[Platform-fossilfuels] Time to Act

[John Andrews]

It's happening.  Greenland is going.  There is very little time to act.
It's time to declare an emergency.

See the following material from the May 1 issue of New Scientist.

MCHC is launching an attempt to get signatures declaring a state of
emergency for the people and the planet.  The signature gathering should
start within a couple of weeks.  I'll send you more info as it becomes
available.

- John

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What if the ice goes?

For hundreds of millions of people living near the world's coastlines, a
rise in sea level is the biggest danger posed by climate change. Last year's
IPCC report puts the likely rise in the coming century at between 18 and 59
centimetres, and most countries are basing their decisions on climate policy
on that assumption. But it could be much more.

Even as the IPCC report was being finalised, new research showed sea levels
were rising 50 per cent faster than the report assumed. And new modelling
presented last month at the conference of the European Geosciences Union in
Vienna, Austria, by Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic
Laboratory in Liverpool, UK, predicted the rise in the 21st century would be
three times the IPCC prediction, at up to 1.5 metres. The new element here
is the discovery that as the atmosphere warms, the ice sheets on Greenland
and West Antarctica may not melt gradually as had been predicted. Instead,
they may break up rapidly as meltwater penetrates the ice.

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts
reported last month that they had watched a lake in Greenland 3 kilometres
across empty down a kilometre-deep crack in the ice within 90 minutes - a
discharge that, they said, "exceeded the flow of Niagara Falls". The
possibility that such events could cause the break-up of the Greenland ice
sheet is an increasingly controversial topic among glaciologists. Not all
believe even large numbers of "Greenland Niagaras" would destabilise the
entire sheet, but the possibility remains that it could disappear, which
would raise sea levels by 6 metres.

Meanwhile the old certainties of gradual melting over thousands of years
remain in the IPCC report. It is doubtful whether they still hold water.

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Poor forecasting undermines climate debate
New Scientist, 1 May 2008, by Fred Pearce

POLITICIANS seem to think that the science is a done deal," says Tim Palmer.
"I don't want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for
regional climate change, are immensely uncertain."

Palmer is a leading climate modeller at the European Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and he does not doubt that the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job
alerting the world to the problem of global climate change. But he and his
fellow climate scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC's predictions of
how the global change will affect local climates are little more than
guesswork. They fear that if the IPCC's predictions turn out to be wrong, it
will provoke a crisis in confidence that undermines the whole climate change
debate.

On top of this, some climate scientists believe that even the IPCC's global
forecasts leave much to be desired. In particular, they say that because the
IPCC cannot take the most recent research into account, its predictions are
too conservative.

Next week, climate modellers from around the world will meet in Reading at
the World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction, held under the auspices
of the UN, to try to improve our forecasting abilities. Its declared aim is
to "prepare a blueprint to launch a revolution in climate prediction",
including measures that will allow us to predict how the climate will be
affected locally as well as globally.

The organisers say that this will require the computing power brought to
bear on the problem to be increased "by a factor of 1000". One option likely
to be discussed is the creation of a global climate modelling centre - a
climatological equivalent of international collaborations like the CERN
particle physics centre in Europe.

Meanwhile representatives of the world's nations were meeting in Bangkok,
Thailand, last month, to begin detailed work on a treaty to replace the
Kyoto protocol in 2013. They will be basing their discussions on the best
predictions available from the IPCC, which means that by the time this
son-of-Kyoto is in force, the science on which it is based will be eight
years old.

European governments are pressing for an agreement that would keep
atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide below 450 parts per million.
This compares with pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm and current levels of
380 ppm. This, they argue, will prevent warming by more than 2 °C, and so
avoid "dangerous" climate change.

Yet many climate scientists wince at this. First, because the European
governments like to claim that the IPCC backs these targets, when in fact
the IPCC goes out of its way to say that setting targets is a job for
politicians. And second, because nobody knows either whether 450 ppm will
hold warming below 2 °C, or whether this amount of warming will turn out to
be safe. "It's horrifying when you see things boiled down to simple terms
like a 2 °C warming. That will mean hugely different things for different
places," Palmer says.

One reason the IPCC's official reports are slow to bridge this gap is the
panel's policy of only considering published peer-reviewed research that is
available when its review process gets under way. This means the current
report, published last year, takes no account of research published after
early 2005.

An increasingly scary debate about the state of the Greenland ice sheet is
almost entirely absent in the 2007 report, for instance (see "What if the
ice goes?"). Other recent research suggests that warming may be accelerating
beyond IPCC predictions: first, because higher temperatures are releasing
greenhouse gases from forests, soils and permafrost; and second, because the
ocean's ability to absorb CO2 seems to have declined in the past decade.

Equally worrying is the fact that climatologists are losing confidence in
the ability of existing models to work out what global warming will do to
atmospheric circulation - and hence to local weather patterns like rainfall.
The most recent IPCC report made a number of regional predictions. It felt
able to do so because it was generally assumed that if most models agreed on
future climate in, say, the Amazon rainforest or western Europe, then they
were probably right.

Palmer disputes this. In a paper in the April edition of the Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society he warns that models often share the same
biases and blind spots about features of the climate system that are
critical for regional forecasts. They cannot reproduce El Niños in the
Pacific Ocean, for instance. Nor can they simulate the weather systems that
bring drought to the Sahel region of Africa, or the Atlantic storm tracks
and blocking high-pressure zones that determine whether western Europe is
wet or dry.

Last year, a panel on climate modelling that was preparing the ground for
next week's summit concluded that current models "have serious limitations"
and that their uncertainties "compromise the goal of providing society with
reliable predictions of regional climate change". The panel, chaired by
Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University in Claverton, Maryland, dismissed
many current regional predictions as "laughable".

But whatever the uncertainties at the local level, the big picture remains
clear. Our planet is straying into unknown climatic territory, with
consequences that we probably have to accept are almost impossible to
predict.

One of these unknowns was highlighted last month in the preprint of a paper
James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has submitted
to the journal Science (www.arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126). Looking back 50
million years, to a time when falling CO2 levels in the atmosphere reached
425 ppm - a level we are likely to reach within two decades - he says that
was the moment Antarctica got its ice cap. This suggests that the planet may
have a tipping point at around that level, give or take 75 ppm, and that by
going above it we could render Antarctica ice-free once again. That would
raise sea levels by around 60 metres.

Hansen concludes that far from aiming to limit rising CO2 concentrations to
a ceiling of 450 ppm, as currently suggested, the world should set a
long-term target of getting back down to 350 ppm. A few decades with CO2
above that figure might not matter, but "it would be foolish to allow CO2 to
stay in the danger zone for centuries," he says. "If the present overshoot
of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding
irreversible catastrophic effects."

These developments in climate research raise fears that the IPCC will be
left stranded, too distant from the cutting edge of research to be of much
use in guiding action over climate change. Some researchers now argue that
it should produce more regular, up-to-date reviews of climate science, but
at a meeting in Budapest in early April the panel decided to stick with its
current policy. Its next full assessment is due in 2013 or 2014. Who knows
where the world will be by then?