Greenland is the world’s largest island at 2,130,800 sq. km. or 1,323,227 sq. miles. It is nearly ten times larger than Japan, and it is ten times larger than Great Britain. Compared to the U.S.’s largest states, Alaska at 633,267 sq. miles and Texas at 268,580 sq. miles, Greenland is enormous, and it is mostly ice, lots of ice, 1,500 x 500 miles of solid ice. What if Greenland’s ice sheet melts? And, are people playing Russian roulette with global warming by spewing CO2 into the atmosphere like there is no tomorrow… will there be a tomorrow… after tomorrow?
Things are heating up, according to National Geographic News, July 25, 2012: “After just a few days of intense melting this month, nearly the entire surface of Greenland’s massive ice sheet turned to slush, NASA images show— the fastest thaw rate since satellites began keeping score 30 years ago.” Remarkably, from July 8th, when 40% of the melt had already occurred, to July 12th. four days later, 97% of the island’s surface ice had thawed into slush. Most of the thaw occurred in a scant four days time! Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA explained, “This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: Was this real or was it due to a data error?
Putting this into historical context, according to satellite record keeping, over the past 30 years, on average, only about ½ of Greenland’s surface thaws in July. However, there is historical precedent, thankfully, for July’s ‘whopper thaw’ as revealed in ice cores of similar melts once every 150 years. Thus, scientists cannot label global warming as the cause… yet. However, an obvious sidebar is that if scientists are dismayed and shocked at how quickly the icy landscape is changing today, what if the same happens 10 years from today? Will they again be dismayed and shocked, standing waist-deep in water and wearing yellow waterproof waders?
According to scientists, if similar widespread thawing occurs more frequently due to climate change, sea levels could rise up to 23 feet, assuming all of Greenland melts, which is a big assumption, and it would completely submerge London and LA, and au revoir to New Orleans, prompting the largest surge of people inland since Noah’s Arc.
Unfortunately, this past summer’s thaw only scratches the surface of the dilemma surrounding Greenland. Most importantly, and crucial to the ice sheet’s integrity, what happens to the melt lakes formed by surface thaw during the warm season?
Greenland’s Melt Lakes
In the final analysis, what happens deep below the surface during thaws is the biggest risk to losing Greenland sooner rather than later. According to Science Daily, Greenland May Be Slip-Sliding Away Due to Surface Lake Melting, April 16, 2012, “Like snow sliding off a roof on a sunny day, Greenland’s Ice Sheet may be sliding faster into the ocean due to massive releases of melt water from surface lakes.” During the warm season, thousands of supraglacial lakes form on the surface of Greenland. The warmer it is, the more melted ice turns to water and slush, resulting in more pressure on the ice and eventually catastrophic lake drainages occur as the ice cracks apart, creating enormous crevasses which drain the melt lakes. Scientists have clocked the sudden rush of water at speeds equivalent to Niagara Falls, completely draining a melt lake within hours.
The question thus becomes: Does the melt water travel 1-2 miles below to bedrock and serve as a lubricant, slipping n’ sliding the ice sheet’s glide into the ocean, or does the drainage efficiently route the water thru glacial sewers to the ocean without traveling to bedrock, or does the drainage refreeze into the ice sheet? As of today, the melt lake drainages are considered by scientists to be a wild card for enhancing the ice sheet’s slip n’ slide.
Regardless of whether melt lakes are seriously undercutting the ice from Greenland’s bedrock, new records for melting are occurring this year. Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York, states: “… this year’s overall melting will fall way above old records. That’s a Goliath year- the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979,” Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet Breaks 30-Year Record, Jeanna Bryner, Managing Editor, Live Science, August 15, 2012.
The Impact of Reflectivity of Solar Heat on Ice
The issues associated with ice sheet dynamics are only one set of complications for Greenland. New research raises a different basis for concern, which is reflectivity of solar heat. New findings indicate sun reflectivity off the ice sheet, particularly at high-elevations where snow typically accumulates year-round, has reached record lows, meaning the annual snow fall is melting too quickly to serve as a giant reflector of the sun, as it has done for centuries. Therefore, the ice sheet is absorbing more sun energy, leading to record melt years, building upon itself, a self-fulfilling prophecy of bigger thaws and more cascading waterfalls within the colossal ice sheet. According to polar researcher Jason Box of Ohio State University, “In this condition, the ice sheet will continue to absorb more solar energy in a self-reinforcing feedback loop that amplifies the effect of warming.”
Albedo is the scientific term for the amount of radiation from the sun that reflects off the surface. “In the 12 years beginning in 2000, the reduced albedo combined with a significant increase in downward solar irradiance yielded an accumulation area net radiation increase…. Another similar decade may be sufficient to shift the average summer accumulation area radiation budget from negative to positive, resulting in an abrupt ice sheet melt area increase,” (Greenland Ice Sheet Albedo Feedback: Thermodynamics and Atmospheric Drivers, the Cryosphere, 2012.) This assessment makes mention of an unique feature of global warming, which is this: Over the millennia, climate change is slow; however, there is a tipping point when rapid, dramatic change occurs within decades, not millennia. Thus, prompting the big question: Are we at a tipping point? If so, start making plans way ahead of time to move inland; don’t wait for coastline real estate to drop in price to the value of a fishing license.
Greenland and the Tipping Point
“This month, at the height of the melt season, Greenland’s albedo has fallen off the charts,” according to James Wight, Is Greenland Close to a Climate Tipping Point? Skeptical Science, August 2, 2012. However, it is not yet clear whether this reading of extremely low albedo is indicative of a trend because a year with greater snowfall could return albedo to a more normal state; nevertheless, the recent recordings are cause for concern when considered in the context of Greenland’s ice melting at an accelerating rate, losing over 2 trillion tonnes of ice over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, over 4.2 trillion tonnes of ice melted worldwide between 2003 and 2010, which is enough ice to cover the entire U.S.A. coast-to-coast 1.5 feet deep, source: NASA’s GRACE-Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment- program, February 25, 2012.
Recent scientific modeling indicates a tipping point for total melting of the ice sheet of global temperatures of around 1.6 degrees C above pre-industrial, and there is another measurement of the lower range of possibility for total melt of only 0.8 C, which is equal to today’s global temperature. Hence, it appears that temperatures are already deadly close to the tipping point!
“In the last interglacial age 125,000 years ago, called the Eemian, global temperature was only ~1°C warmer than pre-industrial; i.e., only a couple of tenths of a degree warmer than today. Yet the poles were several degrees warmer, there was no summer sea ice in the Arctic, and multiple studies using different methodologies indicate sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher, meaning at least partial melting of the Greenland and/or West Antarctic ice sheets,” Ibid. Skeptical Science… Aloha Hawaii!
“All this points to the conclusion we may already be getting close to a dangerous tipping level of global warming. If humanity rapidly cuts global CO2 emissions to zero or near zero, it might be possible to return the Earth to energy balance and prevent much further warming. If business-as-usual emissions continue for much longer, there is a risk that eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet could become irreversible,” Ibid, Skeptical Science.
The Big Fix
Fixing this worldwide predicament requires political will similar to America’s determination to place a man on the moon in the 1960s (President John F. Kennedy); throughout the history of America, extraordinary leaders have accomplished extraordinary things. Even though Neil Armstrong (“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” July 21, 1969) did set foot on the moon, my great grandfather swore that Disney staged the moon landing because he believed it was impossible to go to the moon, and he never believed to his passing day. Today, people of high rank in America have a similar problem of not believing in science & engineering. They claim global warming is a Hollywood act or spurious science, people like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), and ignorant mouthpieces on coast-to-coast talk radio, which brings to mind: Is it acceptable in today’s society, like days of old, to tar and feather miscreants and run them out of town on a rail?
According to sociologists Riley Dunlap (Okla. St. Univ.) and Aaron McCright (Mich. St. Univ.) in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, August 2011, climate denialism exists because there has been a long-term, well financed effort by conservative groups to distort global-warming science: “Contrarian scientists, fossil-fuel corporations, conservative think tanks and various front groups have assaulted mainstream climate science and scientists for over two decades.”
For example, there are really, and truly, people out there who advocate more carbon dioxide levels. According to Mike Ludwig, Truthout, February 15, 2012:
Craig Idso, chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and other think tanks, receives $11,600 per month from Heartland. Idso’s study center is funded in part by Exxon Mobile and he recently spoke on the benefits of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual meeting… the Charles G. Koch Foundation-funded Heartland’s proposed 2012 budget includes $75,000 to develop a ‘Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms’.
One of their strongest arguments in support of more carbon dioxide levels is as follows: Plants and trees love it!
Prompting the question: Does standing water drown plants and trees?
Coming back to reality… whether America’s sacred coastline; e.g., Plymouth Rock, remains as a monument for future generations depends upon the prospective consequences of Greenland’s ice sheet melting, but…much more alarming yet, the risk of underwater coastlines, as described in this article, does not take into account Antarctica, which is 14 million sq. km. or nearly 7 times larger than Greenland. Antarctica is roughly the size of the United States and Mexico combined. Ominously, Antarctica has only recently started calving ice flows the size of large cities.
A new satellite survey of Antarctica (Science, October 24, 2012) recalibrated data, and that recalibration, according to Matt King, University of Tasmania, “…puts the Antarctic’s current contribution to sea level rise at the ‘lower end of the ice-melt spectrum’, which is a little bit of good news. However, ‘the parts of Antarctica that are losing mass most rapidly are seeing accelerated mass loss and this acceleration could continue well into the future…The sea level change we’re seeing today is happening faster than it has for centuries with just a small contribution from the massive Antarctic ice sheet. What is sobering is that sea levels will rise even faster if Antarctica continues to lose more ice into the oceans’….”
The Big Fix
Although there is no way for anybody to know if, or when, corrective action is early enough, or conversely too late, a Big Fix may be possible, depending upon how quickly political will takes control over haphazard efforts to go green: Alternative energy resources; i.e., (1) algae fuel, (2) wind turbines, (3) tides, (4) geothermal, (5) electric cars, (6) solar, (7) hydro, and (8) biofuels are already commercially viable and ready for worldwide installation/development…thus, abandoning fossil fuels altogether… with the exception of airplanes and wherever it is absolutely necessary for industry; thereby, eliminating CO2 similar to how the world effectively joined together to successfully eliminate chlorofluorocarbons to resolve the ozone hole dilemma in the 1980s.
A worldwide effort to eliminate fossil fuels as quickly as humanly possible would be a bonanza for western economies, and obviously for the planet, prompting an economic renaissance of strong growth for the entire world, low unemployment, and a clean, healthy planet, ushering in powerful worldwide economic growth as carbon-based energy is replaced, employing millions upon millions in clean energy conversions on a scale equivalent to sending man to the moon fifty years ago.
But… where’s the political will?
Let’s face it: climate change is getting scarier by the week. In this all-American year, record wildfires, record temperatures in the continental U.S., an endless summer, a fierce drought that still won’t go away, and Frankenstorm Sandy all descended on us. Globally, billion-dollar weather events are increasingly dime-a-dozen affairs, with a record 14 of them in 2012 so far. So is a linked phenomenon, the continuing rise in the volume of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, especially from burning fossil fuels, that get pumped into the atmosphere. The latest figures from 2011 indicate that those gases once again made an appearance in record amounts with no indication that abatement is anywhere on the horizon.
With new studies and more data, it seems, come ever more frightening projections of just how much the temperature of this planet is going to rise by 2100. After all, as Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of the invaluable The Race for What’s Left, points out, the International Energy Agency’s latest study suggests a possible temperature rise by century’s end of 3.6 degrees Celsius. That should startle the imagination, involving as it would the transformation of this planet into something unrecognizably different from the one we all grew up on. And keep in mind that it’s by no means the top estimate for temperature disaster. A new World Bank report indicates that a rise of 4 degrees Celsius is possible by century’s end, a prospect that bank president Jim Yong Kim termed a “doomsday scenario.”
In the meantime, the most comprehensive study to date of how humans have affected the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere predicts that the planet’s temperature could rise by an unimaginable 6 degrees Celsius by 2100. These days, it increasingly looks like we’ve entered the lottery from hell when it comes to Earth’s ultimate temperature -- especially now that a recent report from the United Nations Environment Program suggests carbon in the atmosphere has increased by 20% since 2000 and that “there are few signs of global emissions falling.”
With this in mind, consider the latest “good news” reported (and widely hailed) in the world of fossil fuels, courtesy of Michael Klare. Tom
World Energy Report 2012
The Good, the Bad, and the Really, Truly Ugly
By Michael T. Klare
Rarely does the release of a data-driven report on energy trends trigger front-page headlines around the world. That, however, is exactly what happened on November 12th when the prestigious Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) released this year’s edition of its World Energy Outlook. In the process, just about everyone missed its real news, which should have set off alarm bells across the planet.
Claiming that advances in drilling technology were producing an upsurge in North American energy output, World Energy Outlook predicted that the United States would overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the planet’s leading oil producer by 2020. “North America is at the forefront of a sweeping transformation in oil and gas production that will affect all regions of the world,” declared IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven in a widely quoted statement.
In the U.S., the prediction of imminent supremacy in the oil-output sweepstakes was generally greeted with unabashed jubilation. “This is a remarkable change,” said John Larson of IHS, a corporate research firm. “It’s truly transformative. It’s fundamentally changing the energy outlook for this country.” Not only will this result in a diminished reliance on imported oil, he indicated, but also generate vast numbers of new jobs. “This is about jobs. You know, it's about blue-collar jobs. These are good jobs.”
The editors of the Wall Street Journal were no less ecstatic. In an editorial with the eye-catching headline “Saudi America,” they lauded U.S. energy companies for bringing about a technological revolution, largely based on the utilization of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to extract oil and gas from shale rock. That, they claimed, was what made a new mega-energy boom possible. “This is a real energy revolution,” the Journal noted, “even if it's far from the renewable energy dreamland of so many government subsidies and mandates.”
Other commentaries were similarly focused on the U.S. outpacing Saudi Arabia and Russia, even if some questioned whether the benefits would be as great as advertised or obtainable at an acceptable cost to the environment.
While agreeing that the expected spurt in U.S. production is mostly “good news,” Michael A. Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that gas prices will not drop significantly because oil is a global commodity and those prices are largely set by international market forces. “[T]he U.S. may be slightly more protected, but it doesn’t give you the energy independence some people claim,” he told the New York Times.
Some observers focused on whether increased output and job creation could possibly outweigh the harm that the exploitation of extreme energy resources like fracked oil or Canadian tar sands was sure to do to the environment. Daniel J. Weiss of the Center for American Progress, for example, warned of a growing threat to America’s water supply from poorly regulated fracking operations. “In addition, oil companies want to open up areas off the northern coast of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean, where they are not prepared to address a major oil blowout or spill like we had in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Such a focus certainly offered a timely reminder of how important oil remains to the American economy (and political culture), but it stole attention away from other aspects of the World Energy Report that were, in some cases, downright scary. Its portrait of our global energy future should have dampened enthusiasm everywhere, focusing as it did on an uncertain future energy supply, excessive reliance on fossil fuels, inadequate investment in renewables, and an increasingly hot, erratic, and dangerous climate. Here are some of the most worrisome takeaways from the report.
Shrinking World Oil Supply
Given the hullabaloo about rising energy production in the U.S., you would think that the IEA report was loaded with good news about the world’s future oil supply. No such luck. In fact, on a close reading anyone who has the slightest familiarity with world oil dynamics should shudder, as its overall emphasis is on decline and uncertainty.
Take U.S. oil production surpassing Saudi Arabia’s and Russia’s. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Here’s the catch: previous editions of the IEA report and the International Energy Outlook, its equivalent from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), rested their claims about a growing future global oil supply on the assumption that those two countries would far surpass U.S. output. Yet the U.S. will pull ahead of them in the 2020s only because, the IEA now asserts, their output is going to fall, not rise as previously assumed.
This is one hidden surprise in the report that’s gone unnoticed. According to the DoE’s 2011 projections, Saudi production was expected to rise to 13.9 million barrels per day in 2025, and Russian output to 12.2 million barrels, jointly providing much of the world’s added petroleum supply; the United States, in this calculation, would reach the 11.7 million barrel mark.
The IEA’s latest revision of those figures suggests that U.S. production will indeed rise, as expected, to about 11 million barrels per day in 2025, but that Saudi output will unexpectedly fall to about 10.6 million barrels and Russian to 9.7 million barrels. The U.S., that is, will essentially become number one by default. At best, then, the global oil supply is not going to grow appreciably -- despite the IEA’s projection of a significant upswing in international demand.
But wait, suggests the IEA, there’s still one wild card hope out there: Iraq. Yes, Iraq. In the belief that the Iraqis will somehow overcome their sectarian differences, attain a high level of internal stability, establish a legal framework for oil production, and secure the necessary investment and technical support, the IEA predicts that its output will jump from 3.4 million barrels per day this year to 8 million barrels in 2035, adding an extra 4.6 million barrels to the global supply. In fact, claims the IEA, this gain would represent half the total increase in world oil production over the next 25 years. Certainly, stranger things have happened, but for the obvious reasons, it remains an implausible scenario.
Add all this together -- declining output from Russia and Saudi Arabia, continuing strife in Iraq, uncertain results elsewhere -- and you get insufficient oil in the 2020s and 2030s to meet anticipated world demand. From a global warming perspective that may be good news, but economically, without a massive increase in investment in alternate energy sources, the outlook is grim. You don’t know what bad times are until you don’t have enough energy to run the machinery of civilization. As suggested by the IEA, “Much is riding on Iraq’s success... Without this supply growth from Iraq, oil markets would be set for difficult times.”
Continuing Reliance on Fossil Fuels
For all the talk of the need to increase reliance on renewable sources of energy, fossil fuels -- coal, oil, and natural gas -- will continue to provide most of the additional energy supplies needed to satisfy soaring world demand. “Taking all new developments and policies into account,” the IEA reported, “the world is still failing to put the global energy system onto a more sustainable path.” In fact, recent developments seem to favor greater fossil-fuel reliance.
In the United States, for instance, the increased extraction of oil and gas from shale formations has largely silenced calls for government investment in renewable technology. In its editorial on the IEA report, for example, the Wall Street Journal ridiculed such investment. It had, the Journal’s writers suggested, now become unnecessary due to the Saudi Arabian-style oil and gas boom to come. “Historians will one day marvel that so much political and financial capital was invested in a [failed] green-energy revolution at the very moment a fossil fuel revolution was aborning,” they declared.
One aspect of this energy “revolution” deserves special attention. The growing availability of cheap natural gas, thanks to hydro-fracking, has already reduced the use of coal as a fuel for electrical power plants in the United States. This would seem to be an obvious environmental plus, since gas produces less climate-altering carbon dioxide than does coal. Unfortunately, coal output and its use haven’t diminished: American producers have simply increased their coal exports to Asia and Europe. In fact, U.S. coal exports are expected to reach as high as 133 million tons in 2012, overtaking an export record set in 1981.
Despite its deleterious effects on the environment, coal remains popular in countries seeking to increase their electricity output and promote economic development. Shockingly, according to the IEA, it supplied nearly half of the increase in global energy consumption over the last decade, growing faster than renewables. And the agency predicts that coal will continue its rise in the decades ahead. The world’s top coal consumer, China, will burn ever more of it until 2020, when demand is finally expected to level off. India’s usage will rise without cessation, with that country overtaking the U.S. as the number two consumer around 2025.
In many regions, notes the IEA report, the continued dominance of fossil fuels is sustained by government policies. In the developing world, countries commonly subsidize energy consumption, selling transportation, cooking, and heating fuels at below-market rates. In this way, they hope to buffer their populations from rising commodity costs, and so protect their regimes from popular unrest. Cutting back on such subsidies can prove dangerous, as in Jordan where a recent government decision to raise fuel prices led to widespread riots and calls for the monarchy’s abolition. In 2011, such subsidies amounted to $523 billion globally, says the IEA, up almost 30% from 2010 and six times greater than subsidies for renewable energy.
No Hope for Averting Catastrophic Climate Change
Of all the findings in the 2012 edition of the World Energy Outlook, the one that merits the greatest international attention is the one that received the least. Even if governments take vigorous steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the report concluded, the continuing increase in fossil fuel consumption will result in “a long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees C.”
This should stop everyone in their tracks. Most scientists believe that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius is about all the planet can accommodate without unimaginably catastrophic consequences: sea-level increases that will wipe out many coastal cities, persistent droughts that will destroy farmland on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their survival, the collapse of vital ecosystems, and far more. An increase of 3.6 degrees C essentially suggests the end of human civilization as we know it.
To put this in context, human activity has already warmed the planet by about 0.8 degrees C -- enough to produce severe droughts around the world, trigger or intensify intense storms like Hurricane Sandy, and drastically reduce the Arctic ice cap. “Given those impacts,” writes noted environmental author and activist Bill McKibben, “many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target.” Among those cited by McKibben is Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes. “Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,” Emanuel writes, “and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it this way: “If we’re seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.”
At this point, it’s hard even to imagine what a planet that's 3.6 degrees C hotter would be like, though some climate-change scholars and prophets -- like former Vice President Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth -- have tried. In all likelihood, the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets would melt entirely, raising sea levels by several dozen feet and completely inundating coastal cities like New York and Shanghai. Large parts of Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the American Southwest would be rendered uninhabitable thanks to lack of water and desertification, while wildfires of a sort that we can’t imagine today would consume the parched forests of the temperate latitudes.
In a report that leads with the “good news” of impending U.S. oil supremacy, to calmly suggest that the world is headed for that 3.6 degree C mark is like placing a thermonuclear bomb in a gaudily-wrapped Christmas present. In fact, the “good news” is really the bad news: the energy industry’s ability to boost production of oil, coal, and natural gas in North America is feeding a global surge in demand for these commodities, ensuring ever higher levels of carbon emissions. As long as these trends persist -- and the IEA report provides no evidence that they will be reversed in the coming years -- we are all in a race to see who gets to the Apocalypse first.
Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left (Metropolitan Books). A documentary movie based on his book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on Facebook by clicking here.
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Copyright 2012 Michael T. Klare