TO CLAIM A 2 DEGREE CELSIUS GLOBAL TEMPERATURE RISE WOULD BE SAFE, IS (VERY) BAD SCIENCE! THE UNITED NATIONS IS TO BLAME, For Fostering This Fable.
***
In a nutshell: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that the world is safe below a 2C rise. On the face of evidence, this statement is completely false. Safety means getting out of carbon ASAP, with reduction of 40% by 2020, as the island states have asked. It won’t happen: fossil fuel interests are too entrenched, and the UN hypocrisy demonstrates it.
***
The United Nations’ IPCC has claimed that the rise of global temperatures would be dangerous if, and ONLY IF it exceeded two degrees Celsius. This is an obvious overestimate, as I am going to show. If what I am saying is true, the IPCC is actually doing a disservice and working hand in hand, unwittingly (or not!), with the polluter-destroyers.
My reasoning is very simple: the global temperature rise is estimated variously at between .4 and .75 degree Celsius, so far. The exact number does not matter. What matters is that the rise in the polar regions has been up to 5C. Yes, a FIVE Degree Centigrade rise in some polar regions (both north and south, from Antarctica peninsula to north east Greenland) has already been observed.
Stop, and think, this is how science is done, and what science consists of. A global rise of roughly .5 Celsius has led to a POLAR rise in temperature of TEN TIMES THAT. We have a POLAR HEAT MULTIPLIER effect of TEN. (OK, some fine whine, object to the fine print; maybe only five times; even then, if the POLAR MULTIPLIER will change Polar temperatures only by a factor of 5, as some scientists suggested; it changes the drastic end result only be a factor of 2: half of drastic is still drastic!)
This Is Going To Get Much Much Worse. And Very Soon.
Question: what do you think will happen when the global temperature goes up two Celsius? Well, the polar temperature will go up, or could go up proportionally to ten times two, which is TWENTY. Twenty degree Centigrades. That means one can expect melting of the sea ice in the middle of the Polar night. All right, maybe not twenty, but ten (and we are already half way there in some parts).
Got it? OK, it’s a simplification, and a minimization, of course: plenty of non linear effects will kick in, as polar temperatures shoot up, like massive melting of the polar permafrost, releasing untold quantities of CO2 and CH4, plus warming of the superficial Arctic ocean, exploding gigantic amounts of methane clathrate hydrate deposits.
Methane Clathrate Hydrates
[© by Leibniz-Institut für Meereswissenschaften
IFM-GEOMAR 2002]
*
To tell you how serious a threat methane clathrates are: although the methane deposits were discovered by oilmen in the seventies, they were carefully avoided. Why? Because oil companies thought that, in case of the piercing of a major methane clathrate field, the bubbles rising through the sea could lower the density of the water enough to sink the drilling boat! (Some have wanted to explain the so called Bermuda Triangle that way; it is known that giant tsunamis, 100 feet tall, have been caused by methane clathrate eruptions in the Atlantic.)
Methane Clathrate Hydrate burning. (There maybe more buried below sea and permafrost than all other fossil carbon combined; oil, gas, coal, etc.)
*
So the so far linear rise of temperature at the poles, already intolerable, could turn into a quadratic, or cubic curve. In which case, a two degree rise globally could lead to 25 degree Celsius at the poles. This has happened before, more than 15 million years ago.
In any case, the IPCC is doing bad science: good science consists, first, in good observations. The grossest observation shows that, on present observed facts, a global two degree rise will make the poles TEMPERATE. This is what the grossest, first order science say. The rest is wishful thinking, bull, that is, politics.
A first effect would be a rise of the seas of 75 meters (yes, 250 feet). One meter would flood hundreds of millions of people (however, the White House, the central headquarters of the CO2 holocaust, is 54 feet above sea level, so will not drown first, as it deserves).
***
The poles, as long as they are really cold, as they are now, are the refrigerator, the sun shades, the air conditioning, and the air circulation system of the planet. Once the poles have melted, they will be broken, and the planet will jump in its HOT MODE. Its Jurassic mode. That it has not seen in 100 million years. The biosphere as we know it, will, mostly, die.
This is the tragic truth. Yesterday’s holocaust will not be tomorrow holocaust. Yesterday’s holocaust was founded on the desperate nightmare of some people’s fathers, still immersed in tribalism, boosted by a misinterpretation of the theory of evolution (as Nietzsche had sort of pointed out, as he riled up against Darwin). Tomorrow’s holocaust will literally be global burning (global-burning = holo-caust) of some sort.
It is true that right now the colossal emissions of CO2 by developed countries are capped (in great part because of the colossal efforts of a few countries). But the USA is not cooperating. Islands nations have asked the developed ones to cut down 45% by 2020. It looks impossible, but it is totally doable, modulo some sacrifices.
Among the sacrifices, serious carbon tariffs on miscreants would be very effective (mis-creant = etymologically, those who believe wrongly: mis-believers). Tariffs are better than nuclear bombings. The connection? People, having to choose between drowning, starving, being parked like sick animals, and exacting revenge first, will exact revenge first. So it is.
Some will say: we have time. Oh, no. It is clearer and clearer that climate change can proceed at blinding speed. The very latest news (November 2009), from Canadian academics, is that the stepping into the glaciation of the Younger Dryas 12,500 years ago, took just a few months. Ireland (say) found itself, with the present climate of Svalbard (aka Spitsbergen), from one winter, to the next.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
Annex:
Of course there are more than 5 billion people in developing nations, and the rich hides their consumption among their developing servants: a lot of the Chinese emissions are developed world emissions exported to China by crafty Washington, DC (for Washington, Diabolical Center? American politicians seem hell bound to occupy in world politics a place once owned by German politicians, several generations ago.)
“In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing world’s emissions.” [John Finnegan, CSIRO.]
*
Before about 2002, global emissions grew by about 1% per year.
Then the rate increased to about 3% per year, the change coming mainly from a ramping up in China’s economic output, before falling slightly in 2008 as the global economy dipped towards the Great Recession.
***
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 