Global meltdown
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Scientists fear that global warming will bring climatic turbulence,
with changes coming in big jumps rather than gradually
By Fred Pearce
The Guardian
Wednesday August 30 2006
Richard Alley's eyes glint as we sit in his office in the University of
Pennsylvania discussing how fast global warming could cause sea levels
to rise. The scientist sums up the state of knowledge: "We used to
think that it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice
sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now we know it doesn't take
10,000 years; it takes 10 seconds."
That quote highlights most vividly why scientists are getting panicky
about the sheer speed and violence with which climate change could take
hold. They are realising that their old ideas about gradual change -
the smooth lines on graphs showing warming and sea level rise and
gradually shifting weather patterns - simply do not represent how the world's
climate system works.
Dozens of scientists told me the same thing while I was researching my
book The Last Generation. Climate change did not happen gradually in
the past, and it will not happen that way in the future. Planet Earth
does not do gradual change. It does big jumps; it works by tipping points.
The story of research into sea level rise is typical of how perceptions
have changed in the past five years. The conventional view - you can
still read it in reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change - holds that sea levels will start to rise as a pulse of warming
works its way gradually from the surface through the 2km- and 3km-thick
ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, melting them. The ice is thick
and the heat will penetrate only slowly. So we have hundreds, probably
thousands, of years to make our retreat to higher ground.
Recent research, however, shows that idea is wholly wrong.
Glaciologists forgot about crevasses. What is actually happening is that ice is
melting at the surface and forming lakes that drain down into the
crevasses. In 10 seconds, the water is at the base of the ice sheet, where it
lubricates the join between ice and rock. Then the whole ice sheet
starts to float downhill towards the ocean.
"These flows completely change our understanding of the dynamics of ice
sheet destruction," says Alley. "Even five years ago, we didn't know
about this."
This summer, lakes several kilometres across formed on the Greenland
ice sheet, and drained away to the depths. Scientists measured how,
within hours of the lakes forming, the vast ice sheets physically rose up,
as if floating on water, and slid towards the ocean. That is why
Greenland glaciers are flowing faster, and there are more icebergs breaking
off into the Atlantic Ocean. That is why average sea level rise has
increased from 2mm a year in the early 1990s to more than 3mm a year now.
Soon it could be a great deal more. Jim Hansen of Nasa, George Bush's
top climate modeller, predicts that sea level rise will be 10 times
faster within a few years, as Greenland destabilises. "Building an ice
sheet takes a long time," he says. "But destroying it can be explosively
rapid."
Alarmist? No. It has happened before, he says. During the final few
centuries of the last ice age, the sea level rose 20 metres in 400 years,
an average of 20 times faster than now. These were sudden, violent
times. And the melting was caused by tiny wobbles in the Earth's orbit that
changed the heat balance of the planet by only a fraction as much as
our emissions of greenhouse gases are doing today.
Violent change
There is more evidence of abrupt and violent change, most of it culled
from ice cores, lake sediments, tree rings and other natural archives
of climate. We now know that the last ice age was not a stable cold era
but near-permanent climate change. Towards the end, around 11,000 years
ago, average temperatures in parts of the Arctic rose by 16C or more
within a decade. Alley believes it happened within a single year, though
he says the evidence in the ice cores is not precise enough to prove
it.
All this comes as a surprise to us because, in the 10,000 or so years
since the end of the last ice age, the climate has been, relatively
speaking, stable. We have had warm periods and mini ice ages; but they were
little compared with events before.
It is arguable that this rather benign world has been the main reason
why our species was able to leave the caves and create the urban,
industrial civilisation we enjoy today. Our complex society relies on our
being able to plant crops and build cities, knowing that the rains will
come and the cities will not be flooded by incoming tides. When that
certainty fails, as when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last year, even
the most sophisticated society is brought to its knees.
But there is a growing fear among scientists that, thanks to man-made
climate change, we are about to return to a world of climatic
turbulence, where tipping points are constantly crossed. Their research into the
workings of the planet's ecosystems suggests why such sudden changes
have happened in the past, and are likely again in future.
One driver of fast change in the past has been abrupt movements of
carbon between the atmosphere and natural reservoirs such as the
rainforests and the oceans. Hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide can
burp into the atmosphere, apparently at the flick of a switch.
That is why the Met Office's warning that the Amazon rainforest could
die by mid-century, releasing its stored carbon from trees and soils
into the air, is so worrying. And why we should take serious note when
Peter Cox, professor of climate systems at Exeter University, warns that
the world's soils, which have been soaking up carbon for centuries, may
be close to a tipping beyond which they will release it all again.
Other threats lurk on the horizon. We know that there are trillions of
tonnes of methane, a virulent greenhouse gas, trapped in permafrost and
in sediments beneath the ocean bed. There are fears this methane may
start leaking out as temperatures warm. It seems this happened 55m years
ago, when gradual warming of the atmosphere penetrated to the ocean
depths and unlocked the methane, which caused a much greater warming that
resulted in the extinction of millions of species.
All this suggests that, in one sense, the climate sceptics are right.
They say the future is much less certain than the climate models
predict. They have a point. We know less than we think. But the sceptics are
wrong in concluding that the models have been exaggerating the threat.
Far from it. Evidence emerging in the past five years or so suggests the
presence of many previously unknown tipping points that could trigger
dangerous climate change.
Can we call a halt? Hansen says we have 10 years to turn things round
and escape disaster. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory, which
considers the Earth a self-regulated living being, reckons we are already
past the point of no return. I don't buy that. For one thing, there is
no single point of no return. We have probably passed some, but not
others. The water may be lapping at our ankles, but I am not ready to head
for the hills yet. I'm an optimist.
· Fred Pearce is author of The Last Generation - How Nature Will Take
Her Revenge for Climate Change, Eden Project Books, £12.99. To
order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p call 0870 836 0875 or go to
guardian.co.uk/bookshop |
