Export Land Model and Energy Prices

Posted on March 27, 2014 by

What the Export Land Model Means for Energy Prices

David Galland, Managing Director Casey Research June 5th, 2008

To understand the importance of exports when discussing peak oil, ask yourself the question: “What’s more important: the fact that global oil production is falling… or that the oil exporting nations are cutting off their exports?”

While the two questions are clearly linked, it is the nuance of the export question that clearly matters the most. Especially if you live in a country such as the U.S., which currently imports about 70% of its oil.

Which brings us to the Export Land Model (or, ELM as I will refer to it from here). The basic thesis expressed by Jeffre J. Brown  is that to fully appreciate the impact of peak oil, you can’t just look at the production declines, you also have to look at the rate of local consumption [in the country that exports its oil because if local people use a lot of oil, there’s less oil to export].

The ELM graph here looks at both sides of the equation, and the result as it applies to exports

As you can see [this chart of ELM] assumes that after a country’s oil production peaks it declines at a rate of 5% per year at the same time local consumption increases by 2.5%. The dashed red line shows the impact that will have on the ability of the country to export its excess production. Using these assumptions, the ELM shows that exports reach zero in 9 years.

[In the real world the exports may decline much faster than in this example].  The chart below plots the hypothetical ELM against the actual data from the United Kingdom and Indonesia. While the ELM forecast hypothesizes 9 years between peak to the end of exports, Indonesia’s exports ceased 7 years after peak, and the UK’s exports stopped just 6 years after peak.

The important take away here is that the global market is now deprived of these exports; between UK and Indonesia alone, the change over the last decade alone amounts to a swing in the wrong direction of a total of 2 million barrels per day. And those are just two of a number of important countries which have swung from exporters to importers in recent years.

So while people tend to focus on production, they are overlooking the impact on exports forecast by the ELM. China went from a net exporter in 1993 to importing 4 million barrels a day today… with those imports projected to rise another 50% over the next 10 years.

This is what’s creating so much international competition for the remaining supplies of oil.   And if the ELM is right, things are about to get far worse.

The Even Bigger Picture

In my interview, I also asked Jeffrey to share his thoughts on the situation globally. Here’s his response.

“Global production peaked in 2005, and we’re now into the third year of decline. And the critical point, to keep in mind, is our model and case histories show that the decline rate accelerates, year by year. Using the Lower 48 in the United States as an example, you can see the annual declines going 2%, 3%, 5%, 7%, 10%, 15%, 20, on and on. So it’s an accelerating decline rate.

Posted in Exports decline to ZERO, How Much Left, Oil Shocks | Comments Off on Export Land Model and Energy Prices

Oil and Gas Infrastructure are Rusting Apart

Posted on March 27, 2014 by

Oil And Gas “Rust”: An Evil Worse Than Depletion

Offshore Technology Conference May 5, 2008 Houston, Texas by Matthew R. Simmons Chairman Simmons & Company International

Some of the slides are:

If Infrastructure Not Rebuilt It Creates A Double Whammy A worst case Black Swan 

  • Demand surges and creates run on the inventory bank
  • Supply of oil and gas heads south:  Output down 10% – 20% This is “lights out” for our society. Odds of occurrence higher than most houses burning down.
  • Infrastructure collapses, limited use to 50% of possible supply
  • “Lights Out” is not a pretty picture: Without energy, our system shuts down. Water, food, health care, etc., all wind down in a few days. Food scarcity is “Social Chaos 101.” Raw materials, mineral extraction and refining all extremely energy intense

Steel begins to corrode the day it is cast

  • The Oil And Gas “Body” Is All Built Out Of Steel
  • Almost all oil and gas fields reside thousands of feet underground.
  • Almost all “newer” oil fields lie under the sea.
  • Oil has to be extracted, processed, refined and transported over long distances.
  • The entire oil value chain is built of steel.

Rust Never Sleeps

  • Mariners know that rust never sleeps.
  • Scientific American experts knew this in 1896.
  • The oil industry never grasped this profound risk as it built a house for oil out of steel.

Oil And Gas Infrastructure

A Vast Spider Web Of Steel 100,000 individual oil and gas wells in USA alone:

Casing and tubing

  • Wellheads
  • Processing equipment and gathering lines

335,890 miles of pipeline in USA alone

  • Crude oil pipeline
  • Natural gas pipeline
  • Finished product pipeline

Tank Farms: USA has 1,127
Refineries: World has 657 refineries.
Finished petroleum products systems: 164,292 gasoline stations in USA

Declining Oilfields Accelerate Rust

  • As oil declines, brine generally takes its place.
  • Sweet light oil turns into sour heavy oil.
  • Declining oil basins rarely have sub-surface or surface facilities replaced (why bother?)
  • All these factors accelerate the encroaching corrosion and rust

Corrosion Loves Dirt, Brine, Sour Gas And Seawater

Corrosion is the visible scabs and scars of rust.Paint can temporarily conceal corrosion, like a Band-Aid over a cut.But soon, the Band-Aid turns brown. Corrosion under dirt or seawater cannot be seen. Corrosion breeds fast in these environments.

The industry made a risky bet when it threw away wood and turned to steel

From 1860 to 1901 The Oil System Used Barrels And Wagons. Wooden barrels were built to store/transport oil on wagons. The wood would absorb oil and “caulk.”

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Science editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt : Climate Change + other ecosystem damage = extinction

Posted on March 25, 2014 by

Climate Change Impacts

Marcia McNutt is Editor-in-Chief of Science. 2 August 2013. Science: Vol. 341 no. 6145 p. 435

We are not just experiencing increases in greenhouse gas emissions but also eutrophication, pollution of the air and water, massive land conversion, and many other insults, all of which will have interacting and accumulating effects.

The real problem we need to solve in order to truly understand how Earth’s environment may change is that of cumulative impacts.

Although the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 million years ago) is the time period considered to be a reasonable analog to a higher-CO2 future, the planet was not experiencing these other stressors and climate change simultaneously.

Terrestrial species that survive a climate impact alone may face extinction if reduced to a fraction of their natural range through deforestation and habitat fragmentation. Marine species that are mildly susceptible to ocean acidification may not be able to tolerate this condition plus low oxygen levels.

Even the most optimistic predictions are dire.

Environmental changes brought on by climate changes will be too rapid for many species to adapt to, leading to widespread extinctions.

Even species that might tolerate the new environment could nevertheless decline as the ecosystems on which they depend collapse. The oceans will become more stratified and less productive. If such ecosystem problems come to pass, the changes will affect humans in profound ways. The loss in ocean productivity will be detrimental for the 20% of the population that depends on the seas for nutrition. Crops will fail more regularly, especially on land at lower latitudes where food is in shortest supply. This unfavorable environmental state could last for many thousands of years as geologic processes slowly respond to the imbalances created by the release of the fossil carbon reservoir. The time scale for biodiversity to be restored, with all the benefits that it brings, will be even longer.

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How the sun could end Nuclear Power

Posted on March 25, 2014 by

Flare-up: How the Sun Could Put an End to Nuclear Power

Gar Smith. Spring 2012. Earth Island Journal.

According to NASA, the planet will soon face an outbreak of powerful solar flares capable of collapsing global power grids.

Were this to happen, the world’s nuclear reactors could be left to run wild, overheat, melt, and explode.

A Carrington-sized GMD could damage thousands of extra high voltage (EHV) transformers around the world.

These transformers can weigh up to 300 tons and cost more than $1 million. Power grids cannot operate without them. Because each is custom-built to regional specifications, procuring new EHVs can take up to three years.

Rebuilding a damaged grid could take decades.

That could be the best-case scenario. More worrisome is imagining what would happen to nuclear power plants that are reliant on electrical grids.

A 2011 Oak Ridge National Laboratory report warned of a 33 percent likelihood that a solar flare could lead to “long-term power loss” over a nuclear reactor’s life.

With 440 nuclear power plants in 30 countries, and 250 research reactors, there are nearly 700 potential Fukushimas waiting to be unleashed.

Faced with a grid collapse, nuclear plants must rely on backup power to cool reactor cores and spent-fuel ponds. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires only eight hours of battery power and enough fuel to run emergency generators for a week. Restoring outside power to Fukushima’s damaged reactors was a daunting task even when Japan had a functioning grid to fall back on. If the Sun sends a geomagnetic tsunami sweeping across Earth, it could become impossible to provide any form of traditional power.

The sun’s magnetic cycle peaks every 22 years while sunspot activity crests every 11 years. Both events are set to peak in 2013. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) trigger geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) – tides of high-energy particles that can disrupt power lines. Since the 1970s, the array of high-voltage transmission lines spanning the US has grown tenfold. NASA warns these interconnected networks can be energized by a solar flare, causing “an avalanche of blackouts carried across continents [that] … could last for weeks to months.” A National Academy of Sciences report estimates a “century-class” solar storm could cause 20 times the damage as Hurricane Katrina while “full recovery could take four to ten years.

There have been two massive CMEs over the past 153 years. The 1859 “Carrington Event” irradiated Earth for nine days, causing the Northern Lights to erupt over Hawai’i. On May 14, 1921, a GMD lit up northern skies as far south as Puerto Rico. Both flares disrupted telegraph communication around the world.

But nineteenth- and twentieth-century telegraph systems were more resilient than today’s electronics. Solar flares can bake the circuitry that controls aircraft, banking, GPS, radio, TV broadcasts, iPods, and the Internet. As NASA solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta put it: “A similar storm today might knock us for a loop.

On March 13, 1989, a 90-second solar blast slapped HydroQuebec’s transmission system and left six million Canadians without electricity for nine hours. The storm cooked transformers in Great Britain and triggered 200 “anomalies” at oil-, coal-, and nuclear-fueled facilities across the US.

Gar Smith is editor emeritus of Earth Island Journal.

Here is another similar article:
Solar storm could leave Britain without power ‘for months’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10103492/Solar-storm-could-leave-Britain-without-power-for-months.html

Posted in Electric Grid & EMP Electromagnetic Pulse, Nuclear Power Energy | Comments Off on How the sun could end Nuclear Power

Mercury pollution

Posted on March 25, 2014 by

August 9, 2014. Missing mercury pollution is enough for mass poisoning. NewScientist.

New data suggests that we still don’t know where our emissions of toxic mercury end up. Somewhere out there are tens of thousands of tons of missing mercury. Mercury is released by several industries and accumulates as methyl mercury in aquatic organisms. It causes brain damage and birth deformities.

Carl Lamborg of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts has found that, since industrialization, mercury levels near the ocean surface have tripled in many places (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature13563). The highest rates are in cold waters around Iceland and Antarctica, where they are enough to damage marine life and threaten humans.

But the levels are much lower than expected, Lamborg says, given known emissions from coal burning, cement production, waste incineration and small-scale gold mining. He estimates the oceans contain between 60,000 and 80,000 tons of mercury, less than a quarter of the 350,000 tonnes expected (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/ckm949).

Where is the rest? Small-scale gold mining may be a big source, so the lost mercury could be in soils near mines, Lamborg says. Alternatively, the lost mercury could be in sediments of estuaries and coastal waters, particularly in Asia. Last month, Helen Amos of Harvard University estimated that up to 90 per cent of the mercury flowing down rivers from mining areas ends up in these sediments (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/t2h). If those sediments get stirred up, local mercury levels could reach those seen at Minamata, which affected thousands of people.

Lizzie Wade.  27 Sep 2013. Mercury Pollution Gold’s Dark Side.  Small-scale artisanal gold mining has become the world’s leading source of mercury pollution, poisoning air, rivers, and people.  Science: Vol. 341 no. 6153 pp. 1448-9

Endowed with a unique ability to extract gold from low-grade ore, mercury remains the method of choice for artisanal gold miners around the world. Often very poor, these miners work alone or in small groups, using mercury to separate and bind flecks of gold from soupy slurries of water and sediment. They are outlaws in many countries, eking out a living on the margins of the formal economy.

This diffuse industry is now the world’s largest mercury polluter, pumping more mercury into the environment than all the world’s coal-fired power plants combined. The mining operations typically leave a trail of mercury waste, putting as many as 100 million people at risk of poisoning.

The vast quantities of mercury already dumped by artisanal mining will persist in ecosystems for hundreds of years.

With gold prices soaring and as many as 15 million miners were using 1600 metric tons of the mercury in 2012 alone.

It is “an extremely daunting problem,” says Luis Fernandez, an ecologist and expert in artisanal gold mining at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. And the stakes are high: “Once areas are contaminated, they are contaminated for a long time.”

The process creates ample opportunity for pollution—and exposure. Miners simply dump the mercury-infused slurry, which contaminates rivers. Bacteria in the sediments help transform the inorganic mercury to organic methylmercury, which can be absorbed by phytoplankton and accumulate in fish and other creatures higher on the food chain. People who eat contaminated fish are at risk of neurological damage, autoimmune disease, and devastating birth defects. In a new study, Fernandez found that people in the Peruvian state of Madre de Dios, home to much of the country’s artisanal gold mining, have mercury levels in hair averaging 3 parts per million, triple the maximum limit recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “For the most part, these are people who are not miners. These are people who eat fish,” Fernandez says. Levels are even higher—more than 5 ppm—in the state’s indigenous communities, which rely on local fish for protein.

In mining towns like La Rinconada, the threat is more direct: People are exposed every time they take a breath. As gold shops in the center of town burn the mercury-gold amalgams, mercury vapor wafts into crowded neighborhoods. “In effect, some of these little towns have the equivalent of four, five, 10, 20, coal-fired power plants in the center of them,” Fernandez says. Meanwhile, mercury lifted into the upper atmosphere can travel vast distances before falling back to Earth and making its way into the global food web.

Documenting exactly how much mercury miners are using—and exactly how it is affecting people—has been a challenge. Artisanal gold mining often takes place in remote areas, and miners can be wary of scientists, whose findings could threaten their livelihoods. “We’ve been chased out of towns when we’ve tried to do surveys or a give a talk,” Fernandez says. Still, researchers are making progress. The United Nations more than doubled its estimate of mercury emissions from artisanal mining between 2008 and 2013, “mostly due to better reporting,” says Kevin Telmer, executive director of the Artisanal Gold Council in Victoria, Canada, which works to reduce mercury use in small-scale mining.

The United Nations may not have the whole picture, however. “The more you look, the more you find,” says NRDC’s Keane. A 2011 study of the air quality in and around La Rinconada’s some 250 gold shops, for instance, concluded that they could be emitting 20 metric tons of mercury per year. That’s nearly one-third of Peru’s reported annual emissions, suggesting that the official tally is a severe underestimate.

Simply banning artisanal mining—or mercury—isn’t a realistic option, specialists have concluded. “Making [artisanal mining] illegal hasn’t worked,” Keane says. It only demonizes miners and drives their activity further underground, cutting off the very resources they need to improve their practices: education, training, and credit. “You cannot deal with someone who officially doesn’t exist,” says Jacopo Seccatore, a doctoral student in mining engineering at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

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Writing on the wall for prime farmland. Years of irrigation have taken toll on San Joaquin Valley.

Posted on March 24, 2014 by

Carolyn Lochhead. March 24, 2014. Writing on the wall for prime farmland. Years of irrigation have taken toll on San Joaquin Valley. San Francisco Chronicle.

Decades of irrigation have leached salts and toxic minerals from the soil [in the San Joaquin valley] that have nowhere to go, threatening crops and wildlife.

Aquifers are being drained at an alarming pace.

More than 95% of the area’s native habitat has been destroyed by cultivation or urban expansion, leaving more endangered bird, mammal and other species in the southern San Joaquin than anywhere in the continental U.S.

Federal studies long ago concluded that the only sensible solution is to retire hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.  The 600,000-acre Westlands Water District has already removed tens of thousands of acres from irrigation.   Many experts said if farmers don’t retire the land, nature eventually will do it for them.

More than a decade ago, Jack Mitchell, now 74, sold 3,000 acres of his irrigated land to federal officials trying to find out whether imperiled farmland could be restored. Mitchell’s farm was on the site of the old Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, covering 800 square miles and yielding 3-foot trout. It went dry in the early 20th century as farmers began diverting water.  In 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that despite hundreds of millions of federal dollars spent over two decades, no technological solution had been found to dispose of drain water. Enormous amounts of salt and selenium – toxic to birds, other wildlife and humans at high concentrations – continue to accumulate each year.

The San Joaquin Valley is an ancient seabed arid enough to be classified as desert but irrigated by a huge complex of dams and canals. Large swaths of it have serious drainage problems, including more than 1.75 million acres of farmland, according to a 2005 federal report.

Much of the problem land lies on the valley’s west side, represented primarily by Westlands. More than half its acreage has been classified as drainage-impaired.

The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the best solution is to “remove the fundamental underlying source of the problem” by retiring 379,000 acres of land from irrigation.

In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey warned that within 50 years, 20 million tons of contaminated salt will have to be disposed of. The agency said experimental technologies are “unprecedented and untested at the scale needed” and that the “potential release of selenium-contaminated drainage is massive.” The agency concluded that the best solution would be to retire 300,000 acres in the western San Joaquin Valley.

In some areas of the valley, salt has crystallized on the surface, covering fields with what is known as “California snow,” rendering the ground useless not just for crops but also for any vegetation at all.

Retiring lands before they reach that point “has just got to be the highest priority for California,” said Tom Stokely, a water policy analyst for California Water Impact Network, an environmental group. “We don’t have the water to be irrigating these poisoned lands. We’re having a hard enough time keeping the good lands in production.”

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Rot in the Banking culture

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

Questions are asked of Rot in Banking Culture

Peter Eavis. March 13, 2014. New York Times.

Money laundering, market rigging, tax dodging, selling faulty financial products, trampling homeowner rights and rampant risk-taking — these are some of the sins that big banks have committed in recent years.

Now, some government authorities are publicly questioning whether such misdeeds are not just the work of a few bad actors, but rather a flaw that runs through the fabric of the banking industry. After years of saying little about the behavior of bankers, even as one scandal followed another, regulators are starting to ask: Is there something rotten in bank culture?

At the heart of the issue is an inviolate social contract that bankers are supposed to honor. The government agrees to protect banks from collapse, and in return, bankers are meant to uphold the highest ethics when handling other people’s money.

But when lawbreaking and other missteps proliferate at banks, it is a sign that the industry has stopped cleaving to the special contract, endangering taxpayers. And bad management can be a leading indicator of future financial problems at an institution. “It usually translates into losses down the road,” Mr. Curry said.

It is a concern recently voiced by William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the institution that has more day-to-day contact with Wall Street than any other arm of the government.  “There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions,” Mr. Dudley said in a speech that sent a chill through the financial industry last year.

In a recent interview, Mr. Dudley explained why he decided to make such a loaded point about bank culture: “To make it clear that ‘too big to fail’ isn’t the only problem,” he said in his office three blocks from the actual Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. “I don’t want senior bank management to feel, ‘Oh gee, if we solve “too big to fail,” we’re done.’ ”

“Too big to fail” refers to the belief that some banks are so large that if they got into trouble, the government would have to rescue them to prevent their failure from harming the wider economy. Congress and government authorities have taken many steps to put banks on a firmer financial footing, but such efforts do not focus on cleaning up the ethics of large companies.

Other senior regulators are speaking out in a similar vein. Thomas J. Curry, the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, has recently devoted several speeches to cleaning up the culture of banks. In a recent interview, he gave some insight into how his agency sometimes views its relationship with the banks.

The big question is whether regulators have the resolve to back up their tough words with meaningful punishments. Banks, for instance, have armies of lawyers who deploy strategies like refusing to turn over potential evidence to regulators. And the largest banks make such big profits these days that they can easily absorb the financial penalties the government throws at them. Also, notably, top bank executives did not voice their support for Mr. Dudley after he gave his sharply worded speech on culture.

But boards may have very different priorities from regulators. Directors may not see the need for far-reaching changes if a bank is producing large profits that benefit shareholders.

JPMorgan Chase’s board took steps to hold management accountable after the so-called London Whale trading scandal that engulfed the bank in 2012 and 2013. Still, in January, JPMorgan’s board approved a large raise in the 2013 pay of Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive.

And compensation is one area where bank regulators may need to do more if they want to do more to clean up bank culture, according to critics of the industry.

Wall Street’s compensation practices can reward unhealthy levels of short-term risk-taking and entice bankers into ethical lapses. Acknowledging that, regulators around the world agreed after the crisis to overhaul bankers’ pay, in part by requiring them to wait several years before they receive all of their bonuses. The hope is that bankers will behave better if they know their employers can easily take back the deferred part of their pay.

But there is evidence that large American banks are still deferring much less pay than their European peers. The Fed is in charge of regulating compensation at American banks. When asked whether the pay overhaul at American banks had gone far enough, Mr. Dudley said, “There is potential to defer more compensation for longer periods of time.”

One particularly daunting challenge looms over the efforts to improve the ethics of banks. Some banks may be so large and complex that it would be difficult for managers to maintain a clean culture across all of their operations.

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James Hansen : Sea level could rise in decades, not centuries or millenia

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

James Hansen explains how sea level could rise in decades, not centuries or millenia

At the bottom is a more recent article that backs Hansen up.

Below are excerpts from:  Climate change and trace gases. James Hansen, Makiko Sato, et al. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (2007) 365,1925–1954

The unusual stability of the Earth’s climate during the Holocene is probably due to the fact that the Earth has been warm enough to keep ice sheets off North America and Asia, but not warm enough to cause disintegration of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets.

Climate sensitivity: the whipsaw

‘Fast-feedbacks’, including changing water vapor, clouds, sea ice, aerosols (dust, airborne organic particles, etc.) and effects of aerosols on clouds, determine climate response on decadal time-scales.

Thick ice sheets provide not only a positive feedback, but also the potential for cataclysmic collapse, and thus an explanation for the asymmetry of the ice ages. The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse. We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less.

An ice sheet in equilibrium may have summer melt on its fringes, balanced by interior ice sheet growth. Large climate change will occur only if a forcing is sufficient to initiate rapid dynamical feedbacks and disintegration of a substantial portion of the ice sheet. Rapidly rising temperatures in the past three decades is evidence that the Earth is now substantially out of energy balance and indications of accelerating change on West Antarctica and Greenland indicate that the period of stability is over. Civilization developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12 000 years in duration. That period is about to end.

The imminent peril is initiation of dynamical and thermodynamical processes on the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets that produce a situation out of humanity’s control, such that devastating sea-level rise will inevitably occur. Climate forcing of this century under Business-As-Usual (BAU) would dwarf natural forcings of the past million years, indeed it would probably exceed climate forcing of the middle Pliocene, when the planet was not more than 2–3 8 C warmer and sea level 25 G 10 m higher.

Such warming would assuredly activate the albedo-flip trigger mechanism over large portions of these ice sheets. In combination with warming of the nearby ocean and atmosphere, the increased surface melt would bring into play multiple positive feedbacks leading to eventual nonlinear ice sheet disintegration. It is difficult to predict time of collapse in such a nonlinear problem, but we find no evidence of millennial lags between forcing and ice sheet response in palaeoclimate data. An ice sheet response time of centuries seems probable, and we cannot rule out large changes on decadal time-scales once wide-scale surface melt is underway.

The gravest threat we foresee starts with surface melt on West Antarctica and interaction among positive feedbacks leading to catastrophic ice loss. Warming in West Antarctica in recent decades has been limited by effects of stratospheric ozone depletion. However, climate projections find surface warming in West Antarctica and warming of nearby ocean at depths that may attack buttressing ice shelves. Loss of ice shelves allows more rapid discharge from ice streams, in turn a lowering and warming of the ice sheet surface, and increased surface melt. Rising sea level helps unhinge the ice from pinning points. West Antarctica seems to be moving into a mode of significant mass loss.

Our concern that BAU GHG scenarios would cause large sea-level rise this century Hansen 2005 differs from estimates of IPCC 2001, 2007, which foresees little or no contribution to twenty-first century sea-level rise from Greenland and Antarctica. However,the IPCC analyses and projections do not well account for the nonlinear physics of wet icesheet disintegration, icestreams and eroding iceshelves, nor are they consistent with the palaeoclimate evidence we have presented for the absence of discernable lag between ice sheet forcing and sea-level rise.

 

climate code red

Big trouble in the Antarctic has been brewing for a long time

 15 Jun 2014  by David Spratt

“A game changer” is how climate scientist Dr Malte Meinshausen describes newly published research that West Antarctic glaciers have passed a tipping point much earlier than expected and their disintegration is now “unstoppable” at just the current level of global warming. The research findings have shocked the scientific community. “This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like,” ran a headline in Mother Jones magazine.

In the Guardian, lead researcher Dr Eric Rignot explained:

We announced that we had collected enough observations to conclude that the retreat of ice in the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide. What’s more, its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.

But this news should not have come as a shock. In 2007 when we wrote “Climate Code Red”, Philip Sutton and I devoted a chapter to Antarctica, and surveyed scientists who were warning of this scenario. We quoted NASA climate chief James Hansen:

We find it implausible that BAU [‘business-as-usual’] scenarios, with climate forcing and global warming exceeding those of the Pliocene, would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive  even for a century.

As far back as 1968 John Mercer had predicted that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could herald the loss of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, and 10 years later contended that: “a major disaster — a rapid deglaciation of West Antarctica — may be in progress … within about 50 years.”

Such science was excluded from “mainstream” reports such as those of the IPCC, which systematically and embarrassing underestimated likely sea-level rises, with the most recent, 2013 report being no exception.

It’s par for the course for climate policy-makers to hope for the best, rather than plan for the worst. More than once this blog has warned that sea-level rises are being underestimated by Australian policy-makers, and that the tens of millions of dollars being put into adaptation planning for sea-level rises of no more than 1.1 metres by 2100 will be a waste of money, and all that work will have to be done again. And now that has come to pass.

It’s so dumb, but putting politics ahead of science has got us into this mess, and there is little sign that even peer-reviewed evidence that West Antarctic has passed a tipping point for partial or total collapse of its ice sheets will get those in power to acknowledge scientific reality.

So here, for the record, is what we said back in late 2007.

Climate Code Red (extract): Antarctica

Big changes are also underway at the other end of the world, in the Antarctic, where most of the world’s ice sits on the fifth largest continent. The majority of Antarctic ice is contained in the East Antarctic ice sheet — the biggest slab of ice on Earth, which has been in place for some 20 million years and which, if fully melted, would raise sea levels by more than 60 metres.

Considered more vulnerable is the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains one-tenth of the total Antarctic ice volume. If it disintegrated, it would raise sea levels by around 5 metres, a similar amount to what we would see with a total loss of the Greenland ice sheet.

While it was generally anticipated that the West Antarctic sheet would be more stable than Greenland at a 1–2 degree rise, recent research demonstrates that the southern ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than scientists had previously believed. Ice-core data from the Antarctic Geological Drilling joint project (being conducted by Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States) shows that ‘massive melting’ must have occurred in the Antarctic three million years ago, during the Miocene–Pliocene period, when the average global temperature in the oceans increased by only 2–3 degrees above the present temperature. Geologist Lothar Viereck-Götte called the results ‘horrifying’, and suggested that ‘the ice caps are substantially more mobile and sensitive than we had assumed’.

The heating effect caused by climate change is greatest at the poles, and the air over the West Antarctic peninsula has warmed nearly 6 degrees since 1950. At the same time, according to a report in the Washington Post on 22 October 2007, a warming sea is melting the ice-cap edges, and beech trees and grass are taking root on the ice fringes.

Another warning sign was the rapid collapse in March 2002 of the 200-metre-thick Larsen B ice shelf, which had been stable for at least twelve thousand years, and which was the main outlet for glaciers draining from West Antarctica. An ice shelf is a floating sheet, or platform, of ice. Largely submerged, and up to a kilometre thick, the shelf abuts the land and is formed when glaciers or land-based ice flows into the sea. Generally, an ice shelf will lose volume by calving icebergs, but these are also subject to rapid disintegration events. Larsen B, weakened by water-filled cracks where its shelf attached to the Antarctic Peninsula, gave way in a matter of days, releasing five hundred billion tonnes of ice into the ocean.

Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University and Ted Scambos from the NSIDC found that as glacier fl ow had begun to increase during the 1990s, the ice shelf had become stressed. The warming of deep Southern Ocean currents (which increasingly reach the Antarctic coastline) had also led to some thinning of the shelf, making it more prone to breaking apart. Scambos concludes that ‘the unusually warm summer of 2002, part of a multi-decade trend of warming [that is] clearly tied to climate change, was the final straw’.

Looking at the overall pace of events, Scambos says: ‘We thought the southern hemisphere climate is inherently more stable, [but] all of the time scales seem to be shortened now. These things can happen fairly quickly. A decade or two of warming is all you need to really change the mass balance … Things are on more of a hair trigger than we thought.’

Much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock that is below sea level, buttressed on two sides by mountains, but held in place on the other two sides by the Ronne and Ross ice shelves; so, if the ice shelves that buttress the ice sheet disintegrate, sea water breeching the base of the ice sheet will hasten the rate of disintegration.

In 1968, the Ohio State University glaciologist John Mercer warned, in the journal of the International Association of Scientific Hydrology, that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could herald the loss of the ice sheet in West Antarctica. A decade later, in 1978, his views received a wider audience in Nature, where he wrote: ‘I contend that a major disaster — a rapid deglaciation of West Antarctica — may be in progress … within about 50 years.’ Mercer said that warming ‘above a critical level would remove all ice shelves, and consequently all ice grounded below sea level, resulting in the deglaciation of most of West Antarctica’. Such disintegration, once under way, would ‘probably be rapid, perhaps catastrophically so’, with most of the ice sheet lost in a century. Credited with coining the phrase ‘the greenhouse effect’ in the early 1960s, Mercer’s Antarctic prognosis was widely ignored and disparaged at the time, but this has changed.

(James Hansen says it was not clear at the time whether Mercer or his many critics were correct, but those who labelled Mercer an alarmist were considered more authoritative and better able to get funding. Hansen believes funding constraints can inhibit scientific criticisms of the status quo. As he wrote in New Scientist on 28 July 2007: ‘I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative.’ Hansen is responsible for coining the term ‘The John Mercer Effect’, meaning to play down your findings for fear of losing access to funding or of being considered alarmist.)

Another vulnerable place on the West Antarctic ice sheet is Pine Island Bay, where two large glaciers, Pine Island and Thwaites, drain about 40 per cent of the ice sheet into the sea. The glaciers are responding to rapid melting of their ice shelves and their rate of fl ow has doubled, whilst the rate of mass loss of ice from their catchment has now tripled. NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot has studied the Pine Island glacier, and his work has led climate writer Fred Pearce to conclude that ‘the glacier is primed for runaway destruction’. Pearce also notes the work of Terry Hughes of the University of Maine, who says that the collapse of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers — already the biggest causes of global sea-level rises — could destabilize the whole of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Pearce is also swayed by geologist Richard Alley, who says there is ‘a possibility that the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and raise sea levels by 6 yards [5.5 meters]’, this century.

Hansen and fellow NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher Makiko Sato agree:

The gravest threat we foresee starts with surface melt on West Antarctica, and interaction among positive feedbacks leading to catastrophic ice loss. Warming in West Antarctica in recent decades has been limited by effects of stratospheric ozone depletion. However, climate projections find surface warming in West Antarctica and warming of nearby ocean at depths that may attack buttressing ice shelves. Loss of ice shelves allows more rapid discharge from ice streams, in turn a lowering and warming of the ice sheet surface, and increased surface melt. Rising sea level helps unhinge the ice from pinning points … Attention has focused on Greenland, but the most recent gravity data indicate comparable mass loss from West Antarctica. We find it implausible that BAU [‘business-as-usual’] scenarios, with climate forcing and global warming exceeding those of the Pliocene, would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive  even for a century.

Even in East Antarctica, where total ice loss would produce a sea-level rise of 60 metres, mass loss near the coast is greater than the mass increase inland (mass increase inland is caused by the extra snowfall generated from warming-induced increases in air humidity).

While the inland of East Antarctica has cooled during the last 20 years, the coast has become warmer, with melting occurring 900 kilometers from the coast and in the Transantarctic Mountains, which rise up to an altitude of 2 kilometers.

Research published in January 2008 by Rignot and six of his colleagues shows that ice loss in Antarctica has increased by 75 per cent in the last ten years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers, so that the ice loss there is now nearly a great as that observed in Greenland.

 

 

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If Greenland Ice Sheets melt, sea level will rise 23 feet

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

Greenland Ice Sheet Destabilizing, Threatening Greater Sea-Level Rise

March 2014   (James Hansen makes the case that sea level could rise over decades)

[My comment: 90% of global trade (much of it food and oil) is carried by container ships and oil-tankers. All of the world’s ports will be affected and most of them overwhelmed by just a 3-foot rise from storm surges.  By 6 feet most harbors will be useless, and the massive shipments of food and oil that allow nations now to maintain populations vastly beyond their carrying capacity will become impossible as sea levels continue to rise for centuries]

“The Greenland ice sheet has contributed more than any other ice mass to sea level rise over the last two decades and has the potential, if it were completely melted to raise global sea level by more than 23 feet,” said Jonathan Bamber, a professor at Britain’s University of Bristol.

A new region of a massive ice sheet in Greenland has become unstable, threatening to raise global sea levels beyond previous estimates, an international team of scientists has found.

The Greenland ice sheet is a 660,000-square mile swath of ice that covers 80% of the country. The second-largest ice sheet in the world behind the Antarctic Ice Sheet, it’s especially vulnerable to global warming, yet its northeast portion had remained largely unaffected by rising temperatures.

Until recently, researchers say.

From April 2003 to April 2012, the northeast portion lost about 10 billion tons of ice per year, according to GPS data.

It’s losing more ice, and the rate is accelerating. The ice loss has accelerated by a factor of three,” says Michael Bevis, a professor at Ohio State University and one of the study’s lead investigators. “That’s a pretty big increase – it’s sort of like the canary in the mine.”

“Northeast Greenland is very cold. It used to be considered the last stable part of the Greenland ice sheet,” explained GNET lead investigator Michael Bevis of The Ohio State University. “This study shows that ice loss in the northeast is now accelerating. So, now it seems that all of the margins of the Greenland ice sheet are unstable.”

Historically, Zachariae drained slowly, since it had to fight its way through a bay choked with floating ice debris. Now that the ice is retreating, the ice barrier in the bay is reduced, allowing the glacier to speed up — and draw down the ice mass from the entire basin.

References

Shfaqat A. Khan, Kurt H. Kjær, Michael Bevis, Jonathan L. Bamber, John Wahr, Kristian K. Kjeldsen, Anders A. Bjørk, Niels J. Korsgaard, Leigh A. Stearns, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Lin Liu, Nicolaj K. Larsen, Ioana S. Muresan. Sustained mass loss of the northeast Greenland ice sheet triggered by regional warming. Nature Climate Change, 2014;
Study: Ice Sheet Destabilizing, Threatening Greater Sea-Level Rise The northeast portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster than researchers estimated. Alan Neuhauser. March 16, 2014. US News & World Report

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Lessons From the Little Ice Age

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

Lessons From the Little Ice Age

Geoffrey Parker, March 22, 2014, New York Times

Climatologists call it the Little Ice Age; historians, the General Crisis.

During the 17th century, longer winters and cooler summers disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests across Europe.

In the 17th century, the fatal synergy of weather, wars and rebellions killed millions.

A natural catastrophe of analogous proportions today — whether or not humans are to blame — could kill billions.

It would also produce dislocation and violence, and compromise international security, sustainability and cooperation.

The deep cold in Europe and extreme weather events elsewhere resulted in a series of droughts, floods and harvest failures that led to forced migrations, wars and revolutions. The fatal synergy between human and natural disasters eradicated perhaps one-third of the human population.

What happened in the 17th century suggests that altered weather conditions can have catastrophic political and social consequences. Today, the nation’s intelligence agencies have warned of similar repercussions as the planet warms — including more frequent but unpredictable crises involving water, food, energy supply chains and public health. States could fail, famine could overtake large populations and flood or disease could cross borders and lead to internal instability or international conflict.

Climate …exacerbated [the deaths from] outbreaks of disease, especially smallpox and plague, which tended to be more common when harvests were poor or failed.

The Little Ice Age

It was the coldest century in a period of glacial expansion that lasted from the early 14th century until the mid-19th century. The summer of 1641 was the third-coldest recorded over the past 6 centuries in Europe; the winter of 1641-42 was the coldest ever recorded in Scandinavia. The unusual cold that lasted from the 1620s until the 1690s included ice on both the Bosporus and the Baltic so thick that people could walk from one side to the other.

Earth scientists have discerned three factors at work globally during the 17th century: increased volcanic eruptions, twice as many El Niño episodes (unusually warm ocean conditions along the tropical west coast of South America), and the virtual disappearance of sunspots, reducing solar output to warm the Earth.

The 17th century saw a proliferation of wars, civil wars and rebellions and more cases of state breakdown around the globe than any previous or subsequent age.

Just in the year 1648, rebellions paralyzed both Russia (the largest state in the world) and France (the most populous state in Europe); civil wars broke out in Ukraine, England and Scotland; and irate subjects in Istanbul (Europe’s largest city) strangled Sultan Ibrahim.

When an uprising by Irish Catholics on Oct. 23, 1641, drove the Protestant minority from their homes, no one had foreseen a severe cold snap, with heavy frost and snow at a time and in a place that rarely has snow. Thousands of Protestants died of exposure, turning a political protest into a massacre that cried out for vengeance. Oliver Cromwell would later use that episode to justify his brutal campaign to restore Protestant supremacy in Ireland.

But the cold did take a more direct toll. Western Europe experienced the worst harvest of the century in 1648. Rioting broke out in Sicily, Stockholm and elsewhere when bread prices spiked. In the Alps, poor growing seasons became the norm in the 1640s, and records document the disappearance of fields, farmsteads and even whole villages as glaciers advanced to the farthest extent since the last Ice Age. One consequence of crop failures and food shortages stands out in French military records: Soldiers born in the second half of the 1600s were, on average, an inch shorter than those born after 1700, and those born in the famine years were noticeably shorter than the rest.

Few areas of the world survived the 17th century unscathed by extreme weather. In China, a combination of droughts and disastrous harvests, coupled with rising tax demands and cutbacks in government programs, unleashed a wave of banditry and chaos; starving Manchu clansmen from the north undertook a brutal conquest that lasted a generation. North America and West Africa both experienced famines and savage wars. In India, drought followed by floods killed over a million people in Gujarat between 1627 and 1630. In Japan, a mass rebellion broke out on the island of Kyushu following several poor harvests. Five years later, famine, followed by an unusually severe winter, killed perhaps 500,000 Japanese.

No human intervention can avert volcanic eruptions, halt an El Niño episode or delay the onset of drought, despite the possibility that each could cause starvation, economic dislocation and political instability. But, unlike our ancestors who faced these changes 350 years ago, today we possess both the resources and the technology to prepare for them [my comment: no we don’t, from now on there’s exponentially less resources of all kinds at the same time the human population is still growing exponentially].

Britain’s chief scientific officer has warned, for instance, that in the face of a seemingly inexorable rise in sea levels, “We must either invest more in sustainable approaches to flood and coastal management or learn to live with increased flooding.” In short, we have only two choices: pay to prepare now — or prepare to pay much more later.

The experience of Somalia provides a terrible reminder of the consequences of inaction. Drought in the region between 2010 and 2012 created local famine, exacerbated by civil war that discouraged and disrupted relief efforts and killed some 250,000 people, half of them under the age of 5.

So while we procrastinate over whether human activities cause climate change, let us remember the range of climate-induced catastrophes that history shows are inevitable — and prepare accordingly.

———————-
Geoffrey Parker is a history professor at Ohio State University and the author of “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.”

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