Climate Depression

The climate change news this week is pretty much universally bad. We have a meeting in Bali that will likely not produce much in the way of actual change even though there is now added urgency after the recent UN Report. One of the big problems that has to be addressed hasn't gotten much press: deforestation, which accounts for as much as 25% of the greenhouse gas problem. Fewer forests, fewer uptake of carbon. The knock on effect of melting ice is now better known. The news is bad here, too. Turns out open ocean absorbs nearly 10 times as much heat as sea ice and since there's a lot of melting going on, there's a lot more open ocean. There are additional effects of climate change. One is the increase in glacier floods. This is the sort of thing that scoured the scablands in Oregon and caused those big floods in Iceland a few years back. Well, they're a consequence of getting warm. No surprise there.

Marginal environments are the first to show changes. One study has been in the mountains of Spain, where the ranges of butterfly species have been creeping up in altitude as the weather warmed. Another shows how the tropics are expanding. Humans (notably Americans) don't really believe what's going on unless it's in their own back yard. But the Spanish research suggests that the canary in the coal mine isn't going to be in your garden; it'll be uphill. Or in the ocean.

There was actually some hope that with the additional CO2 there would be a larger sink in the ocean in the form of marine phytoplankton. Such phytoplankton account for about 50% of the global biological uptake of CO2. With elevated CO2, the hope was this biological pump would become stronger. A Norwegian experiment to determine if this would occur. This results were somewhat ambiguous as the experiment produced some unexpected behavior. (The article is here.) However, a couple of conclusions that could be drawn. The increase in uptake of CO2 isn't going to take care of the problem on its own and, in fact, will not have a large impact. The second is showing that the ocean is not going to just sit there and not react to the CO2 increase. The ocean is dynamic and will react dynamically and, as shown in the experiment, unexpectedly. There's even talk of burying CO2 from coal plants beneath the Firth of Forth.

The discussion appears to be shifting away from mere conservation to active carbon capture. I have to view this with some sadness since it's not attacking the problem at its source: human production of carbon.

However, as my friend Erik noted, we're seeing a curious moment in time where the CO2 emissions come from a source ostensibly under our control. Other, similar CO2 eruptions were not generated from human beings. The Deccan Traps, for example, spewed CO2 into the air for millions of years when India slammed into the backside of Asia and caused the Himalayas. His point is regardless of how we get through this current CO2 problem, if we survive we are sure to eventually encouter exactly the same problem but when the source is out of our control.

Several articles have been coming out dealing with carbon capture. First, it has to be determined if we need to-- I think we do for the above reasons. Alex Thompson has a two letters in Nature discussing this. (Here and here.) Olive Heffernan has a letter discussing how to assist the natural weathering process and clean the ocean at the same time.

These are big, big problems. Heffernan's article talks about a huge amount of seawater that has to be processed. But having to approach a management problem with a technical solution has all of the marks of failure. Add in the difficulty of dealing with large problems through large institutions, such as governments and large multinational corporations, and it's easy to get depressed.

Enough sad posts. Next I'll talk about puppies or something. Or truffles.