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A Farewell to Ice

Peter Wadhams

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Why we're reading this: essential to the knowledge of the changes in world climate
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Dec 17, 2019 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, meteorology, environment

This is a marvelous, short book by the leading expert on the Arctic. Peter Wadhams interleaves his own participation in research experiments with his narrative on climate change. He shows his own private viewpoint, and is extremely troubled by the impending catastrophes that climate change will bring.

The climate record shows periodicities every 100,000 years or so. Temperature, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4) concentrations show a sawtooth pattern. Each period shows a sharp upswing foll This is a marvelous, short book by the leading expert on the Arctic. Peter Wadhams interleaves his own participation in research experiments with his narrative on climate change. He shows his own private viewpoint, and is extremely troubled by the impending catastrophes that climate change will bring.

The climate record shows periodicities every 100,000 years or so. Temperature, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4) concentrations show a sawtooth pattern. Each period shows a sharp upswing followed by a gradual decay. The reason for this is that it is far easier to melt away an ice sheet than to grow a new one. Some people argue that human-caused warming will prevent the next ice age, and that is good. The problem is, we are on track to overshoot, and exceed the fastest warming in the Earth's history.

When CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere rose from 180 to 250 ppm between glacial and interlacial ages, temperatures rose by 6 degrees Centigrade. Extrapolating to a doubling in CO2 concentration, equilibrium temperatures should increase by 7.8 degrees C. This hasn't happened yet, because the ocean absorbs much of the heat. So warming is slow, but even if CO2 stabilizes, temperatures would continue to rise for a while.

While global temperatures have risen by about 0.8 degrees C in the last 100 years, temperatures in the Arctic have risen 2.4 degrees C. The Arctic is a bellweather for the future of the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected a sea level rise to the year 2100, but underestimated the rise from several mechanisms. They did not include glacier melt, and their linear extrapolation into the future ignored various feedback loops that will lead to a nonlinear increase in sea level. Sea and land ice are melting at an exponential rate.

One of the greatest immediate risks to the human race is the release of Arctic seabed methane. Before 2005, Arctic shelf waters were shielded by year-round ice cover. Now these waters are ice-free in the summer, and the water is warming up above the melting point. This is an entirely new situation. This is observed to coincide with a sudden release of methane, which 23 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas! Ironically, the oil industry could ameliorate this problem by drilling a network of wells covering the East Siberian Sea. The thawing of terrestrial permafrost will release even more methane, but more slowly.

Wadhams explains why climate change brings more extreme weather events. He discusses various approaches to ameliorate the impending catastrophes; carbon extraction from the atmosphere, the use of thorium nuclear reactors, and geo-engineering approaches. And he talks about the motivations for climate change deniers.

This is an important book on the subject of climate change. It is a complicated subject, but Wadhams explains the physical mechanisms very well, but the narration remains throughout at the level of an informed, non-scientific reader. My only criticism concerns a short digression into his radical view of international politics. ...more

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