2014 Warmest: Antarctica Surprise Melt Coming

I will come back tomorrow, with more details, on the connection between murderous superstition and the plutocracy that has long fostered it.

I will come back on the fact that somebody like Obama is so ignorant of the law (!), that he does not even (seem to) know that one cannot “slander” someone dead (as he pretended one can… At the United Nations, when he equated not respecting a “prophet” with the murder of tens of millions). I will come back on the fact that “legal” tax cheating by the hyper rich, the plutocrats, has left all PUBLIC educational systems in disarray, and states weak. And thus this return to barbarity is pushing young people straight back to Medieval unreason (Rushdie).

Right now, let’s take a break. With climate “change”, for comic relief. Here is another product of our great leaders, and their wealthy sponsors:

Since 1850, the Rise of Temperature Is More Than One Degree Celsius.

The Japanese government announced that 2014 was the warmest year on record for the Surface of the Earth. It is all the more remarkable considering that 2014 was NOT an El Nino year.

What could go wrong?

This brings the Earth global temperature roughly from less than 14 Celsius to 14.7 Celsius (the latter being the average over 2014).

For comparison, at the maximum of massive glaciations, say 22,000 years ago, when a mile high glacier stood above New York City, and a solid shelf of ice extended East, all the way to France, the temperature over the North Atlantic was just five degree Celsius lower… And sea level more than 100 meters below.

What’s the future? An enormous acceleration, surprising all, just as with the repression of Freedom of Expression, and the resurgence of Middle Age murderous religious madness and superstition (encouraged by policy at the highest level).

Acceleration proportional to itself, is the definition of the exponential, a function ubiquitous in nature.

Two exponentiating accelerations will reveal themselves with the climate.

One is well known: it is the massive release of methane hydrates, a form of methane ice found in quantities that may dwarf all the other hydrocarbons put together. Methane, CH4, has a greenhouse capability tens of time greater than CO2. It has already started, complete with huge explosions, it’s not science-fiction on another planet.

The other coming surprise is fast melting of West Antarctica. West Antarctica is basically under water. Or more exactly, the bottom of its glaciers scrap the rock below the waterline.

When warm water slips below the ice, between ice and rock, those giant glaciers may melt in a few years (and not in the few centuries presently predicted by common scientific wisdom). Now how did the glaciations start, three million years ago? With the massive glaciation of Antarctica. This, it is surmised, arose from the ACC, the Antarctica Circumpolar Current (which happened after some obstructing volcano chain across the ocean got eroded away).

Conversely, if half Antarctica melts, the albedo of the planet will diminish considerably, accelerating the warming, with an exponential contribution.

To boot, a similar threat, enormous glaciers resting on rock below sea level, exists over a vast part of East Antarctica:

SUN COOLING, ICE MELTING…

During El Nino, warm water buried in the Pacific Ocean churn, slosh and erupts at the surface of the Eastern Pacific. This warms the surface. The last spectacular El Nino was in 1998, and it caused a spectacular jump in surface temperatures.

(Thereafter those who wanted to deny a rise in surface temperatures used the 1998 peak as a starting point.)

For the first time in history, temperatures in Anchorage, Alaska, did not drop below zero Fahrenheit once in an entire calendar year. In comparison, Alaska’s largest city had 14 days below zero in 2013, and 32 days in 2012. The average is 29 days. Here it is, graphically:

Most of Heating Happens At The Poles, Bringing a Swift Rise in Sea Level.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-baked-alaska-20150103-story.html

In the coldest areas, in the sea or land, where methane hydrates are deposited, evidence is growing of massive eruption.

Even if coal fired power plants worldwide were converted to carbon negative plants (not that this is feasible, even in theory) a catastrophe is unfolding. A pulse of heat is working its way down into the oceans, and in the ground, especially in the Polar regions. That pulse will cause methane to erupt on most or all of the continental shelf methane hydrate deposits, worldwide.

Most of this first eruption of methane will not add directly to global warming (except in shallow Arctic seas, where the CH4 reaches the surface before recombination, and the effect is already apparent). Instead it will add to ocean acidification. After the ability of deep oceans to oxidize the methane is exhausted, methane will vent into the atmosphere. It’s coming, according to the modeling from the IMPACTS consortium of national labs. (The IMPACTS program was quietly de-funded at the end of 2013: our great leaders don’t want the truth to come out.)

Methane eruption is an example of Non-Linear effect E: the more the effect E, the faster E grows (that’s called an Exponential).

Non-Linear effects are all over the infernal climate machinery we have set in motion. For example, the more the ice and snows of the Arctic melt, the darker the Arctic gets, and the more Solar radiation it absorbs.

NASA satellites observed a marked increase in solar radiation absorption in the Arctic since 2000.

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2208/

An enormous acceleration, just as with the repression of Freedom of Expression. Charlie Hebdo and its many ancestors and its many predecessors operated without assassinations for two centuries. But now, for 15 years top cartoonists, journalists and writers in France have been under police protection… When they were not fired outright for criticizing some forms of Islamism.

The times, they are changing. For the best in many ways. However, also for the worst. We have a small planet, perhaps the only one with a civilization (although obviously many harbor some form of life). It is a spaceship. Our immense material powers may well destroy it, in short order.

Lest we exert great discernment. Now. This requires probably changing our inappropriate leadership system, which rest on the brains, of a few individuals, easily bought, or selected by a pernicious elite (the built-up of CO2 was easy to avoid, if a different ethical and political system had been in the lead).

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: 2014 Warmest, Antarctica Circumpolar Current, Antarctica Melting, El Nino, Global Temperature, Global warming, Japan Meteorological Agency, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctica