[R-G] Apocalypse Now: How Mankind Is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth

[Tim Murphy]

September 21, 2005
www.dissidentvoice.org


Apocalypse Now

How Mankind Is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth

by

Maria Gilardin


This headline appeared in the London Independent in early February of 2005,
following a conference at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, England, where 200 of
the world’s leading scientists issued the most urgent warning to date: that
dangerous climate change is taking place today, and not the day after
tomorrow.

Floods, storms, and droughts. Melting polar ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans
turning to acid. Scientists from the fields of glaciology, biology,
meteorology, oceanography, and ecology reported seeing a dramatic rise over
the last 50 years of all the indicators of climate change: increase in
average world temperatures, extreme weather events, in the levels of CO2 and
other greenhouse gases, and in the level of the oceans.

The award winning environmental writer Geoffrey Lean wrote: “Future
historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world . . .
will puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into
disaster -- destroying the climate that has allowed human civilization to
flourish over the past 11,000 years.”

The overwhelming majority of scientists and international climate monitoring
bodies now agree that climate change is taking place, that humans are
responsible, and that time is running out. In fact, we could reach “the
point of no return” in a decade, reported Lean.

Melting glaciers all across the world include: the Broggi in the Peruvian
Andes, Glacier Ururashraju in the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, the Pasterze in
Austria, Portage Glacier near Anchorage, Alaska, Mount Hood in Oregon, Mount
Kilimanjaro in northeastern Tanzania, the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier
National Park, and the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland.

The earth is getting warmer. While average warming is just under 1 degree
Celsius worldwide, the Polar Regions show warming of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius,
due to feedback effects. With the melt of white snow, that previously
reflected some of the heat back into the atmosphere (albedo effect), newly
exposed darker surfaces absorb heat, and accelerate melting of more ice and
snow.

A world average warming of under 1 degree Celsius may seem small. However,
historically, the difference between warm periods and an ice age has been
only 5 to 6 degrees Celsius. The transformation from the last ice age to the
present climate resulted from a slow rise in temperature, which took 5,000
years to fully complete, allowing life on Earth to adapt to the changes. We
could bring about a 5- to 6- degree change in only 150 years if we don’t
start constraining the use of fossil fuels.

It is not only the fundamental change in the composition of air, water, and
soil that we need to consider. The speed at which these changes are forced
upon the planet already leads to high extinction rates.

Scientists at the Exeter meeting agreed that warming over 2 degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial temperatures would be dangerous -- and we are almost
half way there. To burn up the world’s remaining coal reserves, they
estimated, would raise the average temperature by 3 to 8 degrees C in less
than 150 years.

Quite a few climate “skeptics”, fossil fuel executives, and members of the
Bush administration are still denying that there is such a thing as
human-caused global warming. Many of them claim that the sun has just grown
hotter. However, a warmer sun would have heated the stratosphere as well. In
contrast, the stratosphere is cooling -- suggesting a blanket of greenhouse
gases that prevents the earth’s heat from radiating back into space.

We know how the greenhouse effect works. Venus, with a thick greenhouse
cover is hot; Mars, with a thin greenhouse is cold. Earth’s blanket of
greenhouse gases is made up of the byproducts of the industrial age and an
outdated Victorian technology. Even though methane is a more powerful
greenhouse gas, it is CO2 that makes up over 80% of the greenhouse gas mix.
Ice core studies show that CO2 concentrations on this planet had been stable
for the last millennium, never rising or falling more than 10 ppm, and
fluctuating between 275 and 285 ppm. Now CO2 concentrations are beginning to
exceed 370 ppm, and are rising from year to year. Other greenhouse gases
show the same dramatic increase -- mainly in the past 40 to 50 years. We are
already living under a dome of air that no one has breathed in a million
years.

Ocean Warming and Acidification

The average temperature of the surface waters of the oceans, extending to a
depth of several hundred meters, has risen by a 1/2 degree Celsius. This has
occurred in just the past 40 years. The oceans have also become more acidic,
due to the uptake of anthropogenic CO2. The Plymouth Marine Laboratory in
England estimates that 48% of fossil-fuel CO2, or 400 billion tons, have
been absorbed by the oceans, making them the largest reservoir of carbon, a
load greater than that borne by the atmosphere or the earth. CO2, while more
inert in the atmosphere, becomes highly reactive in oceans, leading to
physical, biological, and geological changes.

Carol Turley, head of science at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, warns that
no such ph changes in oceans have occurred in the past 20 million years, and
that the capacity of oceans to take up CO2 is limited.

What might the consequences of such changes in the oceans be? An August 2005
article in the Globe and Mail, on starving sea birds washing up on Pacific
coast beaches from California to British Columbia, reports that scientists
believe that, at least for this year, the “bottom has fallen out of the
coastal food chain.” Off the Oregon coast, the waters near the shore are 5
to 7 degrees warmer than normal. A layer of warm water along the whole
Pacific coastline prevents the usual upwelling of cool water rich in
phytoplankton, the base of the food web for all marine life.

Zooplankton, such as krill, depend on phytoplankton. The disappearance of
zooplankton in turn affects seabirds and fish from sardines to whales. NOAA,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found a 20 to 30 per
cent drop in juvenile salmon off the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and
British Columbia; and monitoring in Central and Northern California shows
the lowest number of juvenile rockfish in more than 20 years.

The world has not yet felt the real impact of global warming since the
oceans have absorbed so much heat and CO2. The US National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR) put out two studies in March 2005. They suggest
that due to the thermal inertia of the oceans global temperatures and sea
levels will continue to rise for the next 100 years - even if greenhouse gas
emissions come under control.

First Signs of a Gulf Stream Collapse
The opening presentations at the Exeter, UK conference gave the most
comprehensive assessment of so-called “wild cards”, climate change events
that risk feedback loops no longer responsive to human intervention. The
run-away events, or ecological landslides include accelerated melting of the
enormous ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, as well as the decline and
possible reversal of the Gulf Stream that conveys heat from the tropics to
Europe.

In the Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” the Gulf Stream stops
flowing in a matter of days, creating an instant ice age on the Atlantic
coast and Western Europe. Scientists at Exeter said it would take at least
ten years for such an event to unfold and a few hundred years to set up the
conditions. But they warned that the Thermohaline Circulation, as they call
the Gulf Stream, has stopped flowing before -- and that we have already a
greater than 50% likelihood of a shutdown if we do not enact strict climate
policies.

The amount of heat transported North by the Gulf Stream, which keeps Western
Europe 5 to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than it would normally be at its
latitude, equals one million billion watts -- sufficient to satisfy the
energy needs of 100 Earths. Even a partial failure of the Gulf Stream would
have huge consequences.

The Gulf Stream picks up heat from the equatorial sun. Driven by warmth, the
stream flows northeast towards Europe and the Greenland ice sheets, where
the water cools and sinks. The cooler and saltier the water, the stronger
the sinking motion. Dense cool and salty water from the Gulf Stream then
flows back to the tropics at a deeper ocean level.

As the Polar Regions and the oceans are warming, melt-water from ice sheets
and glaciers is changing the salinity of the ocean. A combination of the
rising ocean surface temperature, and the decreasing salinity, already
visibly changes the movement of sea currents that depend on differences in
warmth and coolness, and the weight that higher salinity adds to the water
as the driving force.

Large-scale salinity changes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic Seas were reported
in June 2005, in the journal Science. Ruth Curry from the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, analyzed
temperature, salinity, and density data, collected in the North Atlantic
Ocean over the last 55 years. Curry warned that excessive amounts of
freshwater dumped into the North Atlantic could affect the flow of the Gulf
Stream.

We know, from ice-core data, when the Gulf Stream has stopped flowing
before. The most recent collapse, 15,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas,
was caused by the sweetening of the North Atlantic Ocean, when glaciers
covering North America melted and began flowing through the St. Lawrence
waterway into the Atlantic, instead of into the Gulf of Mexico via the
Mississippi. Today’s accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice
sheets may recreate these conditions, not just for the Gulf Stream but also
for other parts of the global ocean circulation.

In May of this year, the London Times reported that first signs of a slow
down of the Gulf Stream had been detected by a Cambridge University
researcher, who hitches rides on a Royal Navy submarine to one of the three
areas where the Gulf Stream reverses its course. Peter Wadhams said that
“until recently we could find giant ‘chimneys’ in the sea where columns of
cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 meters
below, but now they have almost disappeared.”

Off the coast of Greenland, the Odden Ice Shelf once grew out into the
Greenland Sea every winter, and receded in the summer. The Odden triggered
the annual formation of sinking water columns in that area. However, since
1997, the shelf has ceased to form. Where Wadhams had once observed 12 giant
columns of sinking water under the ice, he now found only two -- and they
were so weak that they were unable to reach the seabed.

Wadhams also predicts complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as
early as 2020. On his submarine journeys, using sonar to survey the ice cap
from underneath, he has observed a 46% thinning over the past 20 years.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is Melting
The biggest danger to the Gulf Stream comes from melt-water off the
Greenland ice sheet, the second largest store of fresh water on this planet.
If all of it were to melt, sea levels around the world would rise by 7
meters -- over 20 feet. However even a partial meltdown would affect the
Gulf Stream, by diluting the salt water right at the crucial point where the
Gulf Stream sinks and returns to the tropics.

Prof. Michael Schlesinger from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
whose climate model already predicts a 50% chance of Gulf Stream shutdown if
we do not enact climate policies, and a 25% shutdown even if we limit
greenhouse gases, based his estimate only on increased rainfall, due to
global warming. He now says he will have to include additional melt-water
from the Greenland ice sheet into his next set of data, because it appears
that the melt has begun.

Observations on the Greenland ice sheet are done by G.P.S. (global
positioning systems) and radar and laser via satellites and airplanes.
G.P.S. data of the past 5 years show accelerated melting, and even the
beginning of a possible feedback effect: the more the ice sheet melts the
faster it starts to move. The reason for this acceleration, it is believed,
is that melt-water from the surface of the ice sheet makes its way down to
the bedrock below, where it acts as a lubricant, further speeding up the
slippage and disintegration.

The question now is, when does this feedback process reach the point of no
return? James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says
that if greenhouse-gas emissions are not controlled now, the total
disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could be set in motion in a matter
of decades. Although it could take hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years to
fully play out, once begun the process would become self-reinforcing and
cannot be halted.

The Gulf Stream is just one part of a complex global system of ocean
currents that affect temperatures, winds, and rain across the whole planet.
We now have charts of these powerful currents driven by heat and coolness,
traversing all oceans, - Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. And they are all
interconnected via the huge circumpolar current flowing around the
Antarctic. Changes at the South Pole therefore would have an even larger
effect than those in the Arctic.

Ice Shelf Collapses and the Melting of Antarctica
The Antarctic is the 5th largest continent. It holds 90% of the world’s
fresh water. A comparison in scale to the Greenland ice sheet shows that if
all Antarctic ice were to melt, sea levels would rise by over 169 feet. The
Antarctic has had a permanent ice sheet for the last 30 million years.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge now reports rapid warming on
the West Antarctic Peninsula and the WAIS, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Of
the 224 glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula, over 87% are in retreat. Major
ice shelves have collapsed. BAS scientists believe disappearing ice shelves
are now contributing to more rapid melting of glaciers formerly protected by
the floating ice shelf at their base.
Antarctica’s huge Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in just 35 days after a NASA
satellite detected the first ruptures at the end of January 2002; it was
roughly the size of Luxembourg. Soil sediments from that ice shelf reveal
that Larsen B had been intact for 20,000 years - since the peak of the last
ice age. No collapse of this size has happened since the end of the last Ice
Age.

Larsen B's smaller neighbor, Larsen A, broke off in 1995. According to
studies by the BAS, other much bigger ice shelves nearby, such as the Ross
and Ronne, each larger than France, are also considered at risk of
disintegrating.

Another troubling development in the Antarctic, according to the director of
the BAS, Chris Rapley, is the accelerated flow of melt streams underneath
the Antarctic ice sheet. Until recently, scientists were unable to explain
the 20th century’s world-wide sea-level rises of between 1 and 2 mm per
year, by the amount of ice that has melted from glaciers and ice sheets.
Even after taking into account thermal expansion, they wondered where the
extra water was coming from.

Recent discoveries show a major hidden source of water comes from polar ice
sheets. In the Antarctic, ice streams, and a newly discovered network of
tributaries underneath the ice sheets, drain 33 major basins. Flow rates are
much faster than previously assumed. Ice streams, from the feed glaciers
behind the collapsed Larsen A and B ice shelves, also show accelerated
flows. The BAS calls this a “cork out of the bottle” effect.

These “wild cards,” the melting of the polar ice caps and the acidification
of the oceans, were only the most dramatic events on the agenda of the
Exeter, UK, meeting on the dangers of climate-change. The number of
scientific papers, recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming,
escalated in five years, from 14 to more than a thousand. In one
presentation after another, scientists described a crisis they had dedicated
their lives to avoid.

Geoffrey Lean, who attended the conference, wrote that there were few in the
room that did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly
at their shoulders. The formal conclusion of the meeting, that climate
change was “already occurring” and that “in many cases the risks are more
serious than previously thought,” appeared in the press all over the
world -- except in the United States. However even in the European press,
very few writers took on the scientific details of this story, without which
political action and organizing are impossible. Geoffrey Lean wrote:
“Mankind is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth.”

Bush-Wars on Climate Science
After the Exeter meeting, in an interview for TUC Radio, the director of
BAS, Chris Rapley, spoke about how, in public appearances, he bridges the
gap between science, and popular understanding of these dramatic changes.

He said he always refers to the picture of Earth in space taken by Apollo
17: the small blue planet, tilted back to show the Antarctic, surrounded by
inky blackness. The image, he says, shows that this is all there is, no
other life-support system trails behind; and, that on the planet all is
interconnected.

Earth is the most complex and complicated object in the universe that we
know of, says Rapley, a radio astronomer by training. Only Earth has an
ocean and clouds. Only Earth has physics, biology, geology, chemistry, and
anthropology.

Humans have transformed the earth in a dramatic way, especially in the last
50 years. Not only have we drastically changed the carbon cycle by the
burning of fossil fuel and coal, and by increasing forest fires; we have
also changed the nitrogen cycle worldwide by the amount of nitrogen being
fixed by industrial agriculture and fertilizer use.

We have transformed more than half the land surface through agriculture,
deforestation, mining, industry, paving, and ever-growing cities. These
changes have altered the climate systems by the way moisture is exchanged
between Earth and the atmosphere.

We have destroyed biodiversity by shifting plants and animals into places
and conditions where they cannot survive. Our own survival, as humans, is
only slightly more secure. We are seeing the most basic of our needs -- air,
water, housing, and energy -- disappear before our eyes. Rapley concluded
that there is no way to imagine that humans could do all these things
without an effect.

The demise of our common life-support system is accelerated by even more
energy-intensive activities, by which a privileged group of people attempts
to secure its survival.

The meeting in Exeter was held explicitly to convince the Bush
administration to join the rest of the industrialized world, and to use the
July 2005 G8 meeting to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The United
States and Australia, the world’s two largest polluters, are -- to this
day -- refusing to be part of any global agreement to limit CO2 and other
greenhouse gases.

The G8 meeting came and went. The US, with 42% of global fossil fuel CO2,
and 34% of combined greenhouse gas emissions, not only remained outside the
climate- stabilization effort but also fought vigorously to prevent any
progress in setting limits. Given the extraordinary amount of greenhouse
gases emitted by the US, this country alone can dramatically slow climate
change, or bring the planet to the boiling point.

Three weeks before the G8 summit, The Observer (UK) printed a set of leaked
documents revealing how the Bush White House derailed attempts to address
global warming. These submissions to the G8 action plan show that Washington
officials deleted even the suggestion that global warming has already
started.

Among the key sentences removed were: “Our world is warming. Climate change
is a serious threat that has the potential to affect every part of the
globe. And we know that ... mankind's activities are contributing to this
warming. This is an issue we must address urgently.”

At the Exeter conference the International Climate Change Task Force, UK,
said that if we do nothing the climate system will collapse. Stephen Byers,
the co-chair of that task force and an advisor to Tony Blair, said the point
of no return could be reached in a decade. The Bush delegation to the July
2005 G8 summit in Scotland, probably even George Bush himself, is aware of
that deadline.

However the warning disappeared under the same blanket of denial and
outright lies produced by industry, their paid scientists, and the Bush
administration. Among all official documents that deny climate change, only
one sends a different message: the report on “Climate Change as a National
Security Concern,” commissioned for Donald Rumsfeld by Pentagon defense
adviser Andrew Marshall, and made public in February 2004.

The Global Business Network wrote for the Pentagon: “the focus in climate
research has slowly been shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002, the
National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human
activities could trigger abrupt change. A year later, the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian,
director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged
policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change
within two decades.”

Whether in a decade as the UK scientists say, or two as the Pentagon study
says, a consensus is developing that we are reaching a phase of dangerous,
abrupt, and irreversible climate shifts. However, for the Bush
administration, this is not an ecological or humanitarian, but only a
military issue. They question only how to protect US borders from
environmental refugees, how to overpower nations collapsing under the
environmental pressures, how to keep access to food, water, and energy as
other parts of the world go hungry and thirsty; how to keep nuclear
pre-eminence, while those weapons in other countries fall into the hands of
insurgents.

The eerie similarity of these goals and methods, with those of the so-called
war on terrorism, raises the question of whether that war on terrorism is
not really already a war on the Earth. And, as in the war on terrorism, the
already occurring ecological disasters -- like the Osama bin Ladens -- are
needed and promoted. And the religious fundamentalists are driving this
forward because God has given them dominion over the planet to do as they
wish.

And, as irrecoverable time passes, more bad news of ecological landslides
emerges: In early August 2005, the New Scientist reported that, in Western
Siberia, a permafrost area, the size of France and Germany combined, is
thawing for the first time since the ice age, 11,000 years ago. What was
until recently an expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape
of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometer across. The area’s peat bog
contains an estimated 70 billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times
more potent than CO2, which, if released, could dramatically increase the
rate of global warming.

Even in a best-case scenario, were the methane to be released slowly over a
period of 100 years, it would effectively double atmospheric levels of the
gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, said scientists at
the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK. The scientists from Tomsk State University
and Oxford, who discovered the melt, said that this was yet another feedback
effect, an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is
undoubtedly connected to climatic warming.”

There may be some, cynical enough to think that climate change is an
interesting science fiction experiment, or greedy enough to want to extract
the last drop of oil from the dying Earth for a profit.

But what about the rest of us: not cynical, not greedy and arrogant? It is
pretty clear that there need to be BIG changes in the way we live -- and
that is frightening for many, since we have become so dependent on this
technological civilization. However scientists tell us that the extreme
weather events to come, such as floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and
unprecedented heat waves, are more frightening than any change in the way we
choose to live now.

There is a set of figures that is both deeply depressing and hopeful. The
last published World Bank data for CO2 emissions per capita indicate that,
while every man, woman, and child in the US puts out 20 metric tons of CO2
per annum, those in the European Union put out 8 per person per year; China
2; and the output of Nigerians, who supply us with much of the oil that we
burn into CO2, is zero -- below scale. In 2002, US-Americans used over
12,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per person; Europeans used less than
half the amount, while the use in China is 987 kilowatt-hours per person.
The US per-capita use of oil is twice that of the European Union, and more
than 8 times that of China.

What if China aspires to our standard of living? And why not, if we are not
willing to cut back? Europe gets by with so much less CO2-output and
energy-input, while already planning for further cuts. Where is the measure
of global justice, between those who cause no harm and those whose
extravagant use of fossil fuels harms everybody else?

Regardless of who is driving this: industry, the military, religious
fundamentalists, or any permutation of government, be it red or blue,
responsibility for the approaching climate collapse will fall overwhelmingly
on the United States. Since the US government and corporations not only
refuse to cut back but are driving eco-collapse forward, it is up to
ordinary people to refuse collaboration and to control the perpetrators. For
us living in the US, the opportunity and time to make a difference that will
affect the entire planet is now.

---

Maria Gilardin produces TUC Radio, a weekly half-hour radio program that is
distributed for free to all radio stations via Pacifica Radio's KU Band, and
as an mp3 file on TUC Radio's web site: www.tucradio.org.

Maria Gilardin may be reached at: tuc at tucradio.org

--

Related Links and Resources

* Hadley Centre
http://www.stabilisation2005.com/programme.html

* Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http://www.ipcc.ch/

* British Antarctic Survey
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/

* Plymouth Marine Laboratory
http://www.pml.ac.uk/pml/

* "As the World Burns," by Bill McKibben, Chris Mooney, & Ross Gelbspan,
Mother Jones, May/June 2005.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/world_burns.html

* The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,582584,00.html

* Arctic Sea Ice Changes
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~kd/KDwebpages/NHice.html

* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: Abrupt Climate Change
http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/climatechange_wef.html

* Ice Core drilling on the Greenland Ice Sheet
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/document/gispinfo.ht
m

* Siberian permafrost melting
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1546824,00.html

* Carol Turley on Marine Snow (PDF File)
http://www.socgenmicrobiol.org.uk/pubs/micro_today/pdf/110204.pdf

* Photos of Global Warming, Glacier Melting
http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/index.html

* Douglas Quin recorded the sounds of breaking ice in the Antarctic
http://www.antarctica2000.net/frameset.html

=======

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Gilardin0921.htm

=======