All that Fuel Just Sitting There Waiting to Burn

It was so much easier when you could think of the Arctic as white, covered in a crisp layer of snow and ice. Today you have to think green as in vast tracts of ice-free ocean and exposed tundra and permafrost.

The tundra, largely frozen peat, is thawing and drying out. Peat is what people used for centuries to heat their homes.

There are a lot of peat bogs in the Lower Mainland, the largest being the Burns Bog. Every now and then part of it will catch fire and firefighters have a hell of a time putting it out. It takes days - if they're lucky.

Here's a riddle. What do you call a large peat bog on fire where there's no firefighters? You call it Greenland. Here's a satellite photo of a peat wildfire in Greenland last summer.

So, as you can imagine, such a fire releases loads of CO2 into the atmosphere but that's not the only problem. A potentially bigger problem is the soot carried on the winds, black carbon that lands to coat the Greenland ice cap.

Now you probably realize that white reflects the heat of the sun. That's why those Saudi princes are all cloaked in white from head to toe. Dark stuff, especially black stuff, absorbs that solar heat. That's as true for you in a heatwave as it is for ice that gets coated in soot, black carbon.  From Scientific American:

Scientists who studied the wildfire said that nearly a third of the soot landed on Greenland’s ice sheet. They warned that much bigger blazes could move through the icy island in the future, and the emissions from these fires could contribute to further melting of the already thinning ice sheet. 

“I think it’s a warning sign that something like this can happen on permafrost that was supposed to be melting at the end of the century,” rather than today, Andreas Stohl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), told Live Science.

...Using a computer model to simulate how soot would have been carried in the atmosphere, the researchers estimated that about 7 tons of an aerosol called black carbon—30 percent of the total emissions from that fire—landed on the ice sheet.

This amount of carbon didn’t have much of an impact on the ice sheet’s overall albedo, or reflectivity, Stohl and Evangeliou said. The wildfire, while unprecedented in size for Greenland, was small in comparison to the wildfires that raged over mainland North America last year. (Record-breaking wildfires in British Columbia in 2017 burned more than 4,600 square miles, or 12,000 square kilometers, according to Canadian news magazine Maclean’s.) By sending giant smoke plumes into the atmosphere, the North American fires deposited much more carbon on the Greenland ice sheet than the Greenland wildfire, Evangeliou said. However, the Greenland fire was much more effective at dropping carbon onto the ice sheet, he explained.

...Perhaps more worrisome, these peat fires can burn underground and unnoticed for a long time. Stohl noted that smoldering peat fires in Indonesia can burn for years before they flare up again on the surface. 

“We cannot actually be sure that the fires (in Greenland) are out,” Stohl said.

Now, here's the thing. There are vast peatlands across the far north. Canada has about a third of the peat on the planet.  And a lot of that peat tends to be in places so sparsely populated as to be effectively unpopulated. Who you gonna call? No one, that's who.

That peaty tundra has provided an insulating blanket for the methane-rich permafrost beneath. Permafrost is mainly soil, sand and gravel held together by ice. Scientists recently found that permafrost contains far more methane than had been expected.

So we seem to be confronted by a convergence of forces at play on the cryosphere that may be unstoppable at this point. These include western forest fires and tundra fires, both releasing CO2 and black carbon to the atmosphere, plus thawing permafrost releasing long sequestered methane into the atmosphere.

As Andreas Stohl observed, this was expected to happen by the end of the century only that estimate was out by some 80 plus years. Our bad. We got it way wrong. Our pessimistic forecasts turned out to be wildly optimistic. Oopsie.

What can we do to stop it? No one seems to have a quick fix answer. Okay then, what can we do to make it even worse, far worse? That's easy. Let's just stick to what got this nightmare rolling, fossil fuel energy. Better yet, let's just push really high-carbon fossil fuels on the world markets, as much as we can, as fast as we can. We can even build bigger and better pipelines. And an armada of big, wallowing, fat ass oil tankers. They won't all get through but a lot of them won't sink. Yeah, that's the ticket. Oh wait, some guy in Ottawa has already thought of that. Damn.

Well, That's Certainly Sooner Than We Had Expected. 1.5 C In Just Five Years.

Who can forget the heady days of 2015 when a newly minted prime minister and his enviromin stormed the Paris Climate Summit to promote a new global warming limit of just 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, sweeping aside the old target of 2C by 2100,

So, how is that working out? Well, Canada is well off target for meeting its greenhouse gas emissions reductions. And we're still sticking with Stephen Harper's pathetic targets. In other words, they were just f#@king with ya.

The fact is, it seems we're already out of time for that 1.5 C nonsense. Britain's Met Office warns that we're going to break through that 1.5 C ceiling in  the next five years.

“It is now possible that continued warming from greenhouse gases along with natural variability could combine so we temporarily exceed 1.5C in the next five years,” said Stephen Belcher, the chief scientist at the Met Office.

Global temperatures have been steadily rising over the past 20 years, and in each of the last three years averages have topped the 1C threshold. Last year was the second hottest on record, and the hottest not to have been given an additional boost by the El Niño effect.

The 1.5C threshold was set at Paris as an ambitious target because scientists fear that a world warmer than that would be susceptible to ever wilder climactic events that in turn would precipitate greater drought, habitat loss, food insecurity and mass migration.

The thing to bear in mind is that we've already "locked in" centuries of warming. The greenhouse gas, CO2, lasts for centuries. How many centuries we still don't know. Methane, by contrast, is 104 times more powerful than CO2 over the first 20 years but falls off quickly after that so, by the end of a hundred years, its warming factor is only 28 times more powerful than CO2. A mere 28 times. It's like the burner on the stove that you can't turn off.

And every tanker that sails from a Canadian port with a gutload of high-carbon bitumen makes an already nightmarish situation far worse. Trudeau knows that. Notley knows that. They don't give a f#@k what happens to your grandkids. They've got bitumen to flog, as much and as fast as possible.

And here's another thing to bear in mind. These figures are based on man-made emissions - methane from agriculture, CO2 from internal combustion engines, that sort of thing. Only now we're not alone. We've awoken the sleeping giant, nature itself. As we've thawed the Arctic nature is releasing increasing volumes of seabed methane, clathrates, and methane no longer safely sequestered within the melting tundra and permafrost.

Three Million Years, Are You Kidding? Another Record for Mankind.

Atmospheric CO2 levels got a bump last year to 403.3 ppm, up from 400.0 ppm in 2015. This is all getting into ancient records territory. The last time our planet's atmosphere logged 403.3 ppm CO2 was about 3 million years ago.



“Globally averaged concentrations of CO2 reached 403.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2016, up from 400.00 ppm in 2015 because of a combination of human activities and a strong El Niño event,” according to The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the UN weather agency’s annual flagship report.
...

The last time Earth experienced similar CO2 concentration rates was during the Pliocene era (three to five million years ago), when the sea level was up to 20m higher than now.

“Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, we will be heading for dangerous temperature increases by the end of this century, well above the target set by the Paris climate change agreement,” World Meteorological Organisation chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

The momentum from the Paris accord in 2015 is faltering due to the failure of national governments to live up to their promises. In a report to be released on Tuesday, UN Environment will show the gap between international goals and domestic commitments leaves the world on course for warming well beyond the 2C target and probably beyond 3C. International efforts to act have also been weakened by US president Donald Trump’s decision to quit the accord.

Prof Dave Reay, professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, said: “This should set alarm bells ringing in the corridors of power. We know that, as climate change intensifies, the ability of the land and oceans to mop up our carbon emissions will weaken. There’s still time to steer these emissions down and so keep some control, but if we wait too long humankind will become a passenger on a one-way street to dangerous climate change.”

Just to refresh, let's unpack those warnings. We need "rapid cuts" in atmospheric greenhouse gas loadings. That's rapid as in R.F.N. Not some $20 a tonne carbon tax. Rapid, big, cuts - now. One part of that challenge is to rapidly decarbonize our societies and our economies. Another part is to find some damn way to capture massive quantities of atmospheric greenhouse gases. And this is no longer a matter of just man-made CO2 emissions either. We've awakened that sleeping giant, Earth, and it's now in the game of releasing massive amounts of once safely sequestered greenhouse gases - CO2 from overheated forests and soil as well as wildfires in our temperate forests and tundra plus mega-methane releases from thawing permafrost and melting seabed methane clathrates. So, kids, we have to wipe our own bottoms and Mother Nature's and those bottoms aren't getting any nicer with the passage of time.