since 1950 is due to human activity:

The study shows that it is highly likely that all of the observed warming over the past 50 years was caused by human activities and, while natural variability could have contributed up to about a quarter of the amount over any comparable period, the recent slowing in global temperature rise suggests that natural variability has contributed to offset the human-induced component if anything.

Climatologist Michael Mann emails me:

Natural forcing over this period was negative. So the most likely conclusion is that anthropogenic forcing explains more than 100% of the observed warming. There is an internal variability component too, but no reason to believe that it has been positive.

Absent the increasing GHGs, we probably would have cooled, since

1. We’ve had a couple of big volcanoes.
2. We’re just coming off “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”
3. The underlying long-term trend had been cooling (see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds).

Here’s more background on the study:

Knutti and Huber found that greenhouse gases contributed 0.6–1.1 °C to the warming observed since the mid-twentieth century, with the most statistically likely value being a contribution of about 0.85 °C. Around half of that contribution from greenhouse gases — 0.45 °C — was offset by the cooling effects of aerosols….

The authors calculated a net warming value of around 0.5 °C since the 1950s, which is very close to the actual temperature rise of 0.55 °C observed over that period. Changes in solar radiation — a hypothesis for global warming proffered by many climate sceptics — contributed no more than around 0.07 °C to the recent warming, the study finds.

To test whether recent warming might just be down to a random swing in Earth’s unstable climate — another theory favoured by sceptics — Knutti and Huber conducted a series of control runs of different climate models without including the effects of the energy-budget parameters. But even if climate variability were three times greater than that estimated by state-of-the-art models, it is extremely unlikely to have produced a warming trend as pronounced as that observed in the real world, they found.

“This tightens estimates of past responses,” says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, “And it should also lead to predictions of future climate change that are grounded in the kind of changes already being observed.”

A key point of the study is that our actual confidence that humans are warming the planet is stronger than the confidence just from this one study.

Last year, Time magazine reported on a comprehensive new review paper of “100 peer-reviewed post-IPCC studies” in an article titled, “Report: The Case for Global Warming Stronger Than Ever” noting:

By looking at a wide range of observations from all over the world,  the Met Office study concludes that the fingerprint of human influence on climate is stronger than ever. “We can say with a very high significance level that the effects we see in the climate cannot be attributed to any other forcings [factors that push the climate in one direction or another],” says study co-author Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

It is a “settled fact” that the climate system is warming, as the National Academy concluded in 2010.  It is now beyond a reasonable doubt that humans are responsible for most of that warming, and  highly likely we are responsible for all of it.

Related Posts:

• Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a “Human Fingerprint” on Recent Climate Change
• How carbon dioxide controls earth’s temperature — NASA’s Lacis: “There is no viable alternative to counteract global warming except through direct human effort to reduce the atmospheric CO2 level.”

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:

The team found the tipping point in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for cooling that initiates ice sheet formation is about 600 parts per million. Prior to the levels dropping this low, it was too warm for the ice sheet to form. At the Earth's current level of around 390 parts per million, the environment is such that an ice sheet remains, but carbon dioxide levels and temperatures are increasing. The world will likely reach levels between 550 and 1,000 parts per million by 2100. Melting an ice sheet is a different process than its initiation, and it is not known what level would cause the ice sheet to melt away completely, Huber said.

"The system is not linear and there may be a different threshold for melting the ice sheet, but if we continue on our current path of warming we will eventually reach that tipping point," he said. "Of course after we cross that threshold it will still take many thousands of years to melt an ice sheet."

It would no doubt take a long time to fully melt an ice sheet, but we are headed toward some serious polar warming (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F).  That study projects some 13°F warming over Antarctica in the 2090s.

And a study from earlier this year suggests we are headed toward far higher warming post-2100 (see Science: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter; Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 “may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models”).

Back in October, Climate Progress interviewed Rice University oceanographer John Anderson, a leading expert on sea level rise with more than 200 publications, (see Flood-Gate: Perry Officials Try to Hide Sea Level Rise from Texans with “Clear-Cut Unadulterated Censorship”).

Anderson explained that he's been working in Antarctica for 4 decades, that they've found unprecedented warming in the Antarctic Peninsula, and that "I am quite concerned about the potential of catastrophic contribution to  sea level rise from ice sheet collapse."

Indeed, he said "if people say that ice sheets react slowly, they are not familiar with what we know about ice sheets. There is clear evidence that that ice sheets behave catastrophically."

He was specifically worried about the "weak underbelly" of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Pine Island Glacier.  For two recent discussions of PIG, see

• Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
• Ocean Currents Speed Melting of Antarctic Ice, as “Seawater Appear[s] to Boil on the Surface Like a Kettle on the Stove”

That’s why so many leading experts on the subject agree with the recent scientific literature that as long as we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are headed toward a meter or more of sea level rise by century’s end — and then 6+ inches of sea level rise a decade for a long, long time.

Related Posts:

• Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a “Human Fingerprint” on Recent Climate Change
• 10 indicators of a human fingerprint on climate change
• In must-see AGU video, Richard Alley explains “The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History”
• How carbon dioxide controls earth’s temperature — NASA’s Lacis: “There is no viable alternative to counteract global warming except through direct human effort to reduce the atmospheric CO2 level.”

Global temperatures in 2011 are currently the tenth highest on record and are higher than any previous year with a La Niña event, which has a relative cooling influence. The 13 warmest years have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. The extent of Arctic sea ice in 2011 was the second lowest on record, and its volume was the lowest.

“Our role is to provide the scientific knowledge to inform action by decision makers,” said [World Meteorological Organization] Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and that this warming is due to human activities,” he said.

“Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached new highs. They are very rapidly approaching levels consistent with a 2-2.4 degree Centigrade rise in average global temperatures which scientists believe could trigger far reaching and irreversible changes in our Earth, biosphere and oceans,” he said.

That’s from the WMO news release highlighting the “provisional annual World Meteorological Organization Statement on the Status of the Global Climate, which gives a global temperature assessment and a snapshot of weather and climate events around the world in 2011.”

Here’s more:

The WMO’s provisional statement estimated the global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for 2011 (January–October) at 0.41°C ± 0.11°C (0.74°F ± 0.20°F) above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.2°F, according to the provisional statement. This is the tenth equal warmest year since the start of records in 1850.

The 2002-2011 period equals 2001-2010 as the warmest decade on record, 0.46°C above the long-term average.

Global climate in 2011 was heavily influenced by the strong La Niña event which developed in the tropical Pacific in the second half of 2010 and continued until May 2011. It was one of the strongest of the last 60 years and was closely associated with the drought in east Africa, islands in the central equatorial Pacific and the southern United States, and flooding in southern Africa, eastern Australia and southern Asia.

Strong La Niña years are typically 0.10 to 0.15°C cooler than the years preceding and following them. 2011’s global temperatures followed this pattern, being lower than those of 2010, but were still considerably warmer than the most recent moderate to strong La Niña years, 2008 (+0.36°C), 2000 (+0.27°C) and 1989 (+0.12°C). Weak La Niña conditions have redeveloped in recent weeks but have not yet approached the intensity of those in late 2010 and early 2011.

Surface air temperatures were above the long-term average in 2011 over most land areas of the world. The largest departures from average were over Russia, especially in northern Russia where January-October temperatures were about 4°C above average in places.

The seasonal Arctic sea ice minimum, reached on 9 September, was 4.33 million square kilometres. This was 35% below the 1979-2000 average and only slightly more than the record low set in 2007. Unlike the 2007 season, both the Northwest and Northeast Passages were ice-free for periods during the 2011 summer. Sea ice volume was even further below average and was estimated at a new record low of 4200 cubic kilometres, surpassing the record of 4580 cubic kilometres set in 2010.

The above-average temperatures in most northern polar regions coincided with the second-lowest Arctic sea ice minimum extent and the lowest sea ice volume on record.

Other highlights:

• Severe drought, then flood, in east Africa
• Major floods in south-east Asia, Pakistan, Central and South America
• Deadliest flash flood with landslide in Brazil
• A year of extremes in the United States
• A dry start to the year in Europe and eastern China
• Another year of below-average tropical cyclone activity

The full WMO report is here.

Related Post:

• Hottest Decade on Record Would Have Been Even Hotter But for Deep Oceans — Accelerated Warming May Be On Its Way

by Lauren Simenauer, cross posted from Science Progress

In the late 18th century, Benjamin Franklin was something of an icon in Europe. The French hung portraits of Franklin on their walls much in the same way college students pay tribute to John Belushi or Jim Morrison in their dorms. Everywhere Franklin went, his feisty personality preceded him, and it was this reputation in Europe that played a key role in securing the foreign aid the revolutionaries needed to triumph over the British. Many consider the celebrated polymath to be the first “American” in numerous regards—in entrepreneurialism, in political discourse, and, of course, in partying. As it turns out, Franklin was also the first American environmentalist, and his inventions influenced the scientific community for decades.

Energy Efficiency

In the age of clean energy technologies racing to meet grid parity, we often forget that there was a push for cleaner energy in the time of the founders. Ben Franklin himself designed a four-sided street lamp to replace the commonly used globe lamps. A build-up of soot darkened the globe lamps, which required near-daily cleaning, and let off an excess of smoke. The Franklin lamp increased air circulation within the lamps, allowing for better fuel efficiency and less cleaning.

Similarly, Franklin sought to design a more fuel-efficient stove that consumed less wood and produced more heat. Incidentally, though Franklin managed to sell multiple sets, the stove did not work very well. It was later improved upon, however, and has come to be known as the “Franklin Stove.”

When Franklin was holed up in the suburbs of France due to a debilitating case of gout, his friends encouraged him to find ways to keep busy. And so, Franklin occupied himself in the only way he knew how: by devising ingenious and occasionally self-deprecating plots. In a 1784 letter to the Journal de Paris, Franklin parodied his penchant for sleeping late, observing, after a loud noise awoke him at dawn, “Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon… will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of [the sun] rising so early.”

As a more serious corollary, Franklin observed that, should he or any of his French compatriots rise with the sun, they would not have to burn candles for extra hours in the evening—a chore that Franklin, as a self-proclaimed cheapskate, found decidedly inefficient. It was from this observation and the desire to save a few bucks that Franklin outlined a rough idea for daylight saving time as a means for farmers to maximize production during light hours and cut down on fuel costs of illuminating the dark. The idea would not be adopted until after 1895, when George Vernon Hudson proposed the modern conception of daylight saving time.

It is no surprise that the first man to demonstrate that lightning was electrical would take a keen interest in electricity and energy. And take an interest, he did. Amid his busy schedule of promoting the American agenda, learning French in parlors, and drinking to excess, Franklin was the first to propose the theory of conservation of charge. Franklin also supported the controversial wave-theory of light. Among other contributions to physics, Franklin’s work with electricity precipitated his ascent to the first presidency of the American Philosophical Society, at the time a herald of scientific inquiry, which would later be headed by another famous scientist-statesman, Thomas Jefferson.

Environmentalism

Despite his humble birth, Ben Franklin rose to prominence via his publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack, a collection of aphorisms and amateur guide to meteorology. This interest in meteorology extended itself into other environmental realms, including those of forestry, oceanography, and clean air.

Franklin built his own paper mill in order to furnish himself with a cheaper, more efficient supply of newsprint that would save trees. In doing so, he undercut his competitors. In the 1740s, he encouraged his friends to do the same, and eventually found himself at the center of a wholesale paper mill industry that was also environmentally friendly.

It was in his study of postal routes that Franklin took an interest in oceans and currents. When sailors took Franklin’s advice on the Gulf Stream, they managed to cut their commute by two weeks. Franklin’s studies into oceans lent itself to a concern for clean water. In 1739, Franklin petitioned the Philadelphia government to prohibit local tanneries from dumping waste into the tributary of the Delaware River. Similarly, in the 1760s, Franklin led a commission to monitor water pollution and waste disposal in Pennsylvania. Franklin also urged people to decrease their chimney use so as not to pollute the air.

Public health

Franklin also concerned himself with promoting public health. His contemporaries assumed that wearing damp clothing caused the common cold; however, Franklin observed that sailors wore wet clothes frequently and remained healthy. Before germs were deemed the culprit of compromising the immune system, Franklin suggested that the common cold was transmitted from people living in close quarters—a trend that happened to coincide with winter.

In keeping with his commitment to public health, Franklin launched a campaign to open a public hospital. Franklin diverted funds to the nation’s first hospital, also known as the Pennsylvania Hospital, in order to care for the poor and the mentally ill—two demographics long marginalized by colonial society.

In his will, Ben Franklin stipulated the construction of a water pipeline to provide fresh, clean water to the city of Philadelphia. This construction led to the Philadelphia Water Commission, which institutionalized Franklin’s belief that the public right to health should supersede private interests.

Given his commitment to environmental issues and sustainable business practices, it may be prudent to say that Franklin would have opposed some of the House cuts that stand to strip the public of food safety and farming innovation grants. He certainly would have taken no pleasure in the “Drill, Baby, Drill” chants, and not just because he would have found them lacking in wit.

Today’s political discourse supposes that the Founding Fathers were suspicious of the popular majority and favored limited government. Yet while our nation’s founders may not have intended the government itself to be run by direct democracy, they certainly believed that government had an obligation to protect the welfare of all its citizens. For Ben Franklin, a truly self-made man, that welfare included clean air, clean water, and general hygiene and sanitation. In retrospect, Ben Franklin did a couple things right. Maybe we should follow his lead in the arena of civic duty to protect our earth and our health.

— Lauren Simenauer is finishing her bachelor’s degrees in biology and psychology at the University of Virginia.

This is the third installment in a Science Progress series about the founding fathers’ relationships with science, and what they might have to say about the science policy issues of today. Parts one and two, about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington respectively, can be found here, and here.

But that is unlikely, as this video of University of Alaska, Fairbanks, assistant professor Katey Walter Anthony, suggests:

A new article in Nature, “Climate change: High risk of permafrost thaw” (subs. req’d) concludes:

Arctic temperatures are rising fast, and permafrost is thawing…. Our collective estimate is that carbon will be released more quickly than models suggest, and at levels that are cause for serious concern.

We calculate that permafrost thaw will release the same order of magnitude of carbon as deforestation if current rates of deforestation continue. But because these emissions include significant quantities of methane, the overall effect on climate could be 2.5 times larger.

The permafrost permamelt contains a staggering amount of carbon, which is starting to escape:

Recent years have brought reports from the far north of tundra fires¹, the release of ancient carbon², CH₄ bubbling out of lakes³ and gigantic stores of frozen soil carbon⁴. The latest estimate is that some 18.8 million square kilometres of northern soils hold about 1,700 billion tonnes of organic carbon⁴ — the remains of plants and animals that have been accumulating in the soil over thousands of years. That is about four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity in modern times and twice as much as is present in the atmosphere now.

As the article explains (see below), much of that carbon would be released as methane.  Methane is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times to 100 times as potent over 20 years! 

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Countless studies make clear that global warming will release vast quantities of GHGs into the atmosphere this decade.  Yet, no climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

The new analysis is based on a survey of “41 international scientists, listed as authors here, who publish on various aspects of permafrost.”  Yet even this new paper is conservative.  Their worst-case scenario appears to be derived from the out-of-date 2007 IPCC report, whereby Arctic warming “only” hits 7.5°C [13.5°F] by 2100.  And the new article further assumes temperature is then held constant for the next 200 years.

More recent analyses make clear that business-as-usual warming — not worst-case –  is likely to be considerably higher (see, for instance, “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“).  And the Earth would continue warming well past 2100, perhaps 50% to 100% more.

Even so, the new analysis finds the permafrost releases up to 380 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent by 2100.  This is comparable to the NOAA/NSIDC finding for this century, which looks like this:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Carbon emission (in billions of tons of carbon a year) from thawing permafrost.

The main difference is the Nature article projects considerably higher Permafrost Carbon Flux (PCF) after 2100 — up to 865 billion tonnes CO2-eq by 2300.

The stunning conclusion of the NOAA/NSIDC paper was:

The thaw and release of carbon currently frozen in permafrost will increase atmospheric CO2 concentrations and amplify surface warming to initiate a positive permafrost carbon feedback (PCF) on climate…. [Our] estimate may be low because it does not account for amplified surface warming due to the PCF itself….

We predict that the PCF will change the arctic from a carbon sink to a source after the mid-2020s and is strong enough to cancel 42-88% of the total global land sink. The thaw and decay of permafrost carbon is irreversible and accounting for the PCF will require larger reductions in fossil fuel emissions to reach a target atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Again, that assumed all the PCF came out as CO2.  The new study finds:

Across all the warming scenarios, we project that most of the released carbon will be in the form of CO₂, with only about 2.7% in the form of CH₄. However, because CH₄ has a higher global-warming potential, almost half the effect of future permafrost-zone carbon emissions on climate forcing is likely to be from CH₄. That is roughly consistent with the tens of billions of tonnes of CH₄ thought to have come from oxygen-limited environments in northern ecosystems after the end of the last glacial period.¹⁰

And because of the much higher warming impact of methane over shorter time frames, even this low percentage level of methane means that over a 20 year period, the warming from CH₄ will actually be higher than that of CO₂.

The Nature article concludes:

Our group’s estimate for carbon release under the lowest warming scenario, although still quite sizeable, is about one-third of that predicted under the strongest warming scenario.

… our survey outlines the additional risk to society caused by thawing of the frozen north, and underscores the urgent need to reduce atmospheric emissions from fossil-fuel use and deforestation. This will help to keep permafrost carbon frozen in the ground.

Duh.

For those who  want more background on the permafrost, the news release is quite good.  Here’s a final comment by the lead author:

“Even though we’re talking about a place that is very far away and seems to be out of our control, we actually have influence over what happens based on the overall trajectory of warming. If we followed a lower trajectory of warming based on controlling emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, it has the effect of slowing the whole process down and keeping a lot more carbon in the ground,” Schuur said. “Just by addressing the source of emissions that are from humans, we have this potential to just keep everything closer to its current state, frozen in permafrost, rather than going into the atmosphere.”

Duh, again.

One last point.  This article only looked at the land-based permafrost.  Let’s remember the study from last year:

Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting:  NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”Methane and carbon release from the Arctic is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. This research finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH₄ [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”

Time‘s Bryan Walsh concludes his piece on the new article, “Scary stuff. But at least things are back to normal on the climate science beat: vaguely apocalyptic.”

The climate science is only apocalyptic if we keep ignoring it.

The people out there who think R&D or an energy quest is going to stop us from multiple catastrophes are deluding themselves and others.  We need to start aggressive mitigation now as every major independent study concludes.

Related posts and amplifying feedbacks:

• Journal of Climate: New cloud feedback results “provide support for the high end of current estimates of global climate sensitivity”

• The drying of the Northern peatlands (bogs, moors, and mires).
• The destruction of the tropical wetlands
• Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees “” thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
• Wildfires and Climate-Driven forest destruction by pests
• The desertification-global warming feedback

BACHMANN: I think what you’re advocating for is censorship on the part of government. So the government would prohibit intelligent design from even the possibility of being taught in questioning the issueof evolution. And if you look at scientists there is not a unanimity of agreement on the origins of life. … Why would we forstall any particular theory? Becuase I don’t think that even evolutionists, by and large, would say that this is proven fact. They say that this is a theory, as well as intelligent design. So I think the best thing to do is to let all scientific facts on the table, and let students decide.

Watch it:

Bachmann joins Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who said evolution was merely “a theory that’s out there.”

Of course, the difference here is that evolution is science — creationism and intelligent design are not. All of the world’s leading scientific organizations have affirmed evolution and dismissed intelligent design, noting that teaching it alongside evolution is counterproductive, as it would give the pseudo-science credibility. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science has repeatedly stated, “evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science;” teaching intelligent design “would undermine” the teaching of science, just as teaching false mathematics or alternative history would.