Comments on: NOAA: Fifth warmest April on record

By: Steven Newbury

Steven Newbury — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:34:22 +0000

Little question in my mind we're going to see another record Arctic Sea Ice loss this year. May is shaping up to be a record monthly rate of decline (in both area and extent), following on from a slow April due to unfavourable weather conditions. The Arctic SST anomaly is increasing daily (1), while the entire area of the Arctic cap has fractured(2), much has been discharged from the Arctic Basin along the Eastern coast of Greenland(3) where it has rapidly melted in the the warm surface waters encroaching from the Atlantic. (1) NOAA: Arctic SST Anomaly (2) NASA: MODIS Arctic Mosiac (3) Cryosphere Today: Arctic Sea Ice 30 day animation (requires Java)

By: Dano

Dano — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:09:06 +0000

I’m reminded of Vonnegut:

“The good earth! We could have saved it, but we were too d*mned cheap and lazy.”

Best,

By: jorleh

jorleh — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:32:52 +0000

Living on the edge of permafrost I have seen the trend during decades. If anything, the ice conditions in the Baltic Sea have been astounding. The Arctic is going to behave like the Baltic Sea I think, with now it´s one-year ice cover being dominant. I bet the Arctic one-year ice melts this summer and 2007 record will be hit year by year.

By: James Newberry

James Newberry — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:12:02 +0000

Big electric utilities are setting up to go nuclear. This would substitute one deadly contaminant for another and drain hundreds of billions from the US Treasury that are needed for truly economical responses to climate change. Watch the President’s Advisory Council and current legislative proposals for a Clean Energy Bank that will support dirty fuel.

By: David B. Benson

David B. Benson — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:02:50 +0000

I am neither hopeful nor impressed.

Too little, too late.

By: Leland Palmer

Leland Palmer — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:04:30 +0000

On the other hand, maybe Obama is in the pocket of ExxonMobil and the Rockefellers. He is, after all, associated with the Rockefeller financed Chicago School of economists.

Maybe he wants to go just fast enough to give Exxon its desire of an ice free Arctic that they can cruise around in drilling for oil, going after that 10 trillion dollars worth of oil thought to exist under the current polar icecap, not to mention the additional trillions of dollars worth of natural gas, and long term, economically potentially valuable methane hydrate deposits.

Council on Foreign Relations: Thawing Arctic’s Resource Race

http://www.cfr.org/ publication/ 13978/ thawing_arctics_resource_race.html?breadcrumb=%2Fregion%2Fpublication_list%3Fid%3D482#

In the face of the mostly dire predictions on the impacts of climate change, the shipping, oil, gas, and mining sectors are among those “expected to prosper as snow and ice melts in the north,” reports AFP. At stake are as much as 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources as well as access to new caches of minerals and untouched fish stocks. MoneySense magazine says that for investors, “there’s no time like now to stake your claim” because the “Arctic development game is still in its early innings.”

“Whoops, sorry people, miscalculated just a little, and destroyed the biosphere. Sorry about that.”

Really, though, Obama is doing a lot. Gore is doing a lot. Waxman and Markey are doing a lot. But they’re encountering a huge amount of resistance, much of it traceable in my opinion to ExxonMobil and the Rockefeller family.

Of course, there are other huge traditional economic interests deluded enough to think that they can profit from what may very well be the end of everything that’s worth a damn.

By: Gail

Gail — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:41:40 +0000

I think (hope?) that Obama is a brilliant strategist. He knows what it is possible for him to do right now and he sticks to that, because he is building a reputation amongst most people of being trustworthy and unflappable.

When the “inflection” becomes obvious and threatens civil society – when there are shortages of water and food, and violent weather, floods and wildfires start hitting everywhere at once – the people will demand that government take drastic action. And Obama will be able to accomplish extraordinary things – like shut down the coal plants, and threaten other countries with reprisals if they don’t do the same – with full support of the citizens.

By: Wes Rolley

Wes Rolley — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:15:35 +0000

The concern over the release of methane is not limited to the permafrost. There is mounting evidence that sea bed methane releases are also affecting climate. http://tinyurl.com/qh225k So this is additional confirmation of what we know.

What I don’t get is the optimistic enthusiasm that Gail displayed over the idea that Obama gets it. At one level, he does and mouths the good words. At another level, he is a traditional big-business centrist Democrat, content with whittling away the edges with market based quasi solutions while making sure that mountain top removal continues, that coal mining does not suffer, that electric utilities get free credits on which to make a profit.

Wes Rolley CoChair, EcoAction Committee, Green Party US

By: TomG

TomG — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:03:11 +0000

I’m not a scientist, but after looking at that map, seeing that huge concentration of red over Siberia and taking note of the 4 to 5 degrees C above normal that this red represents….
I’d say the methane is already at work, has probably created its own feedback loop and will continue to work until it has been completely released.
In my humble opinion, this was the tipping point.

By: Leland Palmer

Leland Palmer — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:21:37 +0000

The permafrost melting really scares the snot out of me, too.

Last estimate I saw of organic material in permafrost was 1.6 trillion tons.

If any significant fraction of that gets released as methane, coupled with the ice albedo effect from loss of the polar icecap, and with large scale releases of carbon from forests due to wildfires – this could be the end of all life on earth.

http://www.killerinourmidst.com

Which is why I favor carbon negative energy schemes:

From mongabay/biopact:

These emergency strategies, developed specifically for the grim scenario of ‘Abrupt Climate Change’ (ACC) consist of systems based on carbon-negative bioenergy. The Abrupt Climate Change Strategy Group (ACCS), whose mandate is to study ACC and its mitigation, writes that this concept, also known as ‘bioenery with carbon storage’ (BECS), is one of the few cost-effective and safe geo-engineering options that can be implemented at once and globally. If applied widely, BECS systems can radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and bring back atmospheric CO2 levels by mid-century.

The ACCS was launched in the wake of the G8’s Gleneagles Summit in 2005, to study strategies to cope with “abrupt” forms of global warming. The IPCC’s new wording gives credence to the ACCS concepts. This is what ACCS scientists said in one of their papers:

Abrupt Climate Change (ACC – NAS, 2001) is an issue that ‘haunts the climate change problem’ (IPCC, 2001) but has been neglected by policy makers up to now, maybe for want of practicable measures for effective response, save for risky geo-engineering. A portfolio of Bio-Energy with Carbon Storage (BECS) technologies, yielding negative emissions energy, may be seen as benign, low risk, geo-engineering that is the key to being prepared for ACC.

Under strong assumptions appropriate to imminent ACC, pre-industrial CO2 levels can be restored by mid-century using BECS. – Peter Read and Jonathan Lermit

Obama gets it, as do Waxman and Markey. But maybe they don’t get the full picture.

If Obama really got it, he would nationalize the coal plants, ban the mining of coal, and convert the coal plants to carbon negative power plants. One embodiment of this idea would consist of biocarbon fuel, oxyfuel combustion with a HiPPS topping cycle, and deep injection of the resulting CO2.