About That Other Crisis

As we remain fixated on the immediate, acute crisis that has engulfed the world, it is easy to lose sight of the other crisis that continues to engulf the world:

Last year’s summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600bn tons of ice from Greenland – enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found.

Unlike the retreat of sea ice, the loss of land-based glaciers directly causes the seas to rise, imperiling coastal cities and towns around the world. Scientists have calculated that Greenland’s enormous ice sheet lost an average of 268bn tons of ice between 2002 and 2019 – less than half of what was shed last summer. By contrast, Los Angeles county, which has more than 10 million residents, consumes 1bn tons of water a year.

Glaciers are melting away around the world due to global heating caused by the human-induced climate crisis. Ice is reflective of sunlight so as it retreats the dark surfaces underneath absorb yet more heat, causing a further acceleration in melting.

Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, scientists revealed last year, pushing up previous estimates of global sea level rise and putting 400 million people at risk of flooding every year by the end of the century.

Isabella Velicogna, a professor of Earth system science, has more bad news for us:

More recent research has found that Antarctica, the largest ice sheet on Earth, is also losing mass at a galloping rate, although the latest University of California and Nasa works reveals a nuanced picture.

“In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise,” Velicogna said.

The research has further illustrated the existential dangers posed by runaway global heating, even as the world’s attention is gripped by the coronavirus crisis. Crucial climate talks are set to be held later this year in Glasgow, although the wave of cancellations triggered by the virus has threatened to undermine this diplomatic effort.

Yes, we are right to be very alarmed by our current pandemic; however, we must bear in mind that the other one is going to ultimately cost countless more lives, and act accordingly.

Now Even American Networks Are Using The C-Words

Will wonders never cease?




For more analysis, watch this, from Global National. Start at the 11:30 mark:

UPDATED: An Angry Planet

The future is rapidly arriving, and it isn't pretty, thanks to climate change that is causing rising seas and more volatile storms, of particular threat to low-lying nations of the world right now.

The first video shows what happened when a heavy storm hit Hawaii:



The second video, available with this link, shows the true peril facing people who live only a few feet above sea level.

UPDATE: The following video was originally posted on the Mound's blog but he is encouraging widespread distribution; it is yet another aspect of climate change that clearly relates to rising seas and other such disasters. Everything in this phenomenon is interrelated:

GLACIER EXIT from Raphael Rogers on Vimeo.

Drowning In Our Excesses

The news is alarming, the statistics incredible, the implications dire. A convergence of factors, not the least of which is climate change, is causing rapid ice-sheet melting in Greenland. It is estimated to be losing 40 trillion pounds more ice per year than had been previously thought.

We will soon be drowning in our excesses.

UPDATED: Scenes From Hell, And A Small Effort At Climate-Change Adaptation

It may seem rather pararochial that whenever I post video showing the current effects of climate change, I almost always post scenes from North America, despite the fact that floods, fires, heatwaves and other such apocalyptic signs are present throughout much of the world. Part of the reason is that compelling video of such disasters is readily available, thanks to the good coverage given by NBC, whose main concern is the United States. The other reason is a more basic one: while it is hard to relate to scenes of flooding, for example, from faraway places such as China, when it is in our backyard, i.e., North America, the perils and the threats seem far more immediate, urgent and relatable.

With that in mind, take a look at the following clip, which deals with the conflagrations so regularly engulfing California. For me, the scene that is most moving involves the efforts to evacuate both the horses and the inhabitants of a wildlife sanctuary. I'll introduce the second clip afterwards.



In response to my previous post, The Mound of Sound wrote this:

At some point, Lorne, the question becomes how we and our governments at all levels, especially provincial and local, will act on adaptation. If, over the next five or ten years, these "heat domes" you're currently experience worsen and become the norm adaptive measures will be essential especially in "heat islands" such as Toronto and the GTA. If summer droughts are recurrent it may be necessary for the agricultural sector to begin switching into heat and drought resistant crops. These things aren't long term answers. They don't solve the problems. They merely buy time. Perhaps we'll manage to get Trudeau or his successor to switch their focus from bitumen and pipelines into the survival of our civilization or is that too much to ask?

The issue of adaptation does come up in the following clip, a story about how rising sea levels are threatening the wild horses of Assateague Island, off the Maryland coast. Yet, as I think you will agree, the efforts thus far seem puny compared to the magnitude of the threat. Kind of like closing the proverbial barn door after the horses have escaped, perhaps?




Kate Snow, in introducing the above story, describes how the horses are under threat by "Mother Nature herself." Surely that is a mischaracterization. Humanity's collective willfulness, selfishness and mulish refusal to confront the threats we ourselves have wrought are surely to blame. And sadly, our natures seem to lack any real capacity for attitude or lifestyle adaptation to what is destroying us.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, over in the Middle East, things are equally dire.

On Thursday and Friday, with a strong area of high pressure parked across the Middle East, high temperatures soared above 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51.6 degrees Celsius, in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and western Iran.

In the community of Mitribah, Kuwait, the high temperature rocketed to a record-setting 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 54 degrees Celsius.

On Friday, Basra, Iraq, which has a population of more than 1 million, also hit 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit.

If the World Meteorological Organization verifies these records, they would become the hottest temperature recorded on Earth outside of Death Valley, California, which holds the title of the hottest temperature on record.

This would make the Kuwait and Iraq readings the hottest temperature on record in the eastern hemisphere as well as the hottest on record in Asia.

The Truth Is Not Out There - It's Right Here

Fox Mulder of the X-Files got it wrong. He believed that the truth was 'out there;' in fact, it is right here, but as the Mound of Sound said in a recent post, we live in "a world full of fact-resistant humans."

Our capacity for denial seems almost limitless, perhaps most tragically attested to by our ongoing nonchalance about climate change. Despite increasingly severe weather events, melting arctic ice and rising sea levels, we insist on whistling past the graveyard. The time is growing very late.

Consider what Gwynne Dyer had to say recently:

We cannot count on the average global temperature rising steadily but slowly as we pump more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It may do that -- but there may also be a sudden jump in the average global temperature that lands you in a world of hurt. That may be happening now.

"We are moving into uncharted territory with frightening speed," said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, last November. He was referring to the fact that the warming is accelerating in an unprecedented way.

2014 was the hottest year ever, until 2015 beat it by a wide margin. 2016 may beat that record by an even wider margin. It was the hottest January ever and the average global temperature in February was a full fifth of a Celcius degree higher than January.

To take solace by blaming recent event on El Niño is folly:

As for the frightening acceleration in the warming in the past three months, that has no precedent in any El Niño year, or indeed in any previous year. It could be some random short-term fluctuation in average global temperature, but coming on top of the record warming of 2014 and 2015 it feels a lot more like part of a trend.

Could this be non-linear change, an abrupt and irreversible change in the climate? Yes. And if it is, how far will it go before it stabilizes again at some higher average global temperature? Nobody knows.

What was once thought to be many decades, if not centuries off, is now starting to materialize. Watch the following two videos to consider what may very well be in store for us, perhaps in the lifetime of some alive today, but almost certainly in that of our children and grandchildren:





Such scenarios are no longer in the realm of science fiction, but we continue to treat them as such, and it doesn't appear that anything will shake us and our 'leaders' from this state of denial. It therefore seems appropriate to end this post with Jimi Hendrix's version of Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower, a song that I have always interpreted as depicting impending doom:

It's Called "Nuisance Flooding"

Posted by MoS, the Disaffected Lib:

It's the latest term spawned by climate change - "nuisance flooding." According to Insurance Journal, nuisance flooding is the periodic flooding being experienced due to rising sea levels.

Eight of the top 10 U.S. cities that have seen an increase in nuisance flooding - which causes such public inconveniences as frequent road closures, overwhelmed storm drains and compromised infrastructure - are on the East Coast, according to a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report.

This nuisance flooding, caused by rising sea levels, has increased on all three U.S. coasts between 300 and 925 percent since the 1960s, the report says.

Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland, top the list along with Atlantic City, New Jersey; Philadelphia and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Other cities include Charleston, South Carolina; Washington, D.C.; and Norfolk Virginia.

What is a nuisance today could become something far more destructive in the not too distant future as sea level rise accelerates. At least one analysis suggests we could see up to 2.5 metres of sea level rise by 2040 which would mean a rapid increase beginning over the next few years.

For the most part, sea level rise is a problem we don't seem to talk about. Coastal residents should ask themselves when was the last time they recall sea level rise being discussed by their municipal, provincial or federal representatives? When was it debated on the floor of the House of Commons? What planning is underway? What funding has been allocated to deal with this threat? How much sea level rise do they foresee by when? What do they mean to defend, what do they expect to abandon to the rising sea?

The American example is disturbing. There we find little political will to even acknowledge the problem. Miami, for example, already sustains far worse than nuisance flooding on a regular basis. It cannot be defended and yet municipal and state authorities are doing nothing to rein in new development. Former New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, did commit the city to a major flood protection programme but even that may prove inadequate.

How will coastal Canada cope? I haven't got a clue and neither, apparently, do our elected officials. From documents I've read, low-lying municipalities in the Vancouver suburbs (much of Richmond is already well below sea level) are planning little more than raising their sea walls a metre or two. What do they do when high tides swell the Fraser River to overflow its banks?

Why aren't we talking about this? The answer is easy and powerful. Talking about sea level rise leads to any number of questions that can have immediate ramifications. What's the value of a multi-million dollar waterfront property that may well be submerged in two or three decades hence? What will be the toll on urban and suburban infrastructure? How do we decide what we will attempt to defend, what we will abandon? Who wins, who loses? Who pays, who collects? Decisions, decisions. Oh dear.

A Stark Prediction of Sea Level Rise By 2040

Posted by MoS, the Disaffected Lib:

There have been a number of reports over the past year or two that, taken collectively, seem to point to major changes underway in the Arctic. It's not one thing but a number of changes that are synergistic, each building on the other. These include the rapidly warming Arctic atmosphere and the creation of the more powerful polar jet stream; the loss of Arctic sea ice at rates that were not contemplated even a few years ago; the warming of Arctic Ocean waters, sea level rise and the recent observation of big waves where before there were none; the thawing and burning of the tundra; the exposure and melting of the permafrost beneath; the major increase in wildfires in the northern boreal forests; the spread of black and brown soot from these wildfires and the resultant accelerating deglaciation of the Greenland ice sheet.

We know that the polar jet stream is already playing havoc with us in the temperate zone. It manifests in Rossby waves - deep, slow-moving waves - that can alternately pull warm, southern air into the high northern latitudes and then send cold, Arctic air plunging far into the south. These waves can also leave severe storm events "parked" over certain locations leading to flash flooding of the sort seen in recent years.

What is beginning to emerge from recent observations is that we may have grossly underestimated sea level rise this century especially in the short- and mid-term. By one calculation, all these phenomena playing out today in the Arctic could lead to sea level rise of 2.5-metres by 2040.



I won't explore this forecast in detail. Follow the link, spend an hour or two, and you can come to your own conclusions. Whether 2.5-metres by 2040 is likely, I don't know. What I do know is that we should have very clear answers within 10-years at the outside. We will know by 2025 if this is in store for us by 2040. We might even know by 2020.

What this means is that, by 2020, we may know if we have crossed or are at the tipping point where natural feedback mechanisms, such as those listed above, have carried us into runaway global warming of some extent.

2.5-metres of sea level rise by 2040 wouldn't be the end of Canada or the end of the United States. It would be the end of various low-lying nations. For us, however, it would mean economic upheaval and major social dislocation. It would be an economic body blow. There are a lot of North Americans who live close enough to the sea that 2.5-metres of sea level rise, coupled with the impacts of storm surges, would necessitate retreat from the coast. There are some North American cities such as Miami or New Orleans that cannot survive that sort of rise and would have to be abandoned. The Jersey Shore? Fuggetaboutit.

NOAA has an interactive graphic depicting the impacts of sea level rise up to 2-metres on the United States. It stops at the Canadian border but you can roughly extrapolate from the U.S. picture.

Tar Sands Refinery Cries "Uncle" on Climate Change - Seeks Taxpayer Bailout

The Delaware City Refining Company doesn't just refine oil, it refines bitumen from the Tar Sands. The company, however, is intensely aware of the dangers of climate change, so much so in fact that it's seeking tax dollars to protect its refinery from "tidal encroachment" - another way of saying sea level rise.

The Delaware City Refinery is one of the first refineries to shift its crude oil supply to rail and is refining tar sands -- one of the most carbon-intensive fuels known to man.

To add insult to injury, the sea level rise preparations the Delaware City Refining Company is proposing could negatively affect the community by directing more storm surge toward the town of Delaware City, the small coastal community near where the refinery is located. But who could be surprised by an oil company with such a poor sense of irony acting with no regard for the people around it?

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

While Harper Fiddles, Canada Burns

There have been so many developments on the climate front of late that, collectively, give us a pretty stark warning and yet the media, the public and our political leadership are tuning out. We seem to be culturally embracing a sort of Andean fatalism that seems to precede abrupt civilizational decline. Perhaps we’re hampered by the fact that it’s a moving target that repeatedly exceeds our ‘worst case scenarios’. Far from being pessimists we constantly underestimate the onset of climate change even as severe events increase in frequency, intensity and duration. Maybe that’s why Harper (and his rivals) aren’t coming forward with any meaningful responses. They’re all avowed fossil fuelers and, having staked out that turf, any significant reduction in Canada’s GHG emissions would have to be borne by every other sector of the economy and the Canadian people. Who would risk the public wrath when pretending to act and doing nothing remains an option? There’s a rank and dangerous cowardice that runs through the Conservatives, the Liberals and the New Democrats alike. God save the Queen. The Canadian people can fend for themselves.


The other day came news of a mysterious crater in Siberia that Russian scientists determined was caused, not by a meteorite, but by an eruption of subsurface gas released by thawing permafrost – a global warming event. We’ve known for several years that the ancient permafrost that girds the high north was “perma” no more. The tundra was drying out, catching fire, and exposing the permafrost below that it once shielded. The permafrost was a sink for massive quantities of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, or, as the energy industry calls it, natural gas.

On the heels of the Russian crater story comes a report from Climate Central about fires spreading unchecked across the Northwest Territories.

“The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.

“Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates "unprecedented" in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.

“The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world’s carbon stored in land, carbon that's taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8°F rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.”

The Climate Central report indicates that the massive amounts of airborne soot from these forest and tundra fires could accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet far faster than we had ever imagined, perhaps by the end of this century. Ice, being white, reflects most solar energy back into space. Soot, being black, absorbs the solar energy and it passes into the ice beneath, causing melting. The melt run-off should wash away the soot except that these fires just keep adding more soot. And, of course, the fires that generate the soot also release ever more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Forest fires release the CO2 from the trees. Tundra fires release CO2 and expose the permafrost below that releases methane.

As for the Greenland ice sheet and the prospect of losing all or most of it by the end of this century, here’s what you need to bear in mind. When that ice sheet is gone, and it will eventually, it will create 23-feet of sea level rise. You’ve probably seen plenty of graphics of what three or four feet of sea level rise will mean around the world. The reality is that we tend to build our major cities where there’s navigable water. In Canada that’s Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. With Lake Ontario at 75 metres above sea level, Toronto should be safe from inundation but Montreal, on the St. Lawrence and at 6 metres is vulnerable and, as for Vancouver, well let’s just say that False Creek, Coal Harbour and Burrard Inlet will be a whole lot bigger and the Lower Mainland an awful lot smaller.

So, with the prospect of runaway climate change steadily worsening, with major population centres and critical infrastructure at increasing risk, surely this must be at the very top of our Lord and Master’s priority list, right? What’s that, no? His priority is flogging as much of the world’s highest-carbon oil as quickly as he can push through the pipelines and supertanker ports to carry it, really? Surely the opposition parties are going to shut this down as soon as the voting public gives Harper the boot, right? Wrong? Oh dear. Maybe it’s time to caulk the dinghy.


MoS, the Disaffected Lib.

The Lethal Dysfunction Of The Far Right: A Mound of Sound Guest Post

Problem: you're already getting hammered by early-onset climate change. Solution: deny it's happening, look the other way, think happy thoughts.

It sounds ridiculously dysfunctional and it is but that is the approach being taken by governments, state and municipal, in parts of the American south.

Take North Carolina, for example, where the uber-rightwing state legislature has found a solution to scientific projections of at least a metre of sea-level rise this century - pass legislation banning any mention of that.

And then there's posh Miami, Florida where real estate prices are sky high and still climbing. Miami now floods regularly and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The problem is that the city is very low-lying and it sits atop a dome of porous limestone through which rising sea water passes virtually unobstructed. Seawalls and dikes don't work here because sea water simply comes up from underneath. The city already stands defenceless against seasonal high tides and regular storm surges.

Philip Stoddard is particularly well-placed to judge what is happening in Miami. Tall, thin, with a dry sense of humour, he is a politician, having won two successive elections to be mayor of South Miami, and a scientist, a biology professor at Florida International University.

"The thing about Miami is that, when it goes, it will all be gone," says Stoddard. Nor will south Florida have to wait that long for the devastation to come. Long before the seas have risen a further three or four feet, there will be irreversible breakdowns in society, he says. "Another foot of sea level rise will be enough to bring salt water into our freshwater supplies and our sewage system. Those services will be lost when that happens."

"You won't be able to flush away your sewage and taps will no longer provide homes with fresh water. Then you will find you will no longer be able to get flood insurance for your home. Land and property values will plummet and people will start to leave. Places like South Miami will no longer be able to raise enough taxes to run our neighbourhoods. Where will we find the money to fund police to protect us or fire services to tackle house fires? Will there even be enough water pressure for their fire hoses? It takes us into all sorts of post-apocalyptic scenarios. It makes one thing clear though: mayhem is coming."

Yes, mayhem is coming. So how are Florida's rightwing leaders responding?

"...what really surprises visitors and observers is the city's response, or to be more accurate, its almost total lack of reaction. The local population is steadily increasing; land prices continue to surge; and building is progressing at a generous pace. ...signs of construction - new shopping malls, cranes towering over new condominiums and scaffolding enclosing freshly built apartment blocks - could be seen across the city, its backers apparently oblivious of scientists' warnings that the foundations of their buildings may be awash very soon.

"Not that they're alone. Most of Florida's senior politicians - in particular Senator Marco Rubio, former governor Jeb Bush and current governor, Rick Scott, all Republican climate-change deniers - have refused to act or respond to warnings ...or to give media interviews to explain their stance, though Rubio, a Republican party star and possible 2016 presidential contender, has made his views clear in speeches. 'I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. I do not believe the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.'"

Miami, in fact the entire state of Florida, is an invaluable object lesson, a miners' canary to demonstrate rightwing dysfunction at work in the fight against climate change. It's one but just one of several spots in the US expected to be particularly hard hit by global warming. Another is the American southwest from California through to Texas.

In already hot and dry Phoenix, Arizona, they're being warned to expect 10-degrees Fahrenheit warming this century. That translates from an average summer high temperature of 104 soaring to Kuwait City temperatures of 114F. In a region already severely water stressed, heating on this scale could undermine the major cities.

"Climate Central used the IPCC predictions - which generally estimate that summer high temperatures will be seven to ten degrees higher by 2100 - to make an interactive map to compare the current temperatures with cities that already experience those temperatures. For example, Sacramento will feel more like Tucson in the summer. Boston will feel like Miami. And Austin, where the average summer high is currently about 94 degrees, is projected to be more like Gilbert, which has an average summer high of nearly 104 degrees.

Meanwhile, on the clean, renewable energy front, Aviation Week has recently published several articles about space solar power (SSP). The idea is to capture solar energy in near-Earth space, convert it to microwaves and them beam the energy down to power grids on the surface.

“Space solar power has as a concept never been more appealing and more promising than it is right now,” says John Mankins, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory veteran who spent a decade as manager of advanced concepts studies at NASA headquarters. “The new technical architecture, which exploits all of the technological advances of the past 30 years in terrestrial technology—electronics, robotics, materials—makes the approach to space solar power both affordable and scalable.”


Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, though, it's a technology worth exploring.

Prognosis: Grim

Kevin Farmer, the lead letter-writer in today's Star, captures nicely, I think, the irrational nature of humanity that does not bode well for our collective future:

Re: Antarctic melt greatest in 1,000 years, May 16

As humanity continues to avoid meaningful action on climate change, an unavoidable future of climate catastrophe continues to take shape. In that regard, it has been morbidly fascinating to watch people simultaneously over- and under-react to reports that the West Antarctic ice sheet is destined to collapse, committing spaceship Earth and all of its passengers to a rise in sea levels of up to four meters from this impact alone.

Some people are receiving this news as proof of the urgency of climate change. Others are dismissing it as an unstoppable phenomenon the impacts of which will be felt only over a long period of time. They are resigned to climate change that is out of our hands and a problem for future generations. Ironically, it is the former who are under-reacting and the latter who are over-reacting.

The collapse of this ice sheet was set in motion years ago, perhaps decades. This event is not an indication of how urgent climate change is today, but rather how urgent climate change was before the collapse was triggered. To “take the temperature” of the climate crisis today according to this particular news is to under-react to the implications of this event.

We are setting future climate catastrophes in motion today. The urgency of climate change today is properly measured against those outcomes. To consign future generations to the consequences of inaction in the present, because we are already consigned to the consequences of inaction in the past, is to over-react to the implications of this event.

As long as we wait for catastrophes to inform our environmental awareness, these catastrophes will likely be permanent features of a new normal. By all credible accounts, the future impacts of climate change will continuously accelerate and worsen.

The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is part of the new normal. What else are we waiting for? Whatever it is, do we really want it?

Kevin Farmer, Toronto