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Methane Monster II ~ Demise of the Arctic Transcripts
Thank you for taking the time to listen to this presentation today. It is my distinct pleasure to give this presentation to you about very critical
information in our Earths history. My name is Jennifer Hynes and I am a climate change researcher and an environmental activist. I am not a
climate scientist, but I am a climate generalist and I look at all aspects of the climatic and environmental systems. I really feel a deep sense of
urgency about global warming and climate change at this time and I have a real passion for data and a passion for trend analysis. I have
utilized that passion to galvanize me to create this presentation that I am about to give to you today on the 30th of August 2015.
Before I begin today I'd like to give my extreme thanks to some really active contributors in the Arctic Science community. First and
foremost, Sam Carana and the whole Sam Carana forum at The Arctic News Blogspot. Please refer to their work at http://arcticnews.blogspot.com Excellent articles about climate change and the changes unraveling in the Arctic.
Also like to give grateful thanks to Robert Scribbler. He is one of the foremost climate researchers and journalist out there and he has
excellent articles so please check him out at http://robertscribbler.com
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This is our Earth. Our beautiful, lovely, life-giving, glorious Earth, so beautiful, so sentient, so life affirming and giving us life. Life that is so
unlikely in the vacuum of space. We have a crucible of life on this planet and it has a molten core of iron and it's spinning around a ball of fire
in a vacuum of space. Life is unlikely and look at the earth's biosphere, so beautiful and so thin. It's thinner than an eggshell in comparison,
but it sustains our existence, but it's in trouble and it's dying.
We face a time of environmental destruction that is unprecedented in human history. In fact, we are taking this moment to come together
and look at what's actually going on in the Arctic. We're going to take a look at the changes in the Arctic and how they are directly affecting
every other ecosystem on Earth in a domino sort of effect.
We're going to be taking a look especially at the self-reinforcing runaway feedbacks that are actively working together to speed up the
planetary unraveling that is currently underway. This is not something that might happen in the future. Many runaway feedback processes
are in play and have already fired and it's important to understand how the Arctic is changing and how these changes in the Arctic will
directly affect our lives here on Earth. Do we really know the extent of change that has been happening in the Arctic? As goes the Arctic, so
goes the World. That's what I always say. In order to make anyway forward as a civilization, we really need to come to grips and educate
ourselves about the current situation of what is actually happening to our beautiful Earth.
For that purpose, I've created this presentation and in preparing for this talk today I went for a beautiful morning walk on the plains,
overlooking the Colorado Front Range on the continental divide. As I walked along I gazed over the mountain range and I really noted the
heavy haze that we have been having lately and it obscured the normally clear Mountain View. This haze has been persisting off and on for
over 10 days due to 1000's of western states wild fires. I marveled at how easily we have slipped into the new normal. It's probably not so
much a matter of willful blindness that makes us to so easily accept the new present as something to be adapted too. Perhaps climate change
information is not easily understandable or widely available. Perhaps we've become so disconnected from our Mother Earth that we have
forgotten who she is and it is she that gives us life and breathe. This talk that I will give today focuses primarily on Climate Science and
contains many charts, maps, graphs and so forth as a way to depict our current multi-dimensional climate profile and trajectory. The chilling
conclusion of near term human extinction only opens up more questions and need for discussion. It brings up feelings of loss and grief and
there are many people who are leaders in the field of eco-psychology and grief processing and they are much more skilled than I to talk
about these things and you'll find some references at the end of this presentation.
We have to begin to make room for the thought that the future will not resemble the past. This is a very, very hard thing to take on board.
Our personal challenge is to find balance amidst the continuing chaos, so I'd like to Thank all of you who have guided me along the way and I
give my extreme love and thanks to all my dear friends and you know who you are and to the loves and the parents and teachers in my life. I
am forever in your debt. So with that let's go ahead and get started.
So these days climate change is almost in vogue. It's in the news, we are having marches, and we’re making deals with China. All sorts of
things are happening and we know on some level that we are in a moment of unprecedented change in our world. Do we really understand
the full impact of the changes that are currently unfolding in our world and in our life’s? Lately the shadow of near term human extinction
has raised its head as a possibility in more mainstream magazines. It's usually relegated to works like the Rolling Stones, Salon.com,
TruthDig.com, TruthOut.org and kind of alternative publications. More recently, it was published right here in the Tucson Weekly, clearly
Near Term Human Extinction has gone mainstream.
Isn't this a beautiful picture? It's not photoshopped. This is a picture of methane frozen in the Arctic like multilayered pancakes and it's very,
very beautiful yet it poses an incredibly deadly sort of beauty to us in our life on Earth. This is the subject of our conversation here today.
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This is because a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions is unfolding in the Arctic Ocean.
Huge quantities of Methane are erupting from the seafloor of the East Siberian Sea and entering the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean.
That's a stunner isn't it?
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Before we get into all of this today, let's just take a look at where we are here in summer of 2015, at least summer in the Northern
Hemisphere and take a look at where we have been and were we are going.
So first thing that we notice is 'It's hot outside.' In fact, if you look at the trend lines for all the decades back to the 1880's you can see a clear
trend line in the upwards direction and it's not slowing down.
As of June 2015 the world base temperatures looked like this. We can see there are a lot of high temperatures going on at this point. Just on
June 1 in Baja, in Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India were very hot. You can see right here.
It's interesting to see how it all stacks out.
What you may not realize is that we had temperature anomalies. This is a global temperature chart and you can see how widely distributed
the temperature anomalies are. Take a look at this.
You can see here that there is a very hot temperature anomaly up in the Northwest where Seattle and Washington state as well as over
Siberia, yet at the same time there is a cold temperature anomaly over on the east coast. Things are changing just a little bit and this is just a
snapshot for March of 2015.
What we do notice is that temperatures are on this step incline. If you look at this chart in front of you, you can see, anyone can see that since
1960 more or less we have been on a trend line that points pretty much straight up and especially since around 1980 or so. Temperatures
are going up all the time.
Did you know that the atmospheric temperatures that you feel are really only just two percent of the total heat content that is being
absorbed by our planetary system; the ocean in fact is very instrumental in absorbing our heat. You can see the first 700 Meters of the ocean
absorbs a lot of the heat content that gets projected onto our planet and the deeper ocean, down to 2000 meters absorbs a lot as well. Land
and ice and atmosphere absorb very little
but it's interesting to know because most people think that the atmosphere is really where the action in global warming is but in fact it's
really all about the Ocean.
If we were to give our planet a name, we probably shouldn't call it Earth. We should call it Ocean or something like that.
So in any case let's take a look at the sea surface temperature anomalies, speaking of the oceans in the Northern Hemisphere. You can see
that it is on a steep incline straight up. This is a graph from 1910 projected out to 2030. You can see that we are on a strong trend line,
straight up. Well not straight up but you can see it's a polynomial trend line and it is exponentiating.
So what we can see is that if this plays out to 2030 that we will have a temperature rise in the ocean of two degrees centigrade by 2030.
That's fairly stunning and that's going to have a big affect on the sea life. In 15 years time we can expect to have an ocean that 2 degrees
centigrade over what it was when the industrial revolution began.
So Earth is now halfway to the United Nation Global Warming Limit of 2 Degrees C. We have been on a bit of a hiatus over the past several
years. Maybe 10, 12, 14 years as it had been noted. “There's a good chance that that hiatus and the temperatures are over.” says Kevin
Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
The slowdown in warming that we've experienced since 1998 (the last strong El Nino) was partly due to Oceans taking up more heat. That
could be over.
Important to note: From 1998 to 2012, the warming rate actually slowed almost to nothing. There were a lot of different factors that came
into play here: A less active sun, higher levels of cooling aerosols from volcanoes and Asian factories and also there was increased heat
uptake by the Oceans.
This was dictated by a phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and that is where the surface of the Northern Pacific tends to
flip between being extra hot and extra cold every two or three decades.
It had been in a cold pattern, and it was in a negative phase but it now appears to have switched back to a positive one. The Ocean is
delivering heat now to the atmosphere.
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Dr. James Hansen formerly of Nasa has a paper that he put out lately. It was called "Ice melt, Sea level rise and Superstorms: Evidence from
Paleoclimate Data, Climate modeling, and Modern observations that 2 degrees Centigrade Global Warming is Highly Dangerous." I do not
think that he would casually write this paper. He is staking his entire personal worth on this statement. Clearly if James Hansen thinks that
this is true, I would say there is a very good chance that it is absolutely true.
We've gone up a degree already since 1880 and according to the United Nations 2 degrees is the quote "top of the safe limit" so we are half
way to hell. We'll show in this presentation that 1 degree is actually quite enough to give us climate chaos and abrupt climate change.
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We are not out of here yet right. The temperature keeps going up every year and it is exponentiating as well. NASA actually put this
particular map out which shows the heat forecast for the year 2100 and you can see that parts of it are red hot.
So we used to think that Earth was in the perfect Goldilocks Habitable Zone. You know just right. Not too hot. Not to cold. Not to big. Not to
small. Lots of water. Everything was perfect and we thought that we were in this perfect habitable zone, but
New calculations have shown that earth is actually positioned on the inner edge of the habitable zone and we are closer to runaway
greenhouse gas heat going off the hook than we had thought.
We are in a place where we really don't have much margin or latitude for fooling around with the climate. So before we talk about all these
things today we'd like to take a quick tour through the land of hockey sticks. Dr. Michael Mann, a climate scientist, an activist and the author
of 'The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines' has written a book where he basically coined the phrase, very
properly that climate is like a Hockey Stick. We'll go in and we'll show you why?
This is the Keeling Curve. This is carbon dioxide measurement that is taken at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. It has been taken since 1958 and it is the
longest unbroken record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that exist.
You may notice that it's got jagged edges. It's going up and it's going down. It's going up and it's going down. When it goes down and up the
Earth is actually breathing, so as the carbon dioxide goes down the Earth is actually taking it up in the form of leaves and growth and things
like that so since this is in the Northern Hemisphere and most of the land is in the Northern Hemisphere you can see the Earth actually
breathing, year after year after year. The other thing that you will notice is that this is not really a line is it. It is just a little bit curved. See
how it kind of curves under, it curves over. Then we can surmise that this is actually not a line, it is actually a curve.
When we take a look at the gradients we can see that gradient of carbon dioxide that has been emitted over time is actually increasing. We
are emitting carbon dioxide at a stronger and stronger rate.
Here's an example of the hockey stick. You can see we’ve got hockey sticks here, here and here for some critic greenhouse gases. This is a
graph that shows how carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide look over time from the year zero to pretty much the present day.
What is clear is that there is a distinctive hockey stick shape all throughout the historical emissions of the gases and they are getting bigger
and stronger and steeper all the time.
As a consequence, temperatures are going up. They have only started to go up strongly in the last little bit, but we can see based on
greenhouse gases already being admitted that we have a lot of warming still to come that has not yet been realized.
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So just how bad is climate change?
Well before we can make that determination we have to understand a little bit about climate change and we have to understand that climate
change is in fact Climate Changes is really a function of two things. Two very strong greenhouse gases: It's a function of atmospheric CO2
(carbon dioxide), as well as Methane and both are interconnected.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide at this point is well over 400 ppm (parts per million). I believe it is now sitting pretty strongly at about 404
ppm. That's how CO2 is measured in parts per million. What we can see over time is that it's going up and up and up every year. Let's take a
look at the last 400,000 years. We can see that it's gone up before in the past. Take a look here, you know it's almost like breathing. Here is a
time of deep glaciations and then it ends and then it gets warmer again and as the CO2 goes down there is a time of deep glaciations and
quickly it toggles back and it ends and it takes a long time to cool down again and then there's a deep time of glaciations and then it ends. It's
almost toggling! It's breathing! It toggles between glaciations and non-glaciations but take a look at this.
That goes straight up and we have not yet realized the warming that's going to be coming to us as a consequence of that. In fact, atmospheric
CO2 levels are now hitting and exceeding concentrations that have not been seen since/during the Pliocene of 2 or 3 million years and that’s
fairly stunning and as well carbon dioxide levels today are likely higher than for the last 20 million years. That’s something that’s quite
notable isn’t it?
So what are the dangerous levels? I think we are already in a dangerous level but James Lovelock, a notable scientist predicted that at 450
ppm the Ocean circulation actually stops.
At 350 ppm which we have far passed, James Hansen wrote a paper that warming at this level will cause Methane release from the Arctic.
And at 300 ppm when we knew about the first signs of global warming as far back as 1950 and that’s where it was at that time.
So in any case, we are well into a critical time of CO2 emissions but one more fact to take away. CO2 takes just 10 years to reach the planet’s
peak heat. What this means is that when you put a pot of boiling water on the stove it doesn’t boil immediately, it takes some time. Likewise,
CO2 after you emit it, it takes 10 years to actually realize that heating in the actual atmospheric temperatures.
CO2 does a deadly dance with Methane and with temperature and they all are interrelated. Generally speaking the sequence of events is as
follows. The CO2 gets emitted, the temperature goes up, the Methane gets emitted, the temperature goes up some more and then you get
alot of heat.
Today we’re going to be talking about feedbacks in the Arctic. There are a lot of climate systems that all work together in the Ecology. I’ll just
give you a few minutes to take a look at this very interesting chart. In this talk today we are going to be discussing and at least touching upon
every single item in this chart that is marked in a blue box. So take a look. Look at it. It’s a fascinating thing how Earth systems work
together.
To be sure, it all starts with emissions, so what’s really the take away in this chart, the emissions box right here. This is us. We are putting the
emissions into the air in terms of CO2. Everything spins out from that one box. If you would like to find out more about feedbacks, please
look at the work of David Wasdell at the Apollo Gaia Project at http://apollo.gaia.org He is an expert in feedbacks of the climate.
…so kids, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
The first thing that we’re going to talk about is not Methane. The first thing we are going to talk about is the polar jet streams. For polar jet
stream work, please reference the work of Dr. Jennifer Francis. She is the absolute expert in polar jet streams and has created a lot of videos
that you can find on Youtube.
Some basics about the jet streams first of all:
They are slowing down and they are becoming more wavy
They are circumnavigating the globe at a slower speed and along wavier tracks
The waves are now more elongated, more stretched out vertically which they shouldn’t be because usually it’s like a little ruffle along the top
of the Earth, but it’s not like that anymore so now cold air can move down more easily from the Arctic. Consequently hot air can move more
easily from the tempered zones squarely into the Arctic.
Scientists now have evidence that these persistent extreme weather patterns are increasing in their frequency, due to the rapid heating up of
the Arctic that is changing the behavior of the jet stream and in turn, the polar vortex. This is fancy language that just means you get these
weather patterns that can be strange and they stick around for along time.
Here’s an example. Those of you in the United States, especially those of you in the eastern United States may recall that last winter was
absolutely brutal. I mean in the Midwest it was colder than it was on Mars. That’s unbelievable. How could that be happening? I thought that
we were in a point of global warming? Not global cooling? What’s all this ice and snow and really inclement temperatures and it hung around
forever. Well if you look at the map in front of you can see there is a big patch of purple. That’s the United States and the east coast and that is
actually the Arctic vortex that has been pushed out of the Arctic, split in half and settled on the eastern United States and the Midwest. As
well you can see hot temperatures invading the Arctic, up by Alaska and coming in. If you look down, this is a temperature anomaly map of
how much it’s departed from average. You can see almost a blister of hotness. Look at this blister of hotness right through the Arctic and
then cold over here in Siberia, but really the significant cold is right here in the United States. That’s what we put up with this winter and I’m
sure many of you went through that. So that was the splitting of the polar vortex this last November.
So to illustrate a few ideas, I’d like to do a couple of case studies and this is actually going to illustrate the polar jet stream and it’s changing
right now. This first case study has to do with the Alaskan heat wave that started in May.
And in Alaska in May it was primed for disaster. It had been since the 1930’s increasing on a trend of hotter and dryer.
In fact, May 23 found us at 91 degrees in Eagle, Alaska and high 80’s and 80’s throughout the rest of Alaska. What in the world is going on
that we have these high temperatures in Alaska?
Well take a look at this temperature anomaly map. This map that you see here on the left is actually a temperature anomaly map. Look at
Alaska. Alaska is red hot. I mean it’s not even just a little bit hot, it’s extremely hot over average. This is actual temperature and even in actual
temperature look at this. It’s much hotter than the other places and you know you shouldn’t have any red in Alaska in May. That’s abnormal.
Again to illustrate the point, look at Fairbanks. Look at Eagle. They are on fire. Clearly something is up in Alaska.
The story really is around the jet stream and how the jet stream reacted to the Alaskan heat wave. Please take a look at this. You’ve got here
Alaska. I’m just drawing it out. So that’s Alaska right there with the tail of Alaska and here’s Greenland for reference. So here is the jet stream.
It’s coming along. It’s coming along very fast and it hits this heat wave of Alaska and it can’t jump across and it gets confused and it basically
is like I have to follow the cold air. It tries to find the cold air and it pushes a bunch of itself right up her squarely into the Arctic, then sort of
jumps across and then it splits. This is jet stream. The jet steam should be one contiguous flow. Not a broken up mess like you see in front of
you here. Now the next day
Now the next day, you can see that it actually created a little stream that went all across the Arctic and this is air that’s running over a 100
miles an hour. So now we are in the jet stream and it broke in two, right there you can see it. That’s kind of how it adjusted the next day.
So another case study. We’re going to going to have another case study about the Russian heat wave just a little bit further on down in June.
I’m going to show you how that wrecked the jet stream as well. We had a Russian heat wave that happened in June that put a lot of hot air
into the Arctic.
Here you can see the same thing happening. Just for reference here is Greenland. You can see Greenland. This is Russia under here and again
the jet stream followed the hot air and mangled itself beyond all recognition splitting up yet again.
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So let’s take a look at one more case study at what happens with the jet stream. Here you can see Europe up in this case and Spain and
France and everything is very, very hot in July, as well we can see some cold air poking in on each side. How does that manifest in the jet
stream?
You have these kinds of dips that happen and eddies and it’s pushing the jet stream in all sorts of different ways. You can see the cold is
coming down and the hot is going up.
These weather patterns tend to persist. One more heat wave we had the Siberian heat wave in July and it got up to nearly a 100 degrees
Fahrenheit. (37 degrees Centigrade) Extremely hot! Right here, here’s Alaska, just for orientation and here is Siberia. This got to be very,
very hot. This is not normal to have 98 degrees Fahrenheit in Siberia. It doesn’t really happen, so here’s an interesting fact.
While the media gives wide coverage to the heat waves that have been hitting populous countries such as India, Pakistan, the U.S., Spain and
France recently, less attention is given to heat waves hitting the Arctic. But in truth, these heat waves hitting the Arctic have a huge affect on
us.
Take a look at how this particular heat wave up here in Siberia mangled the jet stream once again. See it’s coming along and here it breaks. It
goes up into the heat wave and then across the Arctic, so the point of this is that the jet stream at this point is very, very mangled. It’s not
acting anything like it used to do.
So another case study is the impending wildfires that have happened as a consequence of these heating areas. So let’s take a look at Alaska.
In June of 2015 we found that there were over 300 wildfires burning in Alaska
and you could see the smoke here. This is a satellite photo and here you can see. Look at all this smoke that’s coming out through here. It’s
just all coming through here. This is all smoke and a lot of it ends up going into the Arctic.
This smoke is going to have an affect on the albedo or the reflectivity of any ice that it settles upon.
These wildfires cause albedo changes in the Arctic as I just mentioned and we find that high temperature rises are starting wildfires all over
the Northern Hemisphere. Now in the western United States we have fires going in northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana
and on and on and on. All of these places have huge fires going on and they are also dry. All of these fires send a huge amount of greenhouse
gas and soot into the air, which have effects.
Some of these fires are huge. Would you please take a look at this? This is a tundra fire up in Alaska and these tundra fires are just so strong
and they are hard to put out as well because there is a lot of combustible material that goes very deep. There tundra fires add volumes and
volumes of CO2 to the atmosphere and a lot of this soot settles on the poor Arctic.
All of this is melting our Arctic ice cap
So let's dive into the science now and see what's up. This particular graph is plotting the sea ice extent between globally (kind of the
average), the Arctic and the Antarctic. Look at the Arctic sea ice extent that it’s currently on. You can see how steep in decline it is. Globally
the sea ice extent is going down as well and the Antarctic that's kind of yearly ice. It's going up slightly but we will talk about that. The Arctic
is really where the action is and look at how much the Arctic sea ice is just dropping before our eyes.
Now it's changed a lot actually. If you look at this map between 1980 and 2007. That's 27 years. Look what's happened. 2007 admittedly was
a low sea ice, but we are getting there again. There is a huge difference. Anyone can see that the sea ice is just dwindling before our eyes.
And the reason that it's dwindling before our eyes is that it's so extraordinarily hot. We have seen extreme global sea surface anomalies in
the Arctic and I want to take us back to last year in September, which is the low sea ice extent for that time in the Arctic. Take a look at this.
You will notice if you take a look at the Arctic above Greenland that the Arctic is Red Hot! In fact, it shouldn't be bright red. It should be
chilling, but it's not. I mean it's really hot and heat melts ice, that’s just chemistry.
Let's talk about the Arctic heating up and it's heating up twice as fast as the rest of the planet. If you take a look at this and kind of turn your
head to the right you will see the 90 on the right. That is the North Pole. -90 on the left hand side is the South Pole. You will see that the
Arctic is really heating up twice as fast as the rest of the planet. There's no question about this. We'll talk about this little dip over by
Antarctica that has additional seawater and cold water going into the Ocean and taking that down.
Let's talk about the changes in the Arctic that are driving the changes that we are seeing elsewhere on the planet. So the disappearance of the
ice in the Arctic is actually leading to warmer air masses moving over Greenland in the summertime. That's causing the Greenland ice sheet
to melt much faster. And, that also is causing Global sea level rise to elevate.
In short our Arctic is dying and at some point in the future and I do not know when that will be. I don't dare to speculate, but we will have a
time when we do not have ice in the summer in September in the Arctic and it won't be very many years in the future, but I'm not going to
make some prediction because I really don't know. What we do know is that the Arctic is in a death spiral and that ice is quickly going away.
Now when that ice goes away, there are a lot of other things that are connected to the Arctic, so the Arctic if you want to say the Arctic is a
domino that thing has tipped. It's done. It's just a matter of time before it melts, but the Arctic affects the Greenland ice sheet, the Arctic
affects the Peat lands, the Arctic affects the Boreal forests and most importantly the Arctic affects the permafrost and the runaway
greenhouse gas emissions that come out of the permafrost. Let's go ahead and take a look at this.
Additionally please see the work of Lester Brown; he is the former head of Earth Policy Institute. A real warrior on the global warming and
Earth policy front; just a gem of a man.
This is how the sea ice extent looked as of a couple of days ago in the Arctic. You can see that this will definitely go away and as well there's
going to be a lot of pulling back in here. This is more or less how it's looking at this point in the Arctic as of August 25.
Let's take a look from the top of the world. This is more or less the skullcap of the Earth and what we can see here just to give you a reference
point, Greenland is here, the Canadian Archipelago is here, and Alaska is here, Siberia and Norway. Svalbard is here, so you can see that the
Arctic is hot.
It's much hotter than it should be and you shouldn't see any redness in the Arctic, but we are seeing the Arctic becoming hot and it’s
becoming warmer in the Arctic than at any time in the past 110,000 years. Think about that for a minute. It’s kind of stunning.
So what we see time after time is that we have underestimated the consequences. So this from the IPCC model, according to the IPCC which
is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was founded by the United Nations and other agencies the Arctic sea ice was going
to last us well into the 22nd Century. You can see that they don’t have it melting out there in 2100 at all yet.
They’ve got two standard lines of deviation, which you see on either side of the line, but that’s not really what’s happening. In fact, the
observations are completely different from the modeling so clearly the model is not correct and is far too conservative.
So let’s dive into the Arctic at this point. Take a look at what is happening in the Arctic and how waves and storms affect sea ice in particular.
So take a look this is the Arctic on March 9th, 2015 and we are going to do a drilldown on sea ice thickness.
To give you an orientation this black ice here along Greenland is the thickest ice, then this green ice is the next thickest, the third thickest, the
very lavender and dark blue ice is very thin. So this is how we started the melting season.
What we found on March 12th a very unusual event ensued. We had seven different storms happening at the same time.
We had Pam down here by New Zealand, well actually by the Solomon Islands. You can see Pam here. There were a few other storms. There
were several storms up here in the Arctic as well and they created high winds and high waves and they started to batter away at the Arctic
sea ice so March 13, 2015 we find ourselves in sort of a gayle situation in the Arctic.
Waves as high as 41 feet were recorded right up here by Norway. Can you believe that and those were battering against the ice in the Arctic.
How would these 7 meter high waves that got right next to the ice, how much would they have destroyed the ice that’s just struggling to stay
in tact?
Quite a bit I would say. Let’s talk a little bit about rivers as well. This is another feedback that heats up the Arctic and contributes to the
demise of the Arctic. So we’re going to talk about baked Alaska. Again this is 2015 in May.
We can see here in May of 2015, here is the MacKenzie River running right along here and see it’s here and it comes right out into the
Beauford Sea and what happened when Alaska got very, very hot it melted all the snow, such as it was and it all flowed hot water into the
MacKenzie River.
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As well rivers in Syberia flowed into the Arctic Ocean as well, so take a look at this. You’ll find that we’ve got here this is the Lena River right
here that goes between Lake Bakal, and the Arctic Ocean, and the Laptev Sea. That’s a huge area of hot water that goes in as well we can see
these other Siberian Rivers that are over here by the Kara Sea as well as rivers over by the East Siberian Sea.
All of these rivers with all of the heat waves that have been going on this last summer filled up with hot water and they put themselves
directly into the Arctic Ocean.
You can see this is a salinity map. Isn’t it interesting? Beautiful as well, but when you know the story it’s telling it’s shocking because take a
look at this. Here is where the MacKenzie River is coming out right here and look right there…Boom! That’s the plume of non salty fresh
water. This is a salinity map. You’ll also see look at that it is almost all fresh water along the Laptev Sea in Siberia.
It’s very interesting. As well, you might not have been aware yet the Atlantic Sea is extremely salty just by nature because there is a lot of
evaporation. The Pacific Ocean is not as salty as the Atlantic Ocean, but the Arctic Ocean is freshest of all. In fact, the Arctic Ocean is almost
fresh with all the water that’s going in from the rivers.
So hot rivers contribute to sea ice decline and that is exactly what we see happening here in the Arctic Ocean. Here on this particular map
it’s interesting. This is just a couple of days apart. Nine days apart: May 9 th to May 18th look at this ruffling right here. You can see this is the
Lena River coming out of Siberia and just melting with it’s hot water, all the way up to the North Pole. The Lena River is melting the Arctic
Sea ice strongly.
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Let’s take a look a little bit further on down into the summer on this animation from May 6th to June 4th and you can see that the sea ice
thickness is just dwindling away. It’s just looking so weak and you can also see that there is water coming in here between Alaska and
Siberia. You can also see that all of these rivers are having an impact on the sea ice thickness and you can see the plumb coming out too.
Watch this. Right there. Did you see that plumb? It came out from the Lena River straight to the North Pole. It’s interesting how these
systems work, isn’t it. So a little bit further on in the summer this map from July 5 th, the sea ice thickness is in deep decline. In fact, you can
hardly see any of that green ice that we had a little bit further.
So let’s watch that green ice kind of slip away. It’s just starting to go away because the ice is not as thick as it used to be.
Now this is fascinating, take a look at this. These are four maps from 2012 to 2015 and this is the sea ice thickness compared across July 15th
for four years.
Take a look at July 15, 2015, the last picture in this series you’ll see the sea ice is practically nothing compared to where it used to be.
In fact, commenting on this picture Harold Hensel, an eminent student of Methane and climate science and a kind of a climate generalist
himself says that ‘I look at these images and have about the same response as the NASA control room when Challenger blew up. It was dead
silence. Why would Harold Hensel, an eminent person of science say such an inflammatory thing? Why would he say that? Well, he would
say that because he can see by looking at the sea ice thickness that soon our sea ice thickness will be gone. If the sea ice thickness is gone, we
do not have ice in the sea.
Let’s take a look at the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is very instrumental in moving hot water up to the Arctic.
Here is the Gulf Stream picture. You can actually see it. This is a temperature map of the Ocean. Just still water temperatures. Look at this.
Look at this all over here around Florida. Look at how hot it is over in Florida.
Here is the Gulf Stream right here and this moves up and deposits it’s warm water into the Arctic Ocean.
Just another comment here about Florida. You’ll see that the sea surface temperature was 92 degrees on this particular day. That’s pretty
darn stunning.
Take a look at this Ocean current map. Very interesting. Again we can see the hot water from the gulf stream. It goes up, kisses the side of
England and goes on it’s way kind of splitting itself between Svalbard and Greenland and kind of making it’s way about.
Now what’s interesting is when this gulf stream current which travels under the surface of the water, it doesn’t travel on the surface of the
water but it makes surface. It basically goes and when it hits Svalbard it in the shallow water as the island starts coming up and it’s hits
Svalbard and comes to the surface. You can see where the gulf stream is crashing into Svalbard here and here. It’s actually creating a huge
sea surface anomaly that is creating a lot of changes in Svalbard as you can imagine.
Here is another picture a few days later, you can see in fact that this is August 25th, just a couple of days ago. You can see that Svalbard is on
fire. It was 63 degrees in the water beside Svalbard on August 25th. That is just a couple of days ago. This is a 21 degree Fahrenheit or 12
degrees Centigrade anomaly. To think of this is really stunning. This is the Arctic death spiral updated for 2015.
You can see that there was a recovery after 2012 which we had a very low sea ice extent. 2013 and 2014, the Arctic sea ice recovered a little
bit. In 2015, I think it's going to be lower than 2013 and 2014. I don't think it's going to be the lowest on record, but I think our little twoyear recovery is over. That is my assessment at this point and the reason that I am saying that is take a look at the sea ice extent map. You
can see right here we have fallen out of two standard deviations.
The dotted line is 2012; this little blue solid line is how far we have gotten thus far in 2015. We are two standard deviations, which means
that we are outside of the model. We are outside the realm of possibility for the model.
With that we're going to take a deep dive into Arctic sea surface temperature anomalies. This is super, super fascinating. I guarantee it. In
particular, before we dive in we are going to take a look at how the sea was when it was high before the melting started and please pay
attention to these areas here in the Kara sea, all these little rivers coming out and then likewise over here in the Laptev sea, the Lena river,
please watch this area, as well watch this area, the Mackenzie River, as well watch this area. And also watch the area where Svalbard is
because this is high sea surface temperature anomaly due to the Gulf Stream and current, as well watch this area in Beaufort by Alaska and
Siberia. Keep your eye on all of these areas because they are all being "attacked" by heat, as you shall see.
So going first to May 27th, kind of the beginning of our melting season we can see some initial anomalies happening in Svalbard and so forth.
Going in a couple of months later, July 20, 2015 of this year we can see degradation happening and melting happening here in the Kara Sea
starting melting here in the Lena sea with the river and starting some severe melting here by Siberia and Alaska and the Beauford Sea and in
the McKenzie River as well as in Greenland. You can see that the melting is underway.
If we progress forward to August 2nd we can see that the melting is getting even stronger and
If we progress into August 15th we can see the melting is getting even stronger. Look at this. This brown here is actually the highest on the
temperature anomaly map, so we can see that this is over 5 degrees Centigrade of where it should be, you know Centigrade which is huge
right?
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And it's huge here and look at where the melting; the Mackenzie River, the Beaufort, the Lena and in the Kara Sea. It's melting and
progressing forward to August
28th we can see the melting setting in a little bit more.
We think that the Arctic is going to look something like this when all is said and done in a couple of weeks but you know time will tell, yet
this is their guess of how it's going to stack up for this year.
As well as sea thickness and temperature there is another thing that we like to look at and it's ice concentration. So that has to do with how
strong the ice is. If it has water in it, if it has bubbles in it, if it has cracks in it, if it's totally strong, so this is the ice concentration animation
and you can see that the ice concentration is literally dwindling. This is a one-month animation between June 28th and July 27th and you can
see that the Arctic ice is being impacted all around. I mean it’s being attacked from all sides. The Arctic ice concentration is getting lighter
and lighter and lighter.
Now this is a really kind of interesting map. This is three types of measurements superimposed on each other. This is the Arctic looking
straight down. You can see Greenland over on the lower right. This is wind, mean sea level pressure and jet stream all superimposed upon
each other. This is July 31st in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Clearly it’s not good when we have a cyclone in the Arctic Ocean because it
could possibly break up already very weak, thin, cracked ice and in fact it does.
We did have a little bit of a cyclone in the Arctic Ocean on July 31 st and that just adds to the sea ice demise and ice loss.
So eventually all this ice is going to melt and go away. It’s a matter of time. It’s being beaten up! It’s being heated, you know it’s being
pressurized. It’s being blown. All sorts of things are happening to this ice. Ice loss means that more sunlight gets absorbed in the sea, instead
of being reflected back into space. What could that mean? Well obviously, sea is darker so it’s going to absorb a lot more energy than white.
You know how it is when you go out on a hot day if you put on a white outfit rather than an outfit that is black, you’re going to be a lot cooler
than you would have been otherwise. It’s the same as with the Arctic.
Sunlight that previously went into melting the sea ice, as well as sunlight that was previously reflected back into space by sea ice, will be
absorbed by the Arctic Ocean instead. This is huge! This means that we are already kind of on the brink with all of our carbon dioxide
emissions, but know the chicken is coming home to roost and we are finding that the Arctic Ocean is absorbing a lot of heat so says Peter
Wadhams, head of the polar physics department at the University of Cambridge. He has studied the Arctic ice for over 45 years.
So this is our session break number one. Thanks for staying with me so far. Let’s all get up and take a break and stretch and get something to
drink and this is a lot of information to take in and we’ll settle back in and we’ll talk about Methane so Thanks for your attention thus far.
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Now we are going to be talking about Methane. In particular, we are going to be talking about Methane Hydrate in the Arctic and indeed the
Methane Monster is roaring. There is a journalist named Dahr Jamail and if you are not familiar with him please check him out on TruthOut.org. He is a very informed and steady journalist when it comes to the Methane issue and also all issues surrounding near term human
extinction. Please check out Dahr on Truth-Out.org.
This is Methane hydrate when it is first mined and it looks pretty innocuous doesn’t it? It’s white and doesn’t look like too much, but it’s a
really condensed substance and indeed one cubic meter of Methane Hydrate actually equates to 164 cubic meters of Methane gas. So it’s got
quite a conversion ratio when it thaws out and that is a pretty stunning thing right there.
As well, atmospheric Methane is over 100 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas over a 10-year time horizon. That’s because
when Methane Hydrate first hits the atmosphere it’s at its full potency and over 100 years it degrades a lot and over 10 years it degrades
some, but the thing to know about Methane Hydrate is it’s much, much more powerful than Carbon Dioxide.
Currently though only 13 percent of our annual Methane emissions come from hydrate and permafrost in the Arctic areas. Most of our
Methane comes from other biologic sources: wetlands, ruminants, and other sources like lakes and things like that. Right now 13 percent is
coming from the Arctic. However, as the Methane begins to thaw that number is expected to go up over time.
Methane is primarily a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon. It creates a global warming Methane veil which you can see here and you can
notice that it is primarily in the Northern Hemisphere progressing along at about a kilometer a day or so. It is more in the north than it is in
the south by a long shot as you can see.
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change) in their latest report did not really discuss Methane as a dangerous substance and
they discussed it yet they didn’t really discuss it in it’s potency and they certainly didn’t talk about the Methane Monster in its entirety so
what we are going to do here is we are going to look at it and do a deep dive right now.
In nature Methane occurs both in the permafrost and under the sea along the continental margins and you can see how it occurs in nature
and it gets seeps and flares and all sorts of things like that.
Here’s an example of a Methane flair and is it currently coming out of the sea bed in it’s frozen form and its being held in place by a
combination of temperature and pressure. The temperature as we know is going up and that is going to impact the methane emission.
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In the ground, in the geology it occurs in these gas hydrate zones and it actually makes it’s way up to the surface through these disturbances
in the geology. Maybe when the land shifts from an earthquake or something like that. It creates weakness within the layers. It creates
vertical weaknesses and these turn into Chimneys.
When the Methane starts to thaw its seeking away out because it’s such a potent gas. It’s so explosive and it really wants to come out. Once it
thaws it’s so much bigger and so there are Methane vents that have been formed around in the Arctic and they have been named Pingo
Structures. They can be fairly large like 70 meters and 600 meters wide which is pretty large and that would be a pure chimney of Methane
coming out.
The global distribution of Methane hydrate occurs along the ocean floor. It really appears along the mantle margins and you can see just
about around all the continental margins there are Methane deposits. One thing to understand about Methane is it’s just so much more
plentiful than natural gas or oil or coal. Look at that ratio down here. The total volume of Methane as compared to natural gas, oil and coal.
Methane is a very common substance. In fact, many countries are actually starting to mine it as an energy source. You can see on this map.
The thing is about Methane that it hasn’t really come out yet. You can see here this graph updated for 2015. The Methane levels they don’t
look really dangerous. They are kind of flat if you look at it. Since 1980 it doesn’t seem like it’s gone up that much. Well everything is relative
and in fact it has gone up a lot because it used to be 700 ppb (parts per billion) and we extrapolate out to the year 2040 we see the Methane
starting to exponent ate and to come out a lot more strongly.
So the Methane levels, the last 800,000 years prior to 1950 there were no issues with Methane. It really wasn’t a problem. Methane is
measured in parts per billion and prior to 1950 the Methane levels were around 700 ppb at its peak and it has natural variations as you can
see; it went up and down and up and down with the Carbon Dioxide record. Prior to 1950 no problem
but what we find now is that Methane is actually going exponential and at some regions in the Siberian Arctic its actually releasing a hundred
times more than normal and that is a shocker, you know.
If it was twice or three times that would be significant but a hundred times is astronomical. If we look at Methane only as a gas and its levels
over the past 800,000 years we see that all of the sudden since 1950, look at that… it’s gone really straight up. It’s gone from 800 ppb to
our current, very high level of 1850 area. The mean Methane level was 1846 ppb in August of 2015. Now important to note, I know it doesn’t
sound like very much. I mean parts per billion that sounds like almost nothing. It’s not really the parts per billion measurement that matters
it’s the change and how much Methane has changed over time. You can see the change from 700 to look at this. We are all the way up here, so
you can see that it’s exponentiating at this point.
If you look at it just since 1985 what you can see is that there is a steady rise when it comes to about 2007 or so. It was somewhat of a
plateau from somewhere around 98 to 2007, it was kind of flat. It has taken off galloping at this point and it hasn’t come back. We do not
expect it to slow down.
So the important thing to understand about Methane, it’s skyrocketing at this point past pre-industrial levels. It fuels climate feedback loops
and this triggers even more Methane. Of course, it’s connected to all sorts of other climate feedback so the more Methane comes out and the
hotter it gets the more other climate feedback loops get fired.
In fact, if you look at Methane over the past few years since 2013, 2014, and 2015 it’s really easy to see that the Methane Levels are really
starting to fill up. Now these are selected altitude graphs and the red towards the bottom of the year represents the air that is closest to
earth. The atmosphere that is closest to earth and the blue represents atmosphere that furtherest away more near the stratosphere.
Methane likes to kind of hang out in the mid-levels as you can see and if you look at the graphic for 2015, look at this you can see how much
the Methane levels have filled up. They are really much more saturated than they were in either 2013 or 2014, which is stunning to know
because it has been progressing steadily since 2007 without break.
So this is a Methane map and the color to pay attention to here is pink, grey is non-readings, white is not part of the data, the satellite did not
capture anything that is white. Those were misses. What’s important to understand is that pink is very, very high so if we look at this we can
see that Methane is coming up here in Siberia really, really strongly as well as it’s coming up North of the Canadian Archipelago and
Greenland and other places as well.
In fact, if you take a look most recently July 19th through August 4, just like two weeks ago or so the Methane is on a steady march up and it
actually is exponentiating as you can see.
If you look at the next Methane map from August 18th look at the difference here. The pink is overriding and anything that is pink is over
2000 ppb and that would be extreme Methane measurements and emissions in those areas.
Methane has two types of readings when you talk about it. There is the daily peak and there is the daily global mean. So the daily global mean
is like the average Methane reading and the peak is wherever that Methane is being taken. What was the peak Methane reading of that day
and you will find there are a lot of peaks in Methane readings.
Methane is measured at Arctic stations through out and you can see here that there are Methane measurement stations in Alert, Canada,
Svalbard, Norway, in Greenland and a couple of places in Alaska. It’s important to have distributed Methane readings because each place will
log Methane a little differently as it’s the local area.
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What we have been noticing with Methane emissions over time and this graphic going back to 1985 to the present with annual oscillations.
You can see the up and down movement of the annual oscillations of Methane, there are anomalous readings through out and every so often
you get these WTF? Anomalous readings and they are somewhat worrying because they could point to future Methane levels and where
Methane will be.
In fact Jason Box, who works for the geologic survey of Denmark has said that ‘If even a small fraction of the Arctic sea floor is released to the
atmosphere, we’re fucked.’ I don’t think that Jason Box would say this casually being that he is a Doctor and he does study the ice. That is his
profession, so if he is saying something like this then we can be sure that its and urgent and pressing issue.
So let’s take a look at this measurement from Barrow, Alaska. There is a Methane measurement station in Barrow, Alaska and what they have
seen in Barrow is that Methane is actually rising by over 10 ppb a year and you can see that the Methane readings are showing up more and
more strongly. If you take a look at this later half of 2015 right here you can see that it’s just more concentrated. There are more data points,
so Methane is coming up more strongly and it’s really evident.
At this point, we are going to talk about where does the Methane Hydrate exist and what affects it so this is a picture of the Arctic if it had no
ice. Greenland’s center is lower than sea level as you can see. The important thing to know and the reason that I am showing you this map is
not because it has no ice. I wanted to show you the fault lines. There is a fault line that goes right up here through Iceland and around
Greenland and up here and through here. It’s important to understand this because we are going to look at some patterns. If you look at this
area right in here there is a lot of Methane lodged her right along here on the inside of this valley and it extends up in kind of a T and that
Methane is starting to come up.
So here is how it actually looks. These are the Methane deposits and as you can see here is that valley in the middle of the Arctic Ocean that
we talked about and then there is Methane that kind of T’s along on either side. The area that is most problematic at this point is in the East
Siberian Arctic shelf. This is what we call the extreme Methane emission zone.
Methane is currently coming up pretty strongly and you can see this in the heat anomaly map from last September 2014 and if you
remember our Methane deposits map the heat is actually mimicking the actual shape of the Methane deposits. You might remember there
were some Methane deposits along Alaska as well. So what we can surmise from taking a look at this temperature anomaly map is that
Methane is probably coming up here and this is also where the sea ice is pulled away and Methane is coming up here very strongly. So this is
the extreme Methane emissions zone, right in here.
Here is another example of the Arctic Ocean. We can see the Arctic Ocean is red-hot which of course is anomalous. This is a temperature
anomaly map, but it’s interesting to see how hot it is compared to the anomalies on the rest on the Oceans of the Earth. The Arctic Ocean is
more anomalous than any other place on Earth, with possible exception of the Gulf Stream or something that is really picking up heat as well.
There is another type of Methane besides our biologic Methane Hydrate. It is non-biologic Methane and it is called Abiotic Methane. It is
created by chemical reactions in the oceanic crust beneath the sea floor and it is something that is starting to come up.
Right now on Svalbard they have found many Methane flares that are coming up right off the island of Svalbard just to the west of it and they
are pretty big. This is not from Methane hydrate, but this is from Abiotic Methane. What they have seen in Svalbard is these enormous 800meter high gas flares that rise up from the seabed. Pretty startling.
Natalia Shakhova is an Arctic scientist. She also works with Igor Semileov. Natalia Shakhova was involved with the SWERUS-C3 mission to go
through the Arctic Ocean and monitor the Methane and get readings of all the different water Methane levels around the extreme Methane
emissions zone. She has said that she considers a release of 50 Giga Tons of Methane hydrate possible. She doesn’t say when but we do know
that it is defrosting and thawing out so with that conversion rate…
you could just imagine what that would do to the atmosphere if that amount of Methane actually hit the atmosphere. It would cause a raise in
heat. She has seen high Methane ratings throughout the Laptiv Sea. If you look here at the Lena River Delta coming out here. Right there.
These are areas that have high levels of Methane dissolved in the sea water and
in fact, it was along these areas that this is a close up of the Lena River Delta. This is a record of her investigations with Methane and she and
Igor Semileov went along in the SWERUS-C3 mission and actually took these readings and you can see the readings over here are much more
heavy. That is expected because this is the discharge right here of the Lena River and you would expect that the readings here would be
much more heavy because that’s where all that river water hits the Arctic Ocean.
So sub sea permafrost is melting in Kara Sea and the Kara Sea is a very shallow sea
and what they have seen is that Massive seabed Methane escape is happening in less than 20 meters of water. When Methane escape
happens in such shallow water, it means that the water column will not be able to absorb it before it hits the atmosphere.
In this case there was a huge Methane release in the Kara Sea and you can see the resultant temperature rise is pretty stunning. Look at this
its 20 degrees centigrade hotter than normal and this is very, very worrying that things can change this quickly. This shows that Methane is
a really dynamic gas and almost an instant heating agent. So as we see massive amounts of Methane escaped in water depths of less than 20
meters deep here in the Kara Sea.
What we see here is that the global Methane levels if you look at the year 2021 they are going to be going up to probably 2000 ppb and that
is going to cause additional heating.
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To really understand Methane we really have to look back at when did this happen before and so to look back we are going to take a look at
the Ice Age. The end of the last Ice Age actually and compare it to the present day because there are actually many more parallels than you
would think!
So here is a graph of the post-glacial sea level rise from the end of the last Ice Age and the end of the last ice age really set in just (the melting
did) just a little over 14,000 years ago. The first melt water pulse that happened quite suddenly right here was called melt water pulse 1A
and that raised sea levels some looks what do we have here 40 meters, like 30 or 40 meters possibly. That is huge! I mean think of what
would happen if sea level rose 30 or 40 meters today. That would be incredible, yet the thing to notice here is that the melt water pulse 1A
has a very step gradient. There were three major pulses that ended the last ice age. This one, this one, this one and each one of them the
gradient got a little bit softer but the first one was very strong indeed.
So when this first one happened the melt water pulse what probably started to happen is that you know the ice sheets melted as they are
today and that created a lot of cold and fresh water on the top of the ocean where the ice was melting next too and the stagnant warm water
actually sank because even though it was warm it was salty and salty water is very heavy. It continued to be heated by this geo-thermal heat
that is just indigenous to the Earths system. It occurs in varying amounts in various parts of the Earth and after a while that heat built up and
there was a tipping point and the whole thing just kind of rotated like a lava lamp or something. It created a lot more melting and really
increased the ice sheet melt at that time. We haven’t really gotten to this point I don’t think, but we do see a lot of this sort of business going
on in Antarctica right now where we have warm salty water with cold fresh on top.
Here is the geo thermal heating that we see in Antarctica and as we can see here on the right Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica there are areas
of geothermal heating and some are stronger than others. In particular there is an area out on the land that has got a lot of geothermal
heating and that is going to be building up under the glaciers and cause additional melt and exacerbation of the ice sheet demise.
Now the next thing that we are going to be looking at are some grooves that were created when the last Ice Age ended. After the grooves
were created there were a lot of Methane pockmarks that became evident and what we see is that the pockmarks are actually occurring
inside of the long grooves.
This is a groove from a glacier from the last Ice Age. It’s in the Barents Sea and you can see here’s the scraping, the ice is kind of scraped
along here pretty deeply all of this was like glaciers scraping along the bottom. You will notice there are a lot of little round indentations
throughout. These are pockmarks and they are pockmarks that are left over from Methane hydrate that basically thawed and became just
Methane and the interesting thing to notice here is that these Methane pockmarks are actually inside the grooves. So because of that, we can
easily say that the sequence of events when you are going to have a Methane’s emission event which we are going to have is that first the ice
melts, then the sea water kind of mixes up and the ice melts some more and it gets even hotter and then when additional heat comes in and
the glaciers are no longer scraping along the bottom then that Methane begins to come up and it creates these pockmarks.
This has happened in the past and it did happen in New Zealand in the past. There are giant pockmarks, greater than a kilometer wide in
New Zealand from the historic record. I’m not sure how old these pockmarks are but they occur and they exist so the thing of it is that New
Zealand’s got a lot of them. You can see there are zones of pockmarks and just a massive amount of land that is covered with these Methane
pockmarks from the past.
Here is a blow up of the Methane pockmarks in New Zealand. This is a blow up of Pen Bay, New Zealand and some of these pockmarks in
here are as big as the Rose Bowl. Its kind of amazing to think about that you could have an explosion as wide as the Rose Bowl coliseum in
California, but that is exactly what they are saying.
With all of this heat that is coming up right now the permafrost is starting to melt. This is really a very scary thing. There is so much
permafrost and the permafrost itself is tied to extremely powerful feedback forces.
We’re going to take a look at these right now! This is the permafrost such as it exists in nature. You can see that this is Siberia and Russian
and there is a huge amount of continuous permafrost here, just absolutely deep, continuous permafrost. It is very, very, very big. As well we
can see it in the Northern part of Alaska and in the Northern part of Canada and in the Archipelago. The thing is about permafrost is that its
not really always going to be permafrost. So it’s neither perm nor is it frost because when it melts it’s going to be permamush and the threat
of permafrost thaw is real and imminent and guaranteed.
What we find right now is that the permafrost is just starting to melt and this process releases both carbon dioxide and methane.
The permafrost is in steep decline and over time its just going to defrost more and more and more. This graphic goes to 2100 and as you can
see its really not going to level out.
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So one thing about Methane and going on a lake, it’s a great way to roast marshmallows. If you do not want to roast marshmallows, you can
just know that the generally accepted ‘Tipping Point’ for large permafrost store release tends to be in the range of 2 degrees Celsius. As you
know, we’ve gone up 1 degree Celsius already.
These lakes within the permafrost where you saw those folks lighting those flares they are really powerful sources of Methane. Methane is
also know as CH4 which you can see right here. One carbon atom to four hydrogen atoms and its just like in these lakes all of this biological
material gets compacted and the Methane gets distilled into the Methane hydrate. The big problem is that we’ve already emitted enough
CO2, methane and other greenhouse gasses to warm the Earth by between 2-4 degrees Celsius long term and by around 1.4 to 1.9 degrees
Celsius this Century. I would personally say that this is very conservative. I expect that it’s going to be more than that, but that is the most
conservative measurement.
So here is an example. This is really not so very far from home if you are here in the United States or Canada. This is in Canada and this is a
Methane eruption in Ontario at a Canadian golf course. A little pond on a Canadian golf course started exploding
in Methane explosions and it was at the Indian Hills golf course. You can see that right down here. Not really so far away from say Toronto or
Detroit or any of the other mid-western cities. So this is a real and present danger. This isn’t something in the future. This isn’t something far
away.
So this is the Methane Monster, No, this is not the Methane Monster. Sorry, mistake. This is the monster from the green lagoon I think but the
Methane monster is this.
This is an exploded Methane crater in Siberia. These have started to appear all over Siberia. This one in the Yamal peninsula in the later half
of 2014 this one was discovered. I’ve heard that there are upwards of twenty of these things now.
They are bigger than they look. They are actually 60 meters wide. Well this particular one is 60 meters wide and it was nicknamed the
Dragon’s Mouth because it was an exploding Methane crater and pretty stunning.
This so you can see how big the people are in comparison to the crater. When these things explode, it explodes with a tremendous amount of
force. Can you imagine the force that that must have taken. The thing is about this any level of warming that begins to unlock significant
volumes of permafrost’s massive store can result in passing a climate change point of no return. I believe that is what we are seeing here as
these big Methane craters begin to pop up in Siberia. I think we have passed a climate change point of no return and this is the evidence.
Let’s turn to the glaciated areas and take a look at some of the great ice sheets of the world. So first we will take a look at the Columbia
Glacier and how it’s doing. This is a picture of the Columbia Glacier breaking off at its terminus.
So this is the Columbia Glacier as it appeared in 1986, not so very far away from our present and
this is it in 2014. Look how far back its pulled. Look this is were the terminus was before and now look it’s all the way back here and it has
two terminus’s. It’s got one here and one here. It just continues to pull back and it just continues to melt and degrade.
Another area with great ice sheets is Svalbard. This is the island of Spitzbergen and it is glaciated at the moment. It is the largest island of
Svalbard, but we are finding that like everything else is deglaciating very quickly.
So lets take a look at Greenland. Greenland is our second biggest ice sheet on Earth as we know and it’s massive. I think it’s like 1.5 miles
high and that would be pure ice and you know it’s very big. It’s getting very dirty. Look at all this dirt and the albedo is going down as it
collects soot and airplane exhaust. And all this dirt gets rinsed into melt water ponds that occur in the summertime and it gets condensed
down and forms a black layer that begins a really extreme melting process at the bottom of these ponds.
If Greenland was deglaciated this is how it would look. The middle is lower than sea level and it has got mountains around the side of it.
Those mountains are kind of holding the glaciers in right now like little pins.
Greenland contains an awful lot of ice and it really affects our life on Earth. It contains 23 feet estimated of sea level rise if it were to all
deglaciate. Here is a picture of Greenland if it were all deglaciated and you can see that it has a middle that has a little, well a huge lake in it
and that is because the middle is actually lower than the outsides. It’s below sea level.
Greenland is melting very quickly. This is how we did over the 2015 melt season in Greenland. We can see that we had a really strong start.
Got to be there above the 2 standard deviations of melt over the 1981 to 2010 average and we actually went out of the 2 standard deviations
in mid-June. It quickly went back in and the melt really seemed to slow down a lot in July and August, which is very good.
So the thing is about Greenland though is that the ice melt is increasing and it’s contributing to sea level rise sooner and greater than
anticipated. This is not good news for us.
So interesting to note where it’s melting on Greenland. You can see up here that this is really where it’s melting right now, a lot. They have
had over a hundred cumulative days of melt here in the North. I would have expected it to melt more in the Southern regions but in fact it’s
melted over on the Northern regions more. Perhaps that had something to do with the heat waves we have been having in the Arctic.
This is a glacier on it’s way to the sea and how it looks during the peak months of the summer melt.
Now the glaciers are actually increasing in speed. Ice sheets are increasing. All the different little ice rivers they are increasing in speed and
some of them are going at more than a kilometer a year. More than a 1000 meters per year around the edges and you can see that anything
that is orange or kind of a brownish, reddish looking. That is the area that is going the fastest. The area that is blue would probably be
defined as the continental divides and in this case the continental divide is actually ice.
So as well Greenland is getting darker. Jason Box knows a lot about this. He has the Dark Snow Project in Greenland and he measures albedo.
Albedo is how dark something gets. So this is just a comparison in June to see how did we stack up between the average albedo between
2000 and 2009, so taking that average and then taking June 16 to 20, 2015, what we can see is that the ice is getting a lot darker. That’s what
this graphic means and in fact the place that we are losing the Albedo the most is the place where the melting is occurring the most and
there’s a lot of melting going on up North so that’s why the albedo is increasing up here in the North because the ice is actually getting
condensed down and becoming darker as a consequence.
Now the thing is about Greenland is there are earthquakes on the ice, but it’s not really earthquakes, as we understand them. They are
actually ice quakes. When these massive ice sheets break off they are so huge and they are such a force when they break off they actually
cause a measurable earthquake in the 5-dotx magnitude ranges. It’s really very surprising, but it is in fact what they are seeing as these huge
icebergs calve off it creates earthquakes as they make their way into the sea.
The Greenland ice sheet melt is picking up speed and this is a graph that shows you that every year it’s picking up a little more speed and
there are variations of course that throw it out of the pattern. 2013 and 14, it did not pick up speed because they pulled back during those
years. Look at 2012, 2011, 2010, on the melt years it’s picking up speed and it’s picking up speed more.
The thing that’s really scary about Greenland and strange things that happen there is as we mentioned before there are these large kind of
ice melt lakes that occur in the summer and they have dark bottoms due to all the soot that’s condensed at the bottom. They tend to form
tunnels that just drill their way down into the ice sheet and then when they find and exodus either in an internal lake or inside the ice sheet
or if it finds a way out that puts it out to sea, then it just flushes the entire lake all at once and these lakes which can be quite sizable can
empty in like an hour with the force of water running through Niagara Falls. It’s really stunning.
So comparing Greenland and Antarctica, Antarctica being our first biggest ice sheet on Earth. Greenland is losing mass faster than Antarctica
is at this point and you can see that depicted here. The incline is much, much stronger.
Over time we expect the exponentiation to really set in as it is right now as we see Greenland losing more and more ice, more quickly on a
stepper and stepper gradient. As well we see the same with Antarctica, but on a less steep gradient.
So let’s go ahead and talk about Antarctica and how it affects everything because it is part of the feedback system. Antarctica has an annual
ice sheet and this is how the sea ice extent looked on August 25. It’s kind of an annual event. It doesn’t really change that much, you know
year over year.
Antarctica is also melting as you can see and it’s causing a very cold sea surface anomaly around it. You can tell the parts of Antarctica that
are melting the most by looking at the sea surface anomaly and see where it’s splashing out with those impressionistic blues. Let me show
you! We know that we have a lot of melting going on. This is West Antarctica. You know we have a lot of melting going on here and in here,
but look it’s reflected in the sea surface anomaly and that is actually real data that is being painted by the sea surface anomaly. This is the
impressionistic painting that Antarctica is actually making as it melts. This is all Antarctic ice melt and over here as well. Over here on the
East side we can see this melting here mirrored over here. This map from April 2015.
Here is a map of Antarctica if you need one for reference and it has a lot of different bits on it, so the part that is melting down right now is
West Antarctica. East Antarctica is melting as well, yet not as strongly. We do know that the West Antarctica ice sheet has been irreversibly
de-stabilized, which means that it is going to melt entirely. It is just a matter of time. We are in a slow motion process from this destabilization of West Antarctica and we will find that ultimately West Antarctica is going to result in 3 meters of sea level rise.
West Antarctic is really hot and you can see in this positive temperature anomaly map, well it covers a little bit into East Antarctica as well.
Truth be told, but here is West Antarctica right here and here’s East Antarctica so you can see that there is a lot of hotness right here. It’s not
normal.
Over the last 50 years Antarctica has headed up a lot and we can see here the red regions really represent the places where the temperature
increases have been the highest in the last 50 years and that’s West Antarctica.
It is melting. There’s no way around it. A massive collapse of ice sheets in Western Antarctica has now begun.
Eric Rignot a polar scientist by way of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and University of California Irvine. Please check his videos out on
YouTube. He’s very good. He has made this map that basically plots all the velocity of the ice sheet. This is another ice sheet velocity map and
you can see which parts of Antarctica are melting the fastest. The blue being the fastest and the brown being not.
This is a crack that opened up in 2011 in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and this particular crack. This is a picture from 2011 and
scientist working there discovered a massive crack in the Pine Island Glacier.
It really was pretty sizable. It was 30 kilometers long. 80 meters wide and 60 meters deep. So that is absolutely huge.
Now the reason that we bring this up is that ice shelves tend to crack when the ocean goes up and down, when it get’s jostled, when heat sets
in, when it gets weak and it’s an on going process that we are going to be seeing really escalate in West Antarctica. It’s important to
understand that these ice shelves are primarily melted from the warm ocean that’s below and that the ocean actually works its way in. Hot
ocean by the way works it’s way in under the ice shelf, under the ice sheet and into the land itself and if there are dips and valleys well you
can be sure that as soon as it gets past the ocean water will soon populate this and that will just accelerate the ice sheet demise in West
Antarctica and really speed everything up and more.
Another thing that has been happening in Antarctica is that the winds have been picking up around the continent itself and these giant
vortex of winds around Antarctica has been exacerbated and spun up by green house gas emissions. It’s pretty stunning when you see it this
way.
Let’s take a look and compare the sea ice extent. So we’re not talking anymore about ice sheets but we are only talking about sea ice extent
between the Arctic and between Antarctica. What we see here, look at Antarctica in the blue. Antarctica is pretty steady year over year over
year. I mean people say it’s increasing a little bit but it’s not really notable. It’s just sea ice extent. It’s an annual event. However, not so true in
the Arctic, Right? I mean look at this, this graph going back to 1980 we can see its just dropping down and that we will at some point be at
zero. It’s not going to recover in the Arctic.
Antarctica is losing a lot of ice and it’s exponentiating as well, but it’s losing in the realm of hundreds of gigatons of ice a year.
We find that Antarctica’s ice melt is actually exponential as well, so if we look at the mass variation of the Antarctic continent itself we can
see that the mass is going down. That is because Antarctica as a land mass is becoming lighter as the ice runs off and this is a pattern of
course that is exponentiating and will continue to do so.
So let’s go ahead and take a break. Let’s get up and stretch and get a drink and I’ll meet you back here in a few minutes and we can discuss
sea ice melt and other exciting topics.
So now let’s talk about Sea Level Rise and the consequence of the deglaciation that we are currently experiencing in the Arctic and Antarctic.
So as human caused climate change disruption progresses, sea level rise is happening far faster than previously expected.
Everything pointing to sea level rise is getting quicker so here again is a global sea level rise map and you can see actually that the sea level is
rising quite a bit. It has risen 8 centimeters since 1982. Can you believe that? Look at this. Look how quickly the gradient rises there and this
is the recovery that we had in 2013 and 2014 because I guess it wasn’t as hot, then look it’s off and galloping again so we’ve got the high
gradient and a steeper and steeper slope with sea level rising. I think that that also is on a polynomial trend line.
We find that global sea level rise is actually going exponential and we find that every 10 years it actually doubles, so by definition that is
exponentiation. And by definition we can’t say that whatever we experienced yesterday is going to look like what we will experience 10
years down the road because it won’t.
In fact, Paul Beckwith has said that we may be on track for a 7-meter sea level rise by 2070. That is 28 or 30 feet. Can you believe that we
would have sea level rise of 28 or 30 feet by 2070? That is really a very stunning thing, but he’s done a lot of calculations and he’s been
looking at this issue along time and he is a scientist. So if Paul Beckwith says that we’ve got 7 meters on track for 2070, I tend to go by that
figure.
He is a very steady scientist. If the doubling period of the ice caps from both Greenland and Antarctica hold up we will see 7 meters of sea
level rise by 2070.
NASA scientists say they are worried about the increasing speed of melting glaciers in Greenland, and this melting is leading to higher sea
levels that threaten coastal communities from Florida to Thailand.
So with that in mind, let’s take a look at Florida and what’s it might experience if in fact there were 3 meters of sea level rise. What we can
see from this map is that if there were 3 meters of sea level rise in Florida, Miami would be wiped out, as well as a lot of other coastal
communities within Florida. They would be wiped out!
If in fact, there were six meters of sea level rise in Florida, we would see of course more devastation and we would see the sea encroaching
on the land more and more.
Here are four maps actually of sea level rise around the world and the color that you should probably pay attention to is the darker blue. The
lighter blue is up to 25 meters of sea level rise, but I really think that we should really only look at the 6 meters of sea level rise for our
purpose’s right now. 25 meters, it certainly will happen. There’s no question in my mind that we will have 25 meters of sea level rise in the
future, but I don’t think it’s for a while.
Let’s look at the 6 meters of sea level rise and see how it looks. You can see around Florida, there’s a lot of inundation. Also Bangladesh is
gone as are parts of India in the West, in the Northwest, as well as China in the Southeast and Europe is quite impacted, Venice, Netherlands,
you know all throughout Europe. It’s quite impacted. So this is devastating for our culture.
If all the ice sheets on Earth melted and I’m not sure that they would all melt, but if they did this is what our new map would look like.
Florida essentially would be off the map. We have about 200 feet of sea level rise wrapped up in Antarctic and about 23 feet wrapped up in
Greenland, so that’s 223 feet of sea level rise potentially wrapped up in the ice caps.
With that in mind, we really have to talk about the Ocean because it is the Ocean that covers 70% of our planet.
And it is the Ocean that is feeling the real brunt and the impact of the increasing carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. This is an upper Ocean
heat anomaly map and you can see by looking at this map that the Ocean heat is very high in the upper part of the Ocean. As well you can see
that it is starting to go down into the deeper parts of the Ocean, but you can see immediately that the entire upper part of the Ocean is
anomalously hot. 2002 through 2011 shows extreme global heating of the upper Ocean.
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This is really happening more in the Northern Hemisphere where all the Methane is coming out and where all the industry is and where all
the land is; not all the land but the greater part of the land and the carbon dioxide emissions are as well, so you can see if you look at this
graph that globally temperatures are on the rise. What you can also see is that the northern hemisphere in fact is getting hotter more quickly
than the southern hemisphere. So that’s just another way to look at it. This is a northern hemisphere phenomenon that is starting all this
stuff up here.
The Ocean heat is going up. I mean, very constantly. Look at this! Since 1980 the Ocean has not stopped. It’s been on a nonstop roller coaster
ride that is straight up and we find that the Ocean is getting hotter and hotter and that is actually quite terrifying.
In March 14th, we find that there is a very high sea surface temperature anomaly of about 70 degrees right here near New York I guess near
the gulf stream. We can see that the Gulf Stream is nearly 70 degrees March 14th and it’s going straight up to the Arctic.
So let’s see how the gulfstream really affects or life and our Ocean temperature and things like that. What we can see, is the gulfstream, of
course is the gulf stream, of course it is heating up as it goes through the Philippines and Indonesia, down through South Africa, through the
Caribbean and Florida area, swings by England and Ireland brushing them with it’s heat and then of course when it hit’s Svalbard it turns
around, delivers it’s heat as we saw to Svalbard, delivers a little bit more heat to Greenland and then abruptly sinks. So that is the Ocean
current and how it’s affecting heat in the Arctic.
As well the Ocean’s are getting a lot more acidic than they used to be. That is because carbon dioxide when it’s dissolved in Ocean water
effectively lowers the pH of the Ocean and it dissolves into the water and it turns the Ocean water much more acidic.
And this is hurting a lot of the sea creatures that are in the Ocean and it’s causing a lot of death in the Ocean. Its causing very abnormal algae
blooms and all sorts of problems are happening in the Ocean that we never used to see before.
And that is because the Ocean is getting increasingly acidic. In fact, you can absolutely track the acidity of the Ocean against the Keeling
Curve of carbon dioxide and you can see that they are 100% parallel and it is a one to one correlation, cause and effect, emissions caused
Ocean acidity.
Within the Ocean, there are these beautiful creatures that give us life. Phytoplankton. Most of the Earth’s oxygen actually comes from these
tiny Ocean plants called Phytoplankton that live near the water’s surface and drift with the currents. They give off 50% of the oxygen that we
breathe here on Earth.
We find that these oxygen-depleted areas are increasing, so there are areas all around the periphery, around the continental margins and
you can see that these are areas that have become dead. There are no fish there. There is no life there and where there are a lot of humans
and a lot of industry and a lot of discharge into the Ocean, these areas then become dead.
So with all of this we then enter El Nino. We officially entered El Nino in April of 2015. That is when the big Kelvin wave that had been
stirring in the depths of the Western Pacific Ocean, right here, finally made it’s ascent from the bottom of the Ocean and it’s just a massive
heat wave and it made surface right here. Around April 9 th was when the article came out in the Arctic News BlogSpot. They had been
anticipating this El Nino for a long, long time but finally in April it came to a head.
You can see right here in this temperature anomaly map, the El Nino is starting to form right along the equator. You can see hot water
starting to pile up here against South America, near Peru; as well we have been talking interestingly enough about the Gulf Stream all this
time. Take a look at the gulfstream. This is a temperature anomaly map. Isn’t that interesting you can see it right there.
So this is actually a fascinating animation. This is an animation of the monster Kelvin wave that basically started the El Nino when it came
from the depths. So in the beginning of this animation, this Kelvin wave is at about 200 meters deep and you can see it’s absolutely huge.
Look at the latitude markings on the bottom and you can see it rose, as it’s own distinct entity kind of from 200 meters up to the surface over
a two-month period of time and finally surfacing there in April of 2015 kicking off the El Nino officially. So this is from February 2nd to April
3rd 2015.
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And as I mentioned this Kelvin wave is not unlike a lava lamp and you can see that it has the same sort of motion if you remember those oldfashioned lava lamps that we used to have.
Now this is kind of interesting. This is a comparison between two El Nino’s. We had an El Nino that was super, super strong in 1997 and you
can see that depicted here on the left hand side and also in July 2015. This is how the El Nino looked. Now you can see that the El Nino in
1997 was indeed very, very strong as the one in 2015 is starting to be, although it has not yet reached peak. It will probably reach peak in
November or December and it will look a little bit different. But what I would like to call your attention to in addition to the stripe of red is in
the July 2015 picture you will see two blobs that are under Alaska and off the coast of California. These are anomalously warm regions of
water that have been logged and stuck there for about three years. This corresponds directly with the time period of the California drought.
Let’s take a look at the El Nino. We can see here that there are anomalies going over 2 degrees centigrade and it will come to its peak in late
2015.
So as a consequence of all this hot water that is going across the equator. That is an awful lot of energy and consequently cyclones can form.
Indeed, cyclones have been forming and kind of lining up like bowling balls. I mean it’s just been one cyclone after another, after another in
the Pacific. Of course the Atlantic has had very little, but look at all these cyclones that formed within just three days in early July. July 3,
2015 we had six tropical cyclones formed in just three days. All simultaneously by the way, so take a look at this some of them are just low
pressure systems, some are full on cyclones, but they actually more or less mimic that red blistering line of the El Nino. And here is how the
Pacific Ocean looked.
We have basically gotten ourselves a monster El Nino. This is how it looks in terms of temperature anomalies on July 12, 2015. It is giving us
back a lot of heat. All this heat that is coming to the surface and blossoming over by South America; this is heat that is going directly into the
atmosphere and this will cause additional heating in the atmosphere as well.
Now when water gets hot it also gets bigger. It just does, so there is a big blister of heat directly on the equator going on right now because of
the El Nino and this caused a sea surface height anomaly that was actually seen by this satellite depiction July 21, 2015. You can see here in
the white area, this sea actually got bigger because it got hotter and in fact some of the sea level that we have been seeing is due to warming
seas and not melted ice. Sea level rise is affected by both warming of current Ocean and by additional water being added by melting ice.
Now this picture is a lot more interesting than you would initially think. This picture is from August 16, 2015 and I’d like to point out.
Remember that pool of warm water we saw off the coast of California and Alaska and all that? Well it creates a high-pressure zone and it
actually warms the atmosphere above it and you can see the familiar counter clockwise motion as it’s going there, so there is a counter
clockwise motion going and these are the storms from El Nino coming across. You would normally expect these storms to go across and hit
California with life giving moisture, but in fact that is not what happened. What we have in affect is a situation where we have a pinball
flipper sitting here off the coast of California, under Alaska pushing all these storms up to the Arctic rather than allowing them to go across to
California and nourish California with life giving water. This is pinball wizard and we have a pinball flipper that is basically taking these two
storms here which were down here and these two storms did not go to California. These two storms went right up here to the Arctic where
they are not needed. Going between the Barring Straight, between Siberia and Alaska.
What we see now is that Ocean heat is at a record high. The sea surface temperature anomalies are off the hook. Here is a picture from
August 16th, 2015 and we can see sea surface temperatures and sea surface temperature anomalies, which the anomalies are more
interesting to look at. This is the straight temperature and these are the anomalies. You can see clearly it’s blistered right across here. Here
is the El Nino and here is the pinball flipper and these storms get cycled right up to the Arctic.
All of this is affecting our climate and that leads us to the topic of abrupt climate change.
So we are going to give a talk about abrupt climate change and see how the Arctic and how the general system is affecting everything.
Affecting us and leading us to a state of abrupt climate change which we find ourselves in today. We are seeing extreme amounts of rainfall
falling in short amounts of time, very short time amount of time and very extreme amounts of rainfall, at places all over the world. This is a
phenomenon that I have called Deluges.
So Deluges are striking all over the world. What is happening? Why are we experiencing so many of these severe weather flooding events
that are supposed to only occur every 1000 years or so? Will they keep occurring? Yes. What city will be hit next? I mean who knows. I mean
it just happens all the time. I’m sure that somebody can answer that but certainly not me. Here’s an interesting question? Can the Alberta Tar
Sands be hit by such a Deluge event and if a Deluge hit them what would be the implications? Well I think that we can all say safely that if the
Alberta Tar Sands were hit by a Deluge event all of that poisonous material that they have been unearthing would directly be put into our
water system and who knows where it would go. It would be horrible, so hope that doesn’t happen.
We are seeing Deluges happen worldwide. Deluge is a word that has now found its way into our vocabulary brought to us by abrupt climate
change.
So what we see is that atmospheric water vapor in the world is increasing a lot. In fact, for every degree increases that the atmospheric
temperature rises, we see 7 percent more moisture in the atmosphere. So we are currently tracking between 4 degrees centigrade and 6
degrees centigrade as far as our temperature that we are going to be raising and just imagine what that will do to the moisture saturation
levels in the atmosphere, especially considering that water is in itself a contributor to global warming.
Did you know that water vapor is actually a global warming gas as well? It is. It’s a huge effect.
So we are seeing scenes like this. This is becoming pretty typical. We are now facing an angry climate so says Paul Beckwith. This picture
taking up in Canada around the Calgary floods that happened last year.
Now when the temperature keeps going up and the humidity keeps going up and the water vapor keeps going up, we can get into a situation
where we have something called wet bulb temperatures and these pose a great threat to life here on Earth during a time of abrupt climate
change.
What is a wet bulb temperature? Well at 100 percent humidity a temperature of 35 degrees centigrade or 95 degrees Fahrenheit proves fatal
within days or hours to people in good health.
James Hansen has said, “Even a person lying quietly naked in hurricane force winds would be unable to survive” such temperatures. That is
because if we can’t shed our waste heat, our organs fail and death results. If we have 100 percent humidity we can’t evaporate and we can’t
get cool.
We are seeing higher temperatures in the southern United States and some of them are getting very dangerous and these are getting
dangerously close to wet bulb temperatures. So take a look all down through the south of Texas, in Houston, in New Orleans, in Baton Rouge
and all those places. They are all getting very hot and very humid and this is going to be a very difficult situation for people.
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With that in mind, I would like to change the topic just a little bit and talk about earthquakes and how they equate into this whole picture
and mosaic today that we have been drawing today of these exponentiating feedbacks. Earthquakes are actually in there.
Did you know that the earthquake rate was actually trending upwards? In this graph between 1035 and 2015, although erratic you can see
again the familiar polynomial trend line of the increasing earthquake activity that we are experiencing here on Earth. Most notably, you can
see there is a really high uptake at the end of 2004 and I believe that had something to do with that earthquake that caused the devastation
in Indonesia.
So take a look at this. Pretty interesting. This is one weeks worth of earthquakes. May 9th to May 15th. What we see here is that there are a lot
of them and not all of them are small. Some of them are larger. We’ve got a 6.8 up here in Japan. That’s a little bit worrisome. Looks like it
almost near the Fukishimi Daiichi plant. In any case what we can know for sure is this: The ring of fire shown here is shaking violently and
earthquake activity is on the increase.
In fact, if you exponentate out the polynomial trend line for earthquake activity, you can see that we are clearly on a polynomial trend line
for earthquake activity and you can tell too by looking at this that the earthquake activity experienced by humans will at least double by
2027. Of course, it’s going to be very targeted but it will double.
Now all of this ice that is melting up in the Arctic, in particular the ice that is melting in Greenland and the deglaciation that is happening
along the Greenland ice sheet is having a very marked effect. In fact, Greenland as an island is becoming lighter and as it becomes lighter the
edge of the island lifts up a little bit because it doesn’t have as much weight and of course as the lip of the continent begins to lift up a little
bit what does it effect, but actual earthquake fault that runs through Iceland between Svalbard and right through the center of the Arctic
Ocean. This is called Isostatic Rebound.
As melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet speeds up, Isostatic Rebound could cause earthquakes around Greenland to become stronger and
occur more frequently.
Earthquakes in this region are very worrying, as they can destabilize hydrates contained in the sediment under the seafloor of the Arctic
Ocean.
As well, one earthquake can trigger further earthquakes, especially at location close by on the same fault line. So earthquakes in Greenland
are very, very worrying.
I will tell you why? When you have earthquakes in an area where you have a lot of Methane hydrates logged into the soil, you get Methane
hydrate destabilization. So say for example you have an earthquake along this area, all of these Methane hydrates that are within the
sediments throughout are shifted, destabilized, jostled, you know woken up possibly and this dissociates them and they begin to form flairs
and a lot more Methane gets into the atmosphere when you have earthquakes in the Arctic for this reason.
They can also cause landslides. It’s under the Ocean, so if you have an earthquake, you can get a whole landslide of sediment and that
sediment can start to emit Methane as well and Methane gas flares.
With that let’s take a look at Iceland and the volcanic eruptions that we have been seeing in Iceland because what they have seen is as well
the volcanic eruptions that have been happening and are currently happening lately could be a consequence of melting glaciers due to
Isostatic Rebound.
So take a look at this. This is a volcano that happened, I think two years ago in Iceland. Bardarbunga. It’s a steam volcano. Look at that thing.
Its just goes on. The Earth just opened up and started doing this. It’s amazing that we’re here at such a miraculous and horrible time on Earth
aren’t we.
Not surprisingly when we look at volcanoes over time this map and chart from the 1611 to the present day, we find that the volcano
eruption and strength are increasing over the last several hundred years.
We also find as well, shouldn’t be a big surprise to us at this point that our polynomial trend line is place and our volcanic activity days are
also on the rise. On this particular graphic from a period between1840 to 2008, you can see the familiar polynomial trend line in place again.
Volcanoes can emit lightening and they can be incredibly beautiful when they erupt they spew massive clouds of ash and set off firework.
This one is in Chile.
As well we can see that when volcanoes erupt they put a very exotic cocktail of substances into the atmosphere. They put in sulfur dioxide
and all sorts of other things into the atmosphere that effect our climate in various ways.
I said they are on the rise. In Indonesia, in July there were five volcanoes that erupted simultaneously shrouding the skies with dark ash
clouds. This is high drama on planet Earth.
Now volcanoes have an effect on our climate and they actually provide a temporary
cooling, so we are going to just take a look at three volcanoes and see how they cooled the actual temperatures of the atmosphere. In 1960
time frame, we had a volcano and you can see immediately after that major volcano, major volcano there was a dampening of temperature.
When this one El Chichon erupted we can see again an immediate dampening of temperature. Then when we had Pinatuba erupt, we had
again an immediate dampening of temperature. It’s because of the sulfur dioxide that the volcanoes produce. This is very, very temporary
and it washes out of the atmosphere in short order.
Oh my goodness, isn’t this one beautiful. This is Sakurajima Volcano in Southern Japan. It’s just such a high drama, pretty volcano.
These volcanoes basically they have an effect on the temperature and what we can see is that over time they are actually dampening the
temperature a little bit, so when you factor in all the volcanic eruptions that we have been having over the last many, many years, you can
see the actual temperature increase is not a degree centigrade. It is actually 1.1 degree centigrade. So we are well over our imaginary two
degrees centigrade of warming at this point. When you factor in the volcanic eruptions.
Population as well is a huge and giant challenge and in the time frame since 1970 to the present day, which is not really all that many years,
just 45 years right. We have found that the Earth’s population in that time frame has gone up 185 percent. That is a huge amount. In that
same time frame of 45 years, wildlife on the land has gone down by 40 percent. Marine wildlife as gone down by 40 percent, but I think it’s
more than that because it could be an old chart and Earth’s freshwater wildlife has gone down by a startling 76 percent. Everything is on the
decline except for the human population, which seems to still be exponentiating.
All these people need a lot of water and in fact we are wringing out the water of the world. In fact, if you would like to find out more about
population please read the work of Paul Ehrlich. He has written the Population Bomb back in 1968, he is an esteemed professor at Stanford
University. He is in the Center for Conservation Biology. He knows a lot about this so I encourage you to investigate his books.
This is an illustration of all the ground water basins on Earth. You can see that they are actually starting to run out. The way this graphic
reads is that the blue ones and the ones that are kind of blue and green are still in fairly good shape from some respects. Yet the ones that are
getting to be red and yellow and orange are running out and they are running out pretty quickly. This is something that we are going to be
hearing a lot about more about as time goes on and as these water stores drawl down even further.
Of course, we all know about the drought in California. We don’t really need to expound on it, but you know California is in a very, very
serious situation. It’s been in a drought for four years and their water situation is terrible. I’m originally from California myself, so my heart
goes out to all the people in California. It’s a terrible situation with the drought. Lake Mead is a source of water in California and it is just
going down and down and down and it went under the 1075, that’s altitude hard line and it was the lowest level ever recorded on June 23rd
at Lake Mead and I don’t know what’s happened since this.
Look at this picture. Isn’t it Gorgeous! This is taken from the International Space Station. This is a picture of New York and Long Island. You
can see New York and Long Island here. The Eastern seaboard. You can see
Boston, you can see all of these cities, but they are all powered by fossil fuel for the most part. Civilization is a heat-producing engine. It’s
been said so by many people and in fact it is. People produce heat, especially the way that we’ve got it set up.
Here is another picture from the space station and it’s taken flying over Spain and France and England and it’s absolutely beautiful until you
realize
That we are actually powering all of that beauty and night lights with fossil fuels and since 1965 our fossil fuel usage has just about tripled
and that is actually pretty stunning. Especially when you consider that we are suppose to be decreasing our fossil fuel usage now, not
increasing it, knowing what we do about the changing climate.
So how does it break down in the fossil fuel emissions? Well we can see that you’ve got a lot of coal and oil in there as well. We have natural
gas and cement manufactures and flaring. The most of it is coming from oil and coal
And continuing to burn fossil fuel risks passing a tipping point beyond which rapid destabilization and release of those carbon stores
becomes locked in. My estimatation at this point is that we have already passed this tipping point.
Look here, this is our plan for the future. We plan to actually keep increasing our coal. We plan to keep increasing out liquid fuels and we also
plan to keep increasing our natural gases. It doesn’t look based on this graphic from International Energy Outlook of 2014. It doesn’t look
like we are actually concentrating very much on decreasing our carbon dioxide output. It doesn’t look like we are serious, at all, in fact.
There is something else that we really have to consider and it is this and we haven’t talked about it thus far. It is the concept of global
dimming and what this means is that say civilization overnight just caved and no more fossil fuels were being burned. Like all of the sudden
we stopped. What would happen if we stopped all fossil fuel usage instantly? Well what we would find is that all of the particulation that
goes into the atmosphere from the energy generation and creation from the fossil fuel usage will actually fall out of the sky. It’s particulation
and it kind of shields us a little bit from the sun getting through, so it actually presents as a global cooling sort of profile for us that is most
temporary. When 9/11 happened and the world trade center got destroyed and all the airplanes stopped flying for about three days, they
found an almost instantatious jump of 1 degrees celicus (2.16 degrees Fahrenheit) in a matter of weeks. That’s stunning and that’s just from
the United States stopping its planes. So global dimming, very scary. You know we have warmed the world more than we thought because if
we stop, if we stop then it’s just going to get hotter. So that is difficult.
There are a lot of people out there that have climate plans and policies and I’d really like to encourage everybody to check out Sam Carana’s
climate plan on the Arctic New Blog Spot. He looks at a kind of a broad sort of blend of actions that have to do with emissions cuts, carbon
dioxide removal and storage, solar radiation management, Land, clouds, wind, water, snow and ice management and Methane management.
So please check out Sam Carana’s climate plan on the Arctic News Blog Spot.
So in summary: This is the “Feedback System” We’ve been talking about feedbacks today. High level of carbon dioxide, CO2 heat the world,
which melts the Arctic and releases the Methane. This Methane heats the planet more than carbon dioxide, CO2 itself, this destroying
ecosystems thus releasing more CO2 in turn. It is in fact a runaway self-reinforcing feedback system and it is in process right now.
Let’s take a look at this now. This is the runaway and global warming extinction diagram of doom brought to us by Sam Carana. Thank you
Sam for so succinctly pointing out and decoding all of these different environmental factors and systems.
We have talked about all of these things here today and you can see that the climate is all connected. That’s why you can’t say this storm is
caused by global warming or this storm isn’t caused by global warming. You can’t really break it down like that. It’s all connected and these
are all various parts of the same system that is all connected together in the web of life that forms our life on Earth.
It is the nature of a single amplifying feedback that they tend to kick off other feedbacks. This is exactly what is happening in the Arctic right
now with the Arctic Methane.
Let’s take a look again at the global Methane levels forecast to 2021. We can see that we are on a polynomial trend line going up and in fact
“The release of greenhouse gasses resulting from thawing Arctic permafrost could have catastrophic global consequences. The real and
imminent threat posed by permafrost thawing must be communicated clearly and broadly to the general public and the policy community”,
so says a scientist out of Woods Hole, Max Holmes.
That is what I have tried here to do today is to communicate what is happening with our beautiful, beautiful Earth. I am making a stand for
the Earth. I’m making a plea for the Earth that we come together in a time of Compassion and try to put aside our differences because we
have got some really big challenges in front of us. In fact, look at this polynomial trend line. Number 3, the white line in front of you. This is
the runaway global warming and projection and this is in fact what they think might happen if all of these feedbacks start going off and
interacting with other feedback systems. Like 2 plus 2 is 100. That’s kind of how it works because there are so many moving parts.
And they all affect each other. Further warming of the Arctic Ocean could cause Methane to erupt from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean in
quantities that could quickly double and triple the amount of Methane in the atmosphere. We haven’t been above 700 parts per billion, ppb
in forever and now we are at 1850 ppb. What if we doubled or tripled that amount like really quickly? What would happen to our
atmosphere and what would happen to the temperatures?
The combined impact of such feedbacks could wipe out crops, deplete water supplies and make a huge number of species go extinct very
quickly, including human beings.
So the temperature has increased in the past. It’s happened. We’ve had deglaciation periods before; we’ve had temperature increases before.
The world will still go on? We will adjust. No problem right? Well… Let’s talk about that.
This time when we are going into this crisis there are: 400 plus Nuclear Power Stations. I think at last count there were 420 each one of them
needing constant attention. Each cooling pool needing constant attention. In addition we have deep-sea platforms that are drilling for oil all
through out. In addition we have dangerous chemical plants and oil refineries that are all over the Earth. In addition, we have tailing ponds
from Tar Sands and in addition, we have nearly 8 Billion people, heading towards 10 Billion. They are armed with nuclear, chemical and
conventional arms. In addition, we have 50 million years of trapped Methane in the Arctic and Billions of years of trapped Carbon all
simultaneously being released.
We are in a Pickle. To destroy your home planet’s ecosystem for imaginary wealth is highly illogical. So well said Mr. Spock, Thank you for
your input.
As we see the risk exposure is increasing, but dealing with the ability to cope with risk is decreasing. Everybody wants to know how long
have we got? I don’t know how long we’ve got all I know is trend lines and consequences of trend lines, but what we can say is this. There
are consequences to super exponential growth in which we are currently engaged.
We will hit 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide sometime between 2030 and 2035. This is far faster than normal estimates. Likely the
safe level is below 300 ppm but that is 100 ppm behind us already. The increasing rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means that once
we hit the critical level we will be going full speed. This is exactly like accelerating a car into a walI. You can’t really put it any more clearly
than that. I’d like to Thank Kevin Lister for this amazing analogy. It is so true.
There is a great book that came out last year from Elisabeth Kolbert. It’s called the ‘Sixth Extinction~An Unnatural History’ She writes so
well. It’s a deadly message delivered in pros. We cannot afford to ignore this message. If you haven’t had a chance to investigate this book
please pick it up. It’s a great book.
In summary this is where we are. These are the runaway feedbacks of our diagram of doom. It’s not nice to look at but we have to look
through it. If we want to put ourselves in a box, we’re in number three. We are in abrupt climate change. We have not yet fully embarked on
stage number four. We have pretty much taken care of one and two very fully already. Given what we have given the Earth and how the
Earth reacts to carbon dioxide, we can expect mass death and destruction to come our way. In fact, we can expect massive Methane releases
and they will be abrupt and they will be unexpected and then they will go away and we’ll think that everything’s Ok and then it will start up
again. Methane releases in bursts and flares because it’s so dynamic. It’s kind of scary because there is so much Methane in the world. It’s
unbelievable but we have to take a look at this and this is what it looks like.
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Now this has not been an upbeat sort of presentation and in fact you can say it’s been sobering. What we are looking at at this point is our
own extinction. We are putting a couple hundred species to extinction everyday. It’s stunning! One of these days it’s going to be us. Who
knows when that will be? Maybe human beings will persist in little groups. We don’t know.
Now let’s take a look at the future and our projectories and how we are handling it.
Easter Island. We all know those great statues on Easter Island, but when those natives were discovered by ships going by they were all
starving and that’s because they depleted all of their natural resources. They had no more trees, they had no more food and they were
starving. This is the current strategy that we are employing as we address this crisis.
There’s another scenario that could happen. The accidental scenario entails nuclear war and that could happen if climate driven unrest and
instability results in a bunch of nations states all waging war together. We are already sitting on a tinderbox and I just hope that we can get
to a place of calm and compassion with all beings. That would be the best approach. If you want to know about nuclear war and the vortex of
violence please check out this book by Kevin Lister. He wrote the book last year, “The Vortex of Violence: and why we are losing the War on
Climate Change.” It is a very good book.
There is another scenario and that is the survival scenario and that is where we actually come together. We put aside our differences. We
agree to collective responsibility and selfishly just for our own survival. Can we do that for our own survival? Can we put aside our
differences and love each other enough that we can work together and face this head on and agree what is actually happening in the world?
This is in fact, out most desperate hour as a world. We have never been here as a species and it is imperative that we start to understand a)
what’s happening on our Earth and b) what can we do to come together effectively and we should first of all admit that a) climate change is
going on and b) it’s much worse than we ever dreamed. So if we can agree that we are all in a world that is undergoing abrupt climate change
that might be a good start to coming together and addressing this. Whatever
One thing we can do on a personal level and that is to live a live of excellence. Let your light shine so brightly that others can see their way
out of the dark. I think this is a time to extend ourselves and our hearts to others around us.
So I’d like to Thank people for all
---------------------This text was prepared by directly and tirelessly by Malathy Drew, of Whispering Energy in Costa Rica. Her website is WeUpLiftUs.org She is also on twitter as
WEUplift.Us. She is a giant and the greatest--both--guide and facilitator a person could wish for in large scale social media. I trust her most astute judgement in
all these matters.
Since I have two equally great helpers, it would be unjust not to simultaneously give equal mention here of David Korn, of David Korn Special Projects of Tacoma
Washington, USA. He is instrumental in all my work and has been by my side from the beginning, guiding, creating, structuring, cajoling, and preparing. I trust his
keen judgement in all ways.