The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

The race is on. Will we run out of oil before the earth reaches The Point of No Return when runaway global heating has started? Different folks with different agendas have have widely opposed concerns … and solutions.

On one side are Prof. James Lovelock, the preeminent environmentalist of the UK, and Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s chief climatologist (until the Bush-Cheney [B-C] administration tried to muzzle him). They are backed by others who study ice cores, glacier recession, ocean salinity, hurricane intensity, insect migration, desertification, and still other facets of increased global temperatures. On the other side is the eminent Senator from Oklahoma who says that CO2 is good. He notes that we generate CO2 by our own metabolism, as with aerobic exercise — it must be beneficial. Moreover, he says plants use CO2 to grow and thrive. Further, says James the opportunist, if the earth heats up a bit and melts the ice over the North Pole year round, we’ll be able to drill for oil there and then the myth of peak oil will be disproven once and for all. CO2 is good.

In the back of the room, an 800 pound gorilla sits in waiting, and no one speaks his name. The gorilla, when at all acknowledged, is referred to as the tipping point point or feed back loops. How technical. It is better felt in the gut when called the Point of No Return or the Time of Runaway Heating. The scientific and environmental communities would increase public awareness of the urgency of the planetary problem by using the latter terms.

In fact, the whole nomenclature ought to be changed. Global warming needs to be replaced by global heating or, more accurately, overheating. Climate change is less urgent than climate chaos or crisis or, soon, climate calamity or catastrophe. It’s time for a reality check. Let’s call it like it is.

The three major greenhouse gases responsible for the greenhouse effect that heats up the planet are: CO2 (carbon dioxide), CH4 (methane), and H2O (water vapor). In earlier times when we were hunters and gatherers, the Earth kept these gases largely in storage. Carbon was kept on deposit in trees and other plants, dissolved in sea & lake water, and locked up in coal, oil & “natural” gas. Methane was frozen in the permafrost of all the lands of the Arctic — Russia, Alaska, and Canada. Water vapor stayed in liquid form in the oceans and lakes of the world as long as temperatures remained well behaved.

Many of the climate mechanisms that keep the weather balanced can, and will, go out of control when the earth’s temperature rises beyond a certain point.

• •  The permafrost of the arctic contains untold tons of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Melt the permafrost even for a couple of summer months, which will let the methane out to play, and the earth will heat up.  More heating leads to further methane release — at some point soon an unstoppable chain reaction begins.
• •  The glaciers of the land and the sea ice of the Arctic are bright white in color and reflect the sun’s heat back into space to keep the earth’s temperature in the narrow range in which civilization developed. Melt that white surface to expose the dark earth and sea and the planet will heat up further. It is another self perpetuating cycle and, when a critical temperature is reached, another chain reaction.
• • The heating of our oceans brings out a whole family of gremlins. The Western Hemisphere is an example. For millennia, the Gulf Stream has flowed north by north east to bring warm Equatorial waters to the British Isles and northern Europe. In the north Atlantic the colder waters are forced downward and to the west, starting a conveyor belt of the sea to return cold waters to the tropics. The pleasant results are a) a milder, wetter climate that favors English flower gardens and b) cold waters off the coast of Maine that lobsters like. Global heating, the demon, melts glaciers and breaks off ice shelves to dilute the salinity of the ocean. The cold, less salty waters of the north don’t sink and the hydrodynamic forces that drive the conveyor belt go on holiday. That would be bad enough, but the 8oo pound gorilla in the room is: without cold water coming down from the north, the waters of the tropics heat up without restraint and evaporate as water
  vapor which drives global heating further. The process has already begun and we are approaching a chain reaction.
• • The glaciers of Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and other places where glaciers normally march deliberately to the sea, have recently donned ice skates. It seems that global heating has caused the bottom layer of the glacier to melt in places, allowing the ice mass to race toward the sea. Thus, the climatic processes noted above are hastened — a conspiracy, to be sure.

As more carbon dioxide pours into the atmosphere, more dissolves in the oceans, making them more acidic. CO2 + H2O = H2CO3. As the acidity (seltzerization) increases, the ability to absorb CO2 decreases. The result is more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and still greater global heating. Yet another terrorist chain reaction.

The weather sequeli of global overheating are several: climate chaos with increased intensity of storms, increased flooding of normally wet regions, increased droughts in dryaries, and a rise in sea level resulting in the disappearance of island nations and the complete submersion of the coast of Florida. But, such climate and oceanographic events are only minor disasters. It is the upward temperature spiral that will continue in a self perpetuating climate catastrophe even if we burn no more coal, oil or gas, don’t engage in heavy exercise, and eschew hamburgers. We must switch to wind, sun, and tides right now. Next year we may be at the point of no return when runaway global heating has started. Good planets are hard to find.