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The Trouble With Permafrost (And A 1000 ppm World)

The Trouble With Permafrost (And A 1000 ppm World)	271 Views
posted on Tuesday, June 03, 2008

IS 450 PPM (OR LESS) POLITICALLY POSSIBLE?
PART 0: THE ALTERNATIVE IS HUMANITY’S SELF-DESTRUCTION
climateprogress.org
April 26, 2008

Original Link

[Visit the URL above for links to the news reports and resource materials cited in these articles. --DS]

What happens if we fail to take the following actions to reverse emissions trends starting in 2009?

1. Start a cap-and-trade system that sets a serious price for CO2.

2. Launch most of the 14 to 16 major mitigation strategies (wedges) described here.

3. Begin a global effort to ban new coal plants that do not capture and store their carbon, an effort that quickly brings in China and other developing countries.

Failing to do that, we are headed to 800 to 1000 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The idea of stabilizing at, say, 550 or 650 ppm, widely held a decade ago, is becoming increasingly implausible given the likelihood that major carbon cycle feedbacks would go into overdrive, swiftly taking the planet to 800 ppm or more. In particular, the top 11 feet of the tundra would probably not survive 550 ppm (a point I will be blogging about soon) and two other key carbon sinks -- land-based vegetation and the oceans -- already appear to be saturating. That said, even if stabilizing at 550 ppm were possible, it would probably bring catastrophic impacts and in any case requires implementing some 10 wedges starting now.

At 800 to 1000 ppm, the world faces multiple miseries, including:

1. Sea level rise of 80 feet to 250 feet at a rate of 6 inches a decade (or more).

2. Desertification of one third the planet and drought over half the planet, plus the loss of all inland glaciers.

3. More than 70% of all species going extinct, plus extreme ocean acidification.

LIVING/SUFFERING IN A 1000 PPM WORLD

I listed only three catastrophes that would probably occur at 800 to 1000 ppm because I think those are the most serious and most inevitable. Climate scientists don’t spend a lot of time studying 800 to 1000 ppm, in part because they can’t believe humanity would be so self-destructive as to ignore their increasingly dire warnings and fail to stabilize at well below 550 ppm.

The IPCC notes that if equilibrium CO2-equivalent concentrations hit 1000 ppm, the “best estimate” for temperature increase is 5.5°C (10°F), which means that over much of the inland United States, temperatures would be about 15°F higher.

This increase would be the end of life as we know it on this planet. Interestingly, 5.5°C is just about the temperature difference between now and the end of the last ice age, the difference between a livable climate for human civilization that is well suited to agriculture and massive glaciers from the North Pole down to Indiana.

Is it 100% certain that 1000 ppm would result in the three major impacts above? Of course not. Such certainty is not possible for a climate transition that is completely unprecedented in the history of the human species. That said, the impacts are probably more likely to be worse than not. The catastrophes we can’t foresee may be just as serious, given that, for instance, no one foresaw that at a mere 385 ppm, warming would help spur an infestation is wiping out essentially every major pine tree in British Columbia.

Importantly, even a 3% chance of a warming this great is enough to render useless all traditional cost-benefit analyses that argue for delay or only modest action, as Harvard economist Martin Weitzman has shown. Yet, absent immediate and strong action, the chances of such warming and such effects are not small, they are large -- greater than 50%. These impacts seem especially likely in an 800 to 1000 ppm world given that the climate appears to be changing much faster than the IPCC had projected.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets already appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule” as Penn State climatologist Richard Alley put it in March 2006. Indeed, a number of peer-reviewed articles have appeared in the scientific literature in the past 18 months supporting the real possibility of a 6-inch-a-decade sea level rise.

As for desertification, “The unexpectedly rapid expansion of the tropical belt constitutes yet another signal that climate change is occurring sooner than expected,” noted one climate researcher in December. As a recent study led by NOAA noted, “A poleward expansion of the tropics is likely to bring even drier conditions to” the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, Australia and parts of Africa and South America.”

In 2007, the IPCC warned that as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe. That is a temperature rise over pre-industrial levels significantly exceeding 4.0°C. So a 5.5°C rise would likely put extinctions beyond the high end of that range.

And these horrific impacts are certainly not the worst-case scenario. As NASA’s James Hansen explained in a 2004 Scientific American article:

"The peak rate of deglaciation following the last Ice Age was … about one meter [39 inches] of sea-level rise every 20 years, which was maintained for several centuries."

Imagine sea level rise of nearly 20 inches a decade lasting centuries -- a trend perhaps interrupted occasionally by large chunks of the West Antarctic ice sheet disintegrating, causing huge sea level jumps in a span of a few years. And imagine that by 2100, we lose all the inland glaciers, which Are currently the primary water supply for more than a billion people. Now imagine what future generations will think of us if we let it happen.

A year ago Science published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” -- levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. And they were only looking at a 720 ppm case! The Dust Bowl was a sustained decrease in soil moisture of about 15% (”which is calculated by subtracting evaporation from precipitation”).

Even the one-third desertification of the planet by 2100 scenario by the Hadley Center is only based on 850 ppm (in 2100). Princeton has done an analysis on “Century-scale change in water availability: CO2-quadrupling experiment,” which is to say 1100 ppm. The grim result: Most of the South and Southwest ultimately sees a 20% to 50% (!) decline in soil moisture.

You may be interested in how fast we can hit 1000 ppm. The Hadley Center has one of the few models that incorporates many of the major carbon cycle feedbacks. In a 2003 Geophysical Research Letters paper, “Strong carbon cycle feedbacks in a climate model with interactive CO2 and sulphate aerosols,” the Hadley Center, the U.K.’s official center for climate change research, finds that the world would hit 1000 ppm in 2100 even in a scenario that, absent those feedbacks, we would only have hit 700 ppm in 2100. I would note that the Hadley Center, though more inclusive of carbon cycle feedbacks than most other models, still does not model any feedbacks from the melting of the tundra even though it is probably the most serious of those amplifying feedbacks.

Clearly, 800 to 1000 ppm would be ruinous to the nation and the world, creating unimaginable suffering and misery for billions and billions of people for centuries to come. No one who believes in science and cares about humanity can possibly believe that adaptation is a more rational or moral policy than focusing 99% of our climate efforts on staying far, far below 800 ppm and far away from the tipping points in the carbon cycle.

And that means current CO2 levels are already too high. And that means immediate action is required. So our choice is really to stay below 450 ppm or risk self-destruction. That’s why climate scientists are so damn desperate these days. That’s why a non-alarmist guy like Rajendra Pachauri -- specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson -- said in November: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” That’s why more than 200 scientists took the remarkable step of issuing a plea at the United Nations climate change conference in Bali. Global greenhouse gas emissions, they declared, “must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose.” The AP headline on the statement was “Scientists Beg for Climate Action.”

That is the position of the true “scientific realists.” If the scientific realists (and others) convince the political realists it should be their position, too, then humanity has a chance. If the political realists remain stuck in the past, then we do not.

In Part 1, I explore the immense scale of energy challenges involved in stabilizing at 450 ppm or lower.

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THE PERMAFROST WON’T BE PERMA FOR LONG, PART 1
climateprogress.org
May 22, 2008

Original Link

The tundra is probably the single most important amplifying carbon-cycle feedback. None of the IPCC’s climate models, however, include carbon emissions from a defrosting tundra as a feedback.

Yet, as NOAA reported last month, levels of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) rose last year for the first time since 1998, which may be an early indication of thawing permafrost. So it seems like a good a time for a review and update of what we know.

The tundra or permafrost is soil that stays below freezing (0°C or 32°F) for at least two years. Normally, plants capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and slowly release that carbon back into the atmosphere after they die. But the Arctic acts like a freezer, and the decomposition rate is very low. The tundra is a carbon locker. We open it at our own risk.

We now know the Arctic contains far more carbon than previously thought -- nearly 1000 billion metric tons of carbon (some 3600 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide). That exceeds all the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. The permafrost may contain more than a third of all carbon stored in soils globally, much of it in the form of methane. Problem: Global warming is melting the top layer of permafrost, creating the possibility of large releases of soil carbon, and that is a potentially devastating vicious cycle. We are defrosting the tundra freezer-and at an unprecedented rate.

We know methane is bubbling up out of the tundra far faster than previously thought. In fact, a 2006 study by Alaska researchers finds rapid degradation to key elements of the permafrost “that previously had been stable for 1000s of years.” The study, titled “Abrupt increase in permafrost degradation in Arctic Alaska,” concludes that this recent degradation exceeds changes seen earlier in the 20th Century by a factor of ten to a hundred.

What’s happening in Siberia is even more alarming:

As New Scientist reported three years ago, a frozen peat bog in Western Siberia the size of France and Germany combined is turning into “a mass of shallow lakes,” some almost a mile wide. In the past 40 years, the region has warmed by 3°C, greater warming than almost anywhere else in the world, in part because of the vicious cycle described earlier: Warming melts highly reflective ice and replaces it with dark soils, which absorb more sunlight and warm up, melting more ice, and on and on.

Russian botanist Sergei Kirpotin describes an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming.” The entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region is melting, and it “has all happened in the last three or four years,” according to Kirpotin, who believes we are crossing a critical threshold. The peat bogs formed near the end of the last Ice Age some 11,000 years ago. They generate methane, which, up until now, has mostly been trapped within the permafrost, and in even deeper ice-like structures called clathrates. The Siberian frozen bog is estimated to contain 70 billion tons of methane (CH4). If the bogs become drier as they warm, the methane will oxidize and the emissions will be primarily CO2. But if the bogs stay wet, as they have been recently, the methane will escape directly into the atmosphere.

Either way we have a dangerous vicious cycle, but the wet bogs are the worse because methane has 20 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide. Some 600 million metric tons of methane are emitted each year from natural and human sources, so if even a small fraction of the 70 billion tons of methane in the Siberian bogs escapes, it will swamp those emissions and dramatically accelerate global warming. Researchers monitoring a single Swedish bog, or mire, found it had experienced a 20 percent to 60 percent increase in methane emissions between 1970 and 2000. In some methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, “the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.”

Even if the tundra carbon is all emitted as carbon dioxide instead of methane, the consequences would be disastrous. Carbon emissions from human activity already exceed 8 billion tons a year, and we are on track to be at 11 billion tons a year by 2020. But as we have already seen, if we merely average 11 billion tons a year this century, then we will hit 1000 ppm by 2100 and destroy the health and well-being of billions of people.

Has anyone ever modeled quantitatively how much tundra will be defrosted by rising CO2 concentrations? Yes -- as we will see in Part 2, “The point of no return.”

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IS 450 PPM (OR LESS) POLITICALLY POSSIBLE? PART 2: THE SOLUTION
climateprogress.org
April 222, 2008

Original Link

In this post I will lay out “the solution” to global warming, focusing primarily on the 14 “stabilization wedges.”

Part 1 argued that stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 ppm is not politically possible today, but that it is certainly achievable from an economic and technological perspective. It would require some 14 of Princeton’s “stabilization wedges” -- strategies and/or technologies that over a period of a few decades each reduce global carbon emissions by one billion metric tons per year from projected levels. The reason that we need twice as many wedges as Princeton’s Pacala and Socolow have said we need was explained in Part 1.

I agree with the IPCC, which concluded last year that “The range of stabilization levels assessed can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are currently available and those that are expected to be commercialised in coming decades.” The technologies they say can beat 450 ppm are here. Technology Review, one of the nation’s leading technology magazines, also argued in a cover story two years ago, “It’s Not Too Late,” that “Catastrophic climate change is not inevitable. We possess the technologies that could forestall global warming.”

I do believe only “one” solution exists in this sense -- We must deploy every conceivable energy-efficient and low carbon technology that we have today as fast as we can. Princeton’s Pacala and Socolow proposed that this could be done over 50 years, but that is almost certainly too slow.

We’re at 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year -- rising 3.3% per year -- and we have to average below 18 billion tons a year for the entire century if we’re going to stabilize at 450 ppm. We need to peak around 2015 to 2020 at the latest, then drop at least 60% by 2050 to 15 billion tons (4 billion tons of carbon), and then go to near zero net carbon emissions by 2100.

That’s why a sober guy like IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, said in November: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Or as I told Technology Review, “The point is, whatever technology we’ve got now -- that’s what we are stuck with to avoid catastrophic warming.”

If we could do the 14 wedges in four decades, we should be able to keep CO2 concentrations to under 450 ppm. If we could do them faster, concentrations could stay even lower. We’d probably need to do this by 2030 to have a shot at getting back to 350 this century. [And yes, like Princeton, I agree we need to do some R&D now to ensure a steady flow of technologies to make the even deeper emissions reductions needed in the second half of the century.]

I am not going to focus on the politics, policies, market factors, or mindset needed to achieve these 14 wedges. That will be the subject of Part 4. But, needless to say, none of this can happen without a serious price for carbon dioxide and a very aggressive technology deployment effort.

So here is the basic solution. I have thrown in a couple extra wedges since I have no doubt that everybody will find something objectionable in at least 2 of these wedges. This is what the entire planet must achieve:

* 1 wedge of vehicle efficiency -- all cars 60 mpg, with no increase in miles traveled per vehicle.

* 1 of wind for power -- one million large (2 MW peak) wind turbines

* 1 of wind for vehicles -- another 2000 GW wind. Most cars must be plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles.

* 3 of concentrated solar thermal -- ~5000 GW peak.

* 3 of efficiency -- one each for buildings, industry, and cogeneration/heat-recovery for a total of 15 to 20 million GW-hrs.

* 1 of coal with carbon capture and storage -- 800 GW of coal with CCS

* 1 of nuclear power -- 700 GW plus 10 Yucca mountains for storage

* 1 of solar photovoltaics -- 2000 GW peak [or less PV and some geothermal, tidal, and ocean thermal]

* 1 of cellulosic biofuels -- using one-sixth of the world’s cropland [or less land if yields significantly increase or algae-to-biofuels proves commercial at large scale].

* 2 of forestry -- End all tropical deforestation. Plant new trees over an area the size of the continental U.S.

* 1 of soils -- Apply no-till farming to all existing croplands.

That should do the trick. And yes, the scale is staggering.

Why not more than 1 wedge of CCS? That one wedge represents a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. It would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure. I also think that CCS has practical issues that will limit its scale, not the least of which is that I doubt it will be among the cheaper solutions. But that is another blog post.

Why not more than 1 wedge of nuclear? Based on a post last year on the Keystone report, to do this by 2050 would require adding globally, an average of 17 plants each year, while building an average of 9 plants a year to replace those that will be retired, for a total of one nuclear plant every two weeks for four decades -- plus 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste. I also doubt it will be among the cheaper options. And the uranium supply and non-proliferation issues for even that scale of deployment are quite serious.

Note to all: Do I want to build all those nuclear plants. No. Do I think we could do it without all those nuclear plants. Probably. Therefore, should I be quoted as saying we “must” build all those nuclear plants, as the Drudge Report has, or even that I propose building all those plants? No. Do I think we will have to swallow a bunch of nuclear plants as part of the grand bargain to make this all possible and that other countries will build most of these? I have no doubt. So it stays in “the solution” for now. [Note to self: Are you beginning to sound like Donald Rumsfeld? Yes.]

This is not to say the two wind power wedges (4000 GW peak total) would be easy -- we only built 20 GW last year. We would need to average 100 GW/year through 2050. But I do think it is ecologically and economically possible, as I think all the other wedges are, too.

But none of the wedges is easy. That’s why getting to 450 ppm is not yet politically possible. Not even close. As noted, part 4 will discuss the politics, policies, market factors, or mindset needed to achieve these 14 wedges.

Three more points: First, it bears repeating that the wedges are not analytically rigorous (as I explained in Part 1), but they are conceptually useful. We might need a few more or a few less.

Second, based on comments posted on this blog, it seemed to make more sense to present the total solution first before posting on each individual wedge in detail. But I do expect to blog in detail on each of these wedge in the coming months.

Third, if you don’t like one of those wedges, you need to find a replacement strategy. Other possibilities can be found here, but I think the ones above are the most plausible by far, which tells you how dubious some of Princeton’s other wedges are [– I’m talking about you, would-be hydrogen wedges]. Could a bunch of breakthrough technologies substitute for some of the above wedges? That is far more implausible, as I will discuss in Part 3.

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