"COP-21 is ignoring huge danger": Press Release by the Arctic Methane Emergency Group

PRESS RELEASE by the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, AMEG

November 2015

Transforming to a safer world

COP-21 is ignoring huge danger

COP-21 will not save humanity from catastrophic climate change and metres of sea level rise, if they continue to rely on IPCC assessments.

The world expects IPCC to ensure the safety of future generations, by producing realistic assessments of the dangers from climate change and by giving good advice to governments on how to deal with these dangers and prevent catastrophe.  But IPCC has absolutely failed in their obligation, under UNFCCC Article 2, to give adequate warning of the planetary emergency resulting from past and continued anthropogenic interference on two counts: excess CO2 in the atmosphere; and an Arctic soon to become seasonally free of sea ice.

Removing excess CO2

IPCC have consistently understated the dangers from global warming and ocean acidification arising from excess CO2 in the atmosphere.  A safe, sustainable target level for CO2 concentration has not been established, as required by UNFCCC Article 2; and other constraints, such as a limit on ocean acidification, rate of sea level rise and Arctic warming, have not been established either.

It is cogently argued by leading climate expert, Professor James Hansen, that the limit for CO2 should be set at 350 ppm or below.  It will require a massive effort in carbon dioxide removal to achieve this level within a few decades.  A similar limit on CO2 is required to avoid excessive ocean acidification, which, in combination with global warming, is already causing coral reefs to die.  By ignoring the dangers of ocean acidification, the whole marine food chain has been put at risk. 

IPCC has set a carbon budget of around 1000 gigatons of carbon for total allowed CO2 emissions, of which they say about half has been spent, leaving a remaining budget of less than 500 gigatons to achieve the 2 degrees target.  But other greenhouse gases together add 75% to the climate forcing from CO2.  This means that the CO2eq level is around 490 ppm.  If allowance is also made for climate forcing from black carbon and albedo loss, then it appears that the budget has already been used up.  The IPCC has failed to do the necessary calculations to establish the real position on carbon budget and what has to be achieved to have a good chance of preventing dangerous interference with the climate system, as UNFCCC require IPCC to establish.

Emissions reduction by itself will not remove CO2 from the atmosphere. While focussing on emissions reduction IPCC have been ignoring the urgency and immensity of the task to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere, which will require a revolution in agriculture, forestry and marine management to put carbon in the ground and improve food production at the same time.  Any delay in getting started on these revolutions will increase the risk of disaster in decades to come.

It is proposed that the funding of the CO2 removal initiative should come from a carbon levy on fossil fuel producers.  This would provide justice, in that the people who benefit from taking carbon out of the ground would be paying for the carbon to be returned to the ground.  The levy would be ramped up until the CO2 level starts to fall towards the target 350 ppm.

Preventing the Arctic Ocean becoming seasonally free of sea ice

But, more serious still than the problem of excess CO2, IPCC has failed to acknowledge the dangers arising from rapid Arctic warming and the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice.  The Arctic Ocean could become seasonally free of sea ice within a few years.  This rapid decline is the real “elephant in the room”.  The sea ice has provided a reflective surface to keep the Arctic cool, maintain permafrost and stabilise our planet’s temperature, sea level and climate.  Now the sea ice is declining to a much lower level, and IPCC is ignoring the implications.

Because of this glaring omission from IPCC reports, it may soon be too late to prevent the Arctic getting locked into a state of low sea ice and rapid warming, from which there will be no escape.  Continued rapid warming will inevitably lead to several absolute catastrophes for the world:

• accelerated meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet to give metres of sea level rise within decades;
• accelerated meltdown of permafrost, releasing vast quantities of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, which both accelerates the Arctic warming in a positive feedback loop and counters attempts to limit global warming to a safe level;
• destabilisation of the planet’s climate system, giving ever worse weather extremes compounded by global warming and El Niño events.

Conclusion

In brief, humanity faces a planetary emergency from precipitous decline of Arctic sea ice as well as from an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere.  COP-21 must now prepare to take the necessary interventions. 

Our condemnation of IPCC assessment reports is not idle speculation or doom-mongering but based on the best available scientific evidence.  There now has to be a strenuous, focussed and determined effort to find solutions to these problems and make the necessary interventions.  Of particular urgency, the Arctic has to be cooled such as to prevent further decline of sea ice.   This is a significant engineering challenge.  Any delay risks the passing of a point of no return, whereby the challenge becomes impossible.

By facing up to the truth of the situation, means can surely be found to avoid catastrophe, using mankind’s collective intelligence, technology and vast resources. 

All nations must now work together to stave off the huge threats facing our civilisation. 

Submitted on behalf of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, 5 November 2015

By John Nissen, chair AMEG (www.ameg.me)

Email: johnnissen2003@gmail.com

More at AMEG's website at:  http://ameg.me/

Join us on facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/ArcticMethaneEmergencyGroup/

MUST SEE NEW VIDEO of Prof. Peter Wadhams on the Arctic sea ice and the subsea methane problem

by Robert Hunziker, Counter Punch, July 3, 2015

[Watch the Arctic sea ice via this link:  https://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview/?p=arctic&l=MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor,MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_Bands721(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_Bands367(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_Bands721(hidden),Graticule,Coastlines&t=2015-07-03&v=-1558366.776201329,-1132033.255730632,1415329.223798671,498174.744269368]

SKIP TO MINUTE 7 FOR THE BIT ABOUT METHANE COMING OUT OF THE SHALLOW SHELVES OFF SIBERIA 

Published on June 20, 2015

Exclusive interview with Professor Peter Wadhams, leading Arctic scientist, Cambridge University - Filmed by Judy Sole, the University of Earth - www.theuniversityofearth.net

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as world governments ignores the risks of an ice-free Arctic (Peter Wadhams). Rather, an ice-free Arctic is widely applauded by much of the world as a positive way forward for re-opening of northern shipping routes, new trips for cruise lines, and access to a huge cache of fossil fuels.

According to Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, an ice-free Arctic with its concomitant methane outbreak potential is scarcely mentioned by the IPCC in its assessment. Evidently, the IPCC does not want to discuss the possibility of major catastrophes.

In truth, an ice-free Arctic tempestuously opens up eons of methane entrapped ever since the last Ice Age. The ramifications are profound.

When the Vatican recently held meetings with leading scientists about climate change in preparation for the Pope’s encyclical of June 2015, one of the invited guest speakers was Professor Peter Wadhams. Assuming that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences listened carefully to his words, they may still be suffering from bouts of sleeplessness.

Status of Arctic Sea Ice and Why it Matters

Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, recently committed to a very candid interview: “Our Time is Running Out – The Arctic Sea Ice is Going,” May 15th, 2015 (all subsequent quotes are from that interview).

“I’ve been measuring the ice thickness go down by 50% over the last 30 years. In the summer for instance, you used to see very heavy pack ice so that a ship would have great difficulty getting through it. Today, it’s more like a blue planet. It’s almost an ice-free Arctic. That’s a big change.”

Accordingly, with the passage of time, the risk of a massive methane outbreak increases along with the ongoing disintegration of sea ice.

“We’re really concerned about the Arctic offshore… the continental shelves of Siberia are very shallow waters. And up until recently there was always sea ice over those shelves, even in the summer… now, it retreats in the summer and it already disappears for 2-3 months off of those shelves. That allows the water to warm up. And, when the water warms up, it causes underwater permafrost to melt, which hadn’t melted since the last Ice Age, and that’s allowing methane to be released.”

According to Professor Wadhams, the East Siberian Sea is a lurking monster. He believes the effect of a methane outbreak could be as catastrophic as an asteroid collision into Earth. The amount of warming would be immediate and large. The probability it will happen: “I would say it is about 50% because we’re seeing the permafrost melting and we’re seeing the methane already being released.”

In fact, field scientists are already seeing sizeable increases of big plumes of methane in the summer whilst discovering new areas of methane release. Until only recently, the East Siberian Sea was monitored every year by one Russian ship. Whereas nowadays, and over the past couple of years, Swedish ships are going elsewhere in the Arctic, and “they’re seeing just as much methane coming out as in East Siberia.”

“So, it’s not a low probability, high catastrophic risk. It’s a high catastrophic, high probability risk.”

He believes complete disappearance of the ice in mid summer could occur within the next couple of years. Presently, the volume of ice in the summer is only a quarter of the 1980s. If that trend continues, summer ice will go to zero very soon.

Impact of Ice-Free Arctic

Changes in the Arctic are driving changes elsewhere on the planet. “For instance, the disappearance of ice in the Arctic is leading to warmer air masses moving over Greenland in the summer. That’s causing the Greenland ice sheet to melt faster. And, that’s causing global sea level rise to elevate.”

Result, instead of a one-meter sea level rise this century, as predicted by the IPCC, Greenland’s melt could cause a rise of a couple of meters, or more. In fact, some glaciologists are talking about 4 or 5 meters [13-16 ft.].

The final cataclysmic impact of too much sea level rise would be some areas of the world, like Miami, would have to be completely abandoned, vacated, evacuated similar to Chernobyl, and very much like Chernobyl, because of cuckoo energy policies.

Not only that, global warming accelerates as a result of Arctic sea ice loss, which reduces global albedo whereby radiation is reflected straight back into outer space, but with loss of the white icy reflective background the sun’s radiation absorbs into a dark background, all of which results in the rate of worldwide warming much faster than anticipated by mainstream science, the IPCC.

“So, this attempt to pretend that we can keep global warming below two degrees C, which was already a pretense, is even more ridiculous. It’s certainly going to get to 4 °C or 5 °C degrees by the end of this century, which will have quite catastrophic impacts on agricultural production.”

What to do?

As for stopping offshore methane release by “bringing back Arctic sea ice, some people are proponents of doing that. The problem is you really cannot bring back the ice without cooling the planet. Global temperatures govern sea ice; it cannot be isolated or targeted. Finding a way to bring back Arctic sea ice won’t work unless you can cool the entire planet.”

The only realistic possibility, ironically, is modification of the fracking method used in oil and gas drilling by utilizing offshore platforms along the Arctic coastline, a network of horizontal drills into the creation of cavities to suck up the methane to prevent it from emitting into the atmosphere (Wadhams). But, no research has been done on this. It has only been suggested.

Regardless of how, what, or when, resolution of the problem is an enormous, overwhelming task: “There is a conspiracy of complacency around the world in which they still imagine that if we do a few minor things, minor adjustments and reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, then all will be well. But, it won’t because we’ve already got too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’re already going to have more than 2 °C degrees of warming even if we don’t emit anymore because of the already existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So, we’ve got to not only stop emitting it or reducing it, reducing emissions, but find ways to take it out of the atmosphere, and that’s a technology that hasn’t been developed.”

Climate change has a progressive effect, slowly working throughout the world. But, all of the slowness is building up to a big change. Moreover, by the time anomalous weather patterns disrupt agriculture, causing worldwide starvation, it’ll be too late to do anything. Unfortunately, global inertia is the problem. “The forces of inertia are so enormous… the use of fossil fuel is so built into our society. Everything in life results from burning fossil fuels.”

Timing of the Worse Case

The only way to save civilization as it currently exist is to bring CO2 levels down, and that can only be accomplished by some drastic method of actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere. “We can’t do it by messing around with reducing our emissions, we can’t even do it by stopping our emissions because we’ve gone too far. We’ve got to actually take it out.”

Professor Wadhams claims climate change research must, front and center, become the major thrust of a worldwide scientific effort, and it must be done urgently, similar to the Manhattan Project (ironically). Society will be forced to use some technology, which is not yet proven, to remove CO2 to prevent a catastrophe. Accordingly, there is no time to tinker around.

He believes in a worse case scenario, “by ten years time, we’ll really be in the soup.”

Current Arctic Weather Conditions

According to Arctic News, as of July 2nd: “While the media gives wide coverage to the heat waves that have been hitting populous countries such as India, Pakistan, the U.S., Spain and France recently, less attention is given to heat waves hitting the Arctic.”

Furthermore: “The heat waves that hit Alaska and Russia recently are now followed up by a heat wave in East Siberia… a location well within the Arctic Circle… temperatures as high as 37.1 °C (98.78 °F) were recorded on July 2, 2015.”

And, even more, “With temperatures as high as the 37.1 °C (98.78 °F) recorded on July 2, 2015, huge melting can be expected where there still is sea ice in the waters off the coast of Siberia, while the waters where the sea ice is already gone will warm up rapidly. Note that the waters off the coast of Siberia are less than 50 meters (164 ft.) deep, so warming can quickly extend all the way down to the seabed, that can contain enormous amounts of methane in the form of free gas and hydrates.”

Also, on July 1, 2015, a temperature of 36 °C (96.8 °F) was recorded near the Kolyma River that flows into the East Siberian Sea.

The Arctic is hotter than Miami!

Somehow or other, 98 °F in the Arctic makes the world seem upside down/sideways. Is it?

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at roberthunziker@icloud.com

http://beta.counterpunch.org/2015/07/03/methane-outbreak-nears/

Nick Breeze: [Gavin Schmidt] Tweeting on Thin Ice - Reflecting on the Arctic Sea Ice Meeting at the Royal Society

by Nick Breeze, Envisionation, September 30, 2014

When it comes to changes in the global climate, one of the most visible and disturbing sites is the data that shows the diminishing state of sea ice in the Arctic region. It is both dramatic and symbolic, with known and unknown consequences. As someone who has been following the scientific literature on this for a few years now, I cannot help feeling that our collective societies, and especially those with real power, will rue the days they turned their backs on this dynamic and important component of our climate.

With this in mind, I was positively excited to attend the two-day event at the Royal Society on the 22nd and 23rd of September, titled, ‘Arctic sea ice reduction: the evidence, models, and global impacts.’ The list of scientists attending read like a dream team of big brains on Arctic sea ice matters:

Dr Julienne Stroeve, University of Colorado, USA; Reduction of summer sea ice extent
Professor Mark Serreze, National Snow and Ice Center, USA; Changes in Arctic sea ice and the polar atmosphere
Professor Peter Wadhams, University of Cambridge, UK; Sea ice thickness from submarines
Professor Ronald Kwok, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CALTECH, USA; Satellite observations of sea ice thickness
Dr Andrey Proshuntinsky, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA; Arctic circulation regimes
Dr Helene Hewitt, Met Office Hadley Centre, UK; Using models to understand and predict Arctic Sea Ice
Professor John Turner, British Antarctic Survey, UK; Why is sea ice increasing in the Southern Ocean?
Dr Marika Holland, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA; The capabilities and limitations of Arctic sea ice ocean climate models
Professor Daniel Feltham, University of Reading, UK; Sea ice mechanics and the next generation of sea ice physics
Dr Dirk Notz, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Germany; Processes controlling the Arctic sea ice mass balance
Professor Don Perovich, Dartmouth College, USA; Field studies of sea ice melt
Professor Grae Worster, University of Cambridge, UK; Sea ice thermodynamics and brine drainage
Dr Gavin Schmidt, NASA, USA; Atmospheric composition and radiative impacts of Arctic sea ice loss
Professor Jennifer Francis, Rutgers University, USA; The impact of Arctic sea ice loss on extreme weather
Dr Sheldon Bacon, National Oceanography Centre, UK; The Arctic Ocean freshwater budget and implications for climate

One of the most striking debates in the discussion of Arctic sea ice is the rate of loss and risk of feedbacks, such as large-scale methane release. The large-scale methane releases are a feature of the Earth’s history, where huge amounts of this deadly gas are released at a rate where they cannot be broken down, and therefore overwhelm the atmosphere. This heating effect, in turn, creates amplified heating making it difficult for life to survive. It is estimated that when the last big methane burst occurred, millions of years ago, 90% of life on Earth died and the recovery rate for biodiversity was millions of years more.

Russian scientist’s, Dr Natalia Shakhova and Dr Igor Semilitov have been conducting annual trips to the East Siberian Arctic Shelf for over ten years and are reporting an increased destabilisation of the permafrost on the shallow Arctic ocean floor in the region. The loss of ice has meant that significant heating has occurred this sensitive region, causing the frozen seabed to rise from -7 degrees centigrade to between -1 C and +3 C. Obviously, above zero, the seabed changes state from ice to water and releases methane from the rotting organic debris that has been frozen for thousands, or millions of years.

More importantly, this permafrost layer acts as a seal over an enormous store of methane hydrates conservatively estimated to be around 1,500 gigatonnes. To put this in perspective, there is currently about 5.5 gigatonnes of methane in the Earth’s atmosphere. A release of a small percentage of 50 gigatonnes has been cited as a risk. Wadhams and his colleagues used the Stern model to calculate that such a release would have the equivalent economic value of $50 trillion USD (roughly the same as global GDP). That is obviously much more than we could ever afford and the world, post-release, would look vastly different, with hardly any humans, or other species, remaining compared to what we see today.

Professor Wadhams gave his talk at the Royal Society focusing on the behaviour of sea ice, using submarine data to back up previous estimates of sea ice decline in volume over multi decades. As these are observations, it is not really something that can be contested. Wadhams has been going on trips to the Arctic aboard military submarines for many years, collecting data to feed into the models, calculating volume in addition to the ice area (extent) shown from the satellites. This has shown a dramatic drop in sea-ice volume by 40% since the late 1970s. The implications are that we are risking setting off a feedback process of methane release that could cause a huge boost to global warming. That is the view from those collecting data from the region.

On the other side of the debate stands the modellers. David Archer (not present at the event) is referred to as the “go to man” on Arctic methane. Archer says that no risk is posed from methane releases from Arctic shelves such as the one in Eastern Siberia. To represent this view at the Royal Society meeting was Dr Gavin Schmidt, the newly positioned Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute For Space Studies. Dr. Schmidt presented his modelling data, positing that there is no evidence such a risk exists. This is as a result of his examination of the data record of the Holocene period; a period of climate stability in which we and many other species have flourished. There are other scientists who look at our unprecedented climate situation and conclude that this is the beginning of the “Anthropocene”; a period of climate driven by human activity.

Schmidt does acknowledge there was a huge methane release way back in the geological record but states that the world was a very different place then and we cannot draw conclusions from it. Schmidt’s view is based much more on modelling data and theory, which is viewed with suspicion by some, due to the inability of the models to keep pace in real-time with the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice. The argument goes that if you cannot get the model to reproduce what is happening today, how can you draw conclusions of what the sea ice will do in 10, 20 or 100 years? All scientists use models, and they are very useful in looking at climate and their results are always getting better, as both the technological capacity, and the scientists understanding of Earth system processes gets better.

Dr Schmidt’s presentation was especially crafted to dispel the idea of a risk from methane releases and to directly discredit the work of Shakhova et al. Even when he mentioned the word methane, he did so encouraging the audience to make horror noises. This seems to me a thoughtless act, considering people are risking their lives to collect the data on the subject. I interviewed Shakhova in June and she gave examples of other expeditions that have had fatal outcomes for those involved. Also, considering Professor Wadhams was sat in the audience and held a different view, it seemed divisive and childish. Schmidt presented in his summary that there was no risk of a methane “bomb,” or other large-scale multi-gigatonne release from hydrate stores in the Arctic.

Although he didn’t explicitly say it, the implication was that the work of those saying “there is a risk” is rubbish. He showed models developed by Archer to prove it. However, I failed to draw a similar conclusion as Schmidt, because the scientists telling us there IS an issue, are the only ones actually visiting the region and collecting data. Shakhova said in June, when we spoke, that a decade ago there were hardly any bubbles coming out, and the ice pack on top was frozen solid. They could drive heavy vehicles out on the ice. Due to global warming, it has vanished, and now the dark open water is absorbing the sun's heat energy, and the waves that occur during intensifying storms (a new phenomenon for the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf) are transporting this heat down to the seabed, where the melting occurs. Thus, their observations show plumes of methane pouring off the seabed, from melting permafrost and over a kilometre wide.

The opposing views portended to set up a scenario for great discussion and perhaps, potentially, collaboration on how scientists could move forward to get to the bottom of what is happening in the volatile polar region. However, what really transpired was that Dr Schmidt was not that interested in any serious consideration of views outside those of his colleagues and had come here to only try and discredit what he might call “opponents.” Even when Professor Wadhams asked him a serious question at the end of his presentation, about what sea water temperature data is feeding Archer’s model (as it was being shown as evidence), he simply replied that “it’s [the answer] in the paper.” Conversely, when Wadhams was on the stage, Schmidt only raised his hand to ask “Is any of this based on physics?” to which Wadhams replied “no,” referring to the fact that it is collected, observational data.

Although having two opposing camps adds a bit of flavour to the proceedings, what soured the taste afterwards was Schmidt’s insulting tweeting during Wadhams' presentation. Probably aware that an older professor is not so likely to be microblogging during a serious conference on his main subject of expertise, Schmidt released the following tweets in reference to him:

"Some anticipation for Peter Wadhams. Audience members already crying," "Wadhams still using graphs with ridiculous projections with no basis in physics," "Wadhams now onto methane pulse of 50 GT. But no better justified than his previous statements," and "Wadhams clearly states that there is no physics behind his extrapolations.”

There is no doubt that such “tweets” must resonate with his own choir of over 5,800 followers on Twitter, but does it add anything whatsoever to the meeting in the room? In terms of credibility alone, it should be highlighted that Wadhams has been studying the sea ice for over 40 years and published over 300 papers on the subject. He has made countless voyages to both polar regions and even the Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher was heard to shout out in Downing Street, “Dennis… The ICE MAN is here!”, having previously telephoned him during an expedition to the Antarctic ahead of a conference in the 1980s. Even if Professor Wadhams was not a person of such high stature, Dr Schmidt’s treatment of him does sully a framework for finding answers to serious questions that science has always been so good at. It undermines the purpose of the meeting hosted by the Royal Society and also the reputation of his current position at Goddard (a position held by one of the most excellent and modest of climate experts we have seen, James Hansen, whom I was fortunate to meet and interview in 2012).

To conclude, the opportunity to discuss in depth the opposing views was squandered in place of a shallow and degrading barrage of Tweets. These were designed to undermine and dismiss a growing field of research that is being published around the world by many institutions, such as the United Nations Environment Programme, as well the peer-reviewed literature. Instead of an arena of informed and intellectual discussion, this behaviour is more akin to playground politics blended with egotistical nastiness.

On a completely different level altogether, one major triumph of the event was the presentation given by Professor Jennifer Francis from Rutgers University, USA, titled, ‘The impact of Arctic sea ice loss on extreme weather.’ Francis has been regularly cited by the mainstream media in recent months when we have experienced extreme weather events.  Her teams work has produced evidence linking the decline in Arctic sea ice to the changes in the oscillation of the jet stream, that delivers our weather and is now being affected by man-made climate change. Such work has been picked up by President Obama’s Chief Science Advisor, Dr John Holdren who is thus briefing the President. I was lucky enough to catch up with Professor Francis later in the week and conduct an interview. We’ll be posting this very shortly.

http://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/blogs/98-tweeting-on-thin-ice-reflecting-on-the-arctic-sea-ice-meeting-at-the-royal-society

Dr. Natalia Shakhova interviewed by Nick Breeze on recent studies of destabilized subsea permafrost off the coast of northern Siberia

June 20, 2014, Dr. Natalia Shakhova interview by Nick Breeze: Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQDVr1eMLK8



Part 2:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BVsS6vo60Y



Part 3:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80ooWqpCdZE

Peter Wadhams: Melting Polar Ice Caps a "Ticking Timebomb" for Earth's Climate System

Bio

Peter Wadhams, ScD, is professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work on sea ice. Dr. Wadhams is the president of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans Commission on Sea Ice and Coordinator for the International Programme for Antarctic Buoys.

Dahr Jamail has written extensively about climate change as well as the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is the author of two books: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Transcript

ANTON WORONCZUK, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Anton Woronczuk in Baltimore.

A recent study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, has found that a section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting at an alarming rate and could raise global sea levels by up to four feet. Meanwhile, the Arctic is also showing the strain of global warming, with an ice-free Arctic summer predicted by 2016, according to research by the U.S. Navy. This research comes as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that April 2014 ranked as the hottest April on record, tying with April 2010. It also follows the recent release of the National Climate Assessment that says that signs of climate change are all around us.

With us to discuss why the melting polar ice caps could spell the end not just for penguins and polar bears but for mankind are our two guests.

Dahr Jamail is a staff reporter with Truthout currently writing about the environment and climate change. His recent articles include "The Vanishing Arctic Ice Cap".

Also joining us is Peter Wadhams, who is a professor of ocean physics and head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at University of Cambridge.

Thank you both for joining us.

So, Peter, let's start with the recent NASA study on the melting of the West Antarctic glaciers. What are the predictions in terms of the scope of the melting and the effects that it will have on rising sea levels?

PETER WADHAMS, PROF. OCEAN PHYSICS, UNIV. OF CAMBRIDGE: Well, it was a surprising prediction. In the past, until recently, the general assumption was that the Antarctic ice sheet is very stable. The West Antarctic ice sheet is slightly less stable than the East Antarctic ice sheet, which is the much bigger area, but the general thought was that it's quite stable and we don't have to worry about the Antarctic ice sheets, and for a long time, if they contain most of the fresh water in the world and if any part, major part of the Antarctic ice sheet did slide off its bed, then there would be a gigantic impact on global sea levels. And this study predicts four feet as what would happen if this large chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet came off. It's something which is clearly based on very good research. It's something where we might expect it not to happen within the next few years.

But climate change at the moment, which is so catastrophically rapid that something that's going to happen in a few decades, perhaps, which is very quick in terms of Antarctic glacial history, is, as far as the world is concerned, kind of slow, because by then the sea ice melt will have had much bigger impacts on global climate and will be affecting us very detrimentally. So I think the Antarctic, it's much more serious than people ever thought, because people thought we didn't have to worry about the Antarctic ice sheets. So it's more serious than we thought it was going to be.

But in terms of what are the immediate threats to our continued existence on this planet, it's probably the case that sea ice retreat is going to have its impact first, and something happening to the West Antarctic ice sheet is not something that's going to happen in less than a few decades.

WORONCZUK: So what would a four-foot rise mean in terms of its effects on humans and the climate system?

WADHAMS: Well, even IPCC, which is a very conservative body, is now predicting something like a meter of sea level rise this century. And if you--they don't take really enough account of the rapid melt of the Greenland ice sheet. But we would expect from Greenland ice sheet melt and general warming, which produces rise in the level of the ocean because the ocean is itself warming, we would expect, I think, more than a meter in this coming century. So what would happen if the Ice Sheet, if the Antarctic Ice Sheet slid off its bed would be a century of sea level rise in one go. And that would be pretty serious. I mean, we can compensate somewhat for a steady sea level rise by raising the heights of flood defenses and taking precautions against it or adapting to it by retreating from certain coastal urban zones, opening up more wetlands, but if it's happening very suddenly, we can't. You can't adapt to something that's happening that rapidly. So it would be a pretty serious thing if it really did happen like that.

WORONCZUK: So, Dahr, as governments and corporations open up new shipping routes and offshore oil drilling projects in the Arctic, why shouldn't we embrace an iceless Arctic summer as the new normal? Can you explain the role of Arctic sea ice within the Earth's climactic system?

DAHR JAMAIL, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Well, another thing--and I'm speaking somewhat out of turn, since Professor Wadhams is really the expert here and he can talk more in detail about this--but, you know, the Arctic sea ice is playing a critical role in keeping methane emissions from melting permafrost in check. And as that ice continues to thin and both retreat, exposing more and more of the shallows, Arctic seabeds, to warming waters and solar radiation, as well as continuing melting of permafrost on the shores, it's well documented at this point that intensification of methane release is ongoing and worsening. And so methane, of course, being dramatically more intense as a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide-- so it's really causing a runaway feedback loop or a positive feedback loop with anthropogenic climate disruption of really causing the whole situation to speed up much, much more dramatically.

And NASA has done studies on this, as well as Professor Wadhams' group, that basically shows--the NASA study referred to the methane in the Arctic as the ticking time bomb of climate change, that as this continues to ramp up in its release, it's really setting in motion a runaway feedback loop that we probably won't be able to do very much about. It's causing dramatic increases in temperatures across the planet.

And then, you know, another thing that I think we need to keep in mind is that as dramatic as the situation that we find ourselves in today and the rapidity with which climate change is happening and ever increasing, that the 63 percent of all human-generated carbon emissions have occurred in just the last 25 years since the Industrial Revolution began. And we have scientific reports that show there's actually a 40-year time lag from when those emissions are released into the atmosphere and when we actually feel the effects. So that, I think, just underscores the urgency of the situation that we're in regarding that we're literally on the precipice of losing the Arctic ice cap in summer is a situation that once it happens is going to increase, of having a longer period each summer where that's open, and then the massive disruptions in the climate that's going to cause.

WORONCZUK: So, from what you're saying, it sounds like nothing much can be done in the short-term to reverse the melting.

JAMAIL: Well, as far as if we're talking about reducing emissions, you know, I think this really puts into perspective, really, the folly of when we hear governments, particularly that of the Obama administration in the United States, talking about 30 year and 50 year timelines of a plan that they might have of reducing emissions, you know, 3 percent per year, for example, up until 2050, or trying to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2050. We simply do not have anywhere near that kind of time.

WORONCZUK: And, Peter, what's your take? Do you think that we've already passed the point of no return in terms of controlling polar ice cap melting?

WADHAMS: Yes, I think we have. A few years ago, I predicted that the summer sea ice--that's the September minimum--would go to zero by about 2015. And at that stage, it was only really one model that agreed with me. My prediction was based on observations from satellites and from measurements from submarines of ice thickness, which I've been doing from British subs, and Americans have been doing the same from American subs. And the trend was so clear and so definite that it would go to zero by 2015 that I felt it was safe to make that prediction, and I still think it is, because next year, although this year we don't expect things to retreat much further than last, next year will be an El Niño year, which is a warmer year, and I think it will go to zero.

And once it goes to zero in the summer, it is sort of irreversible, because it means that the next summer there'll be a longer ice-free period. Instead of just one month, there might be two or three months, because the water warms up during the summer months. If there is no ice there, it's absorbing solar radiation, the water's warming up.

As we've heard, one of the things that would happen from that is that the water on the continental shelves warms very much. We've seen seven degree temperatures from satellites. And that means that the seabed permafrost near the coast then melts, and that releases methane. And the methane effect, I think, is the biggest of all the threats from the retreat of sea ice. We've got other effects as well. The retreat is causing warmer air over Greenland, which is causing the Greenland ice cap to melt faster and sea level rise to accelerate.

But the biggest immediate threat, I think, is that the warming of the water in summer is causing methane to be released from the seabed because of the melt of offshore permafrost. And this is something that's being documented by a Russian-American group, and for several years. And we're joining them with some European funding, which we're putting in to help fund their work and going out with them.

So I think that the documentation of this and the fact that the extra methane we see each summer--that's the big, increasing amounts of methane plumes in the Arctic reaching the surface, releasing methane into the atmosphere--and that's reflected in NASA's measurements from satellites of methane levels in the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere, which have started to go up again quite fast after having been flat for a decade or so. I think that that is a big threat.

But the loss of the sea ice is something that's, I think, irreversible, because all the trends are towards decreased sea ice extent, and there's no countervailing trend that will bring the ice back. The biggest effect is an albedo feedback effect, for instance, the fact that as the ice disappears, you're replacing highly reflective ice and snow with poorly reflective water. And that has an effect of increasing the rate of warming of the Arctic, and that increases the rate of retreat of the ice. So all the feedbacks are positive. There's no negative feedbacks that will tend to bring the ice back. Once it's gone in summer, it's gone, and I think the summer ice-free season, having started very soon, maybe next year, will then extend itself so that we might have a number of months of ice-free conditions. We'll have plenty of ice in the winter, of course.

But that ice-free summer will have all these knock-on effects of increasing methane release, maybe producing a catastrophic pulse of methane, which has been predicted based on how much methane is sitting in the form of methane hydrates. And that pulse would be very catastrophic. We examined this with climate modeling and economic modeling and found that a pulse of the size that's predicted based on how much methane is there could cause a temperature rise of 0.6 of a degree within 20 years. Now, that's a big addition to the amount of warming that is already going on. It's pretty much doubling the rate of global warming.

And so--plus it's costing some astronomical amount of money as well to the planet. This is using a model, an economic model. So the cost to the planet of having this happening far exceeds any of the benefits we might get from Arctic oil or shipping through the Northwest passage. We're really stuck with a massive economic cost and, of course, a catastrophic cost to the planet.

So all these things are bound to happen, sadly. And the only way in which they wouldn't happen would be if for some surprising reason the methane hydrates on the seabeds stopped emitting methane. But then we wouldn't get off scot-free, because the other source of increased methane is permafrost on land, and that's also melting as the climate warms. And it's a slower process, but in the end there's more methane going to be released from that over many decades than would be released from a pulse in the Arctic Ocean. So in the end we'll have the methane impact on global warming, which hasn't been taking account of IPCC [models]. It's going to come in and it's either going to hit us fast or it's going to get us slowly, but it's going to hit us.

WORONCZUK: Okay. Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge, thank you for joining us.

WADHAMS: Pleasure.

WORONCZUK: And Dahr Jamail from truth out, thank you for joining us.

JAMAIL: Thank you.

WORONCZUK: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11899

Interesting interview on Radio EcoShock about how we may have crossed over into the danger zone already

You can always listen to this in the background, but perk up at about minute 14:38, when he starts talking about the amount of methane currently coming out of the thawing subsea permafrost on the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf, in the Laptev Sea region (and this doesn't even mention the methane currently tied up below the subsea permafrost):

http://198.23.252.42/downloads/ES_Jennings.mp3

Wieslaw Maslowski of the US Naval Postgraduate School predicts lower-bound summer ice free Arctic by 2016

Is conventional modelling out of pace with speed and abruptness of global warming?

Greenpeace icebreaking ship, Arctic Sunrise, among broken floes of Arctic sea ice, photographed from the air. This image was taken in the Fram Strait, in the month that the sea ice coverage receded to the second lowest extent since records began. Photograph: Nick Cobbing

by Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian, December 9, 2013

An ongoing US Department of Energy-backed research project led by a US Navy scientist predicts that the Arctic could lose its summer sea ice cover as early as 2016 – 84 years ahead of conventional model projections.

The project, based out of the US Naval Postgraduate School's Department of Oceanography, uses complex modelling techniques that make its projections more accurate than others.

A paper by principal investigator Professor Wieslaw Maslowski in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences sets out some of the findings so far of the research project:

"Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3, one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover."

The paper is highly critical of global climate models (GCM) and even the majority of regional models, noting that "many Arctic climatic processes that are omitted from, or poorly represented in, most current-generation GCMs" which "do not account for important feedbacks among various system components." There is therefore "a great need for improved understanding and model representation of physical processes and interactions specific to polar regions that currently might not be fully accounted for or are missing in GCMs."

According to the US Department of Energy describing the project's development of the Regional Arctic System Model (RASM):

"Given that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe, understanding the processes and feedbacks of this polar amplification is a top priority. In addition, Arctic glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet are expected to change significantly and contribute to sea level rise in the coming decades."

Such Arctic changes "could have significant ramifications for global sea level, the ocean thermohaline circulation and heat budget, ecosystems, native communities, natural resource exploration, and commercial transportation."

The regional focus of RASM permits "significantly higher spatial resolution" to represent and evaluate the interaction of "important fine-scale Arctic processes and feedbacks," such as:

"... sea ice deformation, ocean eddies, and associated ice–ocean boundary layer mixing, multiphase clouds as well as land–atmosphere–ice–ocean interactions."

The role of the Department of Energy in backing the research is not surprising considering that President Obama's national Arctic strategy launched in May is focused on protecting commercial and corporate opportunities related to control of the region's vast untapped oil, gas and mineral resources.

The model coheres with the predictions of several other Arctic specialists – namely Prof Peter Wadhams, head of polar ocean physics at Cambridge University and Prof Carlos Duarte, director of the Ocean Institute at the University of Western Australia – who see the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2015 as likely.

Prof Wadhams is co-author of the controversial Nature paper which calculated the potential economic costs of climate change based on a scenario of 50 Gigatonnes (Gt) of methane being released this century from melting permafrost at the East Siberia Arctic Shelf (ESAS), a vast region of shallow-water covered continental crust. The scenario was first postulated by Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

In 2010, Shakhova's team published results showing that 7 teragrammes of methane was bubbling to the surface annually in the ESAS. Last month, she released a new paper in Nature Geoscience updating these findings on the basis of more rigorous measurements using an unmanned underwater vehicle with advanced sonar capability. She found that annual bottom water temperatures have increased over the last 14 years, correlating with a release of about 17 teragrammes of methane a year, accentuated by storms. This conservative estimate is more than double the earlier assessment.

However, the source of these methane emissions remains a matter of dispute, as other scientists investigating the phenomenon point out that while large deposits of methane hydrates could be breaking up, the other possibility is a slow leak of methane that has already gone on for hundreds of years. Christian Berndt, of the GEOMAR/Helmholz Centre for Ocean Research, has speculated that both phenomena could be going on at once, but he admits, "We have no proof."

Despite their latest study uncovering higher levels of methane than previously recognised, Shakhova has also distanced herself from the 'methane bomb' scenario she had once previously posited, noting a lack of direct evidence for the scenario.

Commenting on the study, the US National Snow & Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) observes:

"Ship-based observations show that methane concentrations in the air above the East Siberian Sea Shelf are nearly twice as high as the global average... Layers of sediment below the permafrost slowly emit methane gas, and this gas has been trapped for millennia beneath the permafrost. As sea levels rose at the end of the ice age, the shelf was once again covered by relatively warm ocean water, thawing the permafrost and releasing the trapped methane... In the short-term... methane has a global warming potential 86 times that of carbon dioxide."

Most scientists agree that more research is needed to determine the source and nature of these methane emissions.

But scientists also largely agree that an ice free Arctic in the summer could have serious consequences for the global climate. Some research has pointed out a link between the warming Arctic and changes in the jet stream, contributing to unprecedented weather extremes over the last few years. These extreme events in turn have dramatically impacted crop production in key food basket regions.

A landmark new study in Nature Climate Change finds the melting of the sea ice over the last 30 years at a rate of 8% per decade is directly linked to extreme summer weather in the US and elsewhere in the form of droughts and heatwaves. Lead study author Quihang Tang at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing said:

"As the high latitudes warm faster than the mid-latitudes because of amplifying effects of melting ice, the west-to-east jet-stream wind is weakened. Consequently, the atmospheric circulation change tends to favour more persistent weather systems and a higher likelihood of summer weather extremes."

The new study supplements earlier research published in Geophysical Research Letters demonstrating a link between Arctic sea ice loss and extreme weather particularly in both the summer and winter, including prolongation of "drought, flooding, cold spells, and heat waves."

Last year Prof Duarte was lead author of a paper in the Royal Swedish Academy of Science's journal AMBIO warning that the Arctic was at risk of passing critical "tipping points" that could lead to a cascading "domino effect once the summer sea ice is lost." Prof Duarte said at the time:

"If set in motion, they can generate profound climate change which places the Arctic not at the periphery but at the core of the Earth system. There is evidence that these forces are starting to be set in motion. This has major consequences for the future of human kind as climate change progresses."

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/dec/09/us-navy-arctic-sea-ice-2016-melt