THE CHILL FACTOR

While the United States and other “leading” nations are debating the costs of abating and reducing their carbon emissions, we need only to look at Africa to see what their diddling will accomplish.

In parts of Somalia, after four years of drought, even the camels are dying, and people only have the food provided by aid groups. Other areas in Africa are experiencing the slow descent into this type of existence, preparatory to disaster and depopulation. People there have sunk into despair. I don’t see a future for them either.

It will be soon that we start hearing about masses of people dying in other, various areas of the Third World, but what response there might be is questionable. There is a futility in just feeding people in an area that cannot sustain a population any longer. It reminds me of a lesson learned in the AIDs epidemic. AIDs medicines brought better health to infected people in Africa, who became well enough to become sexually active again, only to spread the disease to more people. Feeding people in an area that cannot sustain a population any longer without preventing more births and/or population growth is bad public policy, but what happens when this is applied to billions of people in the Third World?

The desertification of Earth is being speeded up by the warming of the planet, but until it happens in America, no one will see it as an emergency. The main problem with this approach is that the warming effects caused by carbon emissions are time delayed, about one to two decades. So once the droughts start, it is way too late. And even if attempts are made to remediate this, it will take generations for the Earth to recover.

In America, the serious drought in Georgia brought some attention to the issue, and later the severe flooding in the Atlanta area. Parts of Texas and Wisconsin are experiencing extremely severe drought now, and the Pacific Northwest and California are in severe drought also, but the real future is a drought over the entire North American continent, lasting hundreds of years. The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high, according to paleoclimatologists, North America suffered through 300-500 year long droughts. This had enormous impacts on wildlife, and is suspected of causing the ancestors of the horse to die off in North America.

Meanwhile, the “leading nations” continue to talk about the cost of preventing this warming by finding ways to reduce carbon emissions, and are not really willing to ante up.

I wanted to wait to post my next blog until after the House of Representatives had voted on the climate-change bill sponsored by Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey. The final version of the bill and the House vote would indicate what the future will hold.

The question I have faced as an American since first getting involved with environmental and global warming issues in the 1970s is whether the United States can address global warming issues through its political process in time, or at all. In American politics, the entrenched order, in this case, coal, gas, and nuclear interests, blockaded funding for renewables for decades, and will now die trying to defeat the safe and clean energy future, taking the rest of us and our planet with them. I learned long ago about how American political decisions are made, and by whom. Hint: It isn’t regular folk like us…

Now I can say the Congressional effort regarding global warming and electrical power production was a failure for our future. I liken it to a runaway train approaching a cliff one mile ahead. Congress just stoked the coal engine and advanced a plan to stop in four miles. Oh boy.

The bill had hundreds of pages of special-interest favors and its greenhouse-gas reduction targets had been whittled down. The bill’s biggest concessions went to utilities, which wanted assurances that they could continue to operate and build coal-burning power plants without shouldering new costs. The utilities received not only tens of billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, but also billions for work on technology to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from coal combustion to help meet future pollution targets.

Ethanol and biofuels won big time also because of the wishes of agricultural states.

The original bill called for all utilities to secure 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar, hydro and geothermal energy by 2025, but the standard was weakened to 15 percent by 2020, with states given the ability to reduce it further if they cannot meet the target.

The bill’s centerpiece was a cap-and-trade program that sets a ceiling on emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and allows polluting industries to trade emission permits or allowances to meet it. Mr. Obama said during the presidential campaign that all of those permits should be sold at auction, but the bill’s authors ended up giving away 85 percent free at the outset of the program.

The Senate version hopes to give away billions to the nuclear industry, with an unelected board the decision maker about what loans are guaranteed by the U.S. government.

So going back to my questions that started in the 1970s: Can the United States address global warming issues through its political process in time, or at all. The answer is no.

We can expect the worst now. We had a chance to stop before too much death and destruction; now I know we won’t.

The changes to our world from global warming will be largely irreversible for decades, and quite catastrophic. The warming we are observing and monitoring now is a consequence of carbon emissions of 10-20 years ago, and the Earth will just be getting warmer for quite a while. And as the permafrost melts and more carbon dioxide is released, this will only accelerate.

In the United States, we are somewhat insulated against the worst, we believe, due to our higher standard of living. But the recent fear about “swine flu” underscores how all of that could go south on us so very quickly. It is no accident that a more virulent and deadly strain of influenza would rise in a third world nation with a less nourished population with less access to clean water, medical care, sanitation and sewers, etc. With one billion of the six billion humans on this planet now living in squalor in third world cities without running water, adequate nourishment, or medical attention, it is just a matter of time before there is a plague that takes out an extraordinarily large number of people. The disruption to the world and its economy of this will send shock waves throughout even America and other wealthy nations.

Few people are cognizant in America that there were hunger riots in 30 different countries during the past two years. There are currently billions more people on the planet than it can feed, and when the effects of global warming are folded into the mix, there will be quite a few problems created. The large scale migration of Mexicans to the U.S. starting in the 1990s came about largely due to NAFTA, which had the effect of making corn grown in America so cheap that it supplanted the livelihoods of Mexican corn farmers, which caused them to migrate to the U.S. in search of work and food.

When the worldwide famine begins, there will be more large migrations, including another large movement of people trying to come to the United States. The current view of illegal immigration to the United States will change again, and the Congress will close the borders to immigration, as a practical matter, a numbers matter. A billion displaced people will be looking for food, work, and a home. The U.S. can’t take them, not 10% (100 million), not 1% (10 million).

We in America will have our own issues and challenges.

When the tropics are so warm that food is not easy to grow there anymore, when the wheat fields of the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine are no longer productive because the Hessian fly, previously frozen out by winters’ cold, now reach far to the north, when drought and flood disrupt agriculture on the plains of India and China, then there will be hunger on a scale never seen before, along with extreme civil and political unrest. Even in America, food will become much more expensive. California is in the midst of a huge drought, and that’s where much of the nation’s produce comes from.

A review of about 175 scientific studies that have investigated how a warmer world will influence such aspects of health as insect-borne disease patterns, water and food insecurity, threats to cities from rising sea levels, and harm from extreme climate events, like killer heat waves and floods leaves little doubt. There is nothing credible that disputes these scenarios.

So we know what is going to happen, but really no one is preparing, seriously. Rising sea levels threaten our coastal cities and their water supplies. We all know that now. A notable exception - Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California recently ordered his state agencies to prepare for a seven-inch rise in ocean levels, but what they do remains to be seen. Humans are not very good at proactive actions. We react to emergencies, but try to ignore the warnings. A full year before Katrina flooded New Orleans, another hurricane looked like it was going to hit the city, but missed. The emergency response infrastructure expected the breaches of the levees and discussed the recovery operations needed. When the hurricane missed the city, though, nothing more was done to prevent the disaster. The rest is history. So imagine several New Orleans-style disasters, simultaneously, around the world.

At some point, climate disasters (floods, tornados, hurricanes) bankrupt the insurance industry. Then what?

Great uncertainty and instability…That is our future.

It has been just over a year since I last posted to the blog. If you wonder what happened, I can only say that my investigation into global warming has been extensive and life-altering. What I found was so unsettling and so stark that it required my own immediate action and a search for solutions. Frankly, there really is a question now about whether we will make it as a species and planet. There will certainly be some horrific events, and we shall see them sooner than a few decades. All that stuff you hear will happen by 2050 is really more like 2020.

I did take time away to take action, political action, to get my state, Arizona, on the right track in the field of energy generation. Despite its enormous potential for solar energy, the fossil fuel and nuclear industries had controlled political matters so long that less than 1% of Arizona’s power comes from solar and renewables. There is a lesson in that for all of us in how power and greed can subvert the best option for us humans. The voters responded quite enthusiastically to the message of more solar power for the state, which also goes to show that people will choose renewable energy when given that chance.

As for my search for solutions, I have conducted my research and communicated now with top scientists, who are telling all of us what they are seeing, which is quite ominous, but so far the political and science establishment is still not responding as it needs to. There is no information that I have found that any of could not get on our own. We are, after all, in the information age.

If you look into the works of Katey Walter, you will find that she won the United States Council of Graduate Schools’ prize for the for the best doctoral thesis in 2006, when she monitored the methane being generated in Siberian lakes created by melting permafrost, and found it was over five times what had been predicted. Walter warned that as the permafrost in Siberia melted, growing methane emissions could accelerate climate change. But even she was not expecting such a rapid change. “Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It’s unprecedented. This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing.” The danger is that if too much methane is released, the world will get hotter no matter how drastically we slash our greenhouse gas emissions.

The rest of the tundra is only about one degree from thawing, which will create massive amounts of water and methane. Methane is a relatively potent greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential of 72 (averaged over 20 years) or 25 (averaged over 100 years). Atmospheric methane levels have been rising for years now, and when the tundra thaws, (Tundra is a good portion of the world’s total land mass – think Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada) there will be a huge surge in methane levels.

So what are the implications? What if that is just the match that lights the big one.

James Kennett, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA), in 2000, described support for the hypothesis that methane released from the ocean, not from wetlands, triggered rapid rises in temperature many times over the past 60,000 years. Kennett examined actual core samples from the ocean floor, and especially foraminifera, a microfossil group. (Methane has a distinct, carbon isotopic signature, which can be measured on materials such as the calcium carbonate of fossil shells.) When Kennett analyzed fossil shells from the Santa Barbara Basin using mass spectroscopy, large spikes in methane appeared coincident with periods of abrupt climate shift. It’s detailed in his Methane Hydrates in Quaternary Climate Change: The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis, a sobering and convincing read. He expressed his frustration with his peers for resisting his data. It made me think about Cassandra in Homer’s Iliad, whose warning about the Trojan Horse were scoffed at.

Kennett believes that the greatest potential of rapid methane release into the atmosphere is from sediments under the ocean, not in wetlands as others propose. At low temperatures and high pressures, water molecules form a cage around lighter methane molecules, entrapping this flammable greenhouse gas in a sort of permafrost. He explains that estimates suggest up to 11,000 gigatons of methane hydrate reserves versus 5 gigatons of reserves of all fossil fuels.

So what has caused the methane clathrates to erupt in Earth’s past?

First there is cooling, and the subsequent ice age. The ocean levels drop because so much of the land mass is now blanketed with sheets of thick ice, which lowered the pressure on the methane clathrates and they began erupting, which put more methane into the atmosphere, which raised temperatures, which caused even more methane to be released. This has triggered the abrupt end of ice ages, with temperatures soaring 10 degrees Centigrade within decades, warming the earth, and melting the glaciers.

So what stops this from just spinning out of control? Why did the warming stop? Why didn’t the Earth heat up like Venus has with its methane and carbon dioxide atmosphere?? What happened to counter the methane?

Meet methanotrophy: the interception and consumption of CH4 (methane) by certain microbial communities (Archaea). Methane produced in marine sediments diffuses upward and can be consumed under anoxic conditions by these single-celled organisms that lack nuclei, but that may be the world’s most ancient organismal lineage. Sulfate plays a part in the process, so just as iron stimulates the algae blooms in the ocean, adding sulfates to the ocean may trigger more methane oxidation by these Archaea. Methane oxidation provides energy needed for growth and metabolism of these microbial communities, and estimates of the net global rate of anaerobic CH4 oxidation vary from 12 to 55% of the net modern atmospheric CH4 flux.

These Archaea, which belong to several deeply branching lineages unrelated to those previously known, can be present in extremely high numbers (up to 40% of the microbial biomass) although almost none have been isolated in pure culture. Currently we have almost no information regarding the physiology of these organisms, meaning that their effects on global biogeochemical cycles remain unknown.

To save and otherwise terraform our Earth, we may be helping the Archaea. Stands to reason that the Archaea eat methane a low concentrations in the water, and just like any other microorganism, when levels of food rise, so will their population until there is a stasis of sorts with the food source. So while the glaciers are melting and the earth heats up when the methane clathrates erupt, the Archaea are growing exponentially in numbers and eating more and more methane until the methane levels peak and decline again. (I used to wonder what caused the end of the ice ages…)

When the methane clathrates erupt, and they will, we humans better be ready to ramp up the Archaea. There was a proposal I once read about to seed the atmosphere of Venus with microorganisms that would eat the methane and carbon dioxide there and produce an atmosphere like Earth’s so we could colonize that planet.

My next post will be about sustainable technologies and international disaster planning for what will happen.