The Western mood on the climate-biosphere crisis took a decidedly dark turn over the past couple of weeks.
You could feel it spreading across the world. Hell, you could feel it uncurling in yourself; a black pillar of smoke. After a brief flurry of hope in the wake of the global school students strike, perhaps a last flourish of the idea that we — the West, the lucky ones, or some of us anyway — might be able to get out of this without it transforming us, without it ramming into us, we got the bad news.
It was tangled up together with op-eds, striking pictures, meta-commentaries, but at the core there were two intertwined stories: the possible fast and early melting of the permafrost, and the early and rapid onset of the summer thaw of Greenland ice. Both stories began bubbling through the media about three weeks ago, and their propagation and reception indicate the paradoxes of our current position in the crisis: accepting that humanity is in a very difficult situation can overshoot into apocalyptic “inevitabilism”, whose function appears to be to relieve people of the burden of having to fight for what will inevitably be a damaged, degraded and fallen planet.
Nevertheless, the raw material was compelling enough. In April, the Atmospheric Chemistry department at Harvard announced findings that the permafrost of northern Canada was releasing gases at twelve times the rate previously assumed to be the case. Permafrost, as everyone knows by now, traps gases in ice frozen for up to thousands of years. That it would begin to thaw once the earth’s temperature rose has always been known, but this was assumed to be decades away. That it may be releasing material at such a rate suggests that a major feedback loop of possible runaway heating up has begun much earlier than thought.
This is particularly concerning because the permafrost contains methane — up to twenty times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas — and nitrous oxide, which is three hundred times more potent, and one capable of turning into an ozone-depleting agent when warmed by the sun at higher altitudes. Global warming above 1.5 degrees is regarded as the key threshold event beyond which the permafrost begins to melt at a rapid clip — hence its importance in current planning. The atmospheric sampling measurement was matched weeks later by a lab-based test of permafrost cultures, which also found substantial nitrous oxide release.
There weren’t a lot of pictures capable of illustrating permafrost release. Not so with Greenland ice, an amount of which melts every summer, usually as a series of rapid melts and then lulls, appearing as spikes and troughs on a graph. Before 1988, the melt area in a single spike hadn’t risen above 400,000 square kilometres per incident. Between 1989 and 1995, these spikes rose to 500,000 square kilometres each. And after 1995, they tend to range between 700,000 and 900,000 square kilometres per incident, of which there tend to be about three (and many smaller peaks).
What’s happened this year is that a 700,000 sq km melt peak has occurred earlier than ever previously measured, with a near-vertical rise to the peak in the first week of June, before the northern summer has really got going. This was the source for that range of stories with the husky dogs running through water, the melt of the outer parts of the top layer of the ice sheet which lies across Greenland. But ah, even here, one has to be careful, for recording of ice-sheet melts only began in the late 1970s. That said, joining ice core sample data to instrumental data shows actual and projected warming unlike anything occurring over the past 12,000 years.
What’s interesting, in starting to wrap one’s head around the detail of the debate, is the way in which climate denialist pushback against the Greenland data occurred. At denialist clearing house Watts Up With That, much attention was given to the “huskies running through water” photo, even though little had been made of the phenomenon in the articles.
The short run of data was taken as invalidating any notion of directionality, or a sudden threshold cross in 1995, when the melting area suddenly jumped. That’s only effective by applying a sort of isolating empiricisim to the data, ignoring its corroboration of warming measured from other sources. It’s one of the reflex gestures of scepticism/denialism, which is rhetorically effective only because it runs counter to the way that science actually works, in steering rational action.
Thus anyone wants to rationally assess these findings is caught in the middle. It’s clear that the finding of an early-activated feedback loop in permafrost warming can be used to summon up the thought of an imminent spiral out of control. And that the Greenland ice melt ramifies such. And that escalation is to be avoided.
But the simple fact remains — and is a key to a spreading melancholia — that, as across the world the (utterly inadequate) Paris accord fall apart, system escalation is taking off much earlier than expected. And that is sufficient to conclude that if we get out of this, it wont be in one piece.
So we are looking at a range of outcomes from ‘very bad’ to ‘off the dial bad’. The problem with that in our media culture is that the benchmark for apocalypse is whether tradies may have to give up their utes. So any bad prediction immediately calls up inevitabilism: once the utes have gone, what point is there talking of further gradations? What needs to be communicated is that ‘very bad’ is still a whole lot better than ‘off the dial bad’.
A ‘fun fact’ that got a little lost amid the news about the rapidly disappearing permafrost, and the early Greenland melt;
“After all, America’s political system is on trial before a world community that fully embraced Paris ’15 to restrain global warming as it watches ecosystems in America’s Alaska collapse and emit more carbon into the atmosphere (based upon two-years of airborne measurements) than all U.S. commercial CO2 emissions biannually, which of course merely serves as supporting evidence for the absolutely shocking “drop-to-your-knees news” about the “70-yr too early permafrost collapse.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/21/permafrost-collapses-70-years-early/
Find and befriend an influential sceptic, work out how they might be persuaded, then plug away at it. Minds change in discussion only when the parties reach a moment of shared cognitive vulnerability – a moment where they each have acknowledged the conditions that would or might change their opinion. No-one does this unilaterally.
There is a whole hinterland out here of people who find it difficult not to curl up into a ball of inevitable-ism on reading articles such as this – not that we shouldn’t read them.
What if someone from Crikey undertook the project outlined above and reported the proceedings to us? Maybe we would pick up some ideas about how to do it ourselves.
I agree, Keith. Providing more data and more evidence to those who have rejected the copious amounts of both that have already been provided won’t work. It just doesn’t matter what is shoved in front of their noses, they have the answer. It’s fake. It’s made up. It’s all a conspiracy of scientists who are just trying to get funding so they can stay in their jobs.
The denialists are in control. They run the governments of the world and all of the major corporations. Either control is wrested from them (and given results such as our recent election, the odds of doing that peacefully and democratically seem increasingly unlikely) or we change their denialism. However; I have no idea how to do that.
Agree. Look at what is happening here in Australia. Our rivers are dying in front of our eyes and still the attack dogs deny anything is wrong.
Some denialist friends of mine are currently on a long holiday in the south of France in accommodation without air conditioning. I’m looking forward to an epiphany by the time they return to Oz.
Until people are directly inconvenienced by the extreme weather changes, our delusional society will continue with ignorant old habits.
Keep at it, Rundle.
You can contemplate your melancholy if that works for you. I won’t be going quietly.
It will require possibly a catastrophic storm cyclone , hurricane to devastate some first world nation city, before more public are shocked frightened into making this a serious political priority.
And any kids students reading this, the “adults” will need your support again.
Unfortunately the shouty people will just call these man made calamities ‘gods work’. It wont move them an inch. Thirty years of denial laid six feet deep…….