Abrupt
Climate Change – Faster Than Before
By Bruce Melton PE
Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3
04/01/17
1.
Abrupt
climate change... Twenty-three times in the last 100,000 years our climate
has changed 9 to 15 degrees F globally and 25 to 35 across the Arctic. The
changes happened in a few generations to a few decades normally, but at the most
extreme in two to three years. In Greenland the temperature changes were 25 to
35 degrees F.
Alley, Wally Was Right - Predictive ability of the North
Atlantic Conveyor Belt Hypothesis for Abrupt Climate Change, Annual Review of
Earth and Planetary Science, February 2007, Figure 1 shows the 23 abrupt climate
changes.
http://shadow.eas.gatech.edu/~kcobb/abrupt/alley07.pdf
2.
Record
Temperature Data… Record High Temperatures far Outpace Record Lows Across the
U.S. NCAR/UCAR Atmos News, November
12, 2009.
https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/1036/record-high-temperatures-far-outpace-record-lows-across-us
3.
NOAA Data
Tools: Daily Weather Records… Last 365 days from April 1, 2017, record highs
and lows globally.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
4.
British Columbia Forest Flip from carbon sink to carbon source…
Kurz et al Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to
climate change, Nature, April 2008.
http://booksite.elsevier.com/9780128017128/content/Student_Resources_Downloads/Kurtz%202008.pdf
Background on the most recent insect and disease attacks:
Melton, The Beetles: Eighty-Nine Million Acres of Abrupt Climate Change,
Truthout, February 16, 2016.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34853-the-beetles-eighty-nine-million-acres-of-abrupt-climate-change
5.
The Amazon
Flip…
Melton, Climate Change 2016, The Year The Future Arrived, Truthout, December 29,
2016, see the section, " The Amazon Continues to Emit More Carbon Than it
Absorbs."
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38905-climate-change-2016-the-year-the-future-arrived
References:
The Amazon Continues to Emit More Carbon than it Absorbs…
Feldpausch, Amazon forest response repeated droughts, Global
Biogeochemical Cycles, July 1, 2016.
Press Release:
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_527669_en.html
Lewis at. al., The 2010 Amazon Drought, Science, February,
2011.
(Free subscription)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49809450_The_2010_Amazon_Drought
6.
Gulf
Stream slowed seven percent per
year, 2008 to 2012 ...
Melton, There All Along: "Exceptional" Slowdown of the Gulf Stream From
Greenland Melt, Truthout, April 13, 2015.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30114-it-s-been-there-all-along-exceptional-slowdown-of-the-gulf-stream-from-greenland-melt
Reference:
Smeed et al., Observed decline of the Atlantic meridional overturning
circulation 2004-2012, Ocean Science, February 6, 2014, abstract.
http://www.rapid.ac.uk/rapidmoc/
7.
May snow
cover across the Northern Hemisphere…
Snow Cover Extents: NOAA
National Center for Environmental Information, Global Snow and Ice.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global-snow/201305
8.
Collapse
of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet…
Melton, Collapse of West Antarctic Ice Sheet Reveals Inadequacy of Current
Climate Strategies, Truthout, December 20, 2016.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38794-collapse-of-west-antarctic-ice-sheet-reveals-inadequacy-of-current-climate-strategies
References:
West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Collapse
Tipping Point Defined… This work out of the German National Science
Institute describes marine ice sheet collapse mechanisms, and how there is a
very distinct tipping point with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where collapse
becomes irreversible in about 2050. The very important take-away from this work
is that to prevent ice sheet collapse the “perturbation” that creates the
warming that is responsible for ice sheet collapse, which is mostly ocean
warming, must end by at the latest 2050. This means that we must return ocean
temperature to its preindustrial stable temperature by 2050. The challenge here
is that it is much more difficult to cool the oceans than it is the atmosphere.
Figure 3 shows the model runs that define the stable state in blue.
Feldmann and Levermann, Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet after local destabilization of the Amundsen Basin, PNAS, November 17,
2015.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/46/14191.full.pdf
If upper ocean warming around Antarctica
is not returned to zero…
Dynamical Ice Sheet Collapse Modeling Arrives: The abstract from DeConto and
Pollard states: “model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics—including
previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with
hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of
marine-terminating ice cliffs—that is calibrated against Pliocene and Last
Interglacial sea-level estimates and applied to future greenhouse gas emission
scenarios. Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of
sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 13 metres by 2500, if emissions continue
unabated.”
DeConto and Pollard, Contribution of Antarctica to past and
future sea level rise, Nature, March 31, 2016.
Full:
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2823837-DeConto-Pollard-2016-Contribution-of-Antarctica.html
9.
Benign atmospheric carbon dioxide cleanup
technologies…
Melton, A Generation of Delay: Climate Policy Is 20 Years Behind, Truthout,
December 4, 2015.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33906-a-generation-of-delay-climate-policy-is-20-years-behind
Continuing Research on
CDR in 2016… Climate Change Now has been working with the Healthy Climate
Alliance to further carbon dioxide capture science and describe successful
industrial scale field trials that are perform according to previous research
estimates. There has been a significant theoretical controversy over the cost
feasibility of these technologies because of "infeasible" suggesting theoretical
publication from researchers at the American Physical Society and MIT. This
controversy is over as the new field trials in Menlo Park California by Global
Thermostat, and Squamish, British Columbia by Carbon Engineering, are removing
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for $75 and $250 per ton using $0.06 to $0.07
kWh electricity. Of importance to dramatically reduced costs in the near future,
ENGIE France has projected that because of the extremely strong performance of
solar photovoltaic manufacturing and generation installation globally, by 2025
new solar generation will be at $0.01 kWh. The latest 300+ Megawatt installation
in Abu Dahbi was at $0.0242 kWh.
ENGIE France…
SOLAR ENERGY AT $0.01 kWh IN 2025
ENGIE France, Europe's natural gas giant, says that by 2025,
oil will be at $10 per barrel and solar energy at $0.01 kWh. Aubu Dabi set the
last record for new solar at $0.0242 kWh in the fall of 2016.
Bloomberg, December 20, 2016:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/energy-tsunamis-threaten-to-drag-oil-down-to-10-engie-says
Abu
Dahbi…
Bloomberg, September 19, 2016:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/cheapest-solar-on-record-said-to-be-offered-for-abu-dhabi