The Arctic is melting: 18 reasons to care

Arctic sea ice has once again smashed all kinds of records - for extent, area and volume. Every year a huge amount of ice melts in summer and refreezes in winter, but the trend over the last few decades has been strongly downwards, especially during the summer months. In fact, this year, the extent of ocean with at least 15% sea ice cover declined to a level less than half of what it used to average just twenty years or so ago. Through it is harder to measure, the volume of summer sea ice is down by about three quarters from what it used to be. I posted an introduction to sea ice area, extent and volume back here.

When compared to our best reconstructions of the history of Arctic sea ice over the last 1450 years, the last few decades are, well, unusual. The graph above, which shows the ups and downs of summer sea ice extent over the years gives a sense of just how staggeringly quickly this part of the world is changing. Indeed, the collapse in sea ice is so rapid that it continues to stun even the scientists who have been watching it closely for decades. Back in 2007, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report said that it was unlikely the Arctic would be seasonally free until after 2100.* Now, the UK Met Office says it is likely sometime between 2040 and 2060, most other Arctic organisations speak about sometime around 2030, while a handful of individual experts warn that, depending on weather conditions, it could be as early as the next Olympics in Rio. There is almost no evidence that this has occurred for at least the last few hundred thousand years (estimates range from 700,000 to 4 million years). *There are different definitions for what "ice-free" means. The most common is when extent drops below one million square kilometres, meaning that there might still be some ice clinging on around the north Greenland coast or in bays and inlets in the high Canadian Arctic, but effectively, the main ocean is free of ice.

Whatever the precise timing, why do we care? So what if some polar bears drown? Why does it matter to me what is happening thousands of miles away in the middle of an ocean amidst a deserted wilderness? Because the Arctic is closer than you think. The effects of declining summer sea ice are many. Here are eighteen reasons to care about the likelihood of a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean in the coming years. Only one is polar bears:

1. Polar bears: And walruses, seals and all the other unique Arctic wildlife that depend on sea ice. Seasonal sea ice loss threatens the unique and endemic Arctic biota. The polar bear is an photogenic icon, and as the largest terrestrial predator it instantly commands widespread respect and attention, but there is so much more at stake than simply polar bears.

2. Cultural loss. The loss of sea ice undermines the way of life of various indigenous groups in the Arctic, who rely on hunting and the ice for their livelihood and culture.

3. Infrastructure damage: As the Arctic region is warming, the permafrost that covers the land is both melting and being rapidly eroded. There are many structures and roads built on the permafrost that are already suffering severe damage.

4. Albedo change: Less floating white ice means more exposed dark water, which absorbs more solar radiation, increasing the total incoming heat flux of the planet, and specifically of the Arctic Ocean. The reflectivity of the planet's surface is called its albedo, and the decrease in albedo caused by loss of Arctic ice during the period when it is receiving 24 hours of sunlight is considered by many scientists to be the greatest single threat on this list.

5. Permafrost methane: A warming Arctic Ocean and atmosphere speeds the melt of permafrost in Canada, Siberia and Alaska, not only threatening infrastructure (see #3), but also releasing stored methane (CH₄), a highly potent greenhouse gas that degrades into carbon dioxide, making it both a short term climate nasty and a long term headache. The total amount of frozen methane is vast and although it unlikely to all melt quickly, it is soon likely to become a significant and sustained drag on efforts to cut emissions. More emissions from thawing permafrost means less room and time for us to make our own transition away from carbon-intensive energy systems.

6. Submarine methane: Warmer waters increase the rate at which vast submarine deposits of methane clathrates found along the Siberian continental shelf destabilise and are released to the atmosphere, giving a further kick to warming. Some observers are petrified this "clathrate gun" could end basically all life on earth in matter of years through a catastrophic self-perpetuating release. As I've noted previously, scientists are yet to see a convincing geophysical mechanism for this being a sudden and catastrophic release (with consequent spike in global CH₄) rather than a progressive leak resulting in an elevation of CH₄ with rising CO₂. This represents further drain on our carbon budgets, though the precise scale and timing of these emissions are less understood than those from terrestrial thawing.

7. More available heat: To convert ice at 0ºC to water at 0ºC takes energy, even though the temperature has not changed. The considerable energy involved in this phase change is called latent heat. Without ice in the ocean sucking up extra energy during summer, the solar energy that previous went into melting ice can go into the oceans (and later be released to the atmosphere). This is like removing a handbrake, though my back of the envelope attempts to quantify it suggest it will be significantly smaller effect than albedo change (#4). I'd like to see these calculations made by someone who knows what they are doing.

8. Wacky weather: This is something of a wild card and could prove to be the biggest danger to human society. Losing the ice is already changing wind patterns around the Arctic, which in turn affect the weather throughout the northern hemisphere. There is some evidence that more exposed water in the Arctic and a decreased temperature difference between the equator and pole (since the Arctic region is warming much faster than further south) is increasing the amplitude of the meanders in the jet stream. In turn, this slows down progression of the meanders, leading to "blocking patterns", where one region gets "stuck" in a certain weather pattern, whether heatwave, drought or flood. The 2010 Moscow heatwave that killed 11,000 people and sent the price of wheat skyrocketing (in turn helping to spark the Arab Spring), the 2010 Pakistan floods that displaced 20 million people, the 2010/11 record cold winters in Europe and parts of the US and the 2012 US heatwave and drought have all been linked to unusually persistent blocking patterns. Losing the ice may mean we see more of these kinds of things. The jury is still out on this theory, but if not precisely like this, the loss of Arctic sea ice will almost certainly affect wind circulation patterns and so weather both regionally and hemispherically.

9. Greenland melt: Over the long term, this may be the biggest change. The warmer the Arctic Ocean gets, the warmer Greenland is likely to get, and the faster its glaciers slide and melt into the sea. While floating sea ice doesn't affect sea levels (and there's relatively little of it anyway), there's enough ice on top of Greenland to raise sea levels by 7.2 metres (on average). As I read it, glacial draining and calving of the ice sheet is a larger sea level rise contributor than straight melting (thus the recent fracas over dramatic surface melt may not be the key issue for Greenland - remember, this recent melt event cut centimetres off a sheet that averages over two kilometres thick). The real danger is the acceleration of ice flow dynamics (i.e. the ice cube is more likely to slide off the table before it has finished melting). And the largest boost to glacier acceleration is from warming oceans meeting marine terminating glaciers. No one is entirely sure how long this will take, but it is a process that once it is underway in earnest, is likely to have a momentum of its own, meaning that our descendants will be committed to ever rising sea levels for centuries to come. The somewhat good news is that it is also a process that (on present understandings) is assumed to have some physical constraints due to friction (i.e. there are speed limits for glaciers, even in very warm conditions). The West Antarctic ice sheet, being largely grounded on bedrock well below sea level is actually more plausibly in danger of catastrophically sudden break-up, though warming in the Antarctic is currently only a fraction of what is being observed in the Arctic.

10. Resource conflict: An increasingly ice-free Arctic opens up a geopolitical minefield as nations scramble to take advantage of the resources previously locked away under the ice. The starter's gun for this race has well and truly fired, with various oil companies sending rigs to begin drilling for oil and gas this season. As one signal of the seriousness with which this is now taken, meetings of the Arctic council (comprised of nations bordering the Arctic) now attract Hillary Clinton rather than a minor government official.

11. More oil: The presence of significant amounts of oil and gas under the Arctic Ocean has been suspected and known for some time. Less ice means that fossil hydrocarbons that were previously off limits now become economically viable to extract, thus increasing the pool of available carbon reserves and so worsening the challenge of keeping most of them underground.

12. Fishing: Another resource now increasingly able to be exploited due to the loss of seasonal sea ice. Pristine (or somewhat pristine) marine ecosystems are thus exposed to greater exploitation (and noise pollution).

13. Shipping lanes: The fabled North West passage through the remote islands of Canada has been open to commercial shipping without icebreakers only four times in recorded history: 2011, 2010, 2008, 2007. The North East passage has also been open in recent years. These previously inaccessible Arctic shipping routes reduce fuel needs of global shipping by cutting distances (a negative feedback) but also brings more diesel fuel into the Arctic region, leaving black soot on glaciers (a positive feedback). I'm not sure which is the larger effect overall.

14. Toxin release: For various reasons, certain toxins and heavy metals from human pollution seem to accumulate in Arctic sea ice. As it melts, they are being released once more into the environment.

15. Invasive species: Melting ice reconnects marine ecosystems that were previously separated by ice, enabling migration of species into new regions, with unpredictable ecosystem changes as a result. This is already occurring.

16. Ocean circulation? These last three points are more speculative and I'm yet to see studies on them. But loss of sea ice could well change the patterns of ocean currents in the great global conveyor belt known as thermohaline circulation. This drives weather patterns throughout the entire globe.

17. Acidification acceleration? By increasing the open ocean surface area for atmosphere-ocean gas exchange, the rate of ocean acidification could slightly increase. Would this make any difference to ocean capacity to act as CO₂ sink or rate of acidification? This could well be irrelevant, but it is a question I have.

18 Political tipping point? The loss of virtually all perennial Arctic sea ice would be a highly visual and difficult to dispute sign of rapid and alarming climate change, representing a potential tipping point in public awareness and concern. If we are waiting for that, however, before we make any serious efforts to slash emissions (especially if it doesn't occur until 2030 or later), we'll already have so much warming committed that we'll pretty much be toast. At best, therefore, this point might consolidate public support for massive rapid emissions reductions already underway. These eighteen reasons can be summarised in five broad headings:

1. Direct effects upon local wildlife, human communities and infrastructure (1, 2, 3, 12, 14, 15);
2. Positive feedback affects that accelerate the warming process (4, 5, 6, 7, 11);
3. Changes to human economic and political systems through the opening up of previous inaccessible resources and routes (10, 13, 18);
4. Disruptions to the great atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns that shape the experience of billions of people directly (8, 16);
5. Acceleration of long term threats (9, 17).

The loss of Arctic sea ice will not suddenly be the end of the world, but it represents a major milestone on the path to self-destruction along which we are currently hurtling with accelerating speed.

UPDATE: My opening graph needs some important further clarification. The unamended graph is a 40 year smoothed average, while the additional material displays year-on-year changes and so is not comparing apples to apples. However, using only 40 year averages to capture the dramatic changes of the last few years is also likely misleading. There is further discussion of this image here, here and here.

Not with a bang but with a sustained leak

Real Climate: Why Arctic methane release is bad, not catastrophic. This is a very important post. Many have been deeply worried about the possibility of a so-called "methane gun" in which truly staggering volumes of frozen methane clathrates that sit on and under the ocean floor of the Siberian continental shelf are released in a runaway feedback as the Arctic Ocean warms. Since methane (CH₄) has something like 100 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a twenty year period, it has been hypothesized that a rapid release of large volumes of stored methane could cause a sudden and likely catastrophic surge in global temperatures. A variation or accompaniment to this scenario is the rapid release of methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia. In the linked post, a senior climatologist argues that it is far more likely that methane release will be chronic rather than acute, and given methane's relatively short atmospheric residency (about ten years), this will lead to a dangerous (though not immediately catastrophic) rise then stabilisation of methane levels, supplementing but not overwhelming warming from carbon dioxide. However, since atmospheric methane gradually degrades to carbon dioxide in the presence of oxygen, a slow release would not only give a bump to methane levels but would also see carbon dioxide levels continue to rise. Unlike methane, carbon dioxide is basically forever, with about half of any increase in atmospheric concentration we experience likely to remain for centuries and about a quarter likely to remain for at least ten thousand years. So a relief (of sorts) for us. It's a bit like finding that the Nazis don't, as feared, have a nuclear weapon, but they do have twice as many conventional forces as was thought.

CD: A recent NASA study suggests that climate change may modify 40% the earth's surface from one biome (e.g. forest, savanna, tundra, etc.) to another.

ABC Religion and Ethics: The New Evangelicals: How Christians are rethinking Abortion and Gay marriage. Despite being published by the ABC, this piece (an extract from a new book) has its eyes on the US scene. How applicable are the trends it identifies elsewhere amongst evangelicals?

Guardian: More farmers needed. Feeding seven, eight, nine, ten billion without strip-mining the soil, using the atmosphere as a carbon dump, squeezing out biodiversity, depleting finite fuels or overloading rivers, lakes and oceans with nutrients requires more organic poly-cultural farming, which can often be more productive per unit of land overall than present industrial monocultural farming. However, it is less productive per unit of labour, meaning more people employed (again) in growing food, which probably means higher food prices and a greater share of incomes devoted to food. This in turn may help address obesity, though at the risk of increasing malnutrition associated with poverty. Hence, addressing inequality is also critical.

Peter preaches on the parable of the talents (Matthew 25.14-30). This passage is often used as a key plank in a justification of usury. There are elements in the narrative and context that suggest a very different reading. Peter highlights the key theological question lying behind this hermeneutical issue: which kind of God do we serve?

McKibben: On being hopefully naïve about getting corporate money out of US politics and why being cynical is hopeless.

Guardian: What have trees ever done for us?

NYT: My Guantánamo Nightmare. There are good reasons due process has come to be highly cherished in all civil societies.

Monbiot: The limits of vegetarianism, in which George changes his mind and shifts to ethical semi-vegetarianism. The Conversation publishes an even more provocative piece against ecological vegetarianism, and a very interesting discussion in the comments ensues.

SMH: Energy and water. In the 20thC, global energy use increased thirteen-fold and water use increased nine-fold. The two are related and any future has to consider our water habits, which might be less about having short showers than having cold ones, since energy production is one of the most water-intensive things we do (though conversely, where water is scarce, desalination is one of the most energy-intensive things we do).

Take the mic away from the speakers...

Here's another climate feedback: More frequent and severe heat waves, such as the one breaking all kinds of records in the US at the moment, are one of the most likely effects of continued climate change. More severe/frequent heat waves mean higher peak electricity demand, which means more power stations being built, which means more capacity in the system, which means more impetus to use it, which means (barring widespread and rapid implementation of cleaner energy) more greenhouse gas emissions, which means - well, you get it by now.

What path are we on? Emissions update

Between 2003 and 2008, the global economy was tracking above the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) worst case scenario for carbon dioxide emissions. The financial crisis brought a brief respite in 2009, when emissions actually dropped (remember, this still means that greenhouse gas levels rose in 2009, just a little more slowly than they had been). But it was recently announced by the International Energy Agency that 2010 saw the largest jump in emissions in human history, putting us back up close to the IPCC worst case. What does this mean? If we continue on this trajectory, where will we end up? This piece by two climate scientists gives plenty of good context. The bottom line? According to the IPCC's most recent major report (2007), our current trajectory puts us on track for a 2100 temperature rise of 3-4°C above pre-industrial levels with likely associated impacts including:

Hundreds of millions of people exposed to increased water stress.
30–40% of species at risk of extinction around the globe.
About 30% of global coastal wetlands lost.
Increased damage from floods and storms.
Widespread coral mortality.
Terrestrial biosphere tends toward a net carbon source.
Reduction in cereal productions.
Increased morbility and mortality from heat waves, floods and droughts.

Remember that these projections are based on IPCC AR4 (2007), which was a compilation of research up to the middle of last decade. A lot has happened in climate science in the last five or six years, and little of it has made the picture any rosier. Crucially, the above projections do not include a variety of feedback mechanisms that were not well understood at the time of publication. And there have also been advances in modeling likely impacts in some areas, notably, sea level rise, which is now thought to be between 0.5 and 1.5 metres by 2100. Of course, if our emissions are towards the upper end of the scenarios, then rises are also likely to be higher than 50 cm. However, I think that it is reduction in cereal production that could be the most significant effect geopolitically in the next few decades.

For a more up to date assessment of the state of the science, see the recent Australian Climate Commission's publication The Critical Decade, whose three chapters are helpfully summarised by Skeptical Science: one; two; three. Here is the concluding paragraph:

As you’ve read in this report, we know beyond reasonable doubt that the world is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. The impacts of climate change are already being felt in Australia and around the world with less than 1 degree of warming globally. The risks of future climate change – to our economy, society and environment – are serious, and grow rapidly with each degree of further temperature rise. Minimising these risks requires rapid, deep and ongoing reductions to global greenhouse gas emissions. We must begin now if we are to decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050. This decade is the critical decade.

Remember, we are not just talking about less ice or a few more days of sunscreen, the likely geopolitical consequences of our current path are dire. It doesn't have to be this way.

Insert head (A) into sand (B)

CP: Amazonian drought, another climate wildcard. This is a lengthy post, but worth a read for its significance.

BBC: Mining tax should be higher says OECD.

TPM: Insert head (A) into sand (B).

Running out of places to fish.

Alaskan wildfires getting more intense, and now Alaskan forests and soils are releasing more carbon than they are storing.

The places where fish choke.

Hot Topic: The rainforests of the sea are burning.

Mongabay: Climate change likely to kill five million annually by 2020, mainly children.

Discounting the future

Nicole Foss (a.k.a. Stoneleigh) nicely summarises the effects of crises, instability and uncertainty on human ethical deliberation: our horizons shrink. This is true of both temporal and relational horizon. Nicole has written before about the shrinking relational horizon in times of difficulty (when the chips are down, you stick with those you know and mistrust strangers and those who are other to you) and this recent post points out that much of human history has been lived from hand to mouth, with immediate concerns dominating our time, effort and thinking. When you're worried about where your next meal will come from (or, slightly less pressingly, worried about where your next pay packet is going to come from), you're much less likely to be able to reflect coherently upon or plan for longer term threats and opportunities. Practical and moral vision is narrowed and shortened in order to focus upon the immediate. This is one of the reasons that ecological concerns decline during recessions.

It is also why my expectation of growing economic and social disruptions over the next few decades signals bad news for our collective ability to respond well to the longer term threats our society faces. Human reactions to increasing perceptions of threat constitute a complex series of feedback cycles, both positive and negative, rendering linear trends hyperbolic. This is why specific forecasting has such a bad track record and why "bumpy" is about the level of specificity I'm willing to commit myself to in describing the coming decades.

Some human reactions make crises worse than they need to be. Food shortages can lead to hoarding behaviour that exacerbates the problem for those with least access to food. First order problems (e.g. hunger) can lead to second order problems (e.g. riots) that drain resources from addressing the primary problem.

Other human reactions can mitigate the worst of crises. Co-operation, trust and sharing can spread the burden of a situation upon more shoulders, making it lighter for everyone. Sudden shocks to the status quo can sometimes awaken the moral imagination to envisage a new way of life (or the renewal of old ways).

Which kind of feedback is likely to dominate? It is very difficult to know, and may well differ from place to place. How is it possible to create the conditions now under which communities of trust and co-operation can flourish during times of crisis? How can such communities maintain an openness to outsiders and strangers? And what kinds of communities of trust are able to face immediate challenges without discounting the future?

The next twenty years

The next twenty years are very unlikely to be like the last twenty years. Most of the time, it is reasonable to expect and plan for the future on the basis of the recent past. This is how we are wired and the force of habits and the power of cultural inertia make this kind of thinking natural.

However, for all the reasons I have listed here (and quite a few more, which include consideration of the present economic situation and a debt-based economy that requires continued growth (or at least the perception of the likelihood of continued growth over the long term) to prevent meltdown), I am fairly pessimistic about the likely economic, social and/or political stability of the coming decades.

I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son and I make no claims to predicting what is likely in a massively complex and historically novel globalised system with all kinds of unexpected feedbacks. It is also very hard to be precise about the level of severity we're talking about it. I expect that we will face more than a recession, and something larger than the credit crunch of 2008.

However, I don't think we're talking Mad Max or The Road anytime soon (unless global tensions reach a point where someone reaches for the nuclear option, in which case all bets are off). But we're also not talking Star Trek or even . I think the possibility of political and/or technological silver bullets to avoid the raft of approaching crises is low enough to make it reasonable to hold a fairly bleak outlook.

There are three interconnected systems that are currently under grave threat, and the failure or further deterioration of any one of them will have significant knock-on effects on the others. These are economy, energy and ecology, or finances, fuel and flora & fauna (and fresh water and flooding and fires). I've written primarily about the third category, with occasional references to the second (especially regarding peak oil). In more recent weeks I've been learning quite a lot more about the first, and the ways in which the failures of the other two can be magnified and brought home by the financial system.

Two presentations
I plan to say more on this in due time, but I thought I'd flag the development of my thinking and suggest two presentations that might give you a taste of the kinds of things I've been pondering recently. Both are far from perfect and contain material or emphases which I think are wide of the mark, but at a broad level, I suspect they are identifying some of the most pressing issues of our day.

The first is this talk recorded at the Transition movement conference earlier this year by Stoneleigh, one of the authors of The Automatic Earth blog (H/T Sam and more thoughts here).

The second is called the Crash Course by Chris Martenson. This one is quite a bit longer, but most of the meat is in the second half so feel free to skip the explanations of what money is and how credit works if you like.

Both these presentations major on the first of the three crises (i.e economic), not because it is necessarily the most dangerous, but because it is most likely to make itself felt first and most directly. I suspect that the ecological crises which are largely in the background of these presentations will ultimately prove to be larger and more significant in the long term.

CRU Hacking: the end of the world as we know it?

Or, on not being able to see the wood for the trees
Although it may still be too early for a final call, the illegally hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia are yet to turn up anything that comes close to justifying the "conspiracy", "smoking gun" and "final nail" headlines doing the rounds. There are plenty of cherry-picked quotes that initially sound bad, but isn't it important to presume innocence until proven guilty? So where is the proof?

Well, having had a week to find incriminating evidence, there is very little substantially proven beyond some rudeness from a few scientists when discussing those who have dismissed, misrepresented and distorted their work. Most of the "smoking gun" emails currently generating traffic are "shop-talk" taken out of context. Thus far, it would appear that the claims being made of a grand collusion are themselves merely one more conspiracy theory.

I could well be wrong. There may be more information to come to light in the coming days and weeks. There may be some elements of genuine concern. The discussion of freedom of information requests may indicate that certain individuals didn't want to spend yet more of their time answering the same old questions from dishonest opponents and (maybe) considered unethical actions to avoid doing so. There may be a couple of embarrassing revelations of too much spin (though I am yet to see one published paper decisively compromised by the scandal, and all the relevant journals are looking into the situation). Calling denialists "idiots" and so forth may not increase these scientists' chances of receiving a Christmas card from them this year. But the bottom line at this point is that there is no smoking gun, because there is, as yet, no bullet-ridden body. That is, there is no evidence that I have seen or heard about so far to indicate that any published papers were compromised, that any illegal activity took place, that any conspiracy exists. Amidst all the fuss, it is important to not lose the wood for the trees here.

What the emails do illustrate is something of the internal workings of all sciences, filled as they are with political feuds, concern for reputation, ongoing criticism of methods and interpretations of data, petty squabbles and everything you'd expect to find amongst any group of sinful humans trying hard to sort out various questions about how our world works with limited time, budgets and patience.

There is an interesting and often insightful discussion of some aspects of the ethics of the situation here, including the emails that discuss spurning partisan journals. And there is further detailed discussion of many of the more quoted emails that allegedly show "data manipulation" here. Perhaps the most quoted phrase about "hiding the decline" has been repeatedly shown to be a storm in a tea-cup (e.g. here and here).

Now those who were already convinced that one of the most researched and heavily scrutinised fields in contemporary science is all an elaborate conspiracy may see otherwise, but the onus remains on those who think this is much more than a publicity stunt leading up to Copenhagen to give answers to the following questions: What specific studies have these emails discredited? How does even a least charitable reading of these emails, mainly involving around six scientists at one centre, discredit the work of hundreds of contemporary climatologists and other earth scientists related to climate change in dozens of countries? Where are the faults in the more than thirty thousand published papers that comprise the body of work in this science? Answers must be specific and preferably in peer-reviewed journals.*

So what about all those headlines about the end of the world as we know it (for climate research)? Looks like we're back to the end of the world as we know it (for us and our children).
*NB Those who claim that there are four hundred and fifty peer reviewed papers against the generally accepted understanding are once again on very thin ice indeed. The vast majority of these papers are not actually peer reviewed, and/or known to be false, and/or irrelevant, and/or out of date, and/or not supportive of climate change denial. There are of course many legitimate continuing debates about a number of key factors involved in climate change (e.g. cloud formation, glacial movement, feedback mechanisms and more), but these are almost all happening within a widely accepted general framework that accepts alarming anthropogenic climate change.

PS Apologies for the multiple posts on climate change debates recently. It is just that these issues are quite timely with Copenhagen less than two weeks away.

PPS More interesting commentary.

PPPS And a new joint statement from the MET office, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society on the state of climate science.

Copenhagen and Climate Change: hope and hopelessness

Tomorrow, in at least 177 countries, over 4,600 political actions (many of them involving hundreds or thousands of people) will be taken under a single banner. The banner? A number, three hundred and fifty, referring to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide (and equivalents) in the atmosphere. This is the level many leading climate scientists (including the head of the IPCC) now say is required to minimise the likelihood of passing various climate tipping points that trigger positive feedback mechanisms virtually ensuring further destructive changes. The challenge? We're currently at about 390 ppm. Even the most rigorous goal for the Copenhagen negotiations stands at 450 ppm, on the assumption that this gives us a better than even chance of limiting average warming to 2ºC, widely quoted as a threshold beyond which the dangers multiply. But even an average warming of 2ºC will have enormous effects on many aspects of climate, not least precipitation patterns (and so agricultural yields) in some of the world's most food-stressed areas. To avoid this, the 350 campaign brings together a huge number of organisations, individuals, congregations and parties from nearly every country, calling for global leaders who will soon meet in Copenhagen (see clock in sidebar) to reach an agreement that is strong, equitable and grounded in the latest science. Today's Sydney Morning Herald includes this opinion piece by Archbishop Desmond Tutu explaining his support for the campaign.
H/T Matt Moffitt and Geoff Broughton for this link.

Personally (provided we are both over a cold that has been dogging us recently), Jessica and I will be going to one of the Edinburgh events tomorrow in order to add our voices and bodies in support of keeping this issue high on the agenda. You can find an event near you here.

However, political support for a strong deal seems to be waning. New polling shows that only 57% of Americans believe the climate is warming (compared to 77% in 2007) and only 36% accept that the human actions are primarily to blame. In Australia, 68% saw climate change as a threat to Australia's vital interests back in 2006, by last year that was still 66%, but is now only 52%.

With national leaders concerned about national interests, every country is out to minimise its costs, particularly since the primary dangers are decades away, well beyond the term of any of those responsible for current negotiations. Different approaches to sharing the burden are also evident between countries that have historically contributed most to emissions and those whose emissions are currently rising fastest.

And there is worse news. Even if leaders manage to agree in Copenhagen to limiting emissions to 450ppm, reaching some kind of compromise between developing and developed nations, then even the most optimistic assumptions about a best case scenario put the chances of actually sticking to anything like that as almost impossible. Clive Hamilton, one of Australia's best known public intellectuals and Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, in a lecture delivered earlier this week, summarises the situation like this:

It is clear that limiting warming to 2ºC is beyond us; the question now is whether we can limit warming to 4ºC [to see what a 4ºC change might look like, see here, or here]. The conclusion that, even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm and associated warming of 4°C is almost too frightening to accept. Yet that is the reluctant conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions—the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades—we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.

- Clive Hamilton, "Is it too late to prevent catastrophic climate change?"

The whole article is worth reading. In it, Hamilton argues that things are worse than we thought. Whereas until recently most policy makers assumed that we could limit change to less than 2ºC and that the effects of that change were "worrying but manageable", new research into the likely negative effects of even 2ºC warming and into the extreme (political, economic and social) difficulty of staying below the 450ppm barrier makes even the most aggressive suggestions currently on the table seem at once both beyond our reach and too little in any case.

So why bother at all? Why campaign for a basically impossible target? Why make the (sometimes painful) lifestyle, legislative and policy changes required to reduce our carbon footprint? If all our efforts will be too little, too late, why not "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die"? A longer answer will probably take much of my thesis to articulate. An excellent 11-page answer by Andrew Cameron in his 2007 report to Sydney Anglican Synod on behalf of the Social Issues Executive can be found here.

But the short answer for an already over-lengthy blog post is found in the context of that famous quote ("eat, drink and be merry") in 1 Corinthians 15, namely the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body. The resurrection of Jesus is a promise and foretaste of the general resurrection of the dead: for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. The distinctively Christian hope of resurrection includes the belief that God has not given up on creation, nor on humanity, and that even our stupid self-destruction cannot ultimately thwart divine love. If God has not given up, neither can we. Our actions may or may not make a difference. Our society may or may not survive in anything like its present form, but living well, with humility and repentance as responsible members of the community of life, is enough.