Mixed news on sudden increases in global warming....

Today's post: Wednesday, 12-1-2010

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both. Kuwaiti scientists recently predicted peak oil in 2014 – just 4 years from now.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Today’s post: Mixed news on sudden increases in global warming

Last week we wrote about how the thawing of the permafrost could soon release up to 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, now locked into the tundra & permafrost, into the atmosphere – as methane. This could lead to dangerously rapid climate change or having this extra warming develop its own momentum and become unstoppable by us.

This week the other shoe dropped. It seems the tundra and the permafrost are just part of the earth’s surface that will release more methane as warming continues! Ouch !

The good news is that if we can at least sharply slow the increases in CO2 release soon, this will become a gradual and potentially reversible process instead of creating sudden flooding of coastal cities and developing its own momentum and become unstoppable by us.

The recession has temporarily slowed the increase in CO2 release and will not improve quickly, so if we can become more energy efficient in hundreds of ways and add thousands more sources of clean energy as the recession gradually ends, we may be able to catch this extra carbon release in time to be able to survive it and reverse it. This might actually be doable!

Here’s the story I found today on Livescience.com . They released a story today by their, writer, Jeremy Hsu.

It seems Earth's biggest store of carbon dioxide is locked within the decaying vegetation found in peatlands, from tropical peat swamps to Arctic permafrost – which is just a part of this problem. British researchers have calculated that a too fast-warming world would cause all these peatlands to dump huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

A global warming rate of about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) per decade might well be enough to destabilize these peatlands compost, according to Sebastian Wieczorek, one of these mathematicians at the University of Exeter in England.

“Peat soils contain from 400 billion to a trillion metric tons of carbon, "which is about the same as the carbon content in the atmosphere," Wieczorek said. "A release of the soil carbon from peatlands into the atmosphere would therefore have an enormous impact on the climate system."

Peatlands cover just 3 percent of the world's land area, but they store almost 30 percent of all global soil carbon - about as much carbon as found in the atmosphere or in the total of terrestrial biomass (plants and animals). “

The article goes on to say, however, that slowing this rate of increase would allow the peatlands to release less carbon more slowly as the peatlands evolved relatively more stable ways to adapt to the warming.

This would allow people to take more like 30 years to dike off or abandon coastal areas before they are flooded and move people and businesses in an orderly way that will need to be moved.

If this process reaches a runaway stage because we failed to do this, we would have more like a year or two at most to do this. This would be quite catastrophic as it simply would cause much of the world’s population to become homeless and destroy much of the world’s economy that’s now located in these coastal cities in that year or two.

And, almost as bad, the process of global warming would get worse and become unstoppable even if we stopped adding CO2 to the air totally.

The only good news in this is that we may have enough of a start on implementing solutions to catch this in time.

At the very least, each of us can help contribute something to making our economy more energy efficient and adding more sources of clean energy. This can range from adding just one LED light bulb that saves a few watts of electricity each month or improving the ceiling insulation in your house to helping launch several billion dollar solar farms to generate renewably sourced electricity.

If everyone who can, does something productive, we have a shot.

What can you do?