Geological Extinction Events and Runaway Climate Change

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 5 May 2014

John Scales Avery – TRANSCEND Media Service

The melting of Arctic sea ice is taking place far more rapidly than was predicted by IPCC-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. David Wasdell, Director of the Apollo-Gaia Project, points out that the observed melting has been so rapid that within less than five years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice at the end of each summer. It will, of course continue to refreeze during the winters, but the thickness and extent of the winter ice will diminish.

It has also been observed that both the Greenland ice cap and the Antarctic ice shelfs are melting much more rapidly than was predicted by the IPCC. Complete melting of both the Greenland ice cap and the Antarctic sea ice would raise ocean levels by 14 meters. It is hard to predict how fast this will take place, but certainly within 1-3 centuries.

Most worrying, however, is the threat that without an all-out effort by both developed and developing nations to immediately curb the release of greenhouse gases, climate change will reach a tipping point where feed-back loops will have taken over, and where it will then be beyond the power of human action to prevent exponentially accelerating warming.

By far the most dangerous of these feedback loops involves methane hydrates or clathrates. When organic matter is carried into the oceans by rivers, it decays to form methane. The methane then combines with water to form hydrate crystals, which are stable at the temperatures and pressures which currently exist on ocean floors. However, if the temperature rises, the crystals become unstable, and methane gas bubbles up to the surface. Methane is a greenhouse gas which is 70 times as potent as CO2.

The worrying thing about the methane hydrate deposits on ocean floors is the enormous amount of carbon involved: roughly 10,000 gigatons. To put this huge amount into perspective, we can remember that the total amount of carbon in world CO2 emissions since 1751 has only been 337 gigatons.

A runaway, exponentially increasing, feedback loop involving methane hydrates could lead to one of the great geological extinction events that have periodically wiped out most of the animals and plants then living. This must be avoided at all costs.

Here are some videos that discuss these dangers:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVwmi7HCmSI

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjZaFjXfLec

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aMbM20mbg

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6pFDu7lLV4

On the website, www.lasthours.org, there is also an excellent video that Thom Hartmann has helped to prepare. We need much more public debate about the long-term dangers of runaway climate change, and we also need a sense that this is an unprecedented emergency; but our corporate-controlled mass media have failed completely in their duty to humanity and the biosphere

The worst consequences of runaway climate change will not occur within our own lifetimes. However, we have a duty to all future human generations, and to the plants and animals with which we share our existence, to give them a future world in which they can survive.

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John Scales Avery, Ph.D., who was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.He is chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy and received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent book is Civilization’s Crisis in the 21st Century http://www.learndev.org/dl/Crisis21-Avery.pdf.

 

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 May 2014.

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