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Global Warming, “Thermal Inertia” & Tomorrow’s News

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

In the Arctic, September is the peak ice-melt season. This year, even by August, polar ice had retreated to near record-low levels, exposing dark ocean water to soak up even more of the sun’s heat, in an albedo (reflectivity) cycle that is reinforcing itself. As is often the case, the provocations are both natural and human. Greenhouse gases emitted by human transport and industry are part of the story. The rest involves persistent high pressure over the Arctic that this year allows more sunshine than usual, along with winds from the south, drawing up warm, ice-eroding air.

“During the first week in July, the Arctic sea ice started to disappear at rates we had never seen before,” said Sheldon Drobot, who leads the Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group at the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR). The record-low September minimum for sea ice, set in 2005, is 2.15 million square miles, Drobot said. For 2007, the most likely minimum extent is 1.96 million square miles. Persistent high pressure over the Arctic during the summer of 2007 allowed more sunshine than usual, along with winds from the south, drawing up warm, iceeroding air.

Across Alaska, northern Canada and Siberia, scientists are finding telltale signs that permafrost is melting more quickly than ever. As permafrost melts, additional carbon dioxide and methane convert from solid form, stored in the earth, to gas in the atmosphere, retaining more heat. Once again, human contributions of greenhouse gases are provoking a natural process, like the trigger of a gun.

The real news of global warming, however, is not how warm it is today, because today’s carbon emissions do not give us tomorrow’s temperature. Through a complex set of feedbacks (“thermal inertia” to scientists), we will feel today’s emissions in our faces roughly half a century from now. In the oceans, the feedback loop is longer, probably a century and a half, maybe two.

The real debate isn’t over how much the oceans may rise from melting ice by the end of this century (one to three feet, perhaps), but how much melting will be “in the pipeline” by that time. James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, estimates that thermal inertia by the year 2100 may guarantee a 25-meter sealevel rise within two centuries.

Most of the world’s mountain glaciers, as well as a large part of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would add up to 25 meters. Some are now laying bets on the date that firstfloor toilets will back up from flooding at the White House — about 60 feet above the Tidal Basin.

According to Hansen, Global warming differs from previous pollution problems in two fundamental ways. With water pollution or common air pollution, smog, the problems occur immediately when the pollutants are emitted. If we decide there is a problem and stop emitting them, the problem goes away. However, global warming is caused by greenhouse gases that have a lifetime of hundreds of years. So we can’t wait until we have a fullblown problem and then say “Oh, we better stop emitting these.” It’s too late then. The gases will hang around for centuries.

The second major difference with the global warming problem is that the climate system responds slowly to the gases that we add to the air. Because of the great thermal inertia of the ocean, only about half of the eventual warming due to gases already in the air has been realized. The Earth has warmed one and one half degrees Fahrenheit so far, but there is another one degree already in the pipeline. Moreover, there are surely more gases in the pipeline, because of power plants that we have in place and vehicles that we are not going to take off the road.

One and one-half degrees! Who cares about that? Even with another degree or two in the pipeline, who cares about a few degrees? Well, we had better all care about it, because we have already brought the planet close to some tipping points. If we pass those tipping points there will be dramatic consequences. We will leave an impoverished planet for our children; we will have been lousy stewards of Creation; we will have destroyed Creation for future generations.

In 50 more years, when our children are grandparents, the planetary emergency for which we are now tasting the first course will be a dominant theme in everyone’s life, unless we act now. Hansen and other scientists tell us that within a decade or two, thermal inertia will take off on its own, portending a hot, miserable future for coming generations.

What do we need? To begin, a moratorium on construction of coal-fired power plants until adequate technology is available to remove carbon dioxide from their emissions. As long as we pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are pulling the trigger of thermal inertia. Such technology is now in its infancy.

We also need to conserve power in all ways possible, through tighter buildings and more efficient transportation — on the ground, as well as air travel. At present, only one percent of the energy in a car’s gas tank actually reaches the drive train.

We need vigorous development of alternatives — solar, wind and tidal power. In California, a new technology that concentrates solar energy with mirrors will provide power for 400,000 homes from the Mojave Desert.

Solar panels are being built into the roofs of many new homes across California.

This is a start. Global warming is dangerous because it is a sneaky, slow-motion emergency, demanding that we acknowledge a reality centuries in the future with a system of individual, legal, and diplomatic reaction that reacts in the past tense.

Again, I quote Jim Hansen, who knows the science: “The bottom line is this: business-asusual, if it continues for even another decade will be disastrous for the planet. We can have a stable climate, clean air, and an unpolluted ocean. And clean energies yield good jobs. It is up to the public to make sure that we get onto a path that stabilizes climate and allows all the creatures of Creation to continue to thrive on this planet.”