HAS A RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT BEGUN?

From: Dr. Jai Maharaj (usenet_at_mantra.com)
Date: 11/19/04 

Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 23:00:52 GMT

HAS A RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT BEGUN?

Forwarded message from moderator@portside.org
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[ Subject: Has a runaway greenhouse effect begun?
[ From: moderator@portside.org
[ Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004
    
Has a ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect begun?

Norm Dixon
Green Left Weekly
November 3, 2004

In recent weeks, scientists have released two separate
findings that indicate the consequences of global
warming due to the emission of "greenhouse gases" --
primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) from the industrial
burning of fossil fuels -- may be far greater than
previously estimated.

The new findings underscore the need for governments
around the world, in particular the industrialised
First World countries that are responsible for more
than 80% of past emissions and 75% currently, to take
urgent action to massively reduce the world’s
industrial greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80%.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which
pools the expertise of more than 2000 of the world’s
climate scientists, warned on October 25 that the
greenhouse gas emission reduction targets established
in the 1997 Kyoto agreement do not go far enough and
far more radical solutions must be found.

Pachauri welcomed the Russian parliament’s October 22
ratification of the Kyoto agreement, which will allow
the treaty to come into legal force despite the refusal
by the world’s major polluter, the United States, to
sign. However, "this mustn’t lull us into thinking that
the problem is solved", Pachauri told Reuters. "Kyoto
is not enough. We have to look at the problem afresh."
The Kyoto treaty aims for a reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions of around 5% of 1990 levels, far short of the
60-80% over the next 50 years necessary to arrest
global warming.

The new evidence on the pace of global warming suggests
that world governments may have even less time to act
than previously estimated. The October 11 British
Guardian reported that CO2 in the atmosphere is at
record levels and increasing at an accelerating rate,
while the September 23 edition of Science revealed that
glaciers in western Antarctica flowing into sea are
speeding up, indicating an increased level of melting.

The scientists who make up the IPCC estimate that
unless levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are
stabilised by mid-century, Earth’s average temperature
will rise by up to 5.8°C by 2100. According to the IPCC
figures, if unchecked, CO2 levels in the air will be
between 650 and 970 parts per million (ppm). However,
these estimates may be too conservative.

According to the October 11 Guardian, measurements of
average atmospheric CO2 levels in 2002 and 2003 may
confirm that the rate of CO2 accumulation is now
increasing at an alarming rate. Scientists at Hawaii’s
Mauna Loa Observatory reported that average CO2 levels
increased by 2.08 ppm in 2002, to 373.1 ppm, and by
2.54 ppm in 2003, to an average of 375.64 ppm. This is
the first recorded example of the average CO2 level
jumping more than 2 ppm in two consecutive years. The
average increase in the CO2 level over the last few
decades, reports the Guardian, has been 1.5 ppm. The
current level of CO2 is the highest in at least 420,000
years!

Associated Press reported earlier this year, on March
20, that scientists at Mauna Loa Observatory had
recorded the CO2 level in the atmosphere peaking at a
record of 379 ppm, compared to 376 ppm a year earlier
and 373 ppm in 2002.

The increase has raised the spectre of a "runaway"
greenhouse effect already underway. Previous increases
of CO2 levels of above 2 ppm -- 1973, 1988, 1994 and
1998 -- have coincided with the El Nino weather pattern
in the Pacific. However, this cannot explain the latest
rises.

Weather scientist Charles Keeling, who began measuring
atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa in 1958, told the Guardian
that "it is possible that this is merely a reflection
of natural events like previous peaks in the rate, but
it is also possible that it is the beginning of a
natural process unprecedented in the record ... [The
rise] could be a weakening of the Earth’s carbon sinks,
associated with world warming, as part of a climate
change feedback mechanism. It is cause for concern."

Piers Forster, senior research fellow at the University
of Reading’s department of meteorology, added that "if
this is a rate change ... it will be of enormous
concern, because it will imply that all our global
warming predictions for the hundred years or so will
have to be redone".

Friends of the Earth’s Scotland head Duncan McLaren,
speaking to Agence France Presse on October 11,
demanded action to achieve the 60-80% reductions in
industrial greenhouse gas emissions required within 30
years: "Instead of just keeping our fingers crossed,
these findings should send an urgent reminder to
governments everywhere of the urgent need to tackle the
growing threat of climate change."

Predictions about the rate of CO2 accumulating in the
atmosphere might not be the only estimates that have to
be revised. Based on the IPCC’s present forecasts,
global warming triggered by unchecked greenhouse gas
emissions will cause a sea level rise of between 20
centimetres and almost 1 metre by the end of the
century. However, the IPCC’s prediction is based on an
assumption that the polar ice caps will not melt
significantly.

However, according the September 23 journal Science,
NASA researchers have found that six vast glaciers in
the west Antarctic are flowing into the Amundsen Sea at
a rate up to 25% faster than in the 1970s. The Pine
Island Glacier is entering the ocean at a rate of six
metres a day and as more enters the sea, the remainder
speeds up further. Glaciologists told Science that
within five years, 700 square kilometres of the thick
Pine Island Glacier alone will be floating (and
melting) in the ocean.

According to Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, should the six glaciers
completely melt, they alone will cause the world’s sea
level to rise by more than a metre. Researchers using
ice-penetrating radar also found that the glaciers are
on average 430 metres thicker than previously thought,
meaning they are dumping considerably more fresh water
into the ocean.

One reason why Antarctic glaciers are entering the sea
at a much faster rate is because floating 500-metre ice
shelves, which significantly slow the entry of the
glaciers into the sea, have begun to collapse and melt.
Antarctica has warmed by an average 2.5°C since the
1940s, and winter temperatures have jumped by almost
5°C.

The Larsen A ice shelf suddenly collapsed in 1995. The
Wilkins Ice Shelf is shrinking. In 2002, the 3400-
square kilometre Larsen B shelf -- at least 12,000
years old and up to 70 storeys thick -- disintegrated
into the Weddell Sea in the space of a few months
(satellites images of the collapse are available at <
http://nsidc.org/iceshelves/larsenb2002/animation.html
>).

The calving of monster icebergs is now common. Ted
Scambos, an expert from the University of Colorado’s
National Snow and Ice Centre, found that after Larsen
B’s collapse, nearby glaciers began entering the sea up
to eight times faster than previously.

According to NASA’s Robert Thomas, the ice shelves are
melting rapidly and have been thinning at the rate of
10 to 15 metres a year since the 1990s. The rate of
thinning today is double that in the 1990s, he added.

The Larsen and Wilkins ice shelves are relatively
insignificant in Antarctic terms, but their demise may
indicate that similar processes may be underway on the
massive Ross and the Filchner-Ronne ice shelves. "Ice-
shelf thinning could be happening elsewhere in the
Antarctic, but we just don’t know", Scambos told
Science.

The Ross and the Filchner-Ronne ice shelves prevent the
gigantic land-based Western Antarctic Ice *** from
rapidly entering the ocean and melting. The Western
Antarctic Ice ***, the smaller of Antarctica’s two
vast ice sheets, contains a mind-boggling 3.2 million
cubic kilometres of ice, about 10% of the world’s total
ice -- enough to raise the sea level six metres. (If
the more secure Eastern Antarctic Ice *** melted, the
sea would rise more than 60 metres!)

Within the western *** are five ice streams --
enormous glaciers more than 50 kilometres wide and one
kilometre thick. The Ross Ice Shelf -- floating ice
nearly the size of New South Wales -- and the similarly
sized Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf prevent them sliding
into the sea where they would rapidly melt.

The West Antarctic Ice *** may have melted at least
once before, between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago,
causing the sea level to rise about five metres higher
than today’s level. An article in the August 1995
Scientific American pointed out that the five-metre
rise was followed by a 10-metre decrease -- all in the
space of 100 or so years!

The May 2002 edition of Science reported that
researchers from the Oregon State University, the
University of Toronto and the University of Durham in
Britain had found that a massive and unusually abrupt
23-metre rise in the sea level about 14,200 years ago
was caused by the partial collapse of both major ice
sheets in Antarctica. The sea level took just 500 years
to reach that height.
 
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/605/605p13.htm

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 - Matthew 10:34-36.

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