Tipping points
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| Photo by Josh Barwick on Unsplash |
Those wanting to prepare for future weather events and are interested in working on ways to avoid the worse need to dig deeper. This post is not intended to cover all scenarios or even all categories of scenarios, but to give a hint that there is more information out there.
And, to be blunt: as bad as you think it is, it is likely worse, and might be far worse for several reasons.
The earth is resilient and it takes time to start to break
We’ve been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for over a hundred years and most of us haven’t paid much of a price until recently. Some people still think climate change is not a big deal and figure we have another hundred years before things get bad.
There is a lag between the cause and effect of climate change, time for things to start to break. For example, we warm the climate and there is severe drought in a heavily forested area. The trees are also being damaged by more insects because more survive milder winters. Maybe a disease takes a foothold with warming average temperatures. These all stress the trees. But mature trees are strong and can take a lot of punishment. We might not notice much of a problem until the trees die.
Drought, insects, disease, and bonehead actions by humans eventually kills millions of trees. People living nearby notice this, but others might not.
Finally a massive wildfires blazes out of control destroying and killing over a wide area. Now people suddenly notice the final effect but might not recognize the root cause of the problem.
In the past the forest would likely regrow on its own or with help. However, with climate change some forests may not return in the children’s lifetimes of the young children today. There are many examples, coral reefs being another high profile example, each like a canary in the coal mine.
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| Loss of forests around the world is unfortunate |
Feedback loops and tipping points
The situation leads to another reason – cascading effects and tipping points. Kill off a huge number of trees and the amount of CO2 taken out of the atmosphere and stored is reduced. In addition, carbon that was removed is reintroduced as CO2 into the atmosphere during the fire. So there is more CO2 in the environment even without considering direct human emissions.
Frozen things don’t like global warming
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| Public domain files |
Communities in Alaska and other places have had to move from ancestral lands because the ground is melting under their houses. The earth warms because of greenhouse gases, causing some of the permafrost to melt releasing greenhouse gases. Leading to more heat trapped, more melted permafrost, and more greenhouses gases released. The loop is not pretty and there is a lot of permafrost.
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| USGS picture of collapsing permafrost |
Melting of large areas of ice and snow is another tipping point. Sunlight hitting white ice is reflected back as light. In this case the amount of greenhouse gas doesn’t matter because the light passes back into space as easily as it came in.
I remember visiting Glacier National Park in 1976. The park rangers said then that they expected all the glaciers to melt away, possibly in my life time. Glaciers are also melting away on Greenland, Antarctica, and pretty much everywhere else. The ice floating around the north pole and pretty much everywhere else is also melting.
This gets to the tipping point. Say the ice on land or floating is however thick, 100 feet. Half of the ice melts leaving 50 feet of ice over the same area (in this simplified example) reflecting sunlight. We don’t see any major change and we might think we don’t have a problem.
Once the ice completely melts then sunlight is absorbed by the dark ground or ocean and converted into heat that can be trapped by the greenhouse gases. It is now harder to recover because more heat is trapped because more heat is generated from dark surfaces of the planet and we get more global warming melting more ice even if humans don’t emit another pound of CO2.
Climate scientists
We know what we know about climate and climate change because of climate scientists. Scientists are rather conservative and report what they can prove or what they have a very high confidence in.
And of course climate scientists have been attacked by powerful people since they first raised the issue. (Much like tobacco companies attacked the science of the cancer risks.) So, most of the projections these dedicated men and women have presented have been very conservative, typically close to best case, rather than most likely or worse case.
Further, no one is perfect and we can’t create perfect climate models. And we are not funding enough research. We don’t know when the tipping points will be reached. We don’t even know all the tipping points. We don’t know all the feedback loops or the possible speed of the ones we recognize. We also don’t know all the cascading and interrelated effect of the changes. A recent United Nations Climate report giving a twelve year warming was criticized for being too scary and also not scary enough.
Man has never lived in this climate and it is changing faster than we perceive. I want to get to the good stuff about preparing and responding to climate change but I still need to talk about the oceans before I can talk about how islands like Grenada and Dominica and other nations might improve their situation.
In other news
The Bishop came to visit Holy Cross Parish and School the week. We have been without a priest for some time and I guess he is coming to see how things are in Munich. He stopped by to visit with students and teachers and he also saw the new school on Friday.
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| Bishop leading the school in prayer |
On the topic of the new school. The plan is to move in September. The principal and others think that there is too much stuff to get don't before the start of the final term. I'm due to complete my 2 years in Eastern Caribbean in August and I'm yet not sure what my next step is in that regard.
Love always,
John
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