More Coal -- Is That Good News?

" African Energy Resources recently confirmed a major thermal coal discovery in land-locked Botswana. Some 2.7 billion tonnes of the stuff if you don’t mind."  Confirmation that it was big – and capable of growing bigger still. But with the Indians stomping around Africa looking for new long-term coal supplies, it’s a fair bet that interest in AFR is not over yet.

The Indians themselves reckon that apart from its indigenous coal supplies, it will need 150-200 million tonnes of additional imports by 2025 to meet the electrification demands of the population."

India getting long term contracts for coal imports to power their economic growth is not good news for the prospects of the world's nations to control the growth of atmospheric CO2.  The desire of India to produce electricity is very understandable. Electricity is the basis for industry, and is fundamental to living the modern middle class life. One billion people in India want to have that modern life. The government of India and its energy companies must ensure that happens. 

However, the long term impact on the planet and on India will be very dire. 

Atmospheric CO2 is at 393 ppm and growing at 2.5 ppm per year. The level during the Pliocene matched our current levels. The oceans were 90 feet deeper than today. That means that even if we stabilized CO2 levels at the current level, that Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would eventually melt raising the oceans about 90 feet. 

That will be catastrophic. No Bangladesh. The cities of Mumbai, Surat, Karachi, Hyderabad, Goa,  Chennai, Calcutta, Bangkok, Saigon, Shangai, Seoul, Tokyo, Washington D.C., and many other coastal cities will be underwater.  River delta regions around the globe will be flooded along with the immense food production currently produced. 

Now this may seem unthinkable. But it is important to understand how CO2 works in the atmosphere. CO2 helps trap solar energy by reducing the amount of heat that can be radiated back into space. This impact can presently be measured. On a clear night, the air stays slightly warmer than it used to, since less heat can be radiated out into space. 

Now the retention of this heat energy is cumulative. Each year more heat is retained, raising the heat energy stored in the oceans and atmosphere. Each year, the Earth gets a little bit warmer. Just as the growth of a child is not noticeable day-to-day, the effect of the additional heat is not noticeable year-to-year. And just as a child grows to become an adult, the constant currently high level of CO2 will bring on a Pliocene like climate. 

During the Pliocene, there was no ice in the Arctic, and there were tropical plants in Canada.  

Hearing that India is contracting with African countries to guarantee its future supply of coal is not good news.  How can the global community make any progress on eliminating fossil fuel use if commitments like these are being made? 

No one intends on making this happen. But, by not looking at the evidence and learning to understand the long term effects of climate change, we are committing our planet to a very different future than we have known. Each year that goes by without a global commitment to that change, will make our future efforts that much more difficult. 

Arctic Oil Exploitation - A Growing Danger

"The accidental release of crude oil into the ocean environment is of increasing concern because of the damage to marine and coastal wildlife as well as its adverse impact on humans that depend on the sea. The BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico has made it obvious that, as the demand for oil expands and drilling takes place in technically challenging locations, the likelihood of accidents will increase. The Arctic is a particular concern because, unlike spills in the warm waters of the Gulf, natural dissipation and dispersion of the oil is slowed by the cold temperatures. Moreover, human efforts at remediation are severely hampered by the extreme weather, by ice cover and by winter darkness. The National Energy Board and the CBC state that Canada is not set to start offshore drilling for arctic oil until 2014. However in August 2010 an exploration licence was granted to Chevron."

Oil exploration in the Arctic is going to explode in the next few years as it becomes warmer. The BP tragedy in the Gulf would be much worse if it happened in the Arctic. Some of the greatest fisheries in the world are located their. They may be destroyed when an oil drilling accident occurs.

Granted that in the short term we have little choice but to use oil and gas to enable our transportation and heating our homes. However, that does not mean that we have to commit ourselves to that technology forever. Mankind must start weaning itself from oil and gas. The process may take a long time. As the ancient Chinese proverb says, "a thousand mile journey begins with the first step." We have not made that first step.

Sure, some windfarms have been built, and some solar energy plants are running. But, there has been no commitment to the replacement and dismantling of all the existing coal, oil, and gas electric power stations in the world.  This is what needs to be done, or something close to it.

Nuclear power is NOT the solution. The Fukushima disaster should show that. The bigger problem with nuclear power is there is no solution for the long term handling and storage of the spent nuclear rods. A meltdown can poison groundwater for generations. Nearby farmland can be made useless. Nearby communities can be destroyed. Nuclear power is not an alternative.

Solar, wind, and geothermal are all proven technologies. They would get even better if governments around the world committed themselves to non-fossil fuel electricity production. Wave and tidal energy is also a possibility.  All these energies are there for the taking. They are clean, so they can be put near population centers with no fear of health issues. 

Destroying the last unspoiled wldernesses on Earth that feed us is not the answer.

Making Global Warming Simple

This year the CO2 in the atmosphere reached the level of 392 ppm. The level of CO2 for the past 800,000 years was at its highest about 280 ppm, which is where it was before the industrial revolution began around 1800.  By 1950, the CO2 level was at 315 ppm and rising at about .5 ppm per year. Now it is rising at about 2.5 ppm per year.  So the rate of increase has itself increased. Unabated, we will be at 415 ppm by 2020, and about 470 ppm by 2050.

OK, well and good, but what does that really mean? We have to look at truly ancient climates to get possible answers to that question. We have to look past the relatively recent cycle of ice ages and interglacial periods of the last 800,000 years. We need to look at the ages where CO2 levels were about what they are now and where they might be if the CO2 levels are allowed to rise unabated.

If we go back about 3.5 million years we get to the climate age called the Pliocene.  The Pliocene lasted from approximately 5.5 million years ago (mya) to about 2.5 mya.  Over this time, the continental drift caused the Mediterranean Sea to be formed and the Isthmus of Panama to rise and connect North and South America.

The seas were warmer and the climate was +2.5C (+4.5F) warmer than today.  There was no Greenland Ice Cap, and no Arctic Ice at all. The oceans were 25m (80ft) deeper than they are today.  The CO2 levels were about 390 ppm.

Since we are already at the Pliocene carbon dioxide levels, the question really is "what is going to prevent the duplication of the Pliocene climate from being recreated?".   A second question is "how long will it take for a Pliocene like climate to establish itself?"

Let's look at the first question. At this time, no process has been identified that will likely prevent the establishment of a Pliocene like climate. The identified feedbacks mostly amplify and accelerate current warming trends. Those feedbacks include 1) loss of Arctic albedo (ice reflectivity), 2) melting permafrost adding carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere, and 3) release of methane from shallow undersea formations called clathrates. Of course, mankind is still accelerating its burning of fossil fuels worldwide.

The climatologists differ significantly on their estimations of how long for warming to take effect.  The disturbing feature of their estimations is that for the past ten years their estimations have gotten progressively worse. Each time they update their estimates, they are more dire. The ocean levels rise higher and faster.  A recent update in Ice News, said that oceans may rise up to 5 ft by 2100.

Can that be right?  5 ft? That would flood much of the food producing areas of the world located in river deltas. The Nile delta, Mississippi delta, Ganges delta (Bangladesh), Mekong Delta, Danube delta, and so many more would be mostly underwater if that happened.

For that to happen the Greenland Ice cap would have to start melting at a very fast rate. To rise 60 inches by 2100 it would have to rise at over 1/2 an inch per year, or about 150mm per year. We have been rising at about the rate of 2.5 mm per year in recent years. The climatologists are expecting Greenland to start melting at a significant rate in the next decade or two. The oceans may only rise 6-12 inches by 2050. What can cause Greenland to start melting real fast?

To answer that we have to look at the position of Greenland. The Arctic Ocean is to the north. Much of its weather comes from the north and northwest which have been perpetually ice covered for hundreds of thousands of years. Soon, though, the Arctic Ocean will be ice free during the summers, and will be absorbing sunlight and getting warmer.  As that happens, then Greenland will be surrounded by open ocean at above freezing temperatures. No matter what direction the weather comes from it will bring above freezing warm air to Greenland for a season each year.

With each passing year, the Arctic Ocean gets warmer from absorbing sunlight. And each passing year, the melt season for Greenland gets longer and warmer.  Greenland melting will go into overdrive. It will go into hyper-melt mode. When that happens, then we will likely start seeing the seas rise at 100 mm to 200 mm per year.

Is this for absolute certain to happen? Unfortunately, our knowledge is still developing, and we don't know everything. As of now, no one can point to any natural process that can stop this.  Even if mankind stopped dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, these events are likely to happen. Maybe if mankind decided to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to lower levels to 350 ppm or lower, that might work.

The second question was "how fast". Even if oceans rise only 4 ft, or 3 ft, or 2 ft, does not mean that the processes won't continue and give us the same result. For some reason, the year 2100 has been used as projecting the results of global warming trends. However, the global warming will not stop at 2100.  In fact, the accelerated pace of ocean level rising that is expected to occur from 2050 to 2100 will still go on and accelerate even further.

Remember the Pliocene oceans were 80 ft deeper.  Greenland was free of ice, and the Antarctic had much less. The estimation for how long it will take the whole of the Greenland ice cap to melt (assuming mankind does nothing to reduce CO2 to 350 ppm or less) varies for 2,000 years to 300 years.  The estimated 5 ft of increased ocean rise will mostly come from Greenland. That will represent about 20%-25% of Greenland's mass. At that rate, then Greenland's ice would be gone around 2400.

Antarctica will have started melting, so a rise of  30 ft to 40 ft by 2400 seems reasonable, maybe more.   How long to reach an increased depth of 80 ft? That is difficult to answer because the climate dynamics that will be created in just the next hundred years may be very different. Ocean currents may change. Ocean temperatures will definitely change. Ocean chemistry will change. All these can effect the carbon cycle and the water cycle, and thus effect climate. Hopefully, processes will be altered or uncovered that will slow down, halt, or reverse the warming climate trend caused by higher CO2 levels.

Global Warming is undoubtedly the greatest challenge that mankind can face. People have difficulty planning ahead even a few years. A decade is beyond most people's ability.  To cope with Global Warming people have to deal with decades and centuries.  People live in cities mostly, and are cut off from the natural world around them.  Even when it is nearby, they tend not to notice. Lake Michigan was once a very cold lake to swim in, even in August. Now it is wonderfully comfortable by July. It has increased in temperature 12F since the 1960's.  The changes are around us. The changes will be more significant in the future and probably much less welcome.

Starting Gaia Watch Blog...

Hello World

I am starting a new blog where I will report and discuss observations, developments, and new understandings of what is happening to our planet Earth. My interest in the world started, like everyone, at my birth. As a child, I had great curiosity and interest in everything. Being raised in a conservative Catholic school, I learned that the Earth was created around 4,000 BC, on a Tuesday. I recal being told it happened at 2 PM, although I never understood how that could be calculated from the bible.

Fortunately, I lived in Chicago, and the Field Museum of Natural History was there. In those days, it and all the main museums in Chicago were free. In the summer, I woud get some loose change, take the bus, and spend the afternoon just walking its halls. The Field Museum had the greatest collection of stuffed animals. It seemed all the animals of the world were there, organized in great halls. A hall for cats. A hall for birds. A hall for reptiles, and one for insects, etc. Several halls were dedicated to mankind, organized by location and culture.

Gorgosaurus standing triumphantly
over the slain carcass of a Lambeosaurus
sometime in the Late Cretaceous

I saw the vastness of life, and the diversity of man. I marveled at how people could live in so many different ways. Being an irish boy living in an immigrant Polish neighborhood, I was already aware that people could be very different. My first first freinds were Polish boys, whose parents spoke only polish. So the ways of South Sea Islanders, or of American Indians, or exotic Tibet, were merely extensions of what I already knew.

Several of the halls was dedicated to prehistoric life. As a young boy, the most captivating was the dinosaurs. In the main hall, a skeleton of a Gorgosaurus was displayed in a carnivore’s victory pose over its, supposedly, recently vanquished prey – a Lambeosaurus. I wondered how these creatures lived, and why. I read books by Edwin H. Colbert, who was the existing expert on dinosaurs. His “Dinosaur Book”, was my favorite. However, even at a young age, I was a skeptic by nature. When Colbert claimed that the Dinosaurs were cold blooded, I did not accept that. In fact, I did not accept them as Reptiles. I felt that they were whole other classification — not mammal, not bird, and not reptile. To me, they were Dinosaurs, unique and amazing.

Close by the hall of the dinosaurs, was a hall about geology. It was my least favorite hall. Rocks, being inert, hold very little interest to a child. There was one exhibit in that hall that caught my eye. It showed a 1/4″ rod, coiled round and round, and had the various ages of the earth and what was happening on ther earth at those times. It showed the cambrian, and the age of fishes, the Ordovician, the Silurian, the Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and all the ages. This coil went round and round many times, a dozen or more at least. At the very end of it, about an eighth of an inch finally came the age of man. A fine tiny sliver was the historic era going back to the ancient Egyptians.

I began to see, at that young age, how tiny and insignificant all mankind was. If mankind ceased to exist, our bodily remains would be so few as to hardly leave a trace after a few million years. As opposed to the remains of sea creatures that built Florida, and laid down the huge beds of limestone that we quarry, our existence is as nothing. Yet, being in Chicago, I saw some of the greatest buildings ever built. The skyscraper started in Chicago, and modern architecure was defined and refined there. Still, these creations would eventually turn to dust, given the enormity of Time.

In time, I grew up, and left behind such childish musings. I got a degree, and then a Masters Degree in Business from Northwestern University Kellogg School. I made a living consulting and helping companies operate better and make more money. Outside of the occassional visit to a museum, thoughts of life and the planet did not occur to me much.

I had a daughter. I took her to the Field Museum, wanting to introduce her to the place that was my mind’s incubator. But, it had changed. It charged money now, and the fee was not cheap. More importantly, though, it had changed on the inside. The great halls of stuffed animals were destroyed, and the information gone. I took my daughter into a recently “renovated” bird diorama that you walked through. I guess it was done to give a viewer a “feel” for the birds environment. I guess they think we don’t have imaginations. What is worse, though, is that the stuffed animals cannot be put out in the open like that. So, all the really good ones, the rare ones, were no longer displayed. The absolute worst, though, was the destruction of information.

In the diorama, a red-winged blackbird was displayed. Pretty. But, no information, other than its common name was given. No latin name. No map showing habitat range. No display of young or female birds, whiich I knew looked different. No display of diet, or beavior, anything else. If that is all I needed, I could show my daughter red-winged blackbirds on the side of the highway. It was horrible. To me, it was as if barbarians had invaded the temple to knowledge, and destroyed it. Marauding Vikings with war hammers and axes could not have done a more devastating act of vandalism.

It was obvious that the hordes of religious fanatics, screaming creationism had descended. The dioramas of Neanderthal man were removed. In the main lobby, a glass case once stood, showing the erect skeletons of the five main apes – Gibbon, Chimpanzee, Orangutan, Gorilla, and Homo Sapiens. As a child, I saw how closely we were related to the other apes. Just take a gorilla’s body, and change the dimensions of it bones, and you would get the Chimpanzee, or the Gibbon, or a Man. The same could be done with all of them. That was an important lesson I wanted to teach my daughter. But, it was removed. When I complained about it, and wondering if it was destroyed. I was shown that it still existed, but hidden away where it could not be seen. This, for a display that was once considered so important that it was displayed in the main hall. I guess science had lost its appeal at the Field Museum. All the displays have been ravaged now, and depleted of information. Whatever is shown now is devoid of context, and without context, facts are meaningless. Fortunately, the American Museum of Natural History is still world class.

But I digress. In 2001, my interest in the planet Earth was awakened by a magazine article. I forget where I read it, but it said that naval observations had shown that the average Arctic summer ice thickness had gone from 17 ft thick in 1980 to 9 feet thick by 1998. I was shocked. A simple computation told me that the Arctic will have a summer ice thickness of zero by 2017. What surprised me at the tiime was that climatologists and their models were predicting 2100 as the time for a summer ice free Arctic. I could not square the naval ice thickness data with the climatologist’s predictions.

It was my effort to understand the naval data and the climatologists that got me thinking again about this Earth, and what is happening to it. The Arctic has rekindled my interest, but many other things are happening that need to be understood. Much of what is reported is often without context, or even wrong. The scientists are not always the best at making things understandable. In fact, their wording is often ambiguous. For instance, an article might read “The Arctic has seen its lowest ice extent since 1979″. To the normal reader, that would mean — The Arctichas seen its lowest extent since 1979 WHEN IT WAS LAST AT THIS LEVEL. When, what the scientist really means is — WHEN RECORDS STARTED BEING KEPT. So, no implication of prior extent being that low – EVER. I will do my best to explain things I come across in clear unambiguous terms. Science is not that difficult, when things are presented clearly.

And so, now, I start my blog. If you like it and find it occassionally interesting, please leave your comments, I want to hear them. I will respond as best I can.