Increasing Rates of Acceleration of Ice-Melt: Difficult for Humans to Grasp

The findings of two studies published in January, 2019 indicate that Antarctic’s ice had been melting “at an alarming rate” since 1979.[1]  The rate of melting looked at precisely tells part of the story of why people in general were even in the year before 2020 still catching up in realizing the full extent to which climate change was going on. The key here is the concept of acceleration. The rate of ice loss has not been consistent in that ice disappeared faster in each successive decade.

Specifically, ice loss in Antarctica increased from 40 gigatons (a gigaton is one billion tons) per year from 1979-90 to 252 gigatons per year from 2009-17. That’s a six-fold increase in the rate of acceleration. In fact, the melt-rate accelerated most in the most latter decade. The last two decades saw a melt-rate up 280% compared to the first two decades. This change in the rate of change is extremely difficult to grasp; it is like trying to watch for changes in the rate of acceleration in your car. Paired with this greater difficulty is the fact that the problem is not getting worse at a constant rate; rather, the getting-worse is itself accelerating. The change occurring during the studies’ time-frame of four decades was also difficult to notice because it was being caused by deep relatively warm water hitting the bottom of the glaciers in east Antarctica; the ice-changed-to-water was going on below.[2]  

Whereas the Arctic’s ice is over water, the Antarctic’s ice is generally over land so the additional water raises sea levels more. Yet that won’t stop that water from raising the Atlantic Ocean off Miami in Florida, and sooner rather than later taking up about a third of the present peninsula. Given the very significant population in southeast Florida, that the land there would more likely be underwater sooner than anticipated increases the changes of emergency situations, such as mass relocations. In other words, the studies imply that we as a species could be caught off-guard both from not having kept up on the accelerating rates and the effects of those rates in bringing climate change sooner than would be the case had the rates been constant across the decades. A feedback-loop could develop whereby increasing rates trigger changes that in turn increase the rates even more than otherwise. The situation could at that point be out of humanity’s hands, yet the insufficient action while it can still make a difference has been caused in part because an increasing rate of change is difficult for humans to grasp, let alone see.

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1, Brandon Miller, “Antarctica Ice Melt Has Accelerated by 280% in the Last Four Decades,” cnn.com, January 14, 2109. On holes in a glacier in Antartica, see Sheena McKinsey, "Gigantic Hole Two-Thirds the Size of Manhattan Discovered in Antartic Glacier," CNN.com (accessed January 31, 2019).

2. Eric Rignot et al, “Four Decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet Mass Balance from 1979-2017,” PNAS, January 14, 2019.

Hidden Warnings of Climate Change: A Paralyzed Species Looks On

Global warming has been so difficult to slow down through political means at least in part due to the fact that most of the action has been going on in the Arctic Ocean and the surrounding permafrost land (which, it turns out, is not so permanently frozen after all, so methane is leaving that ground for the atmosphere). All this is far from almost all of the world’s population, so social consciousness has not been changed nearly enough for demands by voters that governments act in enforceable ways, globally. In short, what has been occurring in that far Northern region has both dwarfed consciousness of the impact of human-released carbon/methane.  The proverbial canary in the coal mine has been hidden from view for all but a few (e.g., scientists). The implications are truly astonishing.
According to Alan Buis at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California in 2013, “Climate change is already happening in the Arctic, faster than its ecosystems can adapt. Looking at the Arctic is like looking at the canary in the coal mine for the entire Earth system.”[1] In general terms, if the pace of global warming outstrips the ability of the ecosystem sustaining the human race to adapt, the species can be expected to suffer with inadequate prior notice. The planet's climate may get warmer too fast to allow us to adjust, for instance, in terms of such essentials as food and water. Hotter summers may be just part of the challenge. Lest it be forgotten, the more complex the organism, the less adaptable it is to external change. In addition to the biology of complexity, the motive of greed makes us even less adaptive when the costs are up-front and the benefits totally or even mostly in the future. 
So what is it that was going on up North that had Alan Buis so concerned in 2013? In his article, he points out that over “hundreds of millennia [that’s a very long time], Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon [because dead plants and animals do not decompose in the top soil]—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons).”[2]  This amount of carbon is significant for two reasons. 
First, the carbon is in the soil that is likely to thaw. Once thawed, that soil, which has been warming even faster than the Arctic air, releases carbon into the atmosphere.  Second, the 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams dwarfs “the 350 petagrams of carbon that have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850.”[3] If you are reading this essay while eating in a restaurant, this is when you flag down your server and calmly say, “Check please!” so you can get your affairs in order.
In the frozen soil that covers 9 million square miles, melting would also emit “massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere,” according to Terrell Johnson of weather.com.[4] He adds that methane is “much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, with more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year period.”[5] Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Erasmus University in the E.U. have predicted tremendous economic costs as a consequence of the expected release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane in thawing permafrost under the East Siberian Sea.[6]. That is by no means all of the permafrost up North.
According to Buis, climate models at least as of June 2013 had not yet adequately incorporated the impact of carbon and methane that could be released into the atmosphere from the “permafrost” soils, which, by the way, had warmed as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees F (1.5 to 2.5 degrees C) in 30 years.[7] Regardless of the decade, we could have absolutely no idea where the Earth’s climate would be headed—and thus whether our species would even survive.
Although humans beings have not been holding blow-torches to the frozen tundra as if playing some sick joke on nature in the middle of the night, the vast majority—98 percent—of climatologists agreed in 2013 that the “human contribution” had been a significant factor in the carbon dioxide having reached the 400 ppm (parts per million) benchmark for what Johnson calls “a new danger zone."[8]
We as a species may have inadvertently helped light the fuse on a process even more significant than carbon in impacting global warming. To be sure, at the time, it was difficult to ascertain how much or even whether that methane-process would be mitigated or reduced in its extent should reducing our burning of fossil fuels mean that the Arctic air would not warm up quite so much as would otherwise be the case. Nevertheless, the sheer magnitude of the carbon and methane still caught in the frozen soil and the gigantic effect those gases would have if released into the atmosphere suggest that it is in our own best interest as a species to do what we can to reduce the amount of additional warming of the Arctic air as much as possible.
Making the matter more confusing, the warming at the Arctic has been more than at the equator. The slope between cold and warm air between the two areas fuels the Arctic jet-stream, or "the Polar Vortex." Less energy means the circling river of air around the Arctic is loosens and thus can belch Arctic air southward. Think of that high river of air as like a wobbly rubber-band. The wobbles send more Arctic air further south, the last week of January, 2019 being but one instance. Together, the instances give the false impression that global warming is not occurring. "We had a really cold winter last year," a man in Chicago, Illinois or Berlin, Germany, might say. He might conclude that global warming is a hoax, then he might vote. Hence Jefferson and Adams agreed that a viable republic (and we might generalize to world) requires an educated and virtuous citizenry. 

For all our amazing accomplishments technologically beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the human race has shown itself to be remarkably blind concerning not only its own footprint, but also what might be unleashed in nature itself as a result of our thrashing about. In the film Avatar, Neytiri chastises Jake Sully, saying “You are like a baby. Making noise, don’t know what to do,” on account of his ignorance on how to conduct himself in the forest. The irony is astounding in that we humans have been able to get to the moon, and yet we are so ignorant—arrogant even—regarding how we are impacting our climate and ecosystems, both of which we rely on for our very survival as a species. In all likelihood, the sheer clumsiness in our corporate footprint and the astounding arrogance in our socialite swagger will be outstripped sooner than we suppose by the subtle yet enduring ways of nature. For all our power and money, for all our numbers across many lands, we are indeed a small species that presumes itself to be great.

[1] Alan Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?” NASA News and Features, June 10, 2013. Accessed July 16, 2013.
[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs,” weather.com, July 15, 2013.  Accessed July 16, 2013.
[5] Ibid.

[6] Nina Chestney, "Arctic Methane Release Due to Climate Change Could Cost Global Economy $60 Trillion, Study Reports," Reuters, July 24, 2013.

[7] Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”
[8] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs.”