Antarctic Glacier in retreat

A new study by Gael Durand, at Grenoble Alps University, and others shows that the Pine Island Glacier, one of the largest in the Antarctic, is in “irreversible decline”.

The grounding line – the line along which the glacier lifts away from the sea bottom – has receded about six miles since 2003. But that’s just the start according to Durand; the glacier "has started a phase of self-sustained retreat and will irreversibly continue its decline." This conclusion is based on the use of three different models by the authors. The authors expect a five-fold increase in the volume of ice lost from the glacier for the period 2012 to 2031.

This is dramatic but unsurprising. The IPCC reports multiple measures of accelerating change:

·       The global mean sea level rose by an average of 1.7 mm per year from 1901-2010 but by 3.2 mm per year between 1993 and 2010.

·       Losses from Greenland's ice sheet have probably increased from 34 billion tons per year between 1992 and 2001 to 215 billion tons per year between 2001 and 2010.

·       In Antarctica, the rate of loss probably increased from 30 billion tons a year to 147 billion tons a year over the same timescale.

 
Forecasts of future warming, melting and sea level rise are highly uncertain precisely because the rates are increasing so sharply. It’s no secret that scientists are struggling to understand these changes. What’s not uncertain is that rising sea levels will threaten low-lying communities round the world, starting with the poorest. Without radical change in industry and agriculture the question is not whether they will threaten London and other cities in the developed world but when.

Climate change threat to one third of species

In a previous post I commented on one aspect of the threat world trade poses to amphibians. Now there's evidence that climate change poses an greater threat to birds, corals and amphibians.

A team of scientists at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed species as at  risk if their climate is changing, they are vulnerable to the changes and they are unable to adapt or relocate. The proportion of species they find to be at risk are:

• Birds              24 to 50%.
• Amphibians   22 to 44%
• Corals            15 to 32%.

Many of these species, and most of the bird species rated at risk, are considered safe by the Red Book - the usual reference for such judgements - so we now need to treat all Red Book assessments as optimistic.

Commenting on these results Chris Thomas of the University of York said "the conservation programme you might need to put in place [is] mind-boggling". But this, as he surely knows, is fantasy. Nither the money, nor the will nor the land needed are available. We can keep the threatened species only if we put a stop to climate change.

Review: Climate Wars

Most books on climate change focus on either climate science or the policies needed to avoid catastrophic change. Most, therefore, are written by optimists - by people who think that governments will behave better once people understand more.

Well here's one that isn't:

Climate wars: The fight for survival as the world overheats
By Gwynne Dyer. Published by One World.

This focuses on the social, political and military consequences of the change. More importantly, it’s written by a pessimist. Where most commentators say ‘I hope’ or ‘we ought’ Dyer says either ‘we probably won’t’ or ‘what if we don’t?’ Where most concentrate on how we can avoid catastrophe Dyer focuses on what catastrophic climate change might be like and how the nations are likely to respond to it. His inspiration is similar to mine in my scenario planning but his political analysis is much deeper.

Let me be clear. Dyer has interviewed a lot of influential people. He has understood the science and the politics of Kyoto and Copenhagen. Based on this he believes that we won’t get an effective climate change treaty in the foreseeable future and that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise for a decade or more. His judgments are all too plausible. Indeed, I think them much more likely than not.

He predicts that climate change will produce food and water shortages and that countries will raid their neighbours rather than see their people starve (and their political power decline). Rich countries will, of course, simply close their borders to immigrants.

Starting from these judgments he has created eight scenarios for various regions and dates between 2019 and 2055. These scenarios show how shortages of food and water might play out in a world already divided by money, power, religion and traditional rivalries. They discuss the tensions and wars that might follow.

These are not forecasts – they are more like science fiction stories – stories driven by climate change. None of them are pleasant and some are very frightening - nuclear war between India and Pakistan anyone?

But despite these scenarios Dyer does not despair. If we don't start to get greenhouse gas levels down by 2016 then we'll just have to find something additional to insulation, decarbonisation of power generation, etc., to buy us a decade or two. We'll need to use geo-engineering for that - despite the risks.

Every green optimist should read this book. They should ask themselves: What will we do if we don't get an effective successor to Kyoto?

[A shorter version of this review was published in Green World.]

Fencing

Which prominent country is spending one billion pounds building a 4,000 km fence to keep out its neighbour’s Muslim citizens?

Hint: It’s not Israel.

It’s India.

India has been building a fence along its border with Bangladesh since before 2005. The fence is about eight feet high, though higher in some places. It is accompanied by a road and patrolled by 80,000 troops of the Indian Border Security Force.

India has defended this rather un-neighbourly conduct by pointing to the supposed threats of attack by Islamic extremists and of illegal (Muslim) immigration. The first is real but small. In any case fanatics are more likely to come from Pakistan than from Bangladesh and, as the Mumbai attack showed, can easily arrive from the sea.

There is, of course, no real threat to India from the ten million Bangladeshis living there, many of whom were welcomed after Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan. But there is local friction. Muslims of Bangladeshi origin are thought to comprise 30% of the population of the (mainly Hindu) Indian state of Assam.

These ‘immigrants’ are the subject of the usual accusations, eg ‘they’re taking our jobs’. And, of course, the problem is talked up by rightwing Hindu politicians.

So far, so familiar. But this fence has a broader significance if you look a few decades ahead.

In July 2010 the CIA put Bangladesh’s population at 158 million and its growth rate at 1.3%. That growth is unlikely to be maintained but with a median age of just 23½ and 34% of its people under 14 substantial population growth is inevitable.

By contrast the land area of Bangledesh seems bound to shrink over the coming decades. That’s most obviously because rising sea levels will flood low-lying land but also because more severe storms will make some of that land uninhabitable.

Squeezed out by the rising sea many Bangladeshis will look for somewhere less vulnerable – and where else will they look but India? (Bangladesh’s only other land neighbour is Burma – hardly attractive.)

In this context India’s security fence is a step in creating the Police World scenario described three years ago. It’s not a large step; fencing one’s border is hardly a tyrannical act. But it is through small, defensible, steps that the Police World will be built.

Scenario planning for climate change

This post is obsolete. It has been replaced by a new set of scenarios.


We badly need ways of thinking about the implications of climate change. Most of what’s written gets hung up on the uncertainties of the science. If we don’t know, and we don’t, whether temperatures will increase by one or two or four degrees how can we prepare?

The answer is scenario planning.

In scenario planning, a method pioneered by Shell, we focus on the uncertainties, not on forecasts, and use these to define a set of possible scenarios. If we get this right the actual events will follow one scenario or, more likely, fall between several scenarios. But in any case we’ll have considered what we can and should do before we have to do it.

Climate change is a long-term problem so let’s look at the long-term – 2050. On that timescale little is certain but there are two big uncertainties.

The first uncertainty is the temperature increase. The global temperature is currently 0.6 degrees higher than that in the pre-industrial period. By 2050 we will know whether we’ve managed to keep the increase below two degrees. That’s hardly risk-free but it should be manageable. If we haven’t then we’ll already be aware of the positive feedback effects that will drive the temperature to a four or even six degree increase. (Some models suggest that rises over ten degrees are possible but let’s not go overboard; four degrees is bad enough.) (The environmental consequences of various possible temperatures have been discussed by Mark Lynas in Six degrees. Prof. James Lovelock has discussed the positive feedback effects in The Revenge of Gaia.)

The second uncertainty is the degree of international collaboration on dealing with climate change. The Montreal treaty on CFCs showed that international collaboration is possible. The post-Kyoto experience shows that it’s very hard to get when it requires significant economic sacrifices. However, sentiment is already changing and a recent survey of business executives by McKinsey showed significant concern about climate change. Action now seems likely. The real uncertainty is whether governments will commit to enough change soon enough to avoid triggering the positive feedbacks.

Now we combine the two to get our scenarios. I ignore the possibility that we can keep the temperature increase below two degrees without international collaboration because it’s impossible (unless the scientific consensus is badly wrong).

Scenario 1: Lifeboat

In this scenario the nations do collaborate soon enough to restrain CO2 emissions and the increase is kept below two degrees. I call this the Lifeboat scenario since it requires that every state recognises that we are all in the same boat and that its resources are barely adequate.

In his book Heat George Monbiot has described the technology changes that will be needed to realise the Lifeboat scenario in the UK. He believes that the UK and developed European nations can retain their standard of living (except for flying) by making an extensive set of changes to our industrial base. Most of this is plausible but almost every part is challenging. His conclusion requires that we meet every one of these challenges and this seems very optimistic. We will need to do more either by cutting our standard of living or by reducing our numbers.

The key assumption for this scenario is that the nations collaborate but this collaboration will not be easy. As with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) there will be disputes and we will need a World Climate Authority (WCA), analogous to the World Trade Organisation, to deal with them. The WCA will have, at minimum, to issue emissions permits and to check that actual emissions do not exceed these permissions. It will have to impose sanctions against defaulters. These sanctions will have to be backed by at least the threat of military force, though it’s unclear whether this will require a world police force.

This scenario requires changes in production with fewer new products, more repair and recycling and longer product lifetimes. A significant cultural change will be needed which I’ll call green Puritanism. Green Puritans will disapprove of excessive consumption and travel and these attitudes will reinforce and be reinforced by laws against waste.

Lifeboat will be different from our world but could be a good world to live in.

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Scenario 2: Police World

In scenario 2 the nations have begun to collaborate against climate change but not in time. By 2050 the temperature rise has already exceeded two degrees and major positive feedback effects are visible.

Major habitat changes have already occurred, eg in the Sahara and Amazon basin, leading to a marked reduction in the Earth’s carrying capacity. An increase of at least four degrees is now certain.

It’s clear that the Earth cannot support its current population and that existing human institutions cannot survive the huge population movements that these changes will provoke. In Collapse Jared Diamond has described a variety of precedents for social collapse due to overuse of natural resources.

Once the inevitability of this collapse becomes clear the multinational bodies will shift their focus from mitigation to survival. They will therefore collaborate to ensure that some people and institutions survive. They will identify the territories remote from the equator where the prospects are best and then limit and direct migration into these refuges. The rest of the Earth will be progressively abandoned.

Life in these refuges will be hard but life outside them will become literally impossible; most of those outside them will die. These deaths will be spread over many decades and will mainly be from starvation, though natural disasters and fighting will contribute.

Resistance to the new world order will be severe but the multinational authorities will take large-scale military action to maintain the borders of the refuges. This scenario assumes that the multinational authorities succeed in maintaining law and order and an industrial base but this will be at the price of human rights and ordinary human compassion. The need for vigorous military action against those outside the refuges and direction of labour within them will lead to severe rationing of almost everything and a world-wide police state.

Scenario 3: New Dark Age

In this final scenario attempts to international collaboration have failed to prevent temperature rises and have broken down. As the value of those cold regions in which people will be able to survive becomes clear those nations with such regions will prepare their defences. The others will attempt to negotiate access to these regions. When this fails they will resort to war.

Some large nations (eg Russia and Argentina) will include some refuge areas though not enough for their whole populations. Civil wars will result.

As climate pressures increase (over a period of many decades) military power will become the dominant reality in human affairs. Political authority will give way to it. Jared Diamond’s Collapse shows examples of this breakdown.

Repeated wars will inflict major damage on the very resources, both agricultural and industrial, that they are trying to control. Wars will also destroy much of humanity’s capacity to innovate, except in military matters, and to do or even understand science and the arts. A new global Dark Age will follow.

The new Dark Age will doubtless last several centuries, during which the human population will fall to a fraction of its current level. The best that can be said of this scenario is that it need not last indefinitely. The Greek and later European Dark Ages both ended and were followed by the renaissance of culture and learning. Though we have not previously experienced either a global Dark Age or such abrupt climate change there is reason to hope that our descendants will ultimately be able to rebuild a civilization.

Plausibility

I’m aware that two of my scenarios may sound more like science fiction than sober reflection. However, these scenarios run forward from 2050 and much of today’s world would have seemed like science fiction to our grandparents.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the impacts of four degrees of warming. It’s inconceivable, at least to me, that our civilization will be unchanged by these impacts and it’s time we took this seriously. I’ll return to the scenarios in greater depth in future posts.