Life in the Metricene

I’ve been struggling for the last few days to make sense of the recent NOAA news regarding atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane, plus a handful of other items, including where I now think we might or might not be headed headed in terms of climate chaos.

The impetus for this effort to piece things together is, of course, the uptick in atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane, which I wrote about on May 19th (Methane checkpoint) and, coincidentally enough, on June 19th (CO2 checkpoint), and what, if anything, we should read into those observations.

First, let me do something I should have in the CO2 post, namely use a little math to try to contextualize the results. That post pointed out that the latest NOAA data shows a pronounced jump in the observed global level of atmospheric CO2. The level increased from 387.71 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in March to 388.47 ppmv in April of this year. That 0.76 ppmv growth is the largest for any March-to-April period going back to 1980, the first year of the publicly available data that I could find on the NOAA site.[1] It’s also 0.35 ppmv above the average March-to-April transition for all years other than 2009.

Just how much CO2 is that? An atmospheric level of 385 ppmv equates to 3,000 billion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. That means every ppmv represents 7.79 billion metric tons of CO2, and 0.35 ppmv is 2.73 billion metric tons. According to the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review, the US emits 5.934 billion metric tons of CO2/year.[2] In other words, the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere in March, above the historical average gain for that month, was 46% of the CO2 the US emitted in all of 2006.[3] Using the oft-quoted world number for CO2 of 30 billion metric tons/year, that increment over the normal rise, for just that one month, was equal to about 9% of humanity’s worldwide, yearly CO2 emissions. (The total increase of 0.71 ppmv is 5.53 billion tons, 93% of the US’s 2006 emissions, or 18.4% of world emissions for a year.) That’s a huge additional pulse of CO2 to show up in the atmosphere in a single month, so it’s no wonder that the trend line in the NOAA graph shown in CO2 checkpoint and reproduced below lurches upward so noticeably.

Given CO2′s long lifetime in the atmosphere, that would be bad enough news, but it comes on the heels of a marked increase in methane atmospheric levels (Methane checkpoint). For many of us, the number one climate fear is that we’ll cross the most critical single tipping point and trigger a massive release of both CO2 and methane from the Arctic region. Most of this would come from defrosting permafrost, with some additional methane coming from methane hydrates, a.k.a. the clathrate gun. If (and that’s an enormous “if”) these additions to the atmosphere’s levels of those two greenhouse gases are the early stage of the permafrost bomb going off, it’s almost unimaginably bad news.

The obvious next question then becomes: When will we know? And indeed, someone did ask it. In the comments for my CO2 post, Sasparilla said (emphasis added):

I wonder how long we’ll have to wait to know for sure? What do you think? 2-3 years?

I remember hearing an author (who wasn’t associated with the geo-engineering field) stating that he thought we’d be forced as a society to seriously entertain geo-engineering strategies (just to keep the temperature brakes on while we get emissions down) in 5-10 years. I thought that sounded far fetched at the time (last year), but here we are a year later and if these trends continue and accelerate as the north continues to warm – we may just end up where he thought we’d be, frightening.

To which I replied:

My gut feeling, based on statistical experience with non-climate time series data (mostly from economics) and my E&E reading, is that we could have a pretty good idea much sooner than 2-3 years. Since 1980, the yearly peak in CO2 level has come in April or May every year. If we peaked this year in June, or saw a statistically significant deviation from the established pattern over the summer, then I think the odds of it being the permafrost bomb would go up considerably. I don’t know if that would mean a 10% or 50% or 90% chance of it being The Bomb, but it would certainly set off alarm bells. If the pattern more or less returns to form, but we start seeing a deviation every year, and it gets larger, then it could take several years to be convincing.

I think the odds that we’ll be able to drop emissions quickly enough to avoid betting the farm (and the city and …) on geoengineering are declining. Right now, my gut feeling is that it’s only about a 60 to 70% chance, but that’s making some (very?) optimistic assumptions about international agreements and compliance.

Upon further thought, I think I wasn’t as clear in my response as I could have been, so I’m going to elaborate a bit.

I see three possibilities in the coming months and years:

• The sharp upticks in both CO2 and methane turn out to be one-time events, and the phenomenon doesn’t reappear in 2010. Whether climate scientists reach consensus on the cause now or a year or decades from now is another matter entirely.
• The upticks subside and the rest of 2009 plays out as one might expect based on historical data, but it happens again in 2010, 2011, and later, establishing a new pattern of Spring greenhouse gas pulses. One could argue whether this constitutes the permafrost bomb going off, even if in stages. With a warming climate I think it would be reasonable, even if too flippant, to refer to these yearly events as permafrost firecrackers going off one at a time, a year apart. The nasty detail, of course, is that each one adds to climate change and brings us slightly closer to the bomb actually going off.
• The upticks don’t subside right away. May’s numbers are even higher, and then so are June’s, making it the first time that the yearly high doesn’t land in either April or May.[4] This would be alarming, and it would result in a huge amount of attention focused on the July numbers. If those came in higher yet, I wouldn’t want to think about the implications or what kind of response it would elicit from various countries and political factions. (I’m ignoring the possibility that we could see a sustained, huge increase in Arctic emissions for just this one year.)

In other words, in the best case scenario (the first one above) it would likely take us a year to gather some hard data (the lack of these pulses in 2010) before we would even consider classifying them as a singular event. But even then, we might be premature in saying they’re a one-time anomaly, as they could show up in perhaps one year out of ever two or three at first and then increase in frequency.

The middle case would also take at least one more year to unfold, as we would have to wait for 2010′s data, at the least, before passing judgment, albeit with the same caveat as above about leaping to a wrong conclusion about the new pattern or lack thereof on such scant evidence.[5]

The last and worst case is the one in which we’d get essentially instant feedback from the climate system. This is what I meant when I said in my reply to Sasparilla that we “could” find out in as little as two or three months. Frankly, I was so focused on this horrific scenario that I didn’t lay out the possibilities, as I see them.

So, Sasparilla might well be right, and it could take 2-3 years to tease the pattern and an explanation out of the raw data. All things considered, this is one of the very few times I hope we don’t solve a scientific mystery right away.

The possibility that the data is showing us the beginning of the permafrost bomb going off is so terrifying that I think it needs to be examined in a broader context.

If you assume, as I do, that James Hansen and Bill McKibben are right, and the “safe” level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppmv, about 38 ppmv (or 296 billion metric tons, roughly ten years of worldwide CO2 emissions) less than April’s reading, then, like me, you feel on a visceral level how unsettling these CO2 and methane observations are.

In one sense, we’ve almost certainly crossed a critical boundary. As Bill McKibben pointed out in The Most Important Number on Earth:

DIY [do-it-yourself] conservation makes great practical sense, but we won’t save the planet that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to… not nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way-there are too many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia for voluntary action to do the trick. It didn’t work when President Bush made voluntary reduction by corporations his global warming “policy,” and it won’t work fast enough with individuals either.

Please go read the whole article. It’s worth your time.

(The phenomenon McKibben points out is why I’ve long advocated that we need both individual action to change our consumption patterns and engagement at the voting booth and through whatever other legal means we can find to tell large concentrations of power–corporations, universities, NGOs, governments at all levels, etc.–that we demand they do their share to bring down our collective greenhouse gas emissions. And if they refuse, then we should withhold the things they absolutely require and give them to their competition: Votes and financial support in the case of politicians, sales from corporations, etc. Nothing will change the behavior of large entities faster than a credible threat to reduce or cut off their oxygen supply and feed it to their competition.)

Once again, timing is everything. We’re just beginning to deal with the fact that humanity poured a lot of long-lived CO2 into the atmosphere before we generally realized the consequences. Now we have no choice but to take much more extreme steps to avoid a climate catastrophe than would have been required had we started 50 years ago. This is why I’ve indicated numerous times, including in my response to Sasparilla, that I’m not optimistic that we’ll be able to avoid resorting to one or more geoengineering schemes. (In fact, I’m less optimistic than I said in that reply. I’m not sure where that 60 to 70% range came from.) If we see strong evidence in the data that the permafrost bomb is indeed going off, then the public support for launching orbital mirrors or seeding oceans with iron or who knows what will rise dramatically.

As uncomfortable as that sounds, I think it signals a more profound change than the one McKibben points out. We’re entering a period when we’re so close to (or have already passed) tipping points that dictate we have no choice but to actively manage the planet’s climate. We’re now in (or will be very soon) what I propose we call the Metricene, a time when virtually everything related to climate, including our own actions, is measured and, by implication, explicitly managed. This is the concept I’ve alluded to in the past by saying we’re all living a “measured life on a managed planet”, and what James Lovelock was no doubt talking about when he said:

This could happen if, at some intolerable population density, man had encroached upon Gaia’s functional power to such an extent that he disabled her. He would wake up one day to find that he had the permanent, lifelong job of planetary maintenance engineer. Gaia would have retreated into the muds, and the ceaseless intricate task of keeping all of the global cycles in balance would be ours. Then at last we should be riding that strange contraption, the “spaceship Earth,” and whatever tamed and domesticated biosphere remained would indeed be our “life-support system.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the growing sentiment for terming our current era as the Anthropocene, the time when human activities have had an effect on the world’s climate. Wikipedia’s entry gives a good overview, and points out that there’s some disagreement about when it should start–in the late 1700′s with the beginning of our love affair with mass use of fossil fuels, or 8,000 years ago when the spread of agriculture increased greenhouse gas emissions. While I think William Ruddiman makes a compelling case for the much earlier date (see his book, Ploughs, Plagues & Petroleum), I think the evidence is quickly growing that even that concept has been surpassed by reality and our perception of it. The shift from a period of unintentional climate influence to one of required and intentional control is an even more compelling reason to coin a new term and view our evolving situation much differently.

I certainly don’t like the prospects of being forced down that path, even if you assume we won’t wind up in the kind of centralized Carbon Dictatorship that Tim Flannery describes in chapter 33 of his must-read book, The Weather Makers. But as is so often the case in life, we’re forced into terrible situations through random chance or our own actions born of simple ignorance.

Right now, as we wait for the next few months or years of data on CO2 and methane levels to trickle in, humanity is playing the role of a medical patient anxiously awaiting test results. We’ve had some disturbing symptoms, and we’re now in the gray zone of ignorance that lies between perceiving ourselves as healthy and either getting good news from the doctor or finding out we have a particularly nasty form of cancer that will require extremely unpleasant treatment in an effort to save our lives. Had we known about this nexus point in our lives years or decades ago, we surely would have changed our lifestyle in almost any way possible to reduce our risk factors–or so we tell ourselves. But for now, all we can do is hope we’re not about to pay an awful price for our past actions.

And maybe all will be well. Maybe the climate scientists will give us the equivalent of a chat in which our doctor says, “Good news–your tests were negative. But you really need to get serious about taking better care of yourself. Stop smoking, cut back on the alcohol, get more exercise, and lose 40 pounds. Next time, you might not dodge the bullet.” And sometimes that scare is enough to force us out of our complacency. We make sweeping changes, give up or greatly restrict some things we’d prefer to indulge in, and in time realize the multiple benefits of our new lifestyle which go far beyond what the actuarial tables suggest.

Those CO2 and methane numbers could very well turn out to be nothing more than humanity’s cancer scare, and one that ultimately is beneficial by providing enough uncertainty and genuine fear to overcome our complacency and willful ignorance. Or they could lead to the discovery of an awful underlying truth about the state of the climate, with terrible, sweeping implications we would do anything to escape. We shouldn’t wait for our global test results. Even without a permafrost bomb in the picture, our situation should be more than sufficiently dire to motivate us. We can and should get to work making those changes throughout society, which will benefit us no matter what the data tells us in months or years. What have we got to lose by acting in our own best interest?

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[1] We have CO2 data for Mauna Loa that goes back much further than that, obviously, but I don’t know if there’s global data that predates 1980. I will continue to look for it and contact NOAA.

[2] As I type this on Sunday night, we’re just a couple of days away from the US DOE releasing the latest Annual Energy Review (on Tuesday), which will presumably have emissions data for 2007.

[3] I’m ignoring the fact that some of the CO2 emitted in that month was absorbed by the ocean or plants. I’m assuming that over such a short time frame any such removal of new CO2 would be negligible, although including it would push up the calculated emissions value (2.73 billion metric tons) just slightly.

[4] In the 29 years prior to 2009, the yearly high arrived 16 times in April and 13 times in May. The average change (not absolute value) between those two months was only 0.14 ppmv.

[5] If this sounds like I’m being extremely cautious, I am. The implications of what’s happening to the atmosphere and how we perceive and react to it are impossible to overestimate.

I’m reminded of the story of three scientists walking near their laboratory. One points to a sheep in a nearby field and says, “Gee, didn’t know there were black sheep around here.” The second says, “Don’t jump to conclusions–you’ve only seen one black sheep.” The third says, “Neither of you should jump to conclusions–you’ve only seen one side of one sheep, which happens to be black.”

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