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Tipping Point

Is Al Gore Over Optimistic?

The sub title of this article is, perhaps, a bit unfair in singling out the honorable former vice president. Many other people have similar opinions to Mr. Gore. Also, he is doing his best.

Tipping point

The tipping point referred to in this article is when we have, in the climatic sense, passed the point of no return. Most people believe that this point where we cannot stop the increasing temperatures from continuing to rise because of the type of positive feed back mechanism referred to in the article: "The Methane Gun" is in the distant future. Some of us think that it is in the near future. In my (unpublished) book "A Bad Boy" I put this point of no return at 2017. Most people would put it either in the more distant future, or believe that it does not exist.

However, in this article I am putting forward the even more frightening idea that the point of no return is in the recent past. If so, all the debate about reducing our Carbon Dioxide output is irrelevant, and we are in for a much hotter world very soon.

Can we survive?

Humans are very adaptable and we can survive many things. The trouble is that we do not really know what is going to happen.

What CAN We Do?

We can hope and pray that Mr. Gore and the millions of people with similar opinions are right and we are not too late. We can also continue studying the climate. Much of the problem is that we do not really know what is happening. As pointed out in the article "Is Global Warming Real?"
There is a huge range of theories on what is going to happen, including one school of thought that suggests we are going into another ice age very soon.

Another thing we can do is prepare for what is going to happen. Once again, this is more difficult to do if we do not know what is happening.

Sources

Climate Change 2009 By Will Steffen (http://www.anu.edu.au/climatechange/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/climate-change-faster-change-and-more-serious-risks-final.pdf)

"Long‑term feedbacks in the climate system may be starting to develop now; the most important of these include dynamical processes in the large polar ice sheets, and the behaviour of natural carbon sinks and potential new natural sources of carbon, such as the carbon stored in the permafrost of the northern high latitudes. Once thresholds in ice sheet and carbon cycle dynamics are crossed, such processes cannot be stopped or reversed by human intervention, and will lead to more severe and ultimately irreversible climate change from the perspective of human timeframes."

Note that Will Steffen was not saying that the thresholds have been reached, but is confirming that they exist.

According to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090421_carbon.html):

"Methane levels rose in 2008 for the second consecutive year after a 10-year lull. Atmospheric concentrations increased by 4.4 molecules for every billion molecules of air, bringing the total global concentration up to 1788 parts per billion, according to NOAA data."

NOAA also states that the Carbon Dioxide levels continue to rise exponentially despite the global recession.

The Methane concentration of the atmosphere is dependent on a lot of different factors. One possible reason for the "10-year lull" is the widespread droughts that dried up many wet lands.

New Scientist, 25 March 2009 from an article by Fred Pearce

Magazine issue 2701

"I AM shocked, truly shocked," says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. "I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them."

Back in 2006, in a paper in Nature, Walter warned that as the permafrost in Siberia melted, growing methane emissions could accelerate climate change. But even she was not expecting such a rapid change. "Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It's unprecedented. This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing."

The dramatic changes in the Arctic Ocean have often been in the news in the past two years. ...

Unfortunately, the events speculated about in The Methane Gun may already be happening.