Thawing the snowball

One of the frightening things about a system in equilibrium is what happens when you perturb it.

Within limits, most systems can recover from perturbation through some combination of negative feedbacks.  An example is your body temperature.  If something makes it goes up -- exercise, for example, or being outside on a hot, humid day -- you sweat, bringing your temperature back down.  If your body temperature goes down too much, you increase your rate of burning calories, and also have responses like shivering -- which brings it back up.  Those combine to keep your temperature in a narrow range (what the biologists call homeostasis).

Push it too much, though, and the whole thing falls apart.  If your temperature rises beyond about 105 F, you can experience seizures, convulsions, brain damage -- or death.  Your feedback mechanisms are simply not able to cope.

This, in a nutshell, is why climate scientists are so concerned about the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.  Within limits -- as with your body temperature -- an increase in carbon dioxide results in an increase in processes that remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the whole system stays in equilibrium.  There is a tipping point, however.

The problem is that no one knows where it is -- and whether we may have already passed it.

A piece of research from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, however, has suggested that this flip from stability to instability may be fast and unpredictable.  A paper authored by a team led by paleobiologist Shuhai Xiao, that was published in the journal Geology, looks at one of the main destabilization events that the Earth has ever experienced -- when the "Snowball Earth" thawed out in the late Precambrian Period, 635 million years ago.

Artist's conception of the Precambrian Snowball Earth [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Xiao and his team studied rocks from Yunnan and Guizhou, China, that are called cap carbonates.  They are made of limestone and dolomite and are deposited quickly in marine environments when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere spikes, leading to a dramatic temperature increase and a subsequent increase in absorption of carbonates into seawater (and ultimately deposition of those carbonates on the seafloor).  The cap carbonates Xiao et al. studied were dated to between 634.6 and 635.2 million years old, which means that the entire jump in both temperature and carbon dioxide content took less than 800,000 years.

So in less than a million years, the Earth went from being completely covered in ice to being subtropical.  The jump in global average temperature is estimated at 7 C -- conditions that then persisted for the next hundred million years.

Xiao et al. describe this as "the most severe paleoclimatic [event] in Earth history," and that the resulting deglaciations worldwide were "globally synchronous, rapid, and catastrophic."

Carol Dehler, a geologist at Utah State University, is unequivocal about the implications.  "I think one of the biggest messages that Snowball Earth can send humanity is that it shows the Earth’s capabilities to change in extreme ways on short and longer time scales."

What frustrates me most about today's climate change deniers is that they are entirely unwilling to admit that the changes we are seeing are happening at an unprecedented rate.  "It's all natural," they say.  "There have been climatic ups and downs throughout history."  Which is true -- as far as it goes.  But the speed with which the Earth is currently warming is faster than what the planet experienced when it flipped between an ice-covered frozen wasteland and a subtropical jungle.  It took 800,000 years to see an increase of the Earth's average temperature by 7 degrees C.

The best climate models predict that's what we'll see in two hundred years.

And that is why we're alarmed.

It's unknown what kind of effect that climate change in the Precambrian had on the existing life forms.  The fossil record just isn't that complete.  But whatever effect it had, the living creatures that were around when it happened had 800,000 years to adapt to the changing conditions.  What's certain is that an equivalent change in two centuries will cause massive extinctions.  Evolution simply doesn't happen that quickly.  Organisms that can't tolerate the temperature fluctuation will die.

We can only speculate on the effects this would have on humanity.

This is clearly the biggest threat we face, and yet the politicians still sit on their hands, claim it's not happening, that remediation would be too costly, that we can't prevent it, that short-term profits are more important than the long-term habitability of the Earth.  (Not to mention firing the people and closing the agencies that are currently trying to do something about it.)  Our descendants five hundred years from now will look upon the leaders from this century as having completely abdicated their responsibility of care for the people they represent.

Presuming we still have descendants at that point.

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Ignoring Cassandra

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), sometimes nicknamed "the Atlantic Conveyor," is an enormous oceanic current that not only encircles the entire Atlantic Ocean, it links up with other circulation patterns in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

It's called a "thermohaline" circulation because it's driven by two things; temperature and salinity.  Cold water is denser than warm water; salty water is denser than fresher water.  Alterations in these factors determine where the water goes, setting up convection (the movement of a fluid because of gradients in density).  Specifically, as the warm Gulf Stream (the red line along the eastern coast of North America on the above map) moves northward, it cools down and evaporates.  Those both act to increase its density, to the point that just south of Iceland, it sinks.

That sinking mechanism is what drives the entire thing.  Slow that down, and the whole system fails.

Which is exactly what is happening.  A paper last week in Nature found that the AMOC has diminished dramatically because of anthropogenic climate change; the warming oceans, along with fresh meltwater from Greenland, has made large parts of the north loop of the circulation too buoyant to sink.  Since 1950, the flow rate has gone down by 0.46 sverdrups.  Before you say, "Well, that doesn't sound like very much," allow me to point out that one sverdrup is a million cubic meters a second.  The combined flow of all the rivers in the world is only about 1.2 sverdrups.

So 0.46 is huge.

Current models indicate that this change is going to have enormous effects on local climates.  Western and northern Europe are likely to get colder; the surface loop of the AMOC is why Iceland, Scotland, and Scandinavia are way warmer than you'd expect given their latitudes.  The southeastern United States and eastern South America will probably become much warmer; the heat energy doesn't just go away because it's not being transported northward and dissipated.  Rainfall patterns, and storm paths and intensity, will certainly change, but how is unknown.

The truth is, we don't know enough to predict exactly what the outcome will be, at least not with any certainty.  We're perturbing a complex global system with about as much caution as a toddler playing in the mud.  But what seems certain is that we have now entered the "Find Out" phase of "Fuck Around and Find Out."

What kills me is we've been warning about this for decades.  British science historian James Burke's prescient documentary After the Warming described the collapse of the AMOC as an outcome of anthropogenic climate change all the way back in 1991.  But instead of listening to the scientists, and brilliant advocates like Burke who bring science to the public notice, more people were swayed by idiots like former Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who brought a snowball onto the floor of the United States Senate and basically said, "Hey, it's snowing, so climate change isn't real, hurr hurr hurr durr."

Of course, listening to Inhofe and his ilk is easy.  If you believe him, you don't have to make any changes to your lifestyle.  And we haven't gotten any further in the intervening decades; President-elect Trump has nominated Lee Zeldin for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior, both thoroughgoing climate change deniers who are deep in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.  (And please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them "climate skeptics."  A skeptic respects the evidence.  These people reject a body of evidence that's as high as Mount Everest in the name of profit and short-term expediency.)

Politicians Discussing Global Warming by Isaac Cordal (2011)

I read a serious analysis of Donald Trump's win claiming that one factor was that Americans have a "suspicion of expertise."  That is something that will never, ever make sense to me.  How is it reasonable to say, essentially, "These people know more than I do, so I don't believe them"?  The result is that we now have one of the most powerful countries in the world being run by a cabal of people who are united by two things -- (1) devotion to Donald Trump, and (2) a complete lack of qualifications.  So this distrust of evidence, science, and rationality is only going to get worse -- and will become the motive force in driving policy.

The problem is, though, if you ignore the truth, sooner or later it catches up with you.  And from the recent paper, it appears it's going to be sooner.  Sea level rise is already threatening coastal communities, and there are island nations that will simply cease to exist if if gets much worse.  Extreme weather events are likely to become commonplace.  We're sure to see alterations in climate that will affect agriculture, and in some places, habitability.

As usual, the people creating the problem aren't the ones who are going to get hurt by it -- at least not at first.  But this is an issue that will, ultimately, affect us all.

And lord have mercy, I am tired.  Tired of shouting warnings, tired of citing study after study, tired of arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence with people determined not to listen to any of it.  I'm not even an actual scientist, just a retired science teacher and blogger, and I feel like I've been sounding the call about this stuff forever; I can't imagine how the actual researchers feel.  It makes me sympathize with Cassandra, from Greek mythology -- who was blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to have no one believe her.

I wish I had some sort of hopeful message to end on, but I don't.  I'm not naturally a pessimist, but given the fact that the country I live in just voted in an anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-academic administration whose motto seems to be "Corporate Profit Über Alles," I don't think we're going to make any progress here for the next four years.  By then, how much more damage will have been done?

As journalist Sheri Fink put it: "Soon after a disaster passes, we tend to turn our eyes away and focus our resources on the day-to-day, rather than on preparing for the rare, but foreseeable and potentially catastrophic disaster.  It's another form of triage, how much we invest in preparing for that, a very important question for public policy.  But... we are such a short-sighted species."

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When the volcano blows

It's a point I've made here more than once; if you're trying to convince someone of something, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it.

The reason this comes up today is the horrible situation in Iceland, where (at the time of this writing) the people of the little village of Grindavík on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula, due south of the capital city of Reykjavík, have been evacuated and are waiting for a volcanic eruption that stands a good chance of destroying the town completely.  The buildings and roads in the town have already sustained heavy damage from nearly continuous earthquakes, and the latest estimate is that there are places where the magma is only five hundred meters below the surface.  An eruption is nearly certain -- how extensive it will be is unknown.  (The village is only a few kilometers away from Fagradallsfjall, the volcano I got to see erupting when I visited Iceland in 2022.)

A photograph I took in August 2022

This is certainly awful.  But the whole situation is made worse because every time there's a volcanic eruption, it brings the climate change deniers howling from the dark corners where they hide, claiming that (as one of them put it) "the Climate Scammers conveniently ignore that a single volcanic eruption puts hundreds of times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than cars do.  Climate ups and downs happen all the time, and natural processes account for nearly all of it.  Wake up!"

Which would be a good argument if anything about it was true.

The "hundreds of times more" statistic is about the right factor -- but the inequality points the other direction.  Here's the actual situation, as per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

You might not spot the volcanic carbon dioxide output on this graph right away, because it's the light blue line hugging the x-axis.  In fact, as Mark Gongloff points out, writing for Bloomberg, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens spewed ten million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which seems like a lot until you find out that our burning of fossil fuels does that every two and a half hours.  Geologists estimate that even a cataclysmic eruption like the Yellowstone Supervolcano emitted on the order of thirty gigatons of carbon dioxide -- about what our fossil fuel use accomplishes every single year.

So not only are the climate change deniers coldly and callously capitalizing on the horrible situation unfolding in Iceland, they're doing so by crafting outrageous lies about it.

The fact that this claim is wildly wrong has not stopped it from being circulated all over the place by people who would very much like it if we didn't have to face head-on what we're currently doing to the planet we live on.  I get it; it's a hard conversation to have.  I have an electric car and solar panels and solar hot water, but even so, I very much live an affluent First-World lifestyle, with all that comes along with it.  I'm better situated than most if it came to a serious cutback in fossil fuel use, and it still would force me and my family into some difficult changes.

But we can't keep going as we are.  If this past year's insane weather didn't convince you of that fact, you're being willfully blind.

And the whole thing is not helped by circulating wildly wrong information whose sole intent is to lull everyone into further inaction.  I have no doubt that at least some of the people who are posting this stuff don't know it's wrong, and are guilty of the rather common sin of neglecting to fact-check.  But the ones who write these posts and create these memes -- they know it's a lie, and they do it anyway.

Which is somewhere beyond reprehensible.

So please, please, please... if you see someone posting this claim, tell them they're wrong.  Link this blog post if you like, or (better still) send them to the NOAA and USGS sites that lay the data out in unarguable form.  Because this is a falsehood with serious repercussions -- like endangering the long-term habitability of our own home world.

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Meltdown

With the insane weather we've had this summer -- and which is showing no signs of calming down -- it's easy to forget about another inevitable outcome of anthropogenic climate change: sea level rise.

Part of the issue, of course, is that humans have a regrettable tendency only to pay attention to what's right in front of their faces, like the current worldwide extreme heat wave.  It's why researchers found in 2014 that public concern about climate change decreases during the winter, an attitude Stephen Colbert summed up as "I just had dinner, so there's no such thing as world hunger."

And sea level rise is so gradual you really do have to have a long baseline even to notice it.  It's only in extremely low-lying places like Louisiana's Isle de Jean-Charles that people have been forced to notice -- and that only because the place looks very likely to cease to exist entirely in the next ten years.

Another reason the (well justified) panic over climate change has mostly focused on extreme high temperatures on land and hot sea surfaces fueling bigger storms is that climatologists thought we had something of a buffer, ice-melt-wise, in the Greenland Ice Sheet.  The Greenland Ice Sheet, they thought, had been unmelted for millions of years, which not only kept all that water locked up in solid form on land, but also helped stabilize the Arctic climate.

Note my use of the past tense.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christine Zenino from Chicago, US, Greenland Glaciers outside of Ammassalik (5562580093), CC BY 2.0]

New research, based on an ice core that had been collected in the 1960s but then lost for nearly sixty years, showed something terrifying: four hundred thousand years ago, nearly the entire Greenland Ice Sheet melted, raising the sea level by several meters -- at a time when the carbon dioxide concentration was lower than it is today.  Using something called a luminescence signal -- a highly-sensitive technique that measures the last time flakes of feldspar or quartz were exposed to light, and therefore were on the surface -- the researchers found what they are calling "bulletproof" evidence that layers thought to be continuously buried deep in the Greenland ice were exposed between 420,000 and 370,000 years ago.

If this happened today -- and the indications are that if we don't curb climate change fast, it will -- the results will be nothing short of catastrophic.

"If we melt just portions of the Greenland ice sheet, the sea level rises dramatically," said Tammy Rittenour, climatologist at Utah State University.  "Forward modeling the rates of melt, and the response to high carbon dioxide, we are looking at meters of sea level rise, probably tens of meters.  And then look at the elevation of New York City, Boston, Miami, Amsterdam. Look at India and Africa -- most global population centers are near sea level."

Considering that the average elevation of the state of Delaware is twenty meters -- and that Louisiana and Florida tie at thirty-three meters -- this should scare the absolute shit out of everyone.  (And like Rittenour said -- even in those low-elevation states, most of the population is still along the coast -- so even a meter or two rise would be catastrophic.)

And, typical of privileged people in industrialized countries, I've focused on where I live.  If you look at the top ten cities threatened by climate change, only one (Miami, Florida) is in the United States.  Two are in India (Kolkata and Mumbai), two are in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City and Hai Phong), two are in China (Guangzhou and Shanghai), and one each in Bangladesh (Dhaka), Myanmar (Rangoon), and Thailand (Bangkok).  Just counting the urban population of these ten cities puts almost seventeen million people with the choice of relocating or drowning.

You think the refugee problem is bad now?  

And I'm not just talking about the dreaded "caravans of foreign refugees" the right-wingers here in the U.S. like to bring out every time there's focus on the fact that their entire platform lately has consisted of denying rights to people they don't like.  If the sea level rises even by a meter or two, every coastal city in the United States is in trouble -- so we're gonna have an internal refugee problem the likes of which we've never seen before.

People, we have got to figure this out.

We've had enough time to process it all, to come to the conclusion that yes, it's real, and no, it's not a "natural warm-up."  I'll end with a quote from British science historian James Burke's brilliant (and prescient) documentary After the Warming, which aired all the way back in 1989: "People spend money to insure their homes, their health, and their lives against far less likely occurrences.  That's all legislation to stop climate change turns out to be: planetary insurance...  Our attitude thus far has been like the guy in the old joke, have you heard it?  A man falls off the top of a twenty-story building, and someone on the seventeenth floor sticks his head out of the window and asks the guy how he's doing.  The man shrugs as he falls and says, 'So far, so good.'"

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Shattering the records

As I write this, large chunks of the states of California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are under NOAA Heat Advisories.  June saw over a thousand temperature records set, and conditions this week are predicted to break at least some of those records in the next few days.

For the third time in the last six weeks, out-of-control wildfires in Canada are dumping smoke across the Midwest and Northeast.  Montana, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio are all under Air Quality Advisories, with many areas posting AQIs of over 200 -- "Very Unhealthy For All Individuals."

The eastern parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and all of Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are under Flood Watches.  Last week, storms dumped an unprecedented amount of rain in the area, resulting in floods in much of Vermont, New Hampshire, and eastern New York, the likes of which have not been seen in recent history.  More torrential downpours are expected into this week.

The European Space Agency released an alarming forecast for a huge swath of Europe, including much of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Poland, where a combination of high heat and humidity is predicted to result in life-threatening conditions.  Sixteen cities in Italy, including Rome and Florence, posted "Extreme Heat Warnings" -- the highest level of heat advisory the ESA issues -- with the temperatures in Sicily and Sardinia predicted to reach 48 C (118 F).  If this forecast pans out, it will be an all-time temperature record for the entire continent of Europe.

A heat wave in India and Pakistan in June crossed what one study called "the limits of survivability," reaching 47 C (116 F) with extreme humidity.  The heat was only broken when it started to rain -- but then it didn't stop.  The resulting flooding has caused damage estimated in the millions.  This followed a "once in two hundred years" heat wave in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Malaysia in April.

Sea surface temperatures are the hottest ever recorded.  We're talking pretty much worldwide, here.  Antarctic sea ice is at its lowest level for June -- middle of the Antarctic winter -- since measurements began.  The Atlantic Ocean is so hot it's got the scientists struggling to find words to describe how bad things are.  "The temperatures in the North Atlantic are unprecedented and of great concern," said Michael Sparrow, head of the World Meteorological Organization's World Climate Research Department.  "They are much higher than anything the models predicted."  The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting called them "off the charts."  This raises the specter of a bad Atlantic hurricane year, although how the high temperatures will interact with other factors -- such as wind shear and the fact that we're going into an El Niño, usually an Atlantic storm suppressor -- are unknown.

How much evidence do people need?

It's not so hard to say, you know?  Give it a try, climate-change deniers.  "Well, I guess we were wrong, then."  "Maybe we should have listened to the scientists, who have been warning us about this for forty fucking years."  

But no.  Just yesterday I saw someone post a photograph of a buckled road surface in Louisiana...

... and blamed it on the fact that the contractors hired to build roads don't give a damn and are doing slipshod work.

Yes, I know, all of the information I posted above is weather, and "weather is not climate," a phrase the climate change deniers like to trot out when it's convenient and then proceed to forget about when they gleefully point out there's been a cold snap in Minnesota in January.  I'm not exaggerating; James Inhofe, retired (thank heaven) senator from Oklahoma, set a new record himself -- for the stupidest thing ever said in the halls of the United States Senate -- when he brought a snowball inside in December and claimed it was proof that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.  

Any individual record that's been broken this year is "weather."  Taken all together, what we have is "climate."

Not to mention a crisis that is threatening the long-term habitability of the planet.

Look, it's time we stop playing nice, here.  There's a point at which giving a forum to people who are either ignorant, or else have a vested interest in hoodwinking the gullible, isn't "giving the other side a chance to speak their views," it's a well-nigh suicidal waste of time we don't have.  I've quoted Isaac Asimov many times, but we cannot continue to allow the control of the planet to be hijacked by people who believe that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."  Contrary to what they say, the climate change deniers didn't "do their research;" they were bamboozled by Fox News, Newsmax, and other media in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry.  At best, they spent fifteen minutes cherry-picking websites that agreed with what they already believed and completely ignored the actual research done by actual scientists.

The result?  A populace who sees a buckled road surface in the middle of a catastrophic, life-threatening heat wave, and blames it on inept road workers.

Is it already too late?  I honestly don't know.  Doesn't abrogate our responsibility to do what we can.  I don't know of anyone who, if their house was on fire, would tell the firemen, "Don't bother trying to save it."  At this point, though, I'm sure of one thing; the only solution is to get to the ballot box and vote out the fossil-fuel-funded political hacks who have spent decades pulling the wool over our eyes and fooling us into believing nothing is wrong. 

If we don't, I can nearly guarantee that this blisteringly hot summer will be the coolest one we'll have for a very long time.

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The long rain

Imagine going back 240 million years.

This would land you in the early Triassic Period.  By this time, the Earth would have had twelve million years to recover from the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic Extinction, the largest mass extinction on record.  Life had rebounded some -- two of the dominant terrestrial animal groups were the terrifying crurotarsans (picture a long-legged on-land crocodile) and the dicynodonts (which looked a little like a rhino with a parrot's bill -- and tusks).

Finding your way around the place would be confusing, if all you know is the current continental arrangement.  Pangaea was still locked together, and would be until rifting began to open up the Atlantic Ocean -- but that was still forty million years in the future.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fama Clamosa, Pangaea 200Ma, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Because virtually all the land masses of the world were jammed together into one supercontinent, the climate was really dry.  There probably was a reasonable amount of rainfall along the coastline, but most places were very far away from the coast.  The result is that one of the major early Triassic sedimentary rocks is the "Triassic red sandstone" formed from wind-blown layers of sand deposited in conditions that resembled today's Sahara Desert.  But instead of being restricted to a part of a single continent, this was what it was like in the interior of Pangaea -- i.e., the entire land mass on planet Earth.

But even the Sahara isn't lifeless, and neither was the continental interior of Pangaea during the early Triassic.  Organisms found a way to cope with the dry conditions, and -- all things considered -- life was doing okay.

Then -- 234 million years ago -- it started to rain.

I'm not talking about your short-lived desert thunderstorm, here, nor even the kind of "atmospheric river" event that hit the Central Valley of California this year, causing not only flooding but an explosive burst of wildflowers.

This rainstorm lasted two million years.

It's called the "Carnian Pluvial Episode," and evidence for it can be seen in a sudden shift in sedimentary geology, a change in the isotope concentrations in carbonate rocks (like limestone), and a huge spike in heavy elements (like osmium and mercury) that are much more common in deep-mantle rocks.  The last bit is a clue to what happened -- there was a massive eruption called the Wrangellia Flood Basalts in what would eventually become southern Alaska and western British Columbia.  I've written before about two other flood basalt provinces, the Siberian Traps (implicated in the Permian-Triassic Extinction) and the Deccan Traps (contributory to the Cretaceous Extinction), and while the Wrangellia event isn't as big as either of those, it is many orders of magnitude larger than anything you probably picture as a volcanic eruption.  The Wrangellia Flood Basalt injected huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, largely through the lava burning through limestone, coal, and any organic matter on the surface.  This spiked the atmospheric temperature, increased seawater evaporation...

... and it started to rain.

Imagine being an animal adapted to living in Arizona, and all of a sudden, you find you're living in the Amazon lowlands.  That's pretty much what happened.

The result was another extinction.  Both the crurotarsans and dicynodonts bit the dust.  Or actually, at that point, the mud.  Let me emphasize that both groups were doing fine before the climatic shift; but having spent millions of years adapting to the early Triassic desert conditions, they couldn't handle it when the long rain started.

The winners here were the animals that had the flexibility to cope with the changing conditions -- in this case, dinosaurs, which would go on to dominate the place for another 165 million years.  The early mammals also made it, obviously, but they were still small at this point (and would remain so until the non-avian dinosaurs met their demise).  Interesting that the quintessential Mesozoic group, the dinosaurs, might never have taken off like they did if it hadn't been for a sudden geological event that triggered a climatic shift and knocked out the two main competitor groups.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the rate at which the Wrangellia Flood Basalts injected carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is thought to be significantly smaller than the rate we're doing the same from burning fossil fuels.

Any wonder why environmentalists are worried?

We've already had our share of bizarre weather in the last few years; it seems like not a week goes by without my hearing someone say, "This hardly ever happens."  At the moment, here in upstate New York, it hasn't rained for a month, and we're getting spectacular sunsets (and difficulty breathing) because of a pall of wildfire smoke that's come all the way from central Quebec.  Vietnam and Laos have already set record high temperatures this year, reaching a devastating 44 C (with correspondingly high humidity), as did the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with Portland at a less dangerous but still scorching 35 C.  

Weather isn't climate, something I feel obligated to remind the climate change deniers every time we have a cold snap in January; but as anomalous weather happens over and over and over, these kinds of patterns begin to add up to something significant.  As a Louisiana native, I'm already worried about this year's hurricane season -- especially given that the most recent sea surface temperatures are (in the words of Australian climatologist Matthew England) "heading off the charts."

To judge by the geological record of events like the Carnian Pluvial Episode, it looks like we might be in the last half of "fuck around and find out."

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The swamps of Canada

Ellesmere Island would be high on the list of the Earth's most inhospitable places.

It's huge, only slightly smaller in area than Britain, and is part of the territory of Nunavut in Canada.  It is entirely above the Arctic Circle.  The record high temperature there was 15.6 C (60 F); the average high is 7 C (45 F).  The record low, on the other hand, is -47 C (-52.6 F).  It's also exceedingly dry, averaging a little over six inches of total precipitation a year.  It's no wonder that although the Inuit use some of it as summer hunting grounds, the permanent resident population stands at 144 brave souls.

Honestly, I'm a bit mystified as to why anyone lives there.

It wasn't always that way, though.  As hard as it is to fathom, Ellesmere Island used to be a swamp, back during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period about fifty-five million years ago during which the global average temperature was about eight degrees hotter than it is now.  The reasons it occurred are still a matter of discussion amongst climatologists, but from the chemistry and deposition of sedimentary rocks, it clearly came from a massive increase in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and was accompanied by the sea levels reaching levels between three hundred and four hundred meters higher than they are today.

If that happened now, where I'm currently sitting in upstate New York would be beachfront property.

What's most interesting about the climate of Ellesmere back then is that even though it was a warm swamp, it was pretty much located where it is today (i.e. above the Arctic Circle).  But even though for a couple of months of the year it was plunged into darkness, there were still trees -- fossils of the conifers Metasequoia and Glyptostrobus have been found in regions that now host little else besides mosses and lichens.

And a paper in PLOS-One this week showed that it isn't just subtropical trees that used to live on Ellesmere -- so did some long-lost cousins of primates.

We usually think of primates as being tropical, and for good reason; most of the primate species in the world live in areas not too far from the equator.  We originated there, too, of course; the ancestral home of Homo sapiens is Kenya and Tanzania (that's all humans -- sorry, racists).  We've since expanded our territory a little, but our relative hairlessness is a good indicator that we originally came from warmer climes.

But back during the PETM, Ellesmere was a warmer clime, and paleontologists have found in sedimentary rock strata the fossils of two proto-primates, Ignacius mckennai and Ignacius dawsonae.  The genus Ignacius is part of a much larger group called the plesiadapiforms, who are all extinct but whose closest living relatives are modern primates.  Ignacius was a genus confined to the northern half of North America, and when the temperatures warmed up and the forests spread north, Ignacius followed them.

This makes these remains the northernmost primate fossils ever found.

A reconstruction of Ignacius dawsonae [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Kristen Miller/Biodiversity Institute/University of Kansas (CC-BY 4.0)]

What is amazing to me about this is... well... everything.  That trees could flourish in a swampy environment well above the Arctic Circle.  That non-human primates ever got this far north.  And most especially, that the Earth's climate was this drastically different, only fifty-five million years ago -- a long time ago on our usual timeline, but pretty much day before yesterday on the geological scale.

Of course, this should be a cautionary tale for us cocky humans, and probably won't be.  Things can change drastically.  Have changed drastically, and will again.  What we're doing right now is spiking the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and thus the temperature, at a far faster rate than just about anything in the geological record -- perhaps even exceeding the carbon dioxide pulse that set off the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction.

And that cataclysm killed an estimated ninety percent of life on Earth.

All I can say is, we damn well better start paying attention, or else we'll find out that Santayana's famous quote about not learning from history also applies to not learning from prehistory.  Or, put more succinctly, that the best strategy is not "fuck around and find out."

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Meltdown

One of the most frustrating things about human behavior is that we can receive repeated hints and warnings that if we keep doing what we're doing, bad stuff will happen, then when we continue and bad stuff does indeed happen as predicted, we act all surprised.

We've seen it before with volcanic eruptions, a topic I just dealt with in more detail last week.  As I pointed out, it's impossible (as science currently stands) to predict exactly when volcanoes will erupt, and sometimes they still take us completely by surprise, such as the May 2021 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  But a much better-known example of an eruption geologists saw coming was the March 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, which killed 57 people, a significant fraction of whom were leisure hikers hoping to get close to the mountain, some of whom deliberately went around signs and barricades warning of the danger.

There's something in human nature that makes us say, "Oh, c'mon, that sign isn't meant for me.  We'll be fine."

Which is why we're now in the position of being presented with a study from the University of South Florida confirming what climatologists have been saying for decades -- that anthropogenic climate change, generated by the burning of fossil fuels, is going to melt the on-land ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland, and produce catastrophic sea level rise.

The first person who connected atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with global average temperature was, I shit you not, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, 126 years ago.  That's how long we've known about this.  It started being the subject of serious study (and concern) in the 1970s, and in the 80s and 90s popularizers such as James Burke and Al Gore brought it to the public notice with (respectively) After the Warming and An Inconvenient Truth.  But it's easy to ignore people if paying attention to them means having to change your lifestyle; easier to listen to knuckle-draggers like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate as "proof" that the world wasn't warming up.

Unfortunately for Senator Inhofe, nature continues to operate by the laws of physics and not the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry, because the temperature has continued to climb.  And just last week, a new study in Nature has shown that the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica has lost contact with the rocky basin it rests on, and is in the process of collapse -- something that could raise global sea levels by three meters.

"Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails," said marine geophysicist and study co-author Robert Larter from the British Antarctic Survey.  "We should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future -- even from one year to the next -- once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed."

If that doesn't drive the point home hard enough, the authors point out that according to the United Nations, roughly forty percent of the human population lives within a hundred kilometers of the coast.

The edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

I feel like the climatologists, and also science writers like myself, have been jumping up and down yelling ourselves hoarse for years trying to get people to wake up, and for God's sake, do something.  But the USF study is the most recent indication that whatever window we had to mitigate the effects of human-induced climate change might well have closed.  I hate to be a doom-and-gloom purveyor, and I wish I had good news; but at the moment, this is what we have.  We've allowed people like Senator Inhofe and their mouthpieces over at Fox News to convince the public that somehow we climate activists want bad things to happen, so we're exaggerating them for our own malign purposes.  And all the while, the voters have been climbing over the signs saying "Danger, Do Not Proceed Past This Point," saying, "Ha ha, this can't be meant for me."

I'm very much afraid that the result is we're in the latter half of "Fuck around and find out."

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Modern-day Cassandras

When people think of environmental degradation, usually what comes to mind are urban areas, agricultural land either grazed bare by cattle or sheep or devoted to monoculture farming, and obviously damaged sites like mines, oilfields, and landfills.  It's a little alarming when studies are done that show that an entire country is an example of a severely degraded environment.

Especially when the country is as big as Australia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diliff, Koala climbing tree, CC BY-SA 3.0]

My guess is that Australia wouldn't be the first place you'd think of when it comes to ecological damage.  But a two-thousand-page state of the environment report, commissioned by the Australian government, resulted in an overall assessment that the condition of the country's ecosystems is "shocking."  Amongst the findings:

• Nineteen of Australia's ecosystem are "on the verge of collapse."
• Non-native plant species now outnumber native ones.
• More species have gone extinct in Australia in the last two hundred years than on any other continent.  (Not country; continent.)
• Two hundred species endemic to Australia -- found nowhere else in the world -- have experienced upgraded threat status in the last five years.
• In the past ten years, there has been a record number of droughts, wildfires, record-breaking floods, and typhoons.
• There have been six major coral-bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world.

In a dramatic example of how environmental effects don't stop at national borders, a large contributor to the problem has been climate change -- even though Australia's government has committed to cutting carbon emissions by 43% by the year 2030.  Which is lovely, but when there are countries like the United States still thumbing their noses at decreasing fossil fuel use, it's not going to make much difference.

Not that the Australians themselves have done everything right, mind you.  Many of the exotic species -- most notoriously, the European rabbit -- were brought in deliberately.  Previous governments have been much less eco-friendly than the current one, usually citing budget issues as an excuse not to do anything.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my environmental science students years ago.  The question I threw out to the class was, "What would it take for governments to take action on environmental issues, specifically carbon emissions and climate change?"  Her answer was, "Things will have to get a great deal worse.  Bad enough that ordinary people have their lives drastically changed.  When the food starts running out, when the heat starts killing not just poor people in third world countries but middle-class folks right here in the United States.  I hate to put it this way, but until it's bad enough that people living right in our neighborhoods are dying because of it, we'll just keep on doing what we've always done and pretending everything's okay."

I think she's spot-on.  The problem is, once it gets to that point, it's too late to do anything to halt it.  As the Australians have found out, as the Americans and Western Europeans are finding out, once entire countries are sweltering in a pressure cooker, there's not much you can do other than try to survive it -- and accept that some won't.

Of course, developing countries and the third world has known that for decades.  Right now, Pakistan, India, and large parts of central and northern Africa are experiencing record high temperatures as well.  Unlike the United States and Western Europe, though, this is nothing new.  It seems like every year they have a new record-setting heat wave, people die, and it barely is a blip on the radar in the industrialized world.

Yet another reason why we think we're immune to the effects of what we've been doing to the climate for the past hundred years.

It's profoundly maddening when you think about the fact that scientists and environmentally-conscious laypeople like myself have been sounding the alarm about this for decades.  I'd like to hope that this new report out of Australia will shake a few people up, but our history of ignoring the experts leaves me feeling like this will get shoved under the rug, too.

Remember the character of Cassandra from Greek mythology?  She was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, and was given a blessing and a curse by the god Apollo -- that she could see the future, but when she told people about it, no one would believe her.  Even after Troy was sacked and burned, and her parents killed -- just as she'd predicted -- still people discounted what she said.  The environmental scientists are like modern-day Cassandras, telling people what the models said would happen, and even after the models have proved correct over and over (in fact, when they were wrong, it was usually because they underestimated the effects), people still shrug their shoulders and pretend nothing's wrong.

I'd like to find a positive way to end this post, but I'm fresh out of ideas about how to do that.  The situation is dire.  Our only hope -- slim as it is -- is to elect politicians who place the global environment in first place on the priorities list.  Until we do that, I'm afraid the Cassandras will continue their fruitless prophesying, and the rest of us will continue our slide into the pressure cooker.

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Cliffs of ice and rivers in the sky

One of the most frustrating things is that instead of meeting the challenges we have and then moving forward, we seem to be fighting the same battles over and over and over.  It's like running on a treadmill, except instead of getting aerobic exercise, all you get is high blood pressure and an ulcer.

It will come as no surprise that I'm once again referring to anthropogenic climate change, which has such a mountain of evidence behind it that there is no argument any more.  Or there shouldn't be.  But all it takes is Some Guy On The Internet making a comment that amounts to "Nuh-uh, is not," and all of the science deniers give him a standing ovation and say, "See, we told you."

The latest in the long line of unqualified anti-science types acting as if their pronouncements somehow outweigh actual research is a tweet from Matt Thomas claiming that the eruption of Mt. Merapi in Indonesia in 2020 exceeded all of the human-generated carbon dioxide ever emitted.  Thomas said, "This volcano just spewed more CO2 than every car driven in history.  Climate change is natural.  Taxing us into poverty isn’t the answer."

Despite the fact that this isn't just false, it's false by several orders of magnitude, it immediately started a Greek chorus of "Climate change is a hoax!" from all the self-appointed climatologists on Twitter.  The tweet got over a hundred thousand likes, and the video link he provided got millions of views.  I've seen it posted on social media dozens of times myself, always to shouts of acclamation.  Very few people responded the way I did, which was to say, "You, sir, are a dangerous idiot."  It seems like a lot of the people who actually trust science have been wearied to the point of exhaustion, and we're just not taking the bait any more.

And it's not like the numbers aren't out there to confirm Thomas's dangerous idiocy.  Anyone with a computer and access to scientific databases on the internet can check his figures, and see that he's not just in left field, he's so far away he couldn't see left field with a powerful telescope.  In an average year, all the volcanic activity in the world releases about 0.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide; the carbon dioxide released in one year from vehicular exhaust is ten times higher than that.  (Note that this is all the emissions from all the volcanoes in a year, as compared to vehicular emissions in a year; Thomas was claiming that one volcano exceeded the emissions of all the automobiles ever created.  I guess if you're gonna lie, you may as well make it a doozy.)

So instead of trusting Some Guy On The Internet, let's look at what the actual science is saying.  How's that for a novel idea?

Just last week there were three studies that in a sane world, would alarm the hell out of everyone, but for some reason, have barely caused a blip on the radar.

First from the University of Tsukuba (Japan), we have a study showing that a scary meteorological phenomenon called an atmospheric river is predicted to spike in frequency, especially in east Asia.  Atmospheric rivers are pretty much what they sound like; narrow, fast-moving bands of extremely humid air, that undergo what's called adiabatic cooling when they run into land that has a higher elevation.  This forces the air upward, causing the volume to expand and the temperature to drop -- and all of that moisture condenses as rain or snow.

We're not talking insignificant amounts of water, here.  An atmospheric river, propelled by a typhoon a thousand kilometers to the east, struck Henan Province in China last year.  The amount of rainfall they received is, honestly, hard to imagine.  In three days the city of Zhengzhou got sixty centimeters of rainfall -- about equal to its average annual precipitation.  In some places in the region, the rainfall rate exceeded twenty centimeters per hour.  Over three hundred people died in the floods, and the damage was estimated at twelve billion dollars.

And this phenomenon isn't limited to east Asia.  Want it brought home to you, Americans?  This same phenomenon has been known to strike other places with strong on-shore air currents driving into lowland areas bounded by steep climbs in elevation -- like the Central Valley of California.

The second study is from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and found that current models support that Greenland -- one of the world's largest repositories of land-bound ice -- has a delayed response to warming.  Meaning that even if everyone suddenly wised up and cut greenhouse emissions and the temperature stabilized, the Greenland Ice Cap would continue to melt.

For centuries.

The response of Some Guy On The Internet to this was a viral YouTube video showing an ice cube melting in a cup of water, wherein the water level in the cup did not change, captioned,  "A little science lesson for the IDIOTS at the global warming conference," once again to rousing applause, despite the fact that this particular SGOTI neglected the fact that the meltwater that matters is from ice that starts out on land.

That almost no one raised this objection makes me despair for the state of science education in American public schools.

Scariest of all was the study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union warning that the Thwaites Glacier -- an on-land mass of ice about the size of Florida -- is in imminent danger of collapse.  And I do mean imminent; we're not talking "by 2100."

The prediction is that the collapse could come some time in the next three to five years.

The leading edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

What's going on is that Thwaites is held back by a floating ice shelf, the bottom of which is caught against the top of an undersea mountain.  The recent study looked at the rate of warm water infiltration and melting on the underside of that ice sheet, and found that the area of ice that's caught -- the part that's providing the friction holding the whole thing in place --  has decreased drastically.  It's like putting a chuck underneath the tire of a car in neutral sitting on an incline.  It doesn't move -- until you remove the chuck.  After that, the car rolls forward, and continues to accelerate.

If the ice sheet holding Thwaites back buckles, the entire glacier will start to slide.  Dumping this much ice into the ocean will raise sea levels by something on the order of sixty centimeters, inundating coastlines and low-lying areas and displacing millions of people.

Although the studies have improved in terms of detail, none of this is new information.  Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades.  Increasingly they're taking the role of Cassandra -- the figure from Greek myth who was blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to have no one believe her.  The situation isn't helped by deliberate anti-science propaganda from the corporations who stand to lose financially if fossil fuels are phased out, and "news" services who are funded by those same corporations.

And, of course, by a populace who has been brainwashed to pay more attention to Some Guy On The Internet than to the hard data and sophisticated models generated by trained scientists.  But wearing blinders only works for so long.

Once you're up to your neck in sea water, it will be a little hard to argue that the scientists have been lying all along.

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Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]