Documenting the Train Wreck: Sea Level Rise by 2050

New, more accurate topographic mapping shows that sea level rise could cause Southern Vietnam to disappear by 2050 (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

Most people in power now acknowledge that global warming will drastically remake the planet if it's not addressed in time, if fossil fuels aren't eliminated in time, if preventive measures aren't put it place in time.

"In time" in these constructions usually means "not now, but soon, trust us." Thus we get mainstream plans to reduce carbon emissions to zero (or "net zero," an even vaguer formulation) by 2050, leaving a full generation for people in power to mess around with how to do it and when to start.

How to do it? Let's discuss. When to start? Sometime. All while climate change clips right along at a speed that astonishes even the pessimistic.

New Estimates of the Effect of Sea Level Rise

A new paper (PDF here) has re-estimated the amount of land vulnerable to the most likely sea-level rise based on the most recent projections under a moderate emissions-mitigation scenario, the IPCC's RCP 4.5 scenario. They did this by using neural net technology to correct for errors in previous estimates of land elevation.

As Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle put it in the New York Times, "Standard elevation measurements using satellites struggle to differentiate the true ground level from the tops of trees or buildings, said Scott A. Kulp, a researcher at Climate Central and one of the paper’s authors. So he and Benjamin Strauss, Climate Central’s chief executive, used artificial intelligence to determine the error rate and correct for it."

For a number of reasons, primarily cost, these inaccuracies are most prevalent in less wealthy regions of the world, such as Asia and Africa.

The results of this new modeling are striking. For example, the estimate for Thailand of the number of people likely to be affected by sea level rise by 2050 increased to 10% under the corrected topography mapping, up from just 1% under the old one.

Figure 1 from the paper shows four well-populated regions, with the old estimated area colored in blue and the added new area in pink.

Note that it's not the estimated amount of sea level rise that has changed; it's the accuracy of topological mapping that shows who would be affected by the current estimates. In addition, these new estimates don't take into account the effect of land erosion caused by the influx of water. Once the sea has risen and land inundated, the damage doesn't stop there. Next the new shoreline erodes, causing further damage, something not accounted for in the projections.

Millions More Affected Than Previously Estimated

This new data suggests that hundreds of millions more people will be displaced by sea level rise than previously thought. Here's Chart 1 of the paper with the top six affected nations (column 2 uses the old topography data; column 3 uses the new):

The global total by their estimates is 300 million people, more than 220 million more than previously thought.

Climate Central has a good interactive tool (here) for projecting sea level rise under differing scenarios using the new topological dataset. For example, you could change the assumption that we're going to modestly reduce carbon emissions to something more pessimistic (or as some would say, more realistic). You could also look at the outcome for different years —2100, say — or even manipulate the "Luck" slider to modify the sensitivity of our climate system to the increasing increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases (the "Luck" setting for these projections is Medium).

The Luck setting doesn't take into account the various tipping points that could occur on the way from here to there, such as the sudden collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets. The tool would need a Didn't See That Coming setting to account for those.

As retired Marine Lieutenant General John Castellaw, who served with the U.S. Central Command during the Iraq War said of the coming inundation of Basra, Iraq's second largest city, "So this is far more than an environmental problem. It’s a humanitarian, security and possibly military problem too."

He could just as well be speaking, not just of Basra, but of the entire rest of the world.
 

"Republicans Fear Losing, Democrats Fear Winning"

Bob Dylan's "Watching The River Flow," with Mick Jagger on vocals, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood on guitars, Charlie Watts on drums and Bill Wyman on bass.

by Gaius Publius

Just sitting on this bank of sand, watching the river flow.

At the start of the year I wrote:

There's something greatly troubling about what the media-fronted #Resistance has morphed into, but I'm having trouble writing about it (it's lightly touched here: "A Nation in Crisis, Again"). Partly the problem is the marshaling of pages of proof; partly the problem is the unstoppable train wreck that's coming. Perhaps I should write about the train wreck instead.

This is about the train wreck, or two of them.

The Kavanaugh Confirmation

It looks like Democrats are going to allow Brett Kavanaugh to be confirmed, that their "resistance" will be minimal, as it has been all along. To explain, let's look at this in the New York Times. Jonathan Martin writes:

Few politicians have a greater stake in Judge Kavanaugh’s fate than these 10 [red-state] senators who are trying to appeal to red-state voters back home, and whose re-election bids will determine whether Democrats win control of the narrowly divided chamber in November. [emphasis added]

According to the article, they think their problem is political, not moral; and they think the voters they have to appeal to are "red-state" (meaning conservative) voters "back home." Or at least they say they think this when talking to the press.

Which according to Martin leads to this craven calculation for Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, whom I fully expect to vote yes when the confirmation reaches the Senate floor:

And for three of the most moderate Senate Democrats — Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana — the nomination represented an opportunity for them to vote yes on Judge Kavanaugh and demonstrate independence from their party and deny Republicans an issue in the fall campaign. The three had previously supported President Trump’s first nominee for the court, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

This leads the writer to this conclusion:

Democrats may not want him on the bench for a host of reasons, but Judge Kavanaugh narrowly winning confirmation would be politically tolerable to many of them...

As Ryan Grim tweeted in response to this article:

Republicans fear losing
Democrats fear winning https://t.co/R1tVmTyQcU

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 19, 2018

The entire Democratic caucus supports Minority Leader Schumer's effort to keep Manchin, Heitkamp and Donnelly safe in the next election, which means, in reality, protecting them from having to vote no on Brett Kavanaugh. The whole of the caucus, to a person, is in on this scheme.

There are so many actions Democrats could be taking and aren't. They could be filing for Kavanaugh's impeachment in the House, for example, for lying under oath during his 2006 Senate hearing. They could be releasing all the rest of their nearly 200,000 pages of "committee confidential" documents.

They could be aggressively pursuing the information received from this whistleblower, who says he represents federal employees willing to come forward and talk about Kavanaugh's dealings with his mentor, disgraced Judge Kozinski. Amy Goodman said, "The employees wanted to talk about Kavanaugh’s work as a clerk for disgraced former 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who resigned in 2017 after being accused by at least 15 women of sexual misconduct. But Sanai never heard back."

But Democrats would rather protect three corrupt senators than keep Brett Kavanaugh, the "one ring to bind them," from joining and creating what will be the most radical Supreme Court in our history.

So, what to expect? Look for an accelerated schedule amid much Democratic complaining; ineffective but showy "resistance" from elected liberals; and unless Trump, the public or Ms. Blasey Ford pull their irons from the fire for them, Democratic collusion in a successful confirmation vote the week of October 1 — or faster if Republicans can manage it.

All they want is the win, and they don't care how it looks for them when they get it. Democrats, on the other hand, want to look good in defeat, since that's preferable to them all than abandoning Joe Manchin and his friends.

Also look for both parties to pay a very high price for this when the nation wakes up to what's been done to them — but not nearly as high as the price the nation will pay.

What can we do? Nothing. Watch the river flow.

Climate News

While we're looking at the flow of things, let's add in three climate stories ripped from the most recent headlines. It took less than a minute to find them.

First, this:

Miami’s Existence Is Threatened With As Little As 18″ Of Sea Level Rise

...Miami may not be a major US urban center in a handful of decades.

There are several elements in the equation, but Miami’s existence could be untenable with as little as 18 inches or as much as 15 feet of sea-level rise. The operative question is how much of the city will still exist as a working urban area with citizens, but Miami will be at high risk with only 18 inches of sea-level rise.

It's a very good piece. A number of causes are cited, ten in all. Here are just two: "50% of Miami’s population of 5.5 million lives beneath 6 ft of sea level" and "Miami-Dade County’s low-lying real estate is worth tens of billions of dollars. But it’s already lost hundreds of millions since 2000 due to sea level rise. 10% of Miami’s real estate value could be a write-off by 2045."

When the exodus occurs, it will be in a panic. Best not own Florida land when tide turns against it.

Second this, from Newsweek:

NASA Has Discovered Arctic Lakes Bubbling With Methane—and That’s Very Bad News

...In a NASA-funded study published in Nature Communications, scientists have now discovered a source of methane that has not been accounted for in climate models—methane coming from “thermokarst” lakes.

These lakes form when the permafrost thaws at a faster rate and deeper into the ground than normal. The thawing creates a depression, which then fills with rain water, ice and snow melt. The water then speeds up the rate of the permafrost thaw at the shores of the lake.

The process—abrupt thawing—could speed up the release of methane into the atmosphere.

"Within decades you can get very deep thaw holes, meters to tens of meters of vertical thaw," Katey Walter Anthony, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a statement. "So you're flash thawing the permafrost under these lakes. And we have very easily measured ancient greenhouse gases coming out."

Flash-thawing methane-rich permafrost is a recipe for absolute disaster. Atmospheric methane is extremely potent as a greenhouse gas (GHG) but very short-lived — it resolves to atmospheric CO2 and water, each a greenhouse gas but bound for pound less damaging, in less than two decades. But in its first year, each methane molecule is hundreds of times more powerful than a molecule of CO2. Decades of continuous "flash thawed" methane bubbling up in volume would wreck us.

Finally, it looks like the Paris climate agreement, already behind schedule, was using too high a bar to measure against. Thanks to more sophisticated ways to incorporate methane from melting permafrost into climate models, the amount of "headroom" we have — how much GHG we can still emit and meet the Paris warming target — is even smaller than scientists anticipated:

Paris climate targets could be exceeded sooner than expected

..."Permafrost carbon release from previously frozen organic matter is caused by global warming, and will certainly diminish the budget of CO₂ we can emit while staying below a certain level of global warming. It is also an irreversible process over the course of a few centuries, and may therefore be considered a "tipping" element of the Earth's carbon-climate system that puts the linear approximation of the emission budget framework to the test," explains Thomas Gasser, a researcher with the IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program and lead author of the study published in Nature Geoscience.

This is the first time that such a tipping process is adequately accounted for in emission budgets, and according to the researchers, doing so shows that the world is closer to exceeding the budget for the long-term target of the Paris Agreement than previously thought.

Until we stop billionaires from controlling our world, there's not much we can do.

See what I mean? Watching the river flow, or the trains collide.

GP
 

An Iceberg the Size of Delaware Breaks Off in Antarctica

#LarsenC break-up extends the march of ice shelf retreat toward the pole, as climatic limit recedes to the south [UPDATED with latest break] pic.twitter.com/JdX97nsw2h

— Climate Signals (@ClimateSignals) July 12, 2017

by Gaius Publius

We need new Cassandras to warn us of new disasters, even though they'll never be believed.

—Richard Clarke (paraphrased)

I'll be your Cassandra this week.

—Yours truly

Part of a massive ice shelf in Antarctica, called "Larsen C," has split, and a huge iceberg has "calved off" from the rest of the glacier and entered the ocean. See the tweeted image above (original tweet with full-sized image here). The iceberg really is almost the size of Delaware.

As you can see, the ice shelves labeled Larsen A and Larsen B are gone. Larsen C, further toward the South Pole is collapsing next. (Ice shelves are glacial ice laying in and over the water.) Notice the southward move, from the upper (warmer, more northern) tip of the peninsula toward the southern (cooler) mass of the continent itself.

This is quite dramatic, and while "calving" of ice shelves occurs naturally, the southward move of this sequence is highly suggestive of the march of global climate change. (That's careful-scientist talk, as you'll read below. The person who is certain the globe is drastically changing, on the other hand — meaning almost everyone in the country who has no power — gets it that Antarctica is doomed to melt.)

Here's one report, from ClimateSignals.org:

Larsen C Ice Shelf Calving and Retreat 2017

Short Summary

The imminent calving and the potential follow-on long-term retreat of Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf extend a southward march of ice shelf breakup down the Antarctic Peninsula toward the South Pole, a progression consistent with the direction of climate change and dramatic warming on the Peninsula since the 1950s.

The Antarctic Peninsula exhibits an extraordinarily large range of natural variation. And the immediate mechanisms driving the current calving of Larsen C are understood as part of the ongoing natural process of ice calving along the Antarctic Peninsula. However, key questions about the break remain unanswered, hampered in part by the lack of direct observations.

Larsen C has retreated significantly since the 1980s. And once the rapidly advancing crack in the continent’s fourth-largest ice shelf makes its final cut, the extent of Larsen C will be the smallest on record, probably the smallest since the last interglacial period 115,000 years ago. While the size of the current breakaway is not unprecedented in recent decades, the calving will create one of the largest icebergs on record.

The remaining ice shelf is projected to be unstable and may be prone to runaway collapse over the coming years, an event witnessed in the recent collapses of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves. There is significant evidence that various mechanisms driven by climate change may be weakening the Larsen C ice shelf, increasing its vulnerability to forces pushing the shelf toward retreat, and in the longer term, potentially eventual collapse.

The loss of the Larsen C ice shelf won't significantly affect sea level. The loss of ice shelves doesn't raise sea levels. A collapse of Larsen C could allow blocked glaciers to flow toward the ocean, eventually contributing roughly 1 centimeter to sea level rise.

For context, here's a map of that part of Antarctica showing the ice shelves and the underlying land mass:

Note that Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves are indeed gone, calved off completely.

More from ClimateSignals.org (my emphasis):

Larsen C ice shelf: At the cross roads

The collapse of several ice shelves in sequence going down the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) occurred after decades of observed surface warming. And the direction of the breakup has progressed poleward toward the largest AP ice shelf, Larsen C, suggesting a southerly migration of the climatic limit for ice shelves on the AP.[2][1]

Some of these losses are unusual over the last 10,000 years and have been widely attributed to atmospheric and oceanic changes. As of 2010, 18% of the overall ice shelf area on the AP had been lost, roughly 11,000 square miles.[2] After the current calving event is complete, the extent of Larsen C will be the smallest on record[6] and probably the smallest since the last interglacial period 115,000 years ago.[5]

Larsen now straddles the temperature line considered as the practical limit for the viability of ice shelves in the Antarctic.[1]

The "last interglacial period" (called the Eemian) was the warming period prior to the most recent ice age. At its height, the Eemian had temperatures either about the same as temperatures are today (i.e., after the rapid recent temperature rise of the last 150 years) or about one degree Celsius warmer.

What does that mean for us? An earlier ThinkProgress piece by Joe Romm explains:

Right now, we’re headed towards an ice-free planet. That takes us through the Eemian interglacial period of about 130,000 years ago when sea levels were 15 to 20 feet higher, when temperatures had been thought to be about 1°C warmer than today. Then we go back to the “early Pliocene, when sea level was about 25 m [82 feet] higher than today,” as NASA’s James Hansen and Makiko Sato explain in a new draft paper, “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change.”

Pause at this point. At the peak of the Eemian, temperatures were no more than one degree higher than today, and "sea levels were 15 to 20 feet higher."

That's where we're headed and beyond, all to keep David Koch, Rex Tillerson and every other libertarian billionaire megalomaniac ("I just want to win till I die; is that too much to ask?") in the pathological winner's circle. Not a fair trade, you might think.

More on that winner's circle — and that pathology — in a bit. For now, just bringing the news. Antarctica has started to melt in front of us.

GP
 

Finding the Greater Fool — The Elite Logic Behind "Going Over the Climate Cliff"

The "Seneca Cliff" is the point at which a system that grew large slowly, starts to collapse rapidly. This is the way the 1929 stock market and 2008 banking assets collapsed (image source). Any complex system can go over the Seneca Cliff, says climate scientist Ugo Bardi. (Can you guess why he's studying it?)

by Gaius Publius

I won't belabor this here, since I have a longer piece in draft that makes the same point much more directly. But the basic idea is this: Climate people — activists, scientists, concerned citizens, "woke" politicians — think that the elite drive to march human civilization over the climate cliff is, to put it frankly, "nuts." Irrational. Or "insufficiently self-interested," to put it much too mildly.

I've begun to think differently though. I've begun to think that elites who are driving us over the cliff are not at all irrational. Someone who's had that same thought as well is climate scientist Ugo Bardi, who offers a lay person's view of much of his current work at The Seneca Effect.

Bardi's goal is to study, in his words, "why complex systems fail," and further, why they often fail rapidly. For more about Bardi's work on rapid system collapse, see "The Seneca Effect: Why decline is faster than growth." It explains phenomena like those detailed here — as well as what might soon happen to Uber (see "Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Ten: The Uber Death Watch Begins"). The Seneca Effect is named after the Roman philosopher Seneca, who wrote that "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."

The Maldive Islands and Climate Change

Now to my own point. In a recent post, Dr. Bardi looked at the Maldive Islands, one of the most seriously threatened inhabited places in the world when it comes to climate change. According to the IPCC, 75% of the Maldive Islands could be under water by 2100.

Yet here's what the rulers of the Maldives plan to do — stimulate development:

Full Guardian article here. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Actually it doesn't. Dr. Bardi:

Is this an epidemics of brain disease? Or do the Gods really drive crazy those whom they want to destroy?

Maybe. But there is also a perfectly rational explanation for what's happening. Imagine that you are part of the elite of the Maldives. And imagine that you are smart enough to understand what's going on with the Earth's climate. As things stand today, it is clear that it is too late to stop a burst of global warming that will push temperatures so high that nothing will save the Maldives islands. Maybe not next year but in a few decades, it is nearly certain.

So, given the situation, what is the rational thing for you to do? Of course, it is to sell what you can sell as long as you can find a sucker who will buy. Then you can say good riddance to those who remain.

In the case of the Maldives, Dr. Bardi concludes (emphasis mine): "What we are seeing, therefore, is a game in which someone will be left holding the short end of the dynamite stick. When the elites of the Maldives will have left for higher grounds, the poor will be stuck there. For them, the Seneca Cliff ends underwater."

This is a developer's dream — own something worthless, enhance it enough to sell at a much higher price, then leave. "Then you can say good riddance to those who remain."

Can you guess where this logic leads us with respect to the planet? Not interstellar travel for the elites, but something else. If you still haven't figured out what "then leave" means for them, stay tuned.

GP
 

Arctic Sea Ice Has Lost Two-Thirds of Its Volume Since 1979

Animated visualization of the startling decline of Arctic sea ice, showing the minimum volume reached every September since 1979, set on a map of New York with a 10km grid to give an idea of scale. As it plays, note the sudden drops in 1992, 1995, 2006 and 2012. Collapses aren't linear (source).

by Gaius Publius

I've written before about Arctic sea ice and how the area encompassed by ice at the end of summer is shrinking. For example, in this piece, which contained this age-of-ice graphic:

Graphic showing that Arctic ice is getting younger and younger. Today there is much less ice in the Arctic that's older than five years. Note also the difference in total extent (click to enlarge).

Now comes information on Arctic ice volume, with a nice animation (see top) illustrating it. Greg Laden has more at his climate science blog. Fascinating reading (italics mine):

Every year the sea ice that covers the northern part of the Earth expands and contracts though the winter and the summer. The minimum extent of the sea ice is usually reached some time in September, after which it starts to reform.

Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has increased the surface temperatures of the earth, as measured on the land at about heat height with thermometers, and on the sea at the surface, mainly with satellites. Warming of the surface has continued apace for several decades, though with some expected squiggling up and down in how fast that is happening.

Greenhouse gas, mainly CO2, causes warming because of its heat trapping properties, and this warming (and the CO2 itself) set in motion a number of feedback systems that either push against warming or increase warming. Most of these feedback systems, unfortunately, are what we call “positive” feedbacks, though they are not “positive” in a good way. They are effects that increase the amount of warming beyond what would happen from just the CO2. One of the biggest global effects is an increase in the amount of water vapor carried by the atmosphere. Since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, more CO2 -> more greenhouse effect -> more water vapor -> more greenhouse effect.

One of the bad effects of greenhouse warming is the melting of more ice in the Arctic during the summer. On average, less and less ice is left by the end of the melt season in September. Again, this amount squiggles up and down a bit, but it is a persistent downward trend. Since ice reflects sunlight away from the earth, a decrease in ice cover in the Arctic means more warming. This has both regional effects (such as an increase in melting of land-based Greenland glaciers) and a global effect. The regional effect is very important, because this has resulted in a phenomenon known as Arctic Amplification. This refers to the fact that of all the different regions of the earth, the Arctic is warming more than most other regions. The large scale systems of air movement that make up much of our climate, and thus control much of our weather, are shaped and driven in large part by the redistribution of heat form tropical areas (where the sun has a stronger warming effect) outward towards the poles. This redistribution shapes trade wind patterns and determines the location and strength of the jet streams. The relatively warmer Arctic has changed the basic shape and pattern of these major climatic features in ways that have caused significant changes in weather. The drought in California is caused in part by the persistence of a large jet stream meander caused, almost certainly, by Arctic Amplification and other changes in heat distribution in the northern latitudes. Another change is the increase in large scale precipitation events. Here in the twin cities, for example, the frequency of 3″ plus rainstorm over the year has changed from about one every two years to one every year, on average. Rainfall events of between 1 and 2 inches, and between 2 and 3 inches, have also increased.

There are two major properties of Arctic ice that should be considered. One, just discussed, is extent. Extent matters because of its direct effect on albedo, the reflection of sunlight back into space. Less ice extent, caused by warming, means even more warming. The other property is ice volume. Ice volume builds up over time. Thick ice includes ice from previous years that didn’t melt. The system is complex and dynamic, but a healthy Arctic ice ecosystem has a good amount of thick high-volume ice that persists through the melt season and forms the anchor against which annually re-freezing surface ice forms. The less ice volume, the less stable the Arctic Sea ice is, and the more difficult it becomes to reform. Exactly how this effect works depends on exactly which part of the Arctic one is in.

Over the last several decades, the volume of Arctic Sea ice has reduced by something like 80%. This is not good.

There's more, including charts like the stunner below. I'd like to send you there to read the rest.

Arctic sea ice extent, month by month, for the ten most recent years. September is always the summer low. The dark black line shows the average for the years 1981–2010. The dashed line is 2012. When the September low reaches 1 million square kilometers (left scale), the Arctic is ice-free. (Click to enlarge.)

Notice in the text quoted above the relationship between feedbacks, that they piggyback on each other. For example, this one about water vapor: "Since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, more CO2 -> more greenhouse effect -> more water vapor -> more greenhouse effect." Reduction in "whiteness" also increases the greenhouse effect.

It's Coming, and It Won't Be Linear

By "it," of course, I mean the chaos caused by climate change, both physical chaos and social chaos. The maker of the video at the top puts complete loss of Arctic summer ice in the next few years:

Based on the rate of change of volume over the last 30 years, I expect the first ice-free summer day in the Arctic Ocean (defined as having less than 1 million km² of sea ice) to happen between 2016 and 2022, and thereafter occur more regularly with the trend of ice-free duration extending into August and October.

Meaning, if you live through the next two elections, you'll see it. So will everyone else.

GP