How did we get to this point on the only inhabitable planet in our Solar System? We did it by extracting and burning carbon accumulated over hundreds of millions of years through natural geological and climatological processes. And we did it in two centuries. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until 1970 our burning of fossil fuels, our cement making, our manufacturing industries, our heating requirements, and our use in transportation produced 420 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions of which the majority was carbon dioxide. But between 1970 and 2011 we tripled the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere reaching more than 1.3 trillion tons.
Asking our atmosphere to absorb that much carbon in gaseous form without expecting changes to its chemical balance would be naive, to say the least.
And expecting the rest of the planet to absorb the extra carbon within the atmosphere through natural carbon sinks in light of continued human activity — industrial expansion, further fossil fuel resource development and extraction, the growth in marine and land transportation, and the enormous explosion in world population, approximately double what it was in 1970, without something giving, would also be naive.
Some interesting statistics:
What’s so special about CO2 and why we have to pay attention to the amount we emit?
So having CO2 in our atmosphere is a good thing if kept in balance.
For climate change skeptics who argue that more CO2 will mean more lush vegetation and higher crop yields, the most recent search points out that other factors such as precipitation and soil nutrients play a much more important role.
Then there is the presence of natural carbon sinks on the planet. These include:
As we stated before, the oceans since 1970 have absorbed more than a quarter of all the CO2 we have emitted into the atmosphere. That amount of CO2 has created a noticeable impact on the ocean’s pH balance which has gone from 8.2 to 8.1 meaning the ocean is getting more acidic. With so much ocean life dependent on a higher pH to allow for shell formation, this type of drop has potential negative ecological consequences. With more CO2 in the ocean it is absorbing long-wave radiation in increasing amounts and getting warmer as well. And warmer water expands raising sea levels. And sea levels rise too when sea ice melts because it is in contact with warmer water.
As for the atmosphere, the consequences of increased CO2 have coincided with a warming of 1.0 Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above mean values from less than 150 years ago when we first started keeping accurate temperature records. Coincidence or correlation? I’ll let you decide.
The world’s climatologists and scientists already have and the result has led to a culmination with a worldwide agreement signed in Paris to address carbon in the atmosphere, and in particular CO2 levels. Countries have pledged to reduce emissions but since the 2015 signing, CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions have increased.
So the world’s nations have looked at their options of which there are four.
Option #1 is the Trump option. The U.S. under Trump has announced its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. The administration has loosened regulations governing sources of carbon pollution. And although there is resistance from lots of American cities and a number of states, the results have seen American emissions go up since Trump took office.
And don’t think China is off the hook even though it professes to be committed to the Paris Climate Agreement. Although China has been building renewable energy resources at a dramatic pace until very recently, and has closed or is phasing out domestic coal-fired power plants, it has chosen to export its carbon emissions by being a prime contractor for the building of coal-fired power plants throughout the Developing World.
Without the U.S. and China committed to emission reductions that are real and measurable, the world is going along in Option #1 and the rest of us are along for the ride.
Option #2 is what Paris was all about if the agreement had been binding, rather than non-binding. The political will of leadership to make the hard choices of decarbonizing seems to be absent with exception of those countries already being overwhelmed by visible and measurable changes associated with atmospheric and oceanic warming (Pacific and Indian Ocean island nations in particular, and low-lying countries like Bangladesh).
Part of the problem of achieving Option #2 is the lack of alternatives to the status quo. What do we do about cement and steel? What do we do to decarbonize transportation rapidly? Can we abandon the internal combustion engine in a flash? And what about air travel and marine shipping and the emissions these two methods of transportation produce? Should we be grounding all planes and keeping marine shipping anchored? And what about shutting down coal-burning power plants when countries in the Developing World are energy hungry as their economies expand?
So far, a few countries have attempted to introduce market mechanisms to inhibit carbon emissions. These have included pricing carbon through a levy or tax based on tonnage, and industry sector caps with companies buying and selling carbon credits. China has rolled out a carbon trading program for the entire country but how reliable will its reporting be? California is the paradigm for cap-and-trade. And Canada is attempting to become the first G7 nation to impose a progressively higher price on every ton of carbon pollution beginning this year. Will such market-based strategies keep warming to under 2 Celsius? Highly unlikely unless universally adopted to alter human behaviour on a global scale.
Option #3 comes with two acronyms, CCS, and CCUS. The first stands for carbon capture and sequestration. The second stands for carbon capture utilization and storage. Option #3 involves full-scale carbon removal from the atmosphere to achieve zero emissions. And going beyond that Option #3 can reverse the amount of CO2 over time to produce negative emissions.
The problem with Option #3 is startup costs. Every CCS and CCUS project so far have been very expensive. Without government money, all would never come to fruition. And although there are hundreds of sites where CCS and CCUS projects are in the works, the scale of the requirement requires tens of thousands of these installations.
There is also the issue of finding sufficient places to store captured carbon beneath the surface of our planet. An inventory of stable underground containment needs to be explored before we can pump CO2 into these natural geological subterranean structures. Some CCS proponents have suggested we create impermeable storage tanks sunk into the ocean where we can fill them with CO2. Should some of these “permanent” sequestration sites start leaking as is bound to happen then we will need a further remedy.
The cost, based on estimates by the Energy Transitions Commission, a global body, for net-zero technological solutions would be in the trillions of dollars annually to get to atmospheric carbon levels circa 1970.
Option #4 is by far the most problematic. Blocking the sun through human manipulation of the atmosphere is not a trivial thing. What would be involved? Countries would send aircraft into the stratosphere to spray aerosols to reflect sunlight. This geoengineering of the atmosphere would require repetition. Once started you couldn’t stop because the effect of the aerosols would wear off and the blowback could mean sudden spikes in mean global temperatures. And then there is the unknown? How much aerosol volume would produce how much of a drop in mean global temperatures? How would aerosols in the stratosphere affect global precipitation patterns? What if blocking the sun caused a drought in an area of the world, or altered ocean circulation, or impacted extreme weather events like hurricanes and typhoons?
What if some countries turned Option #4 into a weapon? Whether wittingly or unwittingly, deploying aerosols can easily set off unintended consequences. Spraying aerosols in one area could lead to significant climate change far away from the deployment. And a country could begin to use aerosols as a weapon to damage the agricultural production of a rival or cause its freshwater resources to be negatively impacted. With little in the way of international agreement on the technology and its deployment, we could see weather wars emerge. So Option #4 could be the worst of all the technological fixes we humans have ever thought of as a means to address atmospheric warming.
I’m betting that getting international agreement on deploying aerosols in the stratosphere will certainly be as difficult as it was to get a non-binding climate agreement such as the one signed in 2015 in Paris. And finally, when looking at Option #4, it will do nothing to reverse the acidification of the world’s oceans.
So there you have it. Four options and its decision time according to the latest scientific reports on our warming planet. Which to choose? What level of sacrifice are humans willing to make to ensure a sustainable environment for future generations?
Scientists have noted in several peer-reviewed studies that the Jet Stream in the northern hemisphere is not acting in a normal way. That’s why the last few years have witnessed sudden polar vortices that descend over parts of North America, Europe, and Central Asia, bringing abnormally cold weather for longer than normal periods of time.
It is a meandering Jet Stream that is seen as the cause. And now it is bringing Sahara Desert dust to the North Pole by pulling dust from North African cyclonic events and transporting the stuff in large amounts to the extreme north. The researchers note an increasing frequency in the phenomenon over the last few decades believing that change brought about by rising global temperatures is the primary cause.
The dust forms an aerosol that serves to dampen the normal radiative effect of Arctic ice. The Arctic is seeing more clouds as a result, which rain down grit in the form of carbon and mineral dust which is then deposited on the sea and land ice contributing to accelerated melt. The study states that “coarse size aerosol particles such as dust act like greenhouse gases by absorbing and emitting longwave radiation…..The longwave radiation plays a particularly important role in the energy balance in the Arctic because of prolonged polar nights with little or no sunlight.” The end result, radiative heating of ice surfaces with near-surface temperatures increasing.
The average lifetime of an aerosol particle from the Sahara can vary from days to weeks. Maximum concentrations occur during a period known as the Arctic haze season (late winter and early spring). The aerosols then accumulate as they rain out or fall to the surface where their physical, chemical and thermodynamic properties destabilize the ice surfaces.
The research shows that 60% of the Arctic dust appearing in the spring comes from the Sahara with a lesser contribution from the Taklamakan, Gobi, and other deserts. The mineral and carbon dust contributes to 24% of the absorption mass in the spring and summer contributing to thermodynamic changes in the ice.
This appears to be the first comprehensive study linking Saharan mineral and carbon dust to the Arctic albedo effect responsible for the shrinking of inland glaciers, ice shelves, and sea ice.
The authors of the study used observations from instrumentation on board the Meteosat geostationary satellite to compile the data, as well as data from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. From these sources, they were able to create a computer model that validated the distribution of Saharan dust from North Africa to the Arctic.
Our increasing understanding of the role the Jet Stream plays is significant as data we collect show an increased meandering “in a waveform pattern that allows the extensions of low pressure lobes and cold fronts much further to the south. …. These low pressure lobes can become stationary for a few days and block the normal circulation of the atmosphere.” It is this phenomenon that generates the dust storms in the Sahara and facilitates the transfer of aerosols to the far north.
We now know that here on Earth atmospheric dust can travel a very long way from its source. The phenomenon is not unique to our planet. In the past year, Mars has seen what started as a local dust storm grow into a global one that is only now, many months later, beginning to subside. The rover, Opportunity, may have been a victim of the aerosol storm that blanketed Mars. And recently images and data from the Cassini spacecraft show that a similar phenomenon is native to the Saturnian moon Titan.
While less dramatic than Mars or Titan here on Earth, and less obviously visible, we are witnessing a similar phenomenon on our planet and the movement of the dust poleward and westward is impacting the thermodynamics and albedo of the ice of Greenland, the Canadian Arctic archipelago, and the Arctic Ocean.
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The article, entitled Evidence for a continuous decline in lower stratospheric ozone offsetting ozone layer recovery, is a research collaboration involving scientists from the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos World Radiation Centre, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, New York, Imperial College London, Stockholm University, Hampton University, University of Saskatchewan, University of Colorado, Boulder, Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, NOAA, Morgan State University, Baltimore, and others. In other words, this isn’t just a one-off observation, but rather a compilation of accumulative research with profound implications for our planet.
The key findings:
It’s the latter point that has the researchers concerned. If it can’t be modeled then it becomes hard to figure out if this is a natural phenomenon or human-caused.
For those readers less familiar with the composition of our atmosphere I provide a brief explanation.
The atmosphere consists of a number of layers. Where we humans and almost all life exists is in the troposphere. Here oxygen and water vapour are abundant, and the thickness of the air provides reasonable protection from cosmic and solar radiation.
The layer above the troposphere is the stratosphere. Stratus clouds, those icy wisps often called mare’s tails, form in the lower stratosphere. Where modern commercial jets fly is in the lower stratosphere. And in the stratosphere, a layer of trioxygen molecules made up of oxygen we cannot breathe, called ozone, blocks cosmic and solar radiation.
The other layers lying above the stratosphere include the near-space, mesosphere, above that, the thermosphere, and finally, the exosphere which takes us to a familiar space where near-Earth satellites and the International Space Station fly.
But getting back to the stratosphere, it was in the latter part of the 20th-century when ground-based atmospheric observations combined with satellites detected the thinning of ozone. Eventually the thinning became so pervasive, ozone-free holes opened near the Earth’s poles. Those holes grew to a point where Northern Europe, much of North America, Australia, South Africa and southern Argentina and Chile were exposed to cosmic and solar rays at levels previously not seen. That’s when scientists noted a sharp spike in skin cancers.
The search for a cause led to the discovery that the aerosol chemicals developed in commercial laboratories, used in air conditioning and in many spray-bottle products, was breaking down trioxygen. At a conference held in Montreal, Canada, the countries of the world agreed to ban the identified aerosol chemicals from commercial use. Decades later scientists could measure the recovery of stratospheric ozone over the poles.
Or at least scientists thought there was recovery until the findings of the research were published this week telling a very different story. Now what the researchers may have discovered is, that instead of ozone recovery the net increase at the poles has been offset by a thinning of ozone in the lower stratosphere over a wider swath of the planet.
The puzzle gets even more complex when the compiled data is studied further because it shows tropospheric ozone increasing for no explicable reason. The tropospheric ozone data set studied covers the last 13 years, and although this is a small sample in terms of time, the rise is notable.
So the picture the research shows is less ozone in the lower stratosphere, increases in the upper stratosphere, and increases in the troposphere with no easy explanation for the why.
Speculation points to three potential causes.
The latter is not mentioned in the research paper but has often been considered as a pollution source that interferes with the normal chemical composition of the lower stratosphere. There have been a number of recent studies that link cloud formation with the presence of contrails. So why not ozone?
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The study also looks at how aerosols, both naturally and human produced, are contributing to climate change. Aerosols can have both a positive and negative effect on atmospheric temperature. In the Northern Hemisphere, preponderantly industrial, we see the largest human contribution of aerosols. The study suggests that these aerosols may contribute an offsetting cooling effect countering to some degree the impact of CO2. That cooling is factored in to the projections mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The study’s projections are very much in line with those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even taking into consideration the new research on human-produced aerosols and their impact on global warming. The conclusion – Earth will likely experience 20% more warming than what we have observed through the last 150 years of record keeping by 2099. And based on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation map of the Northern Hemisphere, seen below, that warming will be far greater in upper latitudes.
In their study CO2 was not the primary cause for atmospheric warming of the time. Levels were similar to those we are experiencing today. Instead concentrations of tropospheric ozone, methane and aerosols, the latter emitted by a forest and savannah-dominated planet, altered Earth’s radiation balance and raised temperatures as much as 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 Fahrenheit).
“The discovery is important for better understanding climate change throughout Earth’s history, and has enormous implications for the impacts of deforestation and the role of forests in climate protection strategies,” states Nadine Unger, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
As lead in the study Unger and her team used NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Model-E2 global Earth system to simulate the environment of the Pliocene, a period when Earth was heavily forested contributing to warming through what is known as the albedo effect.
For those unfamiliar with the term “albedo effect,” it refers to how solar radiation gets absorbed or reflected by different Earth surface conditions. Forests absorb the energy from solar radiation while polar ice caps and snowfields reflect it back into space.
Unger further states, “The traditional view is that forests affect climate through carbon storage and by altering the color of the planet’s surface, thus influencing the albedo effect. But as we are learning, there are other ways that forest ecosystems can impact the climate.”
What Unger is referring to are the aerosol compounds emanating from forests and there potent ability to contribute to the atmospheric greenhouse effect.
During the Pliocene we know that Earth’s surface was extensively forested including much of the Arctic. We also know that precipitation was much greater to the extent that those areas dominated by deserts today had savannah-like climate conditions. Wildfires were frequent and the burning of forest and savannah with no humans to put these conflagrations out further contributed to increases in atmospheric carbon and aerosols.
For those of you who are climate change skeptics you may think “ahah, you see CO2 doesn’t cause climate change.” But this would be wrong conclusion. As Unger explains, “we might do a lot of work to reduce air pollution from road vehicle and industrial emissions, but in a warmer future world the natural ecosystems are just going to bring the ozone and aerosol particles right back…….reducing and preventing the accumulation of fossil-fuel CO2 is the only way to ensure a safe climate future now.”
