Through means of…
Abrupt Climate Change: In the past five decades, Earth has warmed approximately 0.8 degrees Celsius. The Arctic air and ocean have warmed approximately twice as much, and sufficient airborne carbon and positive feedbacks are now in effect to drive Earth towards a hothouse state approximately 6-9 degrees Celcius over the 21st century. The equatorial regions, and those places already environmentally degraded or experiencing drought, will be most affected:
Positive Feedbacks occurring
• Northerly expansion and greening of the boreal forest.
• Albedo change of sea ice to water, and snow to dirt.
• Periodic emission of carbon from forests, rather than absorption.
• Emission of methane from tundra permafrost and lakebeds.
• Decreasing dissolved carbon capacity of warming oceans.
• Reduction of 40% of marine algae since 1950. (less carbon sequestration)
• Increasing wildfires
• Increased atmospheric water vapour capacity. (H2O is a greenhouse gas.)
• Methane emissions from the Arctic Siberian Sea.
The sea floor of the shallow (50m) Siberian Sea is now disintegrated, and a presentation to the U.S. Deparment Of Energy on December 2010 by Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov of Alaska University states that:
Bad news: directly observed fluxes exceed estimated by up 3 orders of magnitude. Interpretation of acoustical data recorded with deployed multibeam sonar allowed moderate quantification of bottom fluxes as high as 44 g/m2/d (Leifer et al., in preparation). Prorating these numbers to the areas of hot spots (210×103 km2) adds 3.5Gt to annual methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. This is enough to trigger abrupt climate change (Archer, 2005).
Shakhova’s PDF: http://symposium.serdp-estcp.org/content/download/8914/107496/version/1/file/1A_Shakhova_Final.pdf
Host of presentations and abstract: http://symposium.serdp-estcp.org/Technical-Sessions/1A
Flows exceeded their estimates by up to three magnitudes (1000 times). It could take up to a decade for the gases to fully diffuse in the atmosphere, and as methane emits from the mudflat, deeper clathrates will be insulted from the warming environment. Curt Stager has suggested that the clathrate gun hypothesis may be more like a squirt gun and only periodically burp carbon. None-the-less, increasing emissions from the Siberian Ocean could increase global warming by one degree or more this decade. Or less. Who really knows until it's occurred? Two degrees anomaly has been described as civilizations “safe” limit.
Alvia Gaskill, president of Environmental Reference Materials Inc, a geoengineering research firm (I believe..) thinks such a scenario is enough to trigger runaway climate change. Again, it's probably a long term process with periodic spikes as warming undersea mud flats disintegrate due to landslides or seismic activity.
Returning to the 4 GtC release scenario, assume such a release occurs over a one-year period sometime in the next 50 years as result of slope failure. According to the Report of the Methane Hydrate Advisory Committee, “Catastrophic slope failure appears to be necessary to release a sufficiently large quantity of methane rapidly enough to be transported to the atmosphere without significant oxidation or dissolution. In this event, methane will enter the atmosphere as methane gas. It will have a residence time of several decades and a global warming potential of 62 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.This would be the equivalent of 248 GtC as carbon dioxide or 31 times the annual man-made GHG emissions of today. Put another way, this would have the impact of nearly 30 years worth of GHG warming all at once. The result would almost certainly be a rapid rise in the average air temperature, perhaps as much as 3°F immediately. This might be tolerable if that’s as far as things go. But, just like 15,000 years ago, if the feedback mechanisms kick in, we can expect rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice and an overall temperature increase of 30°F.
http://www.global-warming-geo-engineering.org/DOE-Meeting/Catastrophic-Methane-Hydrate-Release/ag13.html
Accidental Geoengineering / Solar Radiation Management: In his 2008 presentation to the American Geophysical Union, James Hansen showed that aerosols are blocking one or two watts per square metre. Glory, an instrument capable of corroborating such numbers was launched in February 2011, but the launch vehicle failed to detach. Nonetheless, if we clean up our pollution, global warming will speed up, and it is probable that there is enough inertia just from the carbon already in the air to drive warming further. The fellows at Real Climate think if we stop polluting, Earth may warm by 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius over a few months. Maybe the sulphuric acid from China’s coal plants will drift into the high stratosphere and cause cooling? And who really thinks we’re going to stop burning coal and polluting?
Image above from: PDF http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf
Liquid Fuels Entering Terminal Decline:
According to the Joint Operation Environment 2010: “By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day”
Joint Operating Environment 2010: PDF http://www.peakoil.net/files/JOE2010.pdf
Hirsch Report contracted for the US DOE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report <- contains various dates.
PDF: http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/oil_peaking_netl.pdf
According to a German report in 2010 by the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, there is "some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,715138,00.html
Wikileaks released cable documents in January 2011. The cables urge Washington to
take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the
kingdom’s crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300 billion
barrels — nearly 40% According to the cables, which date between 2007-09,
Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12 million barrels a day in 10
years but before then — possibly as early as 2012 — global oil production would
have hit its highest point. Sadad al-Husseini is a geologist and the former head of
exploration at the Saudi oil monopoly Aramco.
General Water and Arable Land Shortage: In a world of seven billion, one in six goes hungry. Industrial agriculture relies heavily on oil based inputs, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. Production and distribution utilize intensive transportation networks. Your average food item travels 1500 miles, and requires 10 calories of oil energy for each calorie of food energy (not including energy for cooking.) Almost all arable land is already occupied and there is only marginal lands left. The pace and types of farming worldwide is unsustainable and ultimately results in field erosion and salinization. As fertilizer, and water shortages occur, genetic engineering and locally grown food will need to fill the gap. According to the UNU’s Ghana based institute, if present soil erosion practices continue, by 2025 Africa will only be able to feed 25% of its population.
Disappearing glaciers and melted snowpack may initially bring increased water flows, but eventually will no longer provide healthy summer flows. Groundwater is becoming depleted in India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the USA, and more. Lakes are evaporating and rivers are drying. Of course, this is simply a shuffling of rain patterns. Some parts will become wetter, others drier. Curt Stager believe climate change will simply cause your present region’s weather anomaly (drought/rain) to increase. The following image is a scenario from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research. Some climate scientists argue that drought and rainfall models can give almost any result.
And how do population demographics match up to oil, water, and land scarcity?
If Saudi Arabia and most of OPEC overestimate their reserves, does that mean Iraq has the world’s largest oil supplies?
Fictional Scenario: Beginning in 2013, Saudia Arabia enters steep oil depletion. Their water is depleting, their wheat farms failed, and their enormous youth bulge restive The world ramps up other sources but a shallow 2% per year decline still occurs. All the world’s oil dependent economies enter a depression and economic stagflation occurs. With fossil fuels becoming increasingly expensive, food prices soar. Heat waves among the industrial exporters wipe out a majority of their crop, and they ban exports. Hunger and famine hits the heavily populated equatorial regions from Morocco to India and China. Mexicans desperation to flee the heat, poverty and famine drive them into Texas where a border war now appears to inflate to something resembling genocide. By 2020, Boeing and Airbus team up to cool the atmosphere, and get awarded a 50 year contract to spray aluminum oxides and sulphuric acid into the high stratosphere over the Arctic. It works, and temperature and rainfalls patterns return to normal over a few years. The ocean is still acidifying, however. The shock of it all brings about a new green revolution in the industrialized world, however overpopulated countries with degraded environments become locked in permanent struggle and wars of attrition – Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and more. Science delivers once more with fusion and famine foods. Geoengineering remains a permanent fixture of modern life.
How will we survive/adapt?
•Localize the food system and begin building up yard soils through composting.
•Convert local areas to food gardens; buy local.
•Conserve and capture rainwater at home.
•Conserve fuels and electricity.
•Cycle or walk. Electric road bicycles can get you around faster than a bus.
•Lobby your city to recycle all waste water.
•Vote for clean renewable power
•Increase the quality and performance of public transport.
•Increase funding in fourth generation nuclear power.
•Increase speed and funding of the International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor.
•Increase funding of genetically engineered plants and microbes.
•Increase research in algal fuels.
•Improve humanitarian and disaster response.
•Increase military presence in Middle Eastern regions.
•Improve Middle Eastern oil pipeline and refinery protection.
•Support and fund geoengineering.
See: Asilomar Conference 2010 or Royal Society: Geoengineering The Climate
•Write your favourite politician.
•+ whatever personally suits you.
•Have hope (unless you live in Africa, Middle East, or Bangladesh; in that case,
buy weapons)
•Move to Canada.
•Or do nothing because its April Fools Day!!
