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Carbon Dioxide Levels:
How Much is Too Much?

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

By August, 2009, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), was coming to support a level of 350 parts per million carbon dioxide over the organization’s officially stated position, in its 2007 assessment, that 450 as a peak level was safe enough. This change brings him into line with the position of our friend and Iowa neighbor Jim Hansen (director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies), which he has been asserting for years.

Bill McKibben, author and climate activist, conveyed Pachauri’s change of mind in an email (borrowing from an Agence France Presse report) to people with whom he works: “As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations,” said Rajendra Pachauri when asked if he supported calls to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 p.p.m. But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target.”

For activists this is good news, an indication that the sometimes-ponderous I.P.C.C. may listen to its own chief officer and ‘smell the coffee.’ For the Earth, it demonstrates just how close to a climatic train wreck we really are, since the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide level is already about 385 p.p.m., and rising. In the meantime, the world’s governments seem to be in no hurry to factor a 350 p.p.m. target into their actions. To do so would require putting the Earth on a crash carbon-dioxide diet, a mass mobilization along the lines of World War II, to change the ways in which we all live, work, consume and generate energy. Hansen also has advocated this approach for years.

As politicians fiddle, however, evidence mounts that the climatic stakes are rising. For example:

We’ve Seen the Last Ice Age

Temperatures are now warmer in the Arctic than during the last 2,000 years, at a time when the Earth is receiving less heat from the sun due to changes in its orbit. The difference is greenhouse-gas emissions due to human activity, Darrell S. Kaufman and colleagues wrote in Science. A cooling trend until the 20th century “was caused by the steady orbitally driven reduction in summer insolation… [which] was reversed during the 20th century, with four of the five warmest decades of our 2000-year-long reconstruction occurring between 1950 and 2000.”

This study also provides fresh evidence for indications that human-generated warming could interrupt the natural ice-age cycle. “The slow cooling trend is trivial compared to the warming that’s been happening and that’s in the pipeline,” Kaufman told Andrew C. Revkin of the New York Times in a September 4 article. After a cooling less than 0.5 degrees F. per millennium, the Arctic has warmed 2.2 degrees since 1900. “The fast rate of recent warming is the scary part,” said co-author Jonathan T. Overpeck. “It means that major impacts on Arctic ecosystems and global sea level might not be that far off unless we act fast to slow global warming.” “It’s basically saying that greenhouse-gas emissions are overwhelming the system,” co-author David Schneider told Revkin.

Thirty scientists from several countries collected lake sediment and glacier ice samples, as well as tree-ring records and other proxy data to trace the slow cooling, then sudden warming, in the Arctic. Without increasing greenhouse gases, they assert that the slow cooling would have continued because the Earth’s orbit, which “wobbles” over time, is about 620,000 miles further from the sun than 2,000 years ago.

Methane Bubbles

A group of British and German research scientists using sonar has found that at least 250 sources of methane bubbles have been rising from methane hydrates in the sea-bed off Norway, an early indication, perhaps, of the “methane gun” that could add to the atmosphere’s overload of greenhouse gases. The group reported in Geophysical Research Letters that the methane was rising from between 150 and 4500 meters near West Spitsbergen.

Temperature records indicate that this area has warmed by about 1 degree C. during the last 30 years, destabilizing some of the hydrates. Professor Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton told British Broadcasting Corp News August 18: “We already knew there was some methane hydrate in the ocean off Spitsbergen and that’s an area where climate change is happening rather faster than just about anywhere else in the world,” he said. “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started,” Minshull said.

This research indicates that the methane release may be part of a long-term pattern that reaches, in some cases, to the last years of the most recent ice age. Most of the methane ejected from the hydrates reacts with oxygen in the ocean, forming carbon dioxide as carbonic acid, contributing to ocean acidification. “If this process becomes widespread along Arctic continental margins, tens of teragrams of methane per year could be released into the ocean,” the scientists wrote.

SOURCES

Burns, Judith. “Methane Seeps from Arctic Sea-bed.” B.B.C. News. August 18, 2009.

Kaufman, Darrell S., David P. Schneider, Nicholas P. McKay, Caspar M. Ammann, Raymond S. Bradley, Keith R. Briffa, Gifford H. Miller, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, Jonathan T. Overpeck, Bo M. Vinther, and Arctic Lakes 2k Project Members. “Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling.” Science 325(4 September 4, 2009):1236-1239.

Revkin, Andrew C. “Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age.” New York Times, September 4, 2009

“Warming Past, Present.” Washington Post in Omaha World-Herald, September 4, 2009, 5-A.

Westbrook, Graham K., Kate E. Thatcher, Eelco J. Rohling, Alexander M. Piotrowski, Heiko Pälike, Anne H. Osborne, Euan G. Nisbet, Tim A. Minshull, Mathias Lanoisellé, Rachael H. James, Veit Hühnerbach, Darryl Green, Rebecca E. Fisher.nAnya J. Crocker, Anne Chabert,  Clara Bolton, Agnieszka Beszczynska-Möller. Christian Berndt, and Alfred Aquilina, “Escape of Methane Gas from the Seabed along the West Spitsbergen Continental Margin.” Geophysical Research Letters 36(August 6, 2009) L15608, doi:10.1029/2009GL039191.

Bruce E. Johansen is a professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and author, in 2009, of Hot Air and Hard Science: Dissecting the Global Warming Debate and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Global Warming Science and Technology.