Star Phoenix Base

BOOK REVIEW

Six Degrees — Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas, National Geographic Society, 2008, 336 pgs., $26.00

By David L. Brown

The 2007 report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) addressed the possibility that within the next century the global temperature might rise anywhere from one to six degrees Celsius. Taking that as a starting point, writer Mark Lynas delved into the files at Oxford University to review thousands of scientific papers on climate change. In doing the research for this book he divided his findings into six folders according to the possible warming suggested or implied by each report. The six main chapters of this book thus follow the pattern “One Degree” … through “Six Degrees.”

Nearly all of what he writes is familiar to followers of Star Phoenix Base, but the organization of the material by temperature range yields a clear perspective on the dangers of climate change as it might unfold. In effect, the book reads like a series of reports on disasters yet to come, building step by step into the possible future. Here is a very brief chapter-by-chapter summary:

One degree. This is a familiar world, basically the one in which we live today. Lynas kicks off with a description of the stabilized sand dunes of the western plains, notably the Nebraska Sand Hills, and the very likely possibility that drought and rising heat will soon destroy the plant cover that now supports grazing cattle and start the sand moving again in a far more serious “dust bowl” event that will continue into the forseeable future. In my book The Star Phoenix I described what will become the Nebraska Desert, so this is no surprise to me. I have visited that region on numerous occasions and once took a wrong turn down what turned out to be a closed road that wound among water-filled pot holes and drift sand for a number of miles before emerging at last on a paved road. I can testify that those sand dunes are real and are merely slumbering before coming to life once again to march across the landscape.

Lynas also addresses potential changes in the Atlantic currents that presently warm Europe; disappearing mountain glaciers; threats to the monsoon weather patterns on which southern Asia depends, causing extremes of drought and catastrophic floods; the on-going meltdown of the Arctic ice cap and hints that the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets may be entering a period of rapid melting. Coral bleaching, the loss of species such as the already extinct golden toad, and the chances of more severe hurricanes as the planet grows warmer round out the scenario as average temperatures rise by one degree. All-in-all, the one-degree world is familiar, pretty much the one we are living in today as the effects he describes are already beginning to appear. Even at this early stage, the danger of reaching a tipping point in the Arctic is introduced. Tipping points will become ever more likely as the heat rises, each bringing an unknown danger of sending the climate spiraling into new directions.

Two degrees. The plot thickens as Lynas walks us into to a future world that is beginning to look more ominous. Massive water shortages will strike in places such as China, India and Pakistan as mountain glaciers disappear and monsoon rains become less reliable. “China,” he writes, “will not just struggle to develop a more affluent lifestyle, it will struggle to feed itself too.”

At this stage the oceans will grow more acidic, threatening the very foundation of the Earth’s food chain. Organisms with calcium carbonate shells will potentially be destroyed, all the way from microscopic plankton to sea urchins, clams, mussels and oysters. To some extent these effects are already being observed.

Europe will become a much hotter place, making the heat wave of 2003 that killed as many as 35,000 people seem mild by comparison. In effect, the conditions of the Sahara Desert will jump across the Mediterranean Sea to transform a swath from Greece to Portugal. One study indicated that with two degrees of global warming, in 50 percent of future summers Europe will experience heat waves even worse than the one in 2003. As in the American High Plains, sand dunes may begin to appear in Spain and crops will wither and burn. Again, a tipping point may be reached as stunted foliage and parched soil gives up more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to feed spiraling warming.

After two degrees of warming the melting of ice will be taking off, causing sea levels to rise steadily higher. The Arctic Ice Cap will disappear completely, leading to a frenzied rush to extract oil and natural gas from the Arctic Ocean Basin, previously unreachable because of the floating ice. More fossil fuel to be burned and more CO2 to be released into the air as the spiral continues. By this time, polar bears, ringed seals, walrus, and even caribou will be threatened or already extinct as tundra melts and ice disappears. Again, this is an effect that is already under way and will only be made more serious at the two degree stage.

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BOOK REVIEW

“With Speed and Violence — Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change,” by Fred Pearce, Beacon Press, 2007, xxvi + 278 pgs., $24.95

By David L. Brown

Climate scientists are afraid. That is the underlying message in this new book by Fred Pearce, long-time editor and environmental consultant to New Scientist magazine. As a leading environmental journalist Pearce has covered the subject of climate change for nearly two decades and has interviewed and observed the work of most of the top figures in climate research and modeling.

His conclusions are ominous, for as he says:

“Often in environmental science it is the young, idealistic researchers who become impassioned advocates. Here I find it is the people who have been in the field the longest—the researchers with the best reputations for doing good science, and the professors with the best CVs and longest lists of published papers—who are the most fearful, often talking in the most dramatic language.”

Pearce focuses his attention on the growing mass of evidence that climate change does not occur slowly, but in sudden spurts. Cores from ice sheets and the ocean bottom reveal that the planet “flickers” between temporary states of equilibrium. It does not slowly morph from one state to the other, but behaves as if an on-off switch had been clicked back and forth. For example, the 1300 year reversion to the last Ice Age called the Younger Dryas era, which occurred about 12,000 years ago after the warming period of the Holocene had seen the glaciers retreat, may have set in as suddenly as within a single year. The end came almost as abruptly with a sudden return to warmer conditions.

Climate scientists are constantly seeing their assumptions challenged. For example, Pearce describes how those who study glaciers and ice sheets have until quite recently posited the idea that massive bodies of ice could only melt slowly and steadily. For example, they predicted that the two-mile thick Greenland ice sheet would take 10,000 years before thawing could reach its bottom.

But recent discoveries reveal that the ice sheet has developed cracks, and rivers of warm meltwater are pouring down those cracks to the bottom of the sheet. As Pearce points out, instead of 10,000 years, the thawing reaches the bottom of the ice sheet in ten seconds. It has been realized that the Greenland ice sheet could break up much faster than ever believed possible.

Similar events are changing ideas about the stability of the Antarctic ice, where the Larson B ice sheet—larger than the nation of Luxembourg and 650 feet thick—broke up entirely over three days in March, 2002. The Larson B had been stable for thousands of years and the only reasonable explanation for its breakup is global warming.

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