Ground Control to Major Tom: Globe heating faster, do something now

by Emily Gertz

Published February 15, 2009 @ 08:35AM PT

What if the cream of the world's astrophysicists, known to be sober individuals not given to extreme statements, gave a press conference tomorrow? And told the gathered reporters that they'd detected a fleet of alien warships out in space, on their way to Earth to destroy human civilization-- and that we had 10 years before they arrived?

We'd probably get to work right now on defending ourselves, right?

Well, we've gotten the equivalent signal on global warming, and while we don't have just 10 years to live, we've got about that much time (maybe less) to preserve a planet that's a pleasure to live upon. On Saturday, a well-respected climatologist told a gathering of colleagues and press in Chicago that pace and impact of climate change on the global environment are likely to be much faster than any recent research has anticipated.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," said Christopher Field, a member of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University.

With this information, there can't be any really valid excuses left to delay cleaning up our energy supply, weatherizing and retrofitting our buildings -- as well as overhauling building codes to require high energy-efficiency standards -- and transportation systems. Judging from some of the provisions in the economic stimulus plan on its way to the president's desk, we can merge our energy and transport goals to some extent with sparking the economy.

The reason the IPCC underestimated the pace of climate change, says Field, is that the recent research (including the IPCC report he helped prepare for publication in 2007) did not have access to the most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that from 2000 to 2007, these emissions were notably higher than the estimates used in the IPCC's report, already not a cheery read. They were higher largely because of the faster-than-anticipated growth of the developing economies of China and India, which rely largely on burning coal for energy.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," Chris Field said on Saturday.

China and India have every right to expand their economies -- but US legislators and political leaders, running what's been until recently the world's largest greenhouse gas polluter -- have played a "China card" in rebuffing strong action to curb our own contributions to destabilizing the climate. Since China, as a developing nations, is not required to participate in the emissions curbs under the Kyoto treaty, why should the US risk its own economic health to do the same?

Happily, it looks like this won't be the operating philosophy of the Obama administration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is making China Asian nations including China the destinations of her first diplomatic trip. "Climate change will figure high on Mrs. Clinton’s agenda in Beijing, where she said she would emphasize how the two countries must work together," reports The New York Times. "She plans to visit an energy-efficient power plant near Beijing that is a joint venture of General Electric and a Chinese partner."

At NYC's Asia Society on Friday, Clinton stated that the US has nothing to fear from a strong Chinese economy, and said she would not pursue the adversarial position of the Bush administration towards China.

Good. Faster-rising global temperatures are creating more powerful "feedback loops" that are intensifying global heating themselves, says Field:

• Higher temperatures are starting to melt the permafrost of the arctic, which stores 1 trillino tons of methane and carbon dioxide. Upwards of 10 percent of that carbon could be released into the atmosphere during the next 90 years, says Field.
• The rising heat is melting the Arctic ice cap, which would otherwise reflect sunlight back into space; instead they're being absorbed by the Arctic Ocean waters, which store the heat and contribute to higher surface temperatures.
• Evidence is mounting that the land and marine ecosystems that have historically soaked up carbon from the atmosphere are hitting their limits.

"We don't want to cross a critical threshold," Field said on Saturday, "where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot."

Image:
"Although most of the deadly bushfires that ravaged Victoria in late January and early February 2009 burned in the area between Melbourne and Lake Eildon, devastation also came to more northern parts of the state. This false-color image from the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite shows part of the 30,700-hectare (75,861-acre) Beechworth Fire—which killed at least two people according to ABC news reports—on February 10, 2009. Unburned vegetation is bright green, while burned areas are dark pink. The bright pink areas are often a sign of open flame in this type of image. The small town of Running Creek was threatened by the fire, but seems to have been spared; a burn scar brackets the town, but does not penetrate it." Source: NASA Earth Observatory