Global Warming - Seeing the Unseen

As our emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise, perhaps one of the biggest problems in getting across the impact it has on our planet is the fact that it is invisible. Particulate pollution, often from burning coal, used to cause smog to visibly affect day to day life in many large western cities, leading to public demands and support for clean air action - and we can see similar developments, including public protests, in emergent economies like China now.

However, by sharp contrast, the very fact that we cannot see, smell or taste CO2 somehow relegates the immediacy and scale of what we are doing to our habitat. We don't need to turn a blind eye to what we cannot see.

This video (below) by the US Environmental Defense Fund sets out to show what it would be like if we could indeed see greenhouse gases. It takes the CO2-equivalent emissions of New Yorkers over a timescale from one hour to one year and represents these with very visible one tonne spheres to show the spread of these gases.

The cumulative effect is powerful, to say the least, and silently exposes the folly of the global warming deniers who continue to claim that somehow we are having no effect on the planet, on this, the only place we have to live.

And, bear in mind, it is not only C02. Other invisible greenhouse gasses like methane are just as transparent, but many, many times more warming - and around us in ever greater quantities every moment of the day. Time to stop denying and start acting.

Counting the Cost of Fire & Ice: methane melt and the business case

A report this week has acknowledged that the increasing release of methane gases trapped for millions of years under now-melting permafrost in the Arctic regions may lead to significant costs to the world economy - $70 trillion, virtually the equivalent of a full year of global economic activity worldwide. 

The report  by researchers at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands warns of the failure of governments, business and economists to take the impact of the methane melt into account in their typical, cold calculations of whether or not the world "can afford" to tackle global warming during the current recession. With the British Government increasingly seduced by the dirty fuel provided by fracking, in spite of the poison it leaves in the ground as well as the atmosphere, our headlong rush to put profit before people and planet continues.

Methane is twenty times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide - the gas currently most driving man-made climate change. As carbon has warmed the Earth, the permafrost has begun to melt and as it does so, the potential for greenhouse gases in our atmosphere to rise exponentially with the release of millions of tonnes of previously trapped methane is alarmingly close. If it was all released, the amount of methane in the atmosphere could treble.

And this is where the world economy, supposedly freed of the regulations that were a feature of most of the post-world war international settlement, is in a state of delusion. With neoliberal capitalism commodifying everything that exists (including the recent suggestions by the Chairman of Nestle that "access to water is not a public right" - his company needs to buy up a lot of it to help make their profits), the idea that the market will deliver the change in behaviour and habits that we need to save our way of life and maybe even our species is ever more surreal.

The Dutch researchers hope their report will encourage bodies like the World Bank, the IMF and multinationals think for on its meaning and implications - by translating the message of environmental emergency into finance-speak. But it's not the first time this has been tried - remember the Stern Report? - and with many still hoping against reality and the mounting evidence around us every day that climate change is an issue for future generations, what chance is there that a system driven by profit will possibly stop what it exists to do and magically transform into something more benign? Even if some or many of the actors involved have a change of heart, the system itself drives people and corporations onwards on its profit-maximising, resource-exhausting path. If food harvests fall due to climate change, the price of food rises and profits and dividends rise too. Immoral? Of course, and many individuals in the Finance Sector would be as appalled at the prospect as much as anyone. But the whole point of a liberal economy is that, if the won't do it, someone else will - the money-making imperative wins. Only when it is constrained, regulated and even removed will anything change.

We have already passed the point where a 2 degree rise in global temperatures is now inevitable - it may not sound much, but it will play havoc with global food systems, water distribution, extreme climate events and more. And at 5 degrees, an increasingly likely scenario by late on in the century our species will encounter conditions it has never before experienced - with huge swathes of the planet rendered uninhabitable, with all the conflict and disruption that will entail and, even more alarmingly, with the potential for air to ignite and hurl giant fireball storms across the sky.

What price action then?

In Praise of Windpower

2012 - the wettest summer in Britain in 30 years; droughts across America, the worst in 80 years, begin to push food prices up across the planet as crops fail - just as last year they did in the Russian grain belt; wild fires torch Spain, the worst in decades; floods engulf the Philippines and China, the worst in decades; while the entire Greenland ice-shelf thaws simultaneously for the first time in thousands of years, and Arctic ice melts at a rate which results in warming equivalent to a doubling of human-created carbon emissions.

Still think it's just a coincidence that global warming just happens to be taking place alongside humanity's continued release of record amounts of carbon gases into the atmosphere? Never heard of cause and effect?

The Earth's temperature is delicately balanced in a range that permits life to exist on its thin crust. Our planet lies in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" as astronomers call the narrow band out from a star where it is neither too hot, like Venus, nor too cold, like Jupiter, for life as we know it to exist. The Earth is particularly blessed by the development of our biosphere into a world with contrasting climates which enhance the overall temperate nature of our planet - keeping it just cool enough for plants to grow and people to flourish.

Key to this is the albedo effect - this is the rate at which the Earth reflects light (and heat) back from the Sun out into space. Without it, the planet would burn, as would anything on it. Albedo is strongest on white and other light surfaces, whereas on dark surfaces it is low to non-existent, causing heat and energy to be absorbed by the recipient material.

Traditionally, Arctic and Siberian ice sheets and snow have played a major role in reflecting heat back off the planet - while just 4% of sun light hitting an asphalt road is reflected back, with snow the rate is between 80% and 90% and ocean ice is around 70%. As global warming caused by human activities heats the planet and these ice sheets melt, the overall albedo of the Earth has started to decline, creating an upwards spiral. As dark water replaces white ice, even more heat is absorbed, leading to more extreme weather patterns such as more typhoons and storms. The feedback loop continues - as Siberian permafrost melts, methane gases twenty times more warming than carbon are released; more ice melts; albedo declines more, and more. Currently, the Albedo effect provides the Earth with an average temperature of around 15C. As ice cover reduces, this is rising, and if, in the extreme, all the ice and snow on the planet was to liquefy, this would rise to an average of 27C: far above the level at which most forms of current life, including humans, could survive.

We need to act urgently more than ever. We need to see a huge switch from carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives. Yet this week, the British Coalition Government has appointed an Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, who is both a sceptic of climate change altogether and keen to abolish any and all support to alternative forms of energy - "fracking" for poisonous shale gas and oil is his pet project. He is keen on green fields, it seems, as long as they are on rich people's estates and splattered with the blood of shot pheasants and , in his ideal world, the body parts of foxes torn apart by hounds. That, ultimately, his green and pleasant land is going to be parched and turned dry brown by rising global temperatures, seems of little concern to him. Like most Tories and capitalists, he can't focus much beyond next year's dividends sheets.

A poet, Derenz, has written on the beauty of wind power, one of several forms of alternative energy which is clean and limitless, and the bizarre hypocrisy of those who oppose them in the name of a nature in imminent peril from carbon emissions. This is the closing verse:

Wind-flowers,
towers, remain
unplanted as the planet
heats, while the booted
arrive in cars of steel,
to tramp hill to hill,
heel to heel,
across the shrinking peat.