Excellent (and terrifying) article written by Dr. Lee Kump

caerbannog · Aug 16, 2011

Available here: http://netzeronyc2020.net/Documents/LastGreatGlobalWarming0711056[1].pdf

Dr. Kump is a professor of geosciences at Penn State and is one of the world's leading paleoclimatologists. The above article summarizes the findings of his latest groundbreaking research into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event of 55 million years ago. The take-home message of the article is that uncontrolled CO2 emissions could trigger a "PETM on steroids" global climate disaster. Everyone should read this article.

Excerpts, emphasis added:

Surprising new evidence suggests the pace of the earths most abrupt prehistoric warm-up paled in comparison to what we face today.
The episode has lessons for our future
By Lee R. Kump

....

The PETM bears some striking resemblances to the human-caused climate change unfolding today. Most notably, the culprit behind it was a massive injection of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and oceans, comparable in volume to what our persistent burning of fossil fuels could deliver in coming centuries. Knowledge of exactly what went on during the PETM could help us foresee what our future will be like. Until recently, though, open questions about the event have made predictions speculative at best. New answers provide sobering clarity. They suggest the consequences of the planets last great global warming paled in comparison to what lies ahead, and they add new support for predictions that humanity will suffer if our course remains unaltered.

.........

When well preserved, such cores offer a beautiful record of climate history. But many of those that included the PETM were not in good shape. Parts were missing, and those left behind had been degraded by the passage of time. Seafloor sediment is typically rich in the mineral calcium carbonate, the same chemical compound in antacid tablets. During the PETM, ocean acidification dissolved away much of the carbonate in the sediments in exactly the layers where the most extreme conditions of the PETM era should have been represented.

It is for this reason that my colleagues and I met up in Spitsbergen in 2007 with a group of researchers from England, Norway and the Netherlands, under the auspices of the Worldwide Universities Network. We had reason to believe that rocks from this part of the Arctic, composed almost entirely of mud and clay, could provide a more complete recordand finally resolve some of the unanswered questions about that ancient warming event.

............

Furthermore, glaciers and ice sheets are melting and driving sea-level rise; coral reefs are increasingly subject to disease and heat stress; and episodes of drought and flooding are becoming more common. Indeed, shifts in rainfall patterns and rising shorelines as polar ice melts may contribute to mass human migrations on a scale never before seen. Some have already begun [see Casualties of Climate Change, by Alex de Sherbinin, Koko Warner and Charles Ehrhart; Scientific American, January].

Current global warming is on a path to vastly exceed the PETM, but it may not be too late to avoid the calamity that awaits us. To do so requires immediate action by all the nations of the world to reduce the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxideand to ensure that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum remains the last great global warming.
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gmb92 · Aug 17, 2011

Amazing how fast the pace of warming is compared to these periods. It's multiple orders of magnitude.

There was a short paper a few years back (saw this linked on RC recently) that estimated climate sensitivity (temperature response to a doubling of CO2) to be 6.8 to 7.8 C from analysis of the PETM.

http://geoengineering.googlegroups....rKEE-Ea7GxYMt0t6nY0uV5FIQ&view=1&part=4&hl=en

Given all of the other estimates from a variety of other analysis methods tending to converge around 3 C, I find this estimate unlikely, just as very low estimates are very unlikely.

The 2006 paper appears to estimate Earth System Sensitivity, which is likely to be somewhat higher than traditional climate sensitivity, which mainly includes only fast feedbacks.

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=lu07000g

waltky · Dec 2, 2011

Geoengineering - a solution to global warming?

Geoengineering could save Earth or destroy it
Fri Dec 2,`11 Brighten clouds with sea water? Spray aerosols high in the stratosphere? Paint roofs white and plant light-colored crops? How about positioning "sun shades" over the Earth?

At a time of deep concern over global warming, a group of scientists, philosophers and legal scholars examined whether human intervention could artificially cool the Earth and what would happen if it did. A report released late Thursday in London and discussed Friday at the U.N. climate conference in South Africa said that in theory reflecting a small amount of sunlight back into space before it strike's the Earth's surface would have an immediate and dramatic effect. Within a few years, global temperatures would return to levels of 250 years ago, before the industrial revolution began dumping carbon dioxide into the air, trapping heat and causing temperatures to rise. But no one knows what the side effects would be.

They could be physical unintentionally changing weather patterns and rainfall. Even more difficult, it could be political spurring conflict among nations unable to agree on how such intervention, or geoengineering, will be controlled. The idea of solar radiation management "has the potential to be either very useful or very harmful," said the study led by Britain's Royal Society, the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund and TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world based in Trieste, Italy. Environmentalist Silvia Ribeiro, of the Canada-based ETC-Group, said geoengineering should be outlawed before it gets off the ground. "Solar radiation management technologies are high-risk and extremely dangerous and they should be treated under international law like nuclear weapons except, unlike nuclear weapons, we have an opportunity to ban their testing and their proliferation before the technology is fully developed, rather than trying to prevent their proliferation after the fact," she said.

The final report grew out of three days of talks in a quiet country retreat last March, the climax of a yearlong dialogue spanning experts in 22 countries. It was prompted in part by the failure of a 20-year U.N. negotiating process to take decisive action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, responsible for climate change. "The slow progress of international climate negotiations has led to increased concerns that sufficient cuts in greenhouse gas emissions may not be achieved in time to avoid unacceptable levels of climate change," the report said.

But geoengineering is not an alternative to climate action, said John Shepherd, a British oceanographer from the University of Southampton who was a lead author of the report. "Nobody thought this provides a justification for not reducing carbon emissions," Shepherd said in a telephone interview from London. "We have to stick with Plan A for the time being, and that could be a very long time indeed," he said. "This would buy time for people to make the transition to a low-carbon economy." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change foresees temperatures rising as much as 6.4 degrees Celsius (11.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, swelling the seas with melted glacial water and disrupting climate conditions around the globe. Releasing millions of tons of sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere would mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption, lowering global temperature about 0.5 Centigrade (0.9 Fahrenheit), which can last for a year or two when it occurs naturally. But deliberately tinkering with nature to counter global warming can only be a stopgap measure, and is fraught with danger, the report said.

MORE
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MannieD · Dec 3, 2011

I came across the same concept in an article Hothouse Earth in National Geographics

Climate scientists don't often talk about such grim long-term forecasts, Huber says, in part because skeptics, exaggerating scientific uncertainties, are always accusing them of alarmism. "We've basically been trying to edit ourselves," Huber says. "Whenever we see something really bad, we tend to hold off. The middle ground is actually much worse than people think

"If we continue down this road, there really is no uncertainty. We're headed for the Eocene. And we know what that's like."
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And you are correct. The article terrified me.

sherp · Dec 12, 2011

MannieD said: ↑

I came across the same concept in an article Hothouse Earth in National Geographics
And you are correct. The article terrified me.
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I was not terrified. Everyone on the Earth today will be long gone and missing the event!

MannieD · Dec 12, 2011

sherp said: ↑

I was not terrified. Everyone on the Earth today will be long gone and missing the event!
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Are you sure everyone on earth will be long gone before the effects begin? Climate change will cause a disastrous change in weather patterns long before the full effects of the PETM scenario are upon us.

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Excellent (and terrifying) article written by Dr. Lee Kump

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