West Antarctic Ice “Fuse Is Blown”: Where Can We Stop Rising Seas?

This is the blog post I hate to write.

Because it’s about worst nightmares coming true.

About tipping points and points of no return. 

We’re there.

Polar ice sheet doomed, the headline read. West Antarctic Ice Shelf on a path to disintegration - 13 more feet of water in the oceans. 

Anyone following polar ice science has seen the trend for years.  Accelerating glacier flow.  Ice shelf break-up. Going on since the 1990s, and intensifying since 2000. Arctic summer sea ice has been fading at an unexpected rate as well.  But sea ice is in the sea so it does not raise sea levels.  Antarctica and Greenland ice above sea level does. 

How far can seas rise?  Consider the Eemian, the warm period before the last ice age.  In the must-read “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’” published in December, climate scientist James Hansen and his team note that the Eemian saw global warming of at most 3.6˚F above temperatures around 1920.  Since then the planet has heated 1.1˚F.  On the current trajectory global warming will exceed 3.6˚F by the end of this century. 

What did Eemian sea levels look like?  At their peak, they were 30 feet higher than today’s.  The rise did not occur gradually.  Hansen et al note that at least 10 feet rapidly piled on in the late Eemian, “suggesting the possibility that a critical stability threshold was crossed that caused polar ice sheet collapse.”  In other words, high temperatures eventually crack and rapidly dissolve ice sheets.

That is the greatest danger posed by the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS). The study in the news was from a scientific team led by Eric Rignot of NASA.  They examined retreat of the largest WAIS glaciers.  Scientists found that the process has now become unstoppable. The shelf is in the ocean’s realm anchored to the seabed. But warm ocean waters and increased winds are undermining the grounding from the bottom.

 “. . .  we have witnessed glacier grounding lines retreat by kilometres every year, glaciers thinning by meters every year hundreds of kilometres inland, losing billions of tons of water annually, and speeding up several percent every year . . . “

Loss of those big glaciers “will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five meters (10-16 feet). Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.”

At current rates the big glaciers would be gone in 200 years.  But rates are accelerating and rapid ice sheet collapse is in the cards.  Our children’s generation could well see WAIS go into its death spiral, maybe even some of the younger members of this generation. 

Cry for the melting cryopshere, and for low-lying coastal cities from Venice to New Orleans.

Ice disintegration doesn’t stop with West Antarctica, but moves into the big daddy of ice sheets, East Antarctica.  Go a little further back in time to around three million years ago when temperatures were 5.4˚F above the current geologic era, a point the Earth could reach in a century.  Sea levels were elevated 50-80 feet over those of today. 

Hansen et al write, “Such sea level rise suggests that parts of East Antarctica must be vulnerable to eventual melting with global temperature increases of only a few degrees Celsius.  Indeed, satellite gravity data and radar altimetry reveal that the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica, which fronts a large ice mass grounded below sea level, is now losing mass.”   

Rignot notes that Totten alone contains the equivalent of 22 feet of sea level.  Our coming generations are facing radically higher sea levels.

Can we stop this somewhere? 

I caught up with Rignot the other day to pose a question: Assume a global political-economic miracle spurred by findings such as that of your group. The world wakes up, finally, and declares an effort on the scale of World War II.  We do what Hansen et al prescribe in their December article. We begin six percent annual reductions in carbon emissions, hold total industrial era emissions to 500 billion metric tons, and pull another 100 billion of the atmosphere into vegetation and soils.  Does this avoid the eventual deterioration of WAIS?  Or is this already baked into the cake?

Eric responded, “We have already blown the fuse but the dismantling of West Antarctica could go faster if we keep heading this way. A slow down of warming would likely help get there slower.”

So there it is.  We can at best slow the disintegration of the WAIS.  With a campaign of radical carbon reduction we can give our coming generations a fighting chance to achieve a managed retreat to higher ground.

But can we stop the disintegration of Greenland and East Antarctica?  A new study shows that Greenland glaciers are more vulnerable to melting than we thought. Valleys underlying the glaciers are beneath the level of warming seas further inland than was previously known.   Greenland ice equals 20 feet of sea level, East Antarctica around 190.

How long before we read the news we’ve “blown the fuse” on substantial parts of these ice sheets?  We don’t know. But the evidence from the way this planet looked when temperatures were only a few degrees warmer says we are perilously close.

This all points to an undeniable conclusion that a dramatic carbon reduction effort is needed on the order of what Hansen et al prescribe in their article.  It may seem completely beyond the realm of political and economic possibility to move to carbon cuts of six percent annually.  It also seemed wild when Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 called on the U.S. to build 50,000 planes a year when we were only making a few hundred.  By 1942, the nation reached FDR’s target. 

It’s going to take leadership.  To stay relevant in the face of ever worsening climate impacts the climate movement needs to start advancing climate solutions equal to the perilous challenges we face. Elected leaders need to step up, honestly address the desperate climate situation and forward the global carbon reduction campaign that must be undertaken.

We are already leaving our kids and their coming generations with some deeply dangerous legacies.  If we are to redeem our memory in the eyes of those who come after us, we need to act now in proportion to the immensity of the challenge. 

I close with the words of Martin Luther King Jr. addressing Riverside Church in April 1967 when he broke silence and took an active stand against the Vietnam War. His words could not be more fitting to our generation’s challenge:

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late.’ There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.’”

p.s. Here’s a great video explaining why WAIS is on the way out.

Beyond Market Fundamentalism: The Climate War Requires Public Purpose and Investment

There was a time when we met overarching challenges with bold public purpose and concerted action as “we the people.” 

When the Depression hit, we created large public works projects, building roads, airports and power dams. 

When murderous tyranny threatened the world, we became the arsenal of democracy and won World War II. 

When Europe was sinking in post-war turmoil, we staged the Marshall Plan to rebuild the continent. 

When John Kennedy set a target to reach the Moon in a decade, we assembled the resources and will and made it happen. 

Then, in the 1980s something happened.  We stopped believing in acting together in the common interest.  With Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, we turned to the “magic of the marketplace.”    In the public policy arena, market tools were conceived to be superior to direct actions by governments.  Government was the problem, not the solution, said Ronnie.  Bill Clinton echoed him in the 1990s when he said the era of big government is over. 

Marketplace mysticism infused both parties, not to mention the environmental movement, where MAs and PhDs with expertise in “neoclassical economics” were avidly sought to develop market tools that would reflect environmental costs and “right price” everything.  Market fundamentalism won the day.

Thus the climate movement is possessed with near theological discussions about which market tool is better.  Is it a straight-up carbon tax, or should we create a carbon cap, auctioning permits to pollute and allowing polluters to buy carbon emissions reductions in a trading marketplace?  Ideally seeking the lowest-cost carbon reductions possible. 

What is lost in the discussion is how we actually met challenges on the order of global warming and climate change in the past, challenges which require the creation of new technologies and industries. Market fundamentalism conceives new innovations and industries to rise magically out of properly adjusted market systems.  Build the incentives and they will come.  A study of economic history shows it just ain’t so.  

The digital computing industry did not start with guys in garages in the 1970s, but with huge investments by the military and then the space program from World War II through the Cold War.  Long before Bill Gates and Steven Jobs came the Department of War-funded ENIAC, the world’s first digital computer, in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania.  From IBM to the predecessors of today’s microchip industry, government-funded research and contracts founded later commercial success. Military and space purchases of costly integrated circuits paved the way for cheap mass computing.

Aerospace likewise rose out of concerted public investments driven by national security needs.  For instance, Boeing built the Boeing 707 jetliner on an airframe designed as the KC-135 air tanker. Before 1955 the company drew over 99 percent of its income from the U.S. Department of Defense.  The telecommunication story is the same, with microwave transmission, communications satellites and fiber optics rising out of federal research and investments.  Even the fossil fuel fracking revolution grew out of decades of public R&D funding. Earlier examples of industry creation include the land and cash grants to the first transcontinental rail lines, and the U.S. Navy’s deliberate creation of an American steel industry to build its new steel fleet in the 1880s. 

Public investment is needed to nurture new technologies through early stages, when investments are not likely to produce immediate returns. If one private party takes the research and development risks, others might share the rewards by reverse engineering new technologies and adopting them as their own.  In economics this is known as the free rider problem.  So the public must assume the risks.  Then when technologies move from R&D to early production, costs are high until economies of scale and learning curves bring them down.   So public support in the form of guaranteed markets for expensive early stage products is crucial. 

Carbon pricing and caps can be a useful supplement to public investment in creating new technologies and industries.  But to win the climate war we need to recall how we succeeded in other great struggles.  By “we the people” acting together in the common good and directly investing in creating the technologies and industries we need to win.  We did it in the past.  We can do it again. 

Carbon cap-and-trade shell game?

Editor’s Note:  After a several month hiatus Cascadia Planet is back.  I’ve been busy ramping up my global sustainability practice, MROC, engaging in a huge project that represents nothing less than the invention of a new, seawater-based agriculture. I’ll tell you more about that in coming months.  Meanwhile, I will be posting articles on a number of topics related to climate and sustainability.  In the spirit of the original 1990s Cascadia Planet, building global sustainability solutions in regions and localities, I will offer occasional analyses of climate policy being developed on my home ground in Washington state.  This is the first. For background see my articles in Crosscut, Part 1 and Part 2.  And I will be doing the second and third pieces of my American Nations review, which will illuminate the difficulties of passing a national climate policy and the need to make sure state and regional climate policies stand on their own two feet.  

The Brits came to Washington state recently to tout the wonders of carbon cap-and-trade before Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s Carbon Emissions Reduction Task Force (CERT).

United Kingdom representatives on May 15 came to share their insights on Britain’s carbon cap-and-trade (CCAT) before the 21-member group tasked with designing Washington state’s carbon framework.  Gov. Inslee’s own executive order mandates a system very much like Britain’s. 

“The carbon emissions reduction program must establish a cap on carbon pollution emissions, with binding requirements to meet our statutory emission limits, and it must include the market mechanisms needed to meet the limits in the most effective and efficient manner possible,” the order reads.  In other words, CCAT.

To hear the British representatives, CCAT is a slam dunk. John Stang reported on the meeting in Crosscut.

“The United Kingdom's combined efforts reduced its carbon emissions by 25 percent from 1990 to 2013, according to (Alyssa) Gilbert (of Ecofys UK) and Emma Wright of the United Kingdom's Department of Energy and Climate Change. British law sets a 34 percent reduction target for 2020 and an 80 percent reduction target by 2050. Nuclear power is a significant plank in the British approach.”

An impressive performance, particularly if one has no objections to new nuclear power in the quake-prone Northwest.  But how real is that 25 percent? 

It’s more like an emissions shell game, the UK Energy Research Center reports in its paper "Carbon Emission Accounting – Balancing the
 books for the UK."

“Nearly 20 years of climate change policy has failed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions linked to
 economic activity in the UK,” researchers conclude. “Although the UK has met its Kyoto obligations, this has been achieved largely by outsourcing production and relying on importing consumer products from abroad to meet growing consumer demand. As UK consumer demand has continued to grow, so have the GHG emissions embedded in imported goods.”

In essence, consumption-based carbon accounting demonstrates that UK’s emissions reductions are showing up in the accounts of China and other industrializing nations. Working-class manufacturing jobs are going out the door in the UK.  It may be they would have anyway with global trends, but a carbon policy that works by making fossil energy more expensive certainly is a disincentive to energy-intensive manufacturing.

Washington state should take a lesson.  If we want an economy of software engineers, lawyers, accountants and other professionals, along with the people who make their coffee, clean their houses and walk their dogs, CCAT will work just fine. These are low-carbon activities. But if we want an economy where people actually make stuff, and which actually sustains family-wage working class jobs, we had better take the British experience to heart.  Particularly a state that has put billions of taxpayer benefits into retaining aerospace manufacturing.

How does a state policy avoid such impacts?  By giving manufacturing industries free passes to emit carbon.  In a CCAT carbon emitters must secure a permit for every ton they release.  Some permits are auctioned in a trading market.  Others are handed out for free in the opening years of a CCAT in order to avoid negative economic impacts.  Such as manufacturing companies moving out of state.  The membership of CERT clearly says it is where the “who gets what” deals on emissions permits will be cut. 

But those free passes undermine the goal of CCAT, which is to reduce carbon emissions.  So CCAT is caught in its own contradictions.  If it’s too tough it drives companies away. Idaho is just across the line.  If it’s too loose it falls short of what is needed to avoid carbon impacts such as loss of snowpack or shellfish industries.  Eventually the cap will tighten as free passes run out.  But then it’s back to square one.  Will companies stay when competing states and nations are offering energy with no carbon penalties?  Only if low-carbon energy is by that time price competitive.  We can hope with trends in wind, solar and energy storage it will be.  But if it’s not pressure will mount to politically bust the cap.  And if that does not happen Washington will be competitively disadvantaged.

CERT and the Washington climate community have no excuse for not understanding the distinction between carbon produced by economic activities in state and carbon associated with goods imported into the state. One of the first studies anywhere on consumption-based carbon accounting was done by Stockholm Environmental Institute for King County, Washington. King County residents emit 12 tons of carbon directly each year, but 29 tons if imports are taken into account, the study concludes.

To capture imported carbon emissions in a state CCAT, goods coming into state would have to secure emissions permits for their embedded carbon energy.  But this would amount to a carbon tariff that would violate the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Ultimately, a national carbon framework could put a carbon tariff on goods imported from nations where carbon is not priced.  But states do not have the power. 

This represents a big hole in state carbon frameworks.  They can only cover a portion of the carbon emissions associated with economic activity in the states, perhaps less than half if the King County study reflects a statewide reality.  The portion they can cover, carbon from energy used in state, makes the state less competitive and other destinations more attractive for manufacturers.  The more effective the CCAT, the more powerful this effect becomes.

It is with these realities that Gov. Inslee and the CERT will have to cope, not happy talk from the Brits.