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.

Words Best Left Unspoken

Ever notice how a word or phrase can abruptly disappear from our language almost without anyone noticing much less wondering why?

I wonder whatever happened to "tipping points"? Where did that term go? Why did it fall off the radar?

Just a few years ago, back when we thought tipping points were decades off in the future, we read about them a lot. We were told we had to keep manmade global warming increases to this limit or that if we didn't want to awake the Sleeping Giant of nature and trigger runaway global warming.

What we were doing was bad enough. It wasn't going to be easy getting by in a climate that was 2 degrees Celsius hotter. That kind of man made warming would be awful but it was at least survivable, not like what awaited us from far greater warming resulting from natural feedback loops triggered should we cross these invisible, unknowable lines called "tipping points."

I suppose tipping points are a bit like a blind man parallel parking. That's why we had to be very, very conservative. This was no time to be pushing our luck, testing limits.

The fact is there are signs, very obvious signs, that we've already crossed some major tipping points. Nature is now running with the ball and has a clear path to the end zone.

The most obvious of these is the Arctic sea ice. Just a few years ago the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was warning that, if we didn't mend our GHG emission ways, the Arctic could be ice free by the end of this century, 2100.  End of the century. That gave us food for thought - tomorrow, maybe. Update: now we're looking at an ice free Arctic Ocean this year, probably, if not then next year for sure.  Why did the IPCC get it so incredibly wrong? Easy, they were working on man made warming. What we're seeing today is nature's doing. We've crossed a major tipping point. Best we stop using that word, eh?

How about a new term, "Arctic amplification"? What it means is that the loss of reflective Arctic sea ice warms the ocean and the atmosphere which warms and energizes the Polar Jet Stream which accelerates the melting of the entire Greenland ice sheet and creates these things called Rossby Waves that brings polar air deep into southern latitudes and warmer southern air high into the Arctic that increases the polar melt and on and on and on.

Think of it as a progression: tipping point, change, knock-on effect, knock-on effect, knock-on effect, more change, knock-on effect, knock-on effect... you get the picture. It's called a "feedback loop" or a positive feedback loop to be exact. Positive in that it accelerates the process of change.

You can't see the Polar Jet Stream that's playing such an important role in this but you can see its handiwork, from space no less.



Yes, the Arctic is greening which is a good thing in some ways. Nice to see plants growing and migrating but nobody can be sure how this rapid ecological change will play out.

One downside is that our northern, Boreal Forest is browning, dying out. The changes underway will cause changes to precipitation, energy and carbon cycles across the far north.

We Just Keep Getting it Wrong

It's a guessing game and we're not very good at it.  The "game" is trying to work out how quickly the planet's ice fields are melting.  In essence, we're guessing how much time we have before the meltwater hits our shores.

The latest guesstimate to fall is the Greenland ice sheet.  It's melting faster than we anticipated.  What is it this time?  It's these things:

See those dark spots on the surface of the ice sheet?  They're called "supraglacial lakes."  They're surface meltwater and, as the Arctic continues to warm, they're expected to grow both in numbers and in size.  They would be a lot bigger already except that many of them manage to drain down through the ice sheet where the rivers of meltwater lubricate the ice above and speed its flow to the sea.

As those lakes grow and spread they also absorb more solar energy than the ice, accelerating the melt.  Here are some images to show how the Greenland ice sheet is decomposing:

No one has an accurate estimate of what this will mean in terms of sea level rise. What is known is that the estimate of 8 inches of rise by 2100 caused by the Greenland ice sheet is way off the mark.

Now This Is an Eye-Opener. Greenland Goes Black.

Glaciologist Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland is trying to wake up the world to just what's actually happening to the Greenland ice sheet.  He's crowd-sourced a venture to bring these photos to the public. They reveal the extent of dust and soot contamination of the ice fields and how they're accelerating the melt, the water digging crevasses before racing to the sea.

Now, remember, what these photos evidence is a very powerful, mechanical process that is devastating the ice field beneath.  This is an enormously powerful event that will impact the entire world.  You can watch it grow, quite discernibly, probably for the rest of your days.  And, when that happens, it's likely that a lot of what is seen in these photos will already be long gone.

We Can't Pretend Any Longer

The tundra is burning.  Coupled with retreating glaciers and loss of Arctic sea ice, we now have three global warming feedback loop mechanisms that are plainly visible to the naked eye from space.

This is not the face of man-made or anthropogenic global warming.   No, we pulled the trigger but the Earth did the rest.  And now we're pretty much powerless to stop any of it.   We can't stop the tundra from burning, releasing greenhouse gases, spreading soot to northern ice caps and exposing the permafrost underneath, itself a rich source of massive quantities of once safely stored greenhouse gases.   We can't stop that and we're not even pretending we have that under control or that we're going to do anything about it.  Instead we just talk about something else, anything else.

Actually we're doing more than talking.   We're in a furious race to extract any fossil fuel we can pump, explode, boil or mine out of the ground.  We're eying the loss of the Arctic sea ice not as a disaster but as a terrific opportunity to extract fossil fuel energy from beneath the sea bed.  It's as though all this fossil fuel, that has lain safely buried beneath our feet since long before the appearance of man suddenly has a best before date and the clock is ticking.

The Americans have suddenly discovered new sources of oil and gas, potentially greater than the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.  It still won't be enough to relieve them of their entire need for foreign oil but it could come a long way to self-sufficiency.   So, what is the buzz in the States?   Exporting.   They want to export their windfall, especially the least carbon-intensive stuff, the natural gas.

As The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk revealed in his expose on the Nexen deal, the fossil fuelers are now in desperation mode.

"Just a couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal inadvertently explained Prime Minister Stephen Harper's extreme bitumen jingoism, the dismantling of domestic environmental legislation as well as Ottawa's promiscuous overtures to Communist China's authoritarian capitalists, including the perfunctory approval of CNOOC's takeover of Calgary-based Nexen.

"In language that no petro politician would use, the Journal boldly announced the obvious: Canada's bitumen was "suddenly, not a sure thing." Or even a smart one. The boom was over. 

"...Bitumen's ailing prospects also explain the government's secretive negotiation of a one-sided investment treaty with China that could make China's highly subsidized and corrupt state owned enterprises the nation's number one foreign investors by 2017.

"Harper's disregard for democratic sentiment on these issues (Canadians and Albertans in particular remain opposed to a CNOOC sell-out, let alone the trade deal) ultimately spell one word: desperation. And desperation in a bust and boom petro state, as any North African can tell you, is not a pretty thing."

It's a feature common to warfare that the gunfire reaches a crescendo in the minutes before a cease-fire comes into effect.  Is something similar happening with fossil fuels?   Are the fossil fuelers and their political minions at last coming to realize they're caught up in a volatile and high-risk fossil fuel bubble?  Are they finally figuring out that all those reserves on their books are woefully sub-prime assets?   Is this a giant "going out of business sale", an "everything must go" petro-bacchanal? 

If Nikiforuk and others, who've been warning us about this bubble for a good long time, are right then Canada and especially Alberta are in trouble.  Despite all its supposed Tar Sands wealth, the Alberta government is running in the red.  Now why would that be?   Could it be high unemployment?  No.  Well, it must be something.

So, with the North warming, the ice melting, the tundra thawing and burning, is this really a good time for a national blow out sale on fossil fuels?   What does this say about us?   What does it mean for our future and that of our children?

Isn't it time our political classes had an adult conversation with us?  Wouldn't it be nice if they would explain how their energy policies are to be brought into conformity with our environmental imperatives?   Tundra fires tell us something, that we have the cart ahead of the horse.