Goodbye Greenland

I have long been predicting that we will see a sudden and significant rise in sea levels. Further that this will happen in the next few years, and by this I mean the next three or four years. While the science backs up this prediction, what I have not known was exactly what mechanism would cause this.

One of the difficulties is that Climate science is not simple and with so many conflicting climate models offering different time tables for the effects of human induced climate change, my own research appeared to be at odds with the majority of opinions in the public domain. However when I communicate with scientists carrying out the front line research, they agree that we will see the disastrous effects of climate change in this coming decade rather than in the next half century.

The reason for this is that politicians keep talking about limiting the global average rise in temperature to two degrees C. While the science already shows that the average global rise will be four degrees C. Therefore politicians are lagging well behind what needs to be done. The main reason for this is that politicians are only looking at local effects rather than the global effects. Therefore, they fail to recognise the consequential effects of climate change.

In Europe one of the main preparations has been the way that the EU has effectively closed the boarders to immigration so as to stop the climate refugees that will come. Even without a rise in sea levels, water shortages and drought will force people to flee the affected areas. But it is the impacts on food and agriculture that will be the greatest impact in the short term. The British government has assumed that if we suffer crop failures or even a simple shortage we can just buy what we need from the world markets. But this policy is based upon a false assumption. As if there are crop failures or shortages, then it will not only effect Britain but will be global and other nations will be trying to do the same for their populations.

However, no matter how much the climate models inform our political leaders that there will be a rise in sea levels, they ignore this as it simply looks like something that will happen to far in the future for them to seize that nettle. But when that effect of human induced climate change does happen, we will loose agricultural land. As this will occur globally all other nations will need to buy in food from the commodity markets too.

The effect on poor nations will be that they will excluded from this, and their populations will starve. This cynical impact of the planning by political leaders is not just inhumane it fails to recognise the reality of our current situation. Britain because of the banking bailout has to borrow money from other nations. Most notably China. When the sea levels rise and they have the need to feed their people from the world market what does the British government think will happen? As nations like China have a culture of saving and have the cash to lend to the financial markets, if they cant buy the wheat or rice they need from Europe or America, do you really think they will lend us the cash we need? Of course not.

The attitude of much of the developed world regarding tackling climate change is analogous to a string of communities along a river. The developed nations are those that live closest to the source of the river where it is clean and pure. Yet each community is also using the river as its sewer and each community suffers from their drinking water getting more polluted. Rather than stopping the pollution small efforts are made to reduce it rather than tackling it properly. Just like pollution in a river, where it will cause outbreaks of collora and the infection will move up river impacting the communities at the start of the chain, Climate change will effect all of us.

The climate is already changing and as the effects are similar to natural cycles, droughts in Africa, Hurricanes in the Atlantic, flooding in Asia, people have been able to dismiss the effects as not having been the result of global warming. However, it is the effects upon the glaciers that can not be dismissed as part of any natural cycle. The receding of these rivers of ice will permanently change the ecology of the mountains and the water courses they feed. But the way that they are melting has shown the mechanism that will create the sudden and dramatic change to sea levels. As behind the wall of ice melt water builds up. In countries like Switzerland the authorities will build drainage tunnels into the ice, often a couple of kilometres long, so that when this water escapes it does not flood the valley and the communities under the glacier. Once the drainage tunnel is dug instruments are located to monitor the liquid water build up as the risk is not just flooding but the whole river of ice speeding up and creating an ice avalanche.

Now if we relocate this to the Greenland ice cap and the same mechanism is at work there. But there is no one digging tunnels in the ice to place instruments to monitor the build up of liquid water. Therefore a sudden breakup of these ice rivers is likely to happen in the next three or four year period. Already there has been a loss of thickness of the Greenland Ice Cap. As well as the ice becoming highly porous over the last decade and the water has drained into the glaciers. In some places it has already escaped into the sea, but the volume of melt water that has already disappeared into the ice is far greater than has been released into the sea. The theory is that some of this melt water has drained into the aquifer, into the ground. While this appears to be good news, it actually means that the glaciers are now flowing over water logged ground rather than the friction of wet rock. This speeds up the flow of the ice, and the faster the ice flows the faster it cracks and brakes up. It is these fractures that allows the sudden release of the glacier lakes.

Add to this the fact that while a global average rise in temperature of even just two degrees, at the poles the local rise will be six to ten degrees and you have enough heat to melt the polar ice, not just on the sea but on land too.

Anyone who has defrosted a freezer will know that while most of the melting is gradual, eventually the melting speeds up. This will be the same in the poles. Already we have seen sudden and dramatic break ups of areas of sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic waters.

None of this I write with pleasure, I would have loved it if the science disproved the reality of human induced climate change, but the reality is that we are stumbling towards a global disaster that will have more impact than the all the wars of the last century.