Gwynne Dyer Resets His Climate Wars Clock

Rossby.   Remember the name - Rossby.    Because Rossby is something that's going to play an increasing role in your life for the rest of your days, all of'em. 

When you think of Rossby, think floods and droughts, think really severe winters and abnormally warm winters.

Melting Arctic Ocean sea ice is warming that polar region twice the rate of anywhere else on the planet.   Open water where once there was ice absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting its energy back into space.  The warmer surface temperatures warm the atmosphere overhead.  Warmer air holds more water vapour, another potent greenhouse gas.   That warmer, moister air also holds a great deal of energy that's now giving rise to a much more powerful Arctic jet stream.   And, as jet streams are wont to do, it meanders in loops that reach far south that are called Rossby Waves.

For reasons apparently still unknown these Rossby Waves have gotten larger, reaching much further south, but have also slowed to a crawl.   So, instead of a nice temperate pattern of alternating rain and sunshine, the sort we have relied on for our agriculture since we stumbled upon that idea, we now get extensive, sustained droughts and, in other places, severe flooding.

The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote about Rossby recently.    Now Gwynne Dyer, who usually sticks to military affairs, is discussing it.

I’m no fan of Don Rumsfeld, who helped lead the United States into the disastrous invasion of Iraq when he was George W. Bush’s defence secretary, but I never had a problem with the distinction he made between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” when discussing the intelligence data. He was brutally mocked in the media for using such jargon, but there really is a difference.

A “known unknown,” in the case of the Arctic Ocean, is how long it will be before the entire sea is ice-free at the end of each summer. The last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, talked about that happening some time in the second half of this century, but it couldn’t be more specific.

The panel usually underestimates the rate of climatic change, but even the pessimists didn’t think we’d get there before the 2030s. I did encounter one maverick at the National Ice and Snow Data Centre who thought it might happen in this decade, but nobody actually knew. A “known unknown,” in other words.

As for the impact that an ice-free Arctic Ocean might have on climates elsewhere, it would obviously accelerate the global warming trend, but beyond that there wasn’t much to go on. This was the territory of the “unknown unknowns.” Big things might happen to the complex atmospheric system of the planet when a major chunk of it suddenly changes, but nobody knew what.

Now we begin to see the consequences. The polar jet stream — an air current that circles the globe in the higher northern latitudes and separates cold, wet weather to the north from warmer, drier weather to the south — is changing its behaviour.

...a warmer Arctic reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate and polar zones. That, in turn, slows the wind speeds in the zone between the two and increases the “wave amplitude” of the jet stream. The jet stream flows around the planet in great swooping curves, like a river crossing a flat plain, and those curves — Rossby waves, in scientific language — are getting bigger and slower.

This is a recipe for extreme weather. In the old days, the Rossby waves went past fast, bringing the alternating of rainy and sunny weather that characterized the mid-latitude climate. Now, they hang around much longer and generate more extreme weather events: droughts and heat waves, or prolonged rain and flooding, or blizzards and long, hard freezes.

The temperate zone has been seeing a lot of that sort of thing in the past couple of years — much more than usual. It’s cutting deeply into food production in the major breadbaskets of the planet, such as the U.S. Midwest and southern Russia, which is why food prices are going up so fast. This was an “unknown unknown.” Nobody saw it coming.

All the scenarios that the militaries of various countries were working with assumed that climate change would hit food production very hard in the tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world, and that is still true. But the scenarios also assumed that the temperate regions of the planet would still be able to feed themselves well (and even have a surplus left over to export) for many decades to come.

Dyer understands the military dimension to this.   He wrote about it in Climate Wars based on research and studies undertaken by the Pentagon, Britain's Ministry of Defence and prominent climate scientists.   A couple of years later he wrote Crawling from the Wreckage in which he turned optimistic, basically relying on a "belief" that we would act in time, that we wouldn't really let this get out of our control, oh surely not.  Dyer envisioned that we'd jettison fossil fuels and transition rapidly into the carbon-free world of nuclear, solar, wind and geo-thermal energy.   Then again, he believed what many scientists then believed, that we had at least a few decades to make that alternative energy world a reality.   They believed a lot of what is happening today and will see over the coming decade wouldn't set in until the end of this century.   This is the still mildly hopeful Dwyer of 2008:



Now Dyer is having his "nobody saw it coming " moment.   He realizes it's already here, it has us in its grip and there's little to nothing we're going to do about it.   If you doubt that, just look to Ottawa.  Stephen Harper is gazing at Arctic seabed oil and gas as though the world needs another huge source of massive carbon emissions.   And Mulcair?   Ever hear "Rossby" cross his lips?   These guys have jumped into a hole and pulled the lid over their heads.   They're Petro-Pols, the lot of them.  It's a Petro-Parliament, Elizabeth May excepted.   Time is not on our side or any other country's.   In fact the Arctic oscillation shows how rapidly and severely we're being overtaken by events.

So, barring some near religious conversion on the floor of the House of Commons, you're on your own.   Hang on, it's going to be a wild ride.