Climate Change Impacts on America

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Top IPCC organizer & U of Arizona Professor Jonathan Overpeck speech at Washington U. given on April 1st, 2008.

After updating the world climate report, Overpeck predicts climate impacts on North America.

His focus, on the two worst climate problems for America:

1. Rising seas. More than half of Americans live within 50 miles of the sea coast. Many American cities, like New York, and States, like Florida, may be flooded by rising seas (plus storm surges) within the experience of our children - or sooner. The implications are enormous.

2. The drying of the West. Already well underway. Dry soils, and 20 percent of normal rainfall this spring (and hot temperatures) are behind the North California fires we now know. Overpeck explains why tree species are dying, and the great droughts that have driven humans from the South West in the past. This time, we have triggered this phenomenon, as the Jet Stream moves North, the former rains move with it.

Overpeck gives a clear explanation, with predictions for Americans that sound to me a lot like what has hit Southern Australia. The possibility of centuries-long drought.

1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB.

Production Notes: 30 second music bed for station ID at 30:14

Methane Burps & Tele-Everything

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Guest host KMO from C-Realm podcast interviews David M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist from NASA Langley Research Center.

Lots of doom, but really good solutions too.

Thanks to KMO for sharing this rare interview.

1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB

Production Notes: 30 second music bed for station ID at 33 min

A WARNING FROM THE PAST

This week's Radio Ecoshock broadcast is about past greenhouse worlds, quick climate shifts, and mass extinctions caused by changes to the atmosphere.

Dr. Andrew Glikson studies comet/asteroid impacts, volcanoes, and past climates. He's been doing it for 40 years.

While studying the oldest record of life on Earth, in the Australian outback, Glikson found a relationship between comet or asteroid impacts and the generation of living things. We do not yet know whether life forms (such as bacteria) actually arrived from outer space - or whether the impact generated energy and unique chemical conditions that caused certain natural reactions to duplicate themselves.

All that is a side issue to this speech, which is an education on the dominating role of the atmosphere in determining the state of life on Earth. Whether caused by impacts or volcanoes, or even gradual tilts in the Earth axis, a changing atmosphere can make life luxurious - or kill off up to 90% of all species.

The science explained by Andrew Glikson in this speech find a parallel in the book "Under A Green Sky" by Peter Ward, a scientist in Washington State. We are talking, for example, about the Permian mass extinction, about 200 million years ago. The ocean lost it's oxygen, and life surived in only a few pockets of the ocean. Most land species were exterminated.

Of the five past great extinctions (we are apparently living in the 6th extinction now) - FOUR WERE CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE. Not hits from outer space. For the survival of our species, we need to know what happened - and few people alive know more than Andrew Glikson, as he summarizes not only his own research, but the general science now developing in the field.

This speech from Australia National University explains our current shift toward a hot-state planet - much faster than ever before. It has been slightly modified for radio, (to fit in an hour) with the permission of Dr. Glikson.

Learn about your planet (or die?)

The Radio Ecoshock Show 080704 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB

Alex
Radio Ecoshock

IPCC Future Forecaster: Andrew Weaver

Click the title above to hear an 11 minute interview with Dr. Andrew Weaver, lead author of the "future predictions" section of the IPCC report released in February in Paris.

We discuss the role of scientists, and the reliability of the future predictions in the report.

Dr. Weaver says there is some good news: he was directly involved in wrapping up oceans research which indicates a catastrophic failure of the Atlantic Converyor Belt, (often called the "Gulf Stream") is VERY UNLIKELY to happen this century. There were worries that melting Arctic Ice, and Greenland ice, could reduce salinity in the ocean current that makes the U.S. Northeast, Britain, and Northern Europe habitable. Apparently, despite massive Arctic melts, so far the current research (literally) indicates we shouldn't be worried about this in the near term.

However, Dr. Weaver concludes we are in for very difficult times, even if we reduce carbon quickly, as we must. And if we cannot decarbonize, our legacy to children and grandchildren will be massive flooding, storms, droughts, and heat.

We discuss the role of Canada's Arctic. If the vegetative carbon, billions of tons of it, is unfrozen - that is if the new heat melts the permafrost - then massive amounts of Greenhouse Gases will be released. This may be a critical tipping point. Science does not yet know how much of this vegetative matter will become carbon dioxide, and how much methane.

It all depends how much is under water - the swamps and lakes of the North. The previously frozen plant material would decompose without oxygen, and thus become methane - a Greenhouse gas 12 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Over this huge continental area, a relatively rapid release of methane over a few years, or even a decade, could tip the climate out of control, leading to the ultimate heat described by Sir James Lovelock - the last humans gathered around the Arctic Sea to escape the heat further South.

If the vegetation rots where oxygen if present, then it releases carbon dioxide. Still bad, but not necessarily fatal.

It all depends on how much, how fast, and in what gaseous form this carbon heads into the sky. And science doesn't know.

Dr. Weaver also describes a just-released study which compares previous IPCC estimates, which have been given every 6 years since 1990 - to what actually happened. The earlier predictions were not only realized, they were conservative, below the heat and other ramifications of climate change that hit us.

There is reason to believe the current IPCC estimates are also low. It was a consensus judgement at the last, involving many countries, including those committed to making money from fossil fuels.

These are my impressions, after the interview - you decide.

Alex
www.ecoshock.org