Hunting the Climate Shift

SUMMARY: This week on Radio Ecoshock 3 interviews with scientists on the cutting edge of climate change. From the UK, Chris Boulton hunts for signs of abrupt ecological shifts. From Norway, Hans Weihe explores the changing Arctic. But first, we look into whether air pollution is shading the world from serious heating, with Bjorn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

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IS IT SAFE TO CLEAN UP AIR POLLUTION? DR. BJORN STEVENS

We know that industrial pollution in the atmosphere actually hides some of the global warming expected from our emissions. But how much? Respected scientists like James Hansen have suggested that a degree Celsius - or more - is "in the pipeline" due to the pollution, called "aerosols" in science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has a wide range of possible impacts of aerosols, but they recently dropped their lowest estimates.

The whole subject is one of the most difficult in science, because it involves swirls of widely varying materials in the atmosphere, unevenly distributed around the globe. The aerosols also interact with one of the last frontiers of science, the activity of clouds.

Our guest Professor Bjorn Stevens is a director at the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology where he leads the Atmosphere in the Earth System Department. He is also a professor at the University of Hamburg. Dr. Stevens was previously at the University of California in Los Angeles. Although born in Germany, he is an American, educated in the United States. Bjorn Stevens is one of the world authorities on clouds and climate change. He's the lead author of a new paper on the limits of aerosol impacts on global warming - and that paper has already stirred up controversy, including among climate sceptics.

The public knows little about this scientific discussion, except when it's called "global dimming". I've run a feature about it by the BBC. I was also impressed by studies of what was first called the "Asian Brown Cloud", but later the "Atmospheric Brown Cloud". Below you will find a link to my 2006 program on the subject, featuring the work of V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute.

For example, simple studies of how long it takes a pan of water to evaporate showed sunlight reaching the surface of China has dropped by at least 10% over the last couple of decades. Consider the implications for agriculture. Another huge big brown cloud forms over Northern India for part of every year, blocking out sunlight. The cause is mostly soot from inefficient indoor cooking fires!

In that blog I wrote:

"Ramanathan told science writer Regina Nuzzo,

'By sheer, dumb luck, we are adding particles that are trapping sunlight and cooling the planet.'

He compares it to a mask - and if that pollution is removed, the climate may suddenly rise to the real levels of warming gases in the atmosphere. Ramanathan said:

'Many of us, including myself, are concerned we could see a huge acceleration of global warming if we unmask the beast.'"



GLOBAL DIMMING RESOURCES:

Find a text summaryof the BBC "Global Dimming" documentary here. Watch the documentary here.

The Radio Ecoshock special on global dimming (20 minutes, 18 MB) is available as a free .mp3 here. A transcript of Radio Ecoshock special on global dimming, (broadcast Sept 8, 2006) is here.

BUT IS GLOBAL DIMMING AN IMPORTANT PROBLEM NOW?

But now in 2015 we ask: is global dimming an appropriate label for the totality of human pollution that may be shading the Earth from the real carbon blanket we've put up there? If I understood him correctly, Bjorn Stevens says "no" because global dimming was really about local or regional conditions of pollution (say over India or China) rather than a global effect.

In fact, Stevens began to argue with other scientists who claimed a large amount of warming was being masked. That argument became his new paper "Rethinking the Lower Bound on Aerosol Radiative Forcing" published in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society in June 2015.

As I understand it (and this is not easy science) - Stevens compared a known period of atmospheric pollution, in the first half of the 20th century, to a more recent period, to calculate the probably effect on global warming. The general analog for the way pollution operates in the early period was sulfur, which came from burning oil, but even more from burning coal. Sulfur pollution in that period from 1910 to 1950 was pretty well known and measured.

This is the big picture method of research. In other words, Stevens doesn't try to add up all the many sources of aerosol pollution (as Dr. James Hansen and others have done) - but instead looks at totals and comparative temperatures.

The data shows that aerosol pollution is not as big a factor in hiding global warming as previously thought. That's good news - because it means there is less danger in cleaning up pollution, say in the skies above China. We don't really have to worry that a sudden jump of temperature will occur, according to Stevens.

In fact, and this is the key, Stevens tell us the worry about aerosol dimming is a problem of the past, of the 20th century. In this century, the effects of carbon dioxide to drive warming has far out-stripped the lesser masking power of pollution. It's yesterday's worry, he says.

Climate skeptics and critics like Judith Curry have jumped on Stevens paper to say "see, there's nothing to worry about, it's already as bad as it's going to get." Stevens was forced to respond to distortion of his research by right-wing media.

I think it is be a mistake to use this to discount the concern about warming "still in the pipeline" as James Hansen puts it. There are other factors which can mask or temporarily hide the true impacts of carbon pollution, like absorption by the world's oceans. That ocean mix down is probably a time limited factor, and the heat energy absorbed WILL come back out at some point.

As for "climate sensitivity" (which we talk about in the Steven interview) - we don't yet know for sure how much climate reacts to carbon. But so far, all the surprises in sensitivity have been worse than we thought, not better.

I recommend listening to this Stevens interview as one of the more serious interviews I've done, with one of the world's more prominent scientists.

You can listen or download this 26 minute talk with Dr. Bjorn Stevens in either CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

Use this tiny URL if you want to Tweet it out to others: http://tinyurl.com/onsddnl

SEARCHING FOR SIGNS OF ABRUPT ECOLOGICAL SHIFT - DR. CHRIS BOULTON

When a scientist starts talking about "abrupt ecosystem change" - as the title of a new paper does - that really gets my attention. This time it's the ocean, and specifically the North Pacific Ocean - which borders some of the mostly heavily populated places on Earth.

The title is "Slowing down of North Pacific climate variability and its implications for abrupt ecosystem change". From the College of Life and Environmental Sciences, at the University of Exeter in the UK, we've reached the lead author, Dr. Chris A. Boulton.

Going back to the beginning of things, Chris Boulton and his research partner Tim Lenton partly based their investigation on a 2008 paper that flew under the radar of most people. That was published in PNAS in 2008 by Vasilis Dakos et al. The title says it all: "Slowing down as an early warning signal for abrupt climate change." The abstract for that paper is here, and you can read the full text here.

Dr. Chris Boulton, University of Exeter.

Dakos and the other scientists reviewed a trend that is commonplace in physics and many other fields: systems can appear to reach an equilibrium just before they break into a significant change of state. The Dakos team found the same pattern in Earth's history, where they say:

"...periods of relatively stable climate have often been interrupted by sharp transitions to a contrasting state. One explanation for such events of abrupt change is that they happened when the earth system reached a critical tipping point. However, this remains hard to prove for events in the remote past, and it is even more difficult to predict if and when we might reach a tipping point for abrupt climate change in the future. Here, we analyze eight ancient abrupt climate shifts and show that they were all preceded by a characteristic slowing down of the fluctuations starting well before the actual shift."

Can we predict when such a critical threshhold is reached (and when it will tip)? That would be very useful for us now. Or can we only see a tipping point after it has happened? Have we already "tipped" and we don't know it yet?

These are the sorts of questions the Boulton and Lenton's research set out to answer. They choose the climate of the North Pacific ocean - partly because long-term sea surface temperature measurements are available, and partly because the North Pacific is subject to shifts - called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO.

Talking about all this in the interview covered a wide range of subjects, including the mysterious presence of "the blob" of hotter water parked off the Pacific coast of North America for the past couple of years - and how that fits into the larger ocean patterns in the Pacific Ocean generally. We care, because these ocean conditions often drive weather formations over huge areas of the continents.

Wikipedia offers this definition of the PDO: "The PDO is detected as warm or cool surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, north of 20° N." Chris Boulton gives us more details. It's interesting to note that this state of the North Pacific, which may last a decade or more, was first named by scientist Steven R. Hare, who was studying salmon runs in 1997. The productivity of salmon runs varied with the state of the North Pacific. You can see this knowledge is relatively recent.

But what if the North Pacific ocean changes were becoming less frequent, and lasted longer in each state? Could that be a slowing down that would indicate we are reaching a climate tipping point, as Vasilis Dakos wrote about?

It would be a fantastic (but awful) scoop to say Boulton and Lenton discovered the smoking gun, and yes the climate is about to experience an abrupt ecosystem change. However, in this case, an exhaustive analysis failed to prove a tipping point has been triggered. Boulton hopes to explore other cases, to find some signals that would provide advance warning of an abrupt change. It's important science in my opinion.

In the meantime, the team did find that marine systems are prone to "higher amplitude, lower frequency" events. Think about this like the stock market. The market could go along fairly calmly, perhaps slowly rising or falling, but now and then it crashes. It appears natural systems, and climate change in particular, can operate the same way.

That's a scary thought for me. What if we go into another so-called "hiatus" of global warming, and relax our efforts to reduce carbon emissions - not realizing this really is "the calm before the storm". The apparent plateau is really a warning of an imminent large system change. I doubt human societies can digest this possibility, and be prepared to act on climate change, even when the weather extremes give us a break. Think that over. I will.

You can listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock 21 minute interview with Chris Boulton in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

LISTENING TO THE ARCTIC: DR. HANS WEIHE

Scientists measure disappearing Arctic sea ice from space. Our next guest travels there, to learn from the land and local culture. Hans Joergen Wallin Weihe is a Professor at Lillehammer University College in Norway.

Dr. Hans Joergen Wallin Weihe

Dr. Weihe has travelled and researched in most parts of the Arctic, including not just his native Scandinavia, but also Greenland, northern Canada, and Siberia. He spent enough time learning from aboriginal people in Greenland that he was able to compile a a study of aboriginal languages from the Canadian north, Greenland, and Scandinavia.

Aboriginal knowledge of "what has always been known" (as they say) is a neglected source of climate study, Weihe says. For example, we can tell from the many terms used for "ice" the ways that ice has changed in these days of climate warming. In his work "Snow and Ice", Weihe writes:

"Among the differences and changes noted by Inuit hunters are thinner sea ice, melting from underneath the sea ice, changes in currents, changes in wind directions, changes in the way the ice breaks up, changes in moving ice, changes in cracks, changes in crystallizaton changes in consistency of sea water, changes in animal behaviour and concentrations. Still, as pointed out by many hunters, they had dogs in the old days and the dogs had senses that supplemented human senses detecting thin ice, animals and so on."

You can read a .pdf of the essay "Snow and Ice" in English here.

Listen to or download this 10 minute chat with Hans Weihe here.

OVER AND OUT

That's it for Radio Ecoshock. I appreciate you taking the time to work through this blog, and the program. I know it's not pre-digested like so much of the media today. I find most modern media is aimed at tweaking thoughts and emotions already in our minds, rather than creating new ones.

I'm also grateful for the people who Tweet and Facebook about each week's show. To be honest, it takes everything I've got to find the best guests, arrange the interviews, put together the program and distribute it to various networks and radio stations. After that, I have not enough time or energy to really promote as I should. Fortunately, many listeners have taken this on, spreading the word about Radio Ecoshock shows to thousands more people all over the world.

My thanks also to those folks who made donations or signed up for our $10-a-month Radio Ecoshock support team. You keep this going.

Join us next week as the world turns. I'm Alex Smith, saying thank you for listening.

By the way, I wrote the background music you hear in this week's show.

Crashing Climate Change

SUMMARY: Climate scientist Paul Beckwith from the University of Ottawa rejoins Alex Smith to investigate the latest record heat, melting, and emissions. Are we already entering an extreme climate shift?

Among the news covered:

* 2015: hottest first 3 months ever

* the new highest carbon dioxide levels ever recorded

* methane and melting permafrost in Russia

* record extreme heat in Spain, Portugal and Italy

* will the California drought last 30 years? (and is it time to get out)

* Australians lose billions with heat waves (even indoor workers affected)

* Canadian scientists protest government muzzling

* Arctic sea ice at new record low for May

* Obama approves Shell Arctic drilling

* even more ice loss in Antarctica then we knew.

Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

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From Pole to Pole, and around the world, climate news is streaming in, and it's not good. We are crashing into the age of global warming.

Here to help us is one of our favorite guests, scientist Paul Beckwith. Paul has two Masters degrees, and is currently working on his PHD in climate science at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

I began this show by saying: "Paul there's so much hot climate news, it's very hard to keep up. I keep expecting somebody like CNN will start the first 24/7 climate news station. That's the level of coverage we need now, don't you think?"

That turned out to be too true. Hardly had we hung up the phone last Friday, that news poured in about more than a dozen killed by extreme flooding in Oklahoma and Texas. Eleven inches of rain fell in the Houston area in 24 hours. Even concrete bridges were knocked out of the way by the raging flood waters.

As Scientific American reported, "Climate Change may have souped up the record-breaking Texas deluge." May have? The United Nations IPCC and many other climate scientists released papers on the advent of extreme weather now that the climate system is breaking down. Extreme rainfall events have been happening around the world. We know the role that increased water vapor in a hotter world plays, and we know the heated oceans play a part too. It's not a secret.

Maybe it's still a secret in Texas and Oklahoma, who keep voting in climate deniers to Congress, like Senator James Inhofe. I have to wonder what it will take to get the average American to wake up and stop voting for people who stop action to save us from even worse climatic events.

Also on the weekend, the supreme heat wave hitting India. It's especially bad in the Southern Indian states, where temperatures hit 48 degrees, and then flirted with 50 degrees C in some places (188-120 degrees Fahrenheit). More than a thousand died. In our interview, Paul Beckwith tells us why babies and seniors tend to die first.

The Indian government advised people to stay inside. Let me tell you, I've been to India, and to Southern India. Millions of people must work every day, or begin the process of starvation for their families. Or course they are going to work in the heat. They must. And many die. Air-conditioning? Don't forget at least 200 million people in India don't have any access to electricity. People in developing countries die because of our carbon-rich lifestyles. It makes me angry.

Anyway, let's go through just some of the top climate stories, as we move around the globe, starting with two very disturbing records. First this.

RECORD LEVELS FOR CO2

"New Records For Atmospheric CO2

"CO2 averaged 404.11 parts per million the week beginning May 3, a new weekly record.

Since we are now passing the annual spring peak, this record will probably stand until next spring. The week beginning May 10 averaged just under 404. The reading of 404.54 on May 16 set a new single-day record."

My comment: It's no big surprise. This whole civilization is based on transferring fossil fuels from underground into gases in the sky. That's what we do...expect to read this story every year.

THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2015 MARKS A NEW RECORD FOR WORLD HEAT

"The first quarter of 2015, a transcendental for the fight against climate change year, has set a new world record high temperatures in the recent history of the Earth.

Data from the National Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) indicate that in March recorded the highest temperature for this time of year since 136 years ago were initiated record, surpassing the previous record, 2010, at 0.05 ° C. The first quarter of 2015 was the warmest period of history in the middle of the land and ocean surfaces in the world, at 0.82 ° C above the average of the twentieth century, surpassing the previous record-from 2002 to 0, 05 ° C.

The average land surface temperature was also overall record for the January-March period. Most of Europe, Asia, South America, East Africa and western North America have had an onset of warmer than normal year, according to the official news agency of the United States.

Regarding the data of the surface of the oceans, last quarter marked the third highest level in the period of 136 years of record, 0.53 ° C above average."

Get another take on this story here. Maybe every year won't break the records, but most will.

Let's go to the regional view, starting with this story out of Russia.

CARBON TIME-BOMB IN SIBERIA THREATENS CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE

"A DEVASTATING and sudden acceleration of climate change which is currently being sparked could result in 'awful consequences', a leading scientist has warned.

"Climate change expert Professor Sergey Kirpotin, [in Tomsk] 51 said this could result in 'awful' consequences.

'Bogs are extremely important for humanity. They function as a sort of natural freezer as they don't let the carbon build up in the atmosphere,' he told The Siberian Times.

'However, the permafrost in northern areas of western Siberia has started melting. As the permafrost thaws, it creates new lakes and old ones get bigger.

"All the organics trapped in permafrost start decomposing rather quickly.

"Obviously, a lot of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, are released into the atmosphere.

"Methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.'"

EXTREME RECORD-BREAKING TEMPERATURES IN SPAIN (and Portugal, Sicily)

Here's a headline from one of my favorite weather guys, and repeat Radio Ecoshock guest, Dr. Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground:

"Jeff Masters: extreme, record-breaking temperatures in Spain

All-Time May Heat Record for Europe Falls For the 2nd Time This Month

by Jeff Masters, wunderblog, May 14, 2015

An extreme May heat wave unprecedented in European recorded history has invaded Spain and Portugal, bringing the hottest May temperatures ever recorded on the continent. According to the Spanish meteorological agency, AEMET, at least four stations in the Valencian Community of eastern Spain hit temperatures today in excess of the previous European May heat record set just eight days ago -- a 41.9 °C (107.4 °F) reading at Catenanuova, Sicily (Italy) on May 6. Today's European record-breaking May temperatures in Spain included:

Carcaixent: 42.9 °C (109.2 °F)

Xativa: 42.7 °C (108.9 °F)

Algemesi: 42.6 °C (108.7 °F)

Valencia: 42.6 °C (108.7 °F)

Many stations in Spain's Valencian community went above their June records, and were near their all-time records for any month. The record set at Valencia Airport today was 6.6 °C (11.9 °F) above the previous highest May temperature, was 4.4 °C (7.9 °F) higher than the record for June, and was the 3rd hottest temperature since records began in 1869 for any month!

This week's heat wave began yesterday, when hot air from North Africa flowed northwards over Spain and Portugal, setting all-time May heat records at Madrid, Sevilla, Cordoba, Ciudad Real, Granada, and many other cities. Portugal beat its all-time May heat record with a 40.0 °C (104.0 °F) reading at Beja EMA (old record: 39.5 °C, 103.1 °F, at Regua on May 28, 2001). The most remarkable record yesterday, however, was from the Canary Islands to the southwest of Spain, where Lanzarote Airport hit 42.6 °C (108.7 °F), breaking its old record for the entire month of May by 6 °C (10.8 °F)! The old record was 36.6 °C (97.9 °F) on May 24, 1986."

NOAA: 90% CHANCE OF EL NINO

The last big El Nino we experienced caused new records in heat, during the winter of 1997/98. That was the year Indonesian peat fires turned that country into one of the world's biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The smoke covered most of southeast Asia. What will burn down this time?

Here is how our recent guest Robert Marston Fanney described it in Robert Scribbler's Blog:

"Well, it’s official. According to NOAA’s May 14 update, we are now looking at a 90 percent chance that El Nino conditions prevail through Northern Hemisphere Summer and a greater than 80 percent chance El Nino will last throughout all of 2015..."

RELATED: CARBON EMISSIONS INCREASE RISK OF U.S. MEGADROUGHTS.

California drought continues despite weak El Nino conditions. NASA says on our current carbon course, the whole US Southwest will experience a drought like the 1930's dustbowl, but lasting for 30 or 35 years - a whole generation. That will happen this century they say. "Carbon emissions could dramatically increase risk of U.S. megadroughts" says NASA.

ARCTIC SEA ICE AT HISTORIC LOW

This from the Arctic News blog.

"THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2015

Arctic Sea Ice At Historic Low

On May 20, 2015, Arctic sea ice extent was only 12.425 million square km, a record low for the time of the year since satellite measurements began in 1979."

Our guest Paul Beckwith explains it takes 80 calories (a measure of heat energy) to melt 1 gram of ice. When the ice is gone, it takes just 1 calorie to raise the temperature of water 1 degree. Theoretically, the same 80 calories of heat falling on ocean instead of ice could raise the surface temperature by 80 degrees! (It doesn't because there is mixing with cooler water below - but this shows the huge difference between having ice in the Arctic and not.

EXTREME HEAT POSES A BILLION-DOLLAR THREAT TO AUSTRALIA'S ECONOMY

I'll bet the cost is far higher, if you include loss of forests, the costs of fighting fires, the toll on farm animals and crops, etc. The key insight to this article is that extreme heat doesn't just affect outside workers. Even people who work in air-conditioned offices lose productivity. Why? Because humans don't sleep as well during hot nights.

"May 4 2015

Extreme heat poses a billion-dollar threat to Australia’s economy

When heat waves hit in summer, do you have trouble sleeping? And the next day, even though you are working in air-conditioning, are you a bit slower, your judgement a bit off, or your patience a bit frayed?

In a paper published today in Nature Climate Change, we and colleagues show that heat stress probably cost the Australian economy nearly A$7 billion in 2013-2014 through productivity losses such as those we’ve mentioned above.

That bodes ill for the future, with heatwaves forecast to get hotter and more common thanks to climate change. While we should continue to attempt to mitigate climate change, we need to take steps to adapt.

One of our most surprising findings is that you don’t have to work outside to feel the heat. Although outdoor workers report greater levels of productivity losses from heat, indoor workers aren’t immune. Poor sleep is one possible explanation."

Find the original paper in Nature here, as published online May 4th.

COLD WEATHER IS MUCH DEADLIER THAN EXTREME HEAT, STUDY SAYS

Here on Radio Ecoshock, we like to follow the truth, whether it is convenient to theories or not. So far, the greater number of deaths are still caused by cold. But that ratio will change, says Paul Beckwith, as the coldest parts of Earth appear to be warming much faster than the global average.

Just look at Alaska this past winter. It was often warmer there than in New England. We've just heard from Jonathan Mingle the same is true in the Himalayas, often called the world' Third Pole. And I've reported on news that Antarctica is melting more rapidly that we thought (more on that below).

"Cold weather is much deadlier than extreme heat, study says

Extreme weather gets more attention, but moderately cold weather is most deadly by far, a study says, analyzing deaths in 13 countries.

By KAREN KAPLAN

Extreme weather gets more attention, but moderately cold weather is most deadly by far, a study says

In the U.S., 84% of days are colder than the 'optimum,' least-deadly temperature. Extreme heat waves like the one that killed more than 70,000 Europeans in 2003 may be the most visible examples of deadly weather, but cold days actually cause more deaths than hot ones, a new study says.

After examining more than 74 million deaths that occurred in 13 countries from 1985 to 2012, researchers calculated that 7.3% of them could be attributed to cold weather and 0.4% to hot weather.

In another counterintuitive finding, extreme weather — either hot or cold — was responsible for only 11% of the weather-related deaths, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Lancet.

'Heat stroke on hot days and hypothermia on cold days only account for small proportions of excess deaths,' the international research team wrote.

The researchers collected daily data on weather conditions, air pollution and deaths from 384 cities around the world. For each city, they calculated the temperature at which deaths were least likely to occur. All other days were compared to days with this 'optimum' temperature.

With the bulk of the days in all areas being below the ideal temperature, days rated cold but not extremely cold were blamed for the most deaths — 6.7% during the study period.

Extreme cold was responsible for about 10% of all deaths on cold days. However, extreme heat was responsible for about half of all deaths on hot days.

Although the study included data from a range of nations — Australia, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand and Britain were also included — no countries from the Middle East or Africa were represented. That means the results don’t necessarily apply everywhere."

PROTESTS in Seattle re SHELL ARCTIC DRILLING

Paul and I discuss the paradox of US President Barack Obama saying that climate change is an extreme threat to the nation's security - and then approving drilling in the Arctic by Shell! What the world does not need is more fossil fuels, especially in the fragile Arctic ecosystem.

Shell has their giant platform in the Seattle harbor. Scads of Kayakers turned out to surround the rig in protest.

Photo credit: Daniella Beccaria/seattlepi.com via AP

Shell says their drilling is perfectly safe, even though (a) their last attempt ended in a dangerous failure when their rig broke down and had to be towed back and (b) there is no reliable secondary drilling rig to try to stop a blowout, like the BP giant spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And remember that the Arctic also lacks the warm-water bacteria the helped eat up some of the BP oil. What spills in the Arctic stays in the Arctic, possibly for thousands of years.

Paul wonders if Obama isn't picking his battles carefully. Perhaps it will take one spill or breakdown in the Arctic to bring the public call for banning all drilling. One allowed might stop thousands of planned rigs invading the Arctic in search of more fossil fuels we cannot afford to burn.

YET ANOTHER ANTARCTIC ICE MASS DESTABILIZED

A few weeks ago I tried to wrap up all the Antarctic news with Dr. Roland C. Warner, the Tasmanian scientist. As I said at the beginning of this post, new and bad climate news just never ends. NASA now announces they've discovered another ice shelf that passed a tipping point of no return in 2009. We're just finding out about that one.

"Yet another Antarctic ice mass is becoming destabilized, scientists report

By Chris Mooney May 22

The troubling news continues this week for the Antarctic peninsula region, which juts out from the icy continent.

Last week, scientists documented threats to the Larsen C and the remainder of the Larsen B ice shelf (most of which collapsed in 2002). The remnant of Larsen B, NASA researchers said, may not last past 2020. And as for Larsen C, the Scotland-sized ice shelf could also be at potentially 'imminent risk' due to a rift across its mass that is growing in size (though it appears more stable than the remainder of Larsen B).

And the staccato of May melt news isn’t over, it seems. Thursday in Science, researchers from the University of Bristol in Britain, along with researchers from Germany, France and the Netherlands, reported on the retreat of a suite of glaciers farther south from Larsen B and C along the Bellingshausen Sea, in a region known as the Southern Antarctic Peninsula.

Using satellite based and gravity measurements, the research team found that 'a major portion of the region has, since 2009, destabilized' and accounts for 'a major fraction of Antarctica’s contribution to rising sea level.'

The likely cause of the change, they say, is warmer waters reaching the base of mostly submerged ice shelves that hold back larger glaciers — melting them from below."

Chris Mooney does great work on climate reporting. Here is another verion of that same story.

"Glaciers Are Crumbling in Southern Antarctica Faster Than Previously Thought

Victor Luckerson @VLuck

Previously stable glaciers have been melting rapidly since 2009

Multiple large glaciers that were previously not thought to be in danger of melting have been crumbling since 2009, according to a new study published in Science. Researchers have discovered that glaciers on the southern Antarctic Peninsula’s coastline have been steadily thinning over the past several years, with some dwindling by as much as 13 feet per year. The glaciers had not shrunk significantly before 2009.

The rate of melting makes the region 'the second most important contributor to sea level rise in Antarctica,'lead study author Bret Wouters told NBC News. Overall, 80 trillion gallons of water were added to ocean by the Southern Antarctic Peninsula between 2009 and 2014. Continued melting could raise sea levels by another 14 inches."

So Antarctica is into "unstoppable" melting. Greenland is pouring ice water into the sea at terrific rates. How far is sea level really going to rise? I recall a few months ago Paul Beckwith put out a You tube video asking if it's possible the world might experience 7 meters (!!) of sea level rise by 2070. That's 22 feet.

At the time I really didn't get it. In this interview, Paul explains his methods and reasoning, and now I wonder if he isn't right. We know for sure that scientists who take a linear view are kidding themselves and everyone else. If we say there is 3 centimeters of sea level rise now, and then extend that to the rest of the century, it looks like a meter of sea level rise by 2100. That's what the IPCC has said.

But once you find out that melting is doubling every few years, that's all nonsense. We'll get a lot more than that! Check out how Paul explains it, in this interview. Or watch Paul's explanation in this You tube video.

CANADIAN SCIENTISTS PROTEST MUZZLING BY THE GOVERNMENT

As I've said before on Radio Ecoshock, if I want to get a quote or explanation of climate research by Canadian government scientists, I have to submit my questions in advance. That request is sent to the Office of the Prime Minister, where junior know-nothings will tell the scientist what to say - a few weeks after the news has passed.

Now Prime Minister Stephen Harper has taken his religious fundamentalism, and his love for the Tar Sands, much further. It's not just climate scientists who are muzzled, but all sorts of people, including biologists and more. Research paid for by the Canadian tax payer is hidden away, made secret. It's something Stalin would do.

In the past two weeks there have been multiple demonstrations by government scientists and workers demanding the right of free speech. It's easy. Just as the American scientists do (after the bravery of Dr. James Hansen) - the scientist merely has to say they are speaking for themselves, and not the Canadian government.

It's been sad to see scientists in their lab coats out with signs, demanding basic human rights. Shame on the government of Stephen Harper. This is an election year. A big change is needed, because Canada has joined the likes of Saudi Arabia in trying to tear down and weaken any effort to forestall the worst of climate change. Until recently, Canada did not even have a plan to reduce emissions. We love the Tar Sands! Who cares if people in India die of heat, if Texans are flooded out, if Canadian forests are ravaged by out-of-control insects. Money drives Canada.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE NEWS

Throughout this whole interview, we get more than snapshots of a planet in trouble. Paul gives us a lot of the reasons behind things, explanations of the way the Earth systems really work. It's an education - and that's no surprise because Paul gives lectures at the University of Ottawa. He's a teacher, a communicator, and a research. It's a rare mix.

Paul has two Masters degrees, and is working on his PHD in climate science. He's tasked himself with the specific project of investigating whether a rapid shift in our climate is possible, what would drive that, and what are the signs.

We had record heat here on Canada's West Coast last week. We're getting the hottest of summer weather in the Middle of May. Is this it? Given all we've talked about, could we be going into a shift in the global climate regime, the one Paul has been researching?

Follow Paul Beckwith on his Facebook page here.

Here are some links to just a few of Paul Beckwith's You tube videos.

Abrupt climate system change NOW: Part 1

Abrupt climate system change NOW: Part 2

Abrupt climate system change is underway.

EXTREME WEATHER Caused By Polar Warming

Global food shocks from climate disruption.

On necessity of geoengineering to cool Arctic

NEXT WEEK: EXTREME MEDICINE FOR AN EXTREME CLIMATE DISEASE

I've given you a lot of bad news this week. Next week, we'll talk about what we need to do about it.

Next week we'll talk about the Climate Pledge - a call for a mass mobilization and a change as great as America's sudden shift in 1942, to fight the Axis powers. The President told the car makers to stop making cars. Everyone, from housemakers to farmers were called to support the war effort. Over 40% of U.S. produce was grown locally, in Victory Gardens.

Now that President Barack Obama has admitted climate disruption is a much greater threat than terrorism, it's way past time to act.

You can download all of our past programs as free mp3's from our web site, ecoshock.org. There's a lot of solid science there, plus our authors and activists. You can support Radio Ecoshock by clicking on the donate button on this page, or get more options here. This program continues only by support from listeners.

SHOW ME

Following all the news in recent weeks, are we already entering a climate shift? How would we know? Those are questions I asked myself, in my newest song, called "Show Me". This piece was written with female vocals courtesy of Mike Greene of realitone.com, and Tantra, from Dmitri Sches.



You can also download this song from Soundcloud, or easily make a link to pass this music on to others.

As always, thank you for listening, and caring about your world.

SPINNING WORLD, ANGRY PLANET

SUMMARY: Welcome to a power-packed Radio Ecoshock Show. I'm Alex Smith. My guests are George Kourounis, host of the TV show "Angry Planet", and the solar-powered international musician known as Turtuga Blanku. But first, we'll talk with a high-powered international lawyer who switched from taking multinational companies into China, to creating new alternatives for local economies.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!



LAURENCE BRAHM - TOWARD A NEW ECONOMY FOR A DAMAGED WORLD

Radio Ecoshock has remarkable guests. Our next is no exception. He was a lawyer advising China, to bring big name multinational companies into that Asian economy. Now he's writing about anti-globalization, localizing economies, and the coming eclipse of the Western banking model. His latest book is "Fusion Economics - How Pragmatism Is Changing the World".

Who is Laurence J. Brahm? Let's find out.

In the 1990's, as an international trade lawyer, Laurence Brahm was instrumental in bringing big-name multinational into China. In 1996, he wrote a book called "China's Number One" predicting China would become the world's largest economy. That drew heat and criticism, but now, according to the World Bank, China is the world's largest economy.

More and more, Brahm turned to advising the government of China, which he still does. He wrote a biography of Zhu Rongji, the former Premier of China, and often seen as an architect of the modern Chinese economy.

Laurence Brahm

In 2002 Laurence retired from his practice as an investment lawyer, to seek "Shangri-La". In 2005, he moved to Tibet, and started a business restoring buildings. He helped found the Himalayan Consensus (more about that in the interview). One of his role models is the Bengladeshi Muhammed Yunis, founder of micro-credit banking.

Also in 2011, he helped form the African Consensus. One innovations of this Consensus was to say the true cause of violence and terrorism is economic poverty and identity stripping.

In 2011 Laurence attended the Climate Conference in Durban South Africa. He found it useless, and joined the protesters outside. He says China is more aware of the dangers of climate change, especially since the disappearing Himalayan Glaciers will dry out the Yellow River. Brahm is quite aware of the challenges climate change is posing for many countries and peoples.

In 2014 he attended the Nepal Economic Forum (see You tube presentations here), and in 2013 the G20 Counter Summit in St. Petersburg (You tube here).

On the economy, Laurence sees the end of world domination by the Bretton Woods World Bank IMF model. In the near-term he sees two parallel universes: the Western reserve currency system, and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) system, based mainly on the Chinese currency Yuan (pronounced Yen) and in Beijing.

He sees the latest sanctions on Russia driving that country closer to China. The two can be natural trading partners, because China needs to import clean food (much of China is not able to produce food, and Chinese food may be contaminated); and water (Beijing itself is facing desertification, China needs a lot of water). To make this trade happen, there needs to be more infrastructure, such as pipelines and roads, connecting the two countries.

His latest book is "Fusion Economics - How Pragmatism Is Changing the World". Brahm is a curious mix of a lawyer at home with CEO's and bankers, who also protests as an activist.

Laurence has his own You tube channel. He talks about "compassionate capital" and "conscientious consumption". Brahm recommends we set up our own alternative financial systems (like local currencies, or bitcoin).

On BBC in December, Brahm said 80% of the wealth of America comes from betting on stocks, currencies and other financial games, and not from producing goods and services. That is not sustainable.

China's super growth came at tremendous cost. Brahm told the BBC that, "about 70% of the underground water in China is undrinkable" (BBC interview 8:49) and "about 60% of all surface water is too toxic for human contact".

Brahm is not a total advocate for all things Chinese. He is critical of their use of fossil fuels, the pollution in major cities, and doesn't think top-down government is good for other countries. He says the emphasis on growth in China was a machine for burning fossil fuels, which has ruined the environment. We can learn from China, but should not try to emulate them.

He says the oil-fossil fuel sector forms an oligarchy that currently runs America. That is why there is no Amercian leadership on climate change. Oil-fossil fuels run in a partnership with the Financial Sector, labelled "Wall Street". Quantitative easing, and over a trillion of tax payer money, went to reboot that financial sector, not to the people. He advises the Chinese that government funding should go to a new green economy, instead of the banks.

Laurence is listed as "Chief Economist" for the New Earth Nation (with Sasha Stone).

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Laurence Brahm in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

GEORGE KOUROUNIS - HOST OF ANGRY PLANET TV

There's so much interest in extreme weather. Almost every news cast features a storm. And with climate disruption, there will be plenty more to see.

That's good news for our next guest, George Kourounis. He travels the world looking for adventure and downright dangerous weather, for his television series "Angry Planet". There's a new batch of shows running right now, so it's a pleasure to welcome George to Radio Ecoshock.

There have been 4 Angry Planet series, running on everything from the Weather Network, the Outdoor Life Netowork in Canada to cable TV channels all over the world (including Finland MTV3, TV8 Sweden, and TVB Hong Kong).

This new season 4 has a special emphasis on stories about the impact of global warming, all over the world, but with a focus on the South Pacific. Some countries there are already flooding regularly, and some will disappear as nations during this century, due to rising seas.

You can watch the free Episode One on the Pivot TV web site here.

George got the storm-chasing bug in the 1990's. He's flow into the heart of hurricanes, and run down the back roads in Oklahoma and the Mid-West looking for the big one. He's also a fan of volcanoes. In fact, he and his wife Michelle hiked into a volcano in their wedding clothes to tie the knot in 2006. It's wasn't a dead mountain either. That one has erupted every 5 minutes for the past 800 years, he tells us.

George has been in Amazon forest fires. One time he landed in the South Pacific island of Tuvalu just as they had 354 mm of rain (13.9 inches, over a foot!) in 24 hours. That's an extreme precipitation event for sure.

It's great that Kourounis is so aware of climate change. He worries we are going to leave a legacy to coming generations they may not be able to deal with. He's getting the word out through this new Angry Planet series: the relationship between extreme weather events and climate change. It's refreshing to find an adventure TV host this climate aware. Catch his new Angry Planet series on Pivot TV if you can.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Geourge Kourounis in CD Quality of Lo-Fi

TURTUGA BLANKU AND HIS SOLAR STUDIO

Regular listeners know one of my hobbies is writing music using computer synthesizers. Martin, who is known at Turtuga Blanku, got in touch, to tell me about his solar studio in the Caribbean. You can visit the studio in this You tube video.

Here is a You tube listing of his eco music.

Why the name Turtuga Blanku? It literally means "white turtle" but is also a name given in the Caribbean to the green turtle. You see, Martin is also a diver and ocean lover. He was in the Caribbean at one of the finest dive locations in the world. That's where he got his knick-name.

During the interview, I learned something new (as I often do from guests). Martin tells us that solar panels are less efficient in high heat. While he got lots of power from his panels in the Caribbean (enough to run his house and studio) - he's get as much or more from the same panels in France. The sub-tropics are good for solar.

Martin has just moved back to "the middle of France". He'll set up a solar studio again. Plenty of his neighbors have solar installations, some large ones, thanks to the French policy of guaranteeing a good rate for renewable power, and in some cases, helping finance the original purchase.

We talk a bit about music. Martin has more talents than I - he can play a range of instruments, which he records and then tweaks on a studio computer. It's good stuff - hard to describe - you just have to click around to find the songs you like best. I enjoyed his music, and his conversation.

Find all of Martin's songs, or at least a lot of them, on You tube here.

Then head over and buy your favorite tunes (quite inexpensive) at his Bandcamp page here. Martin has also done some podcast interviews, including with Alan Weisman, the author of the World Without Us, who also spoke on Radio Ecoshock. Find Martin's interview with Alan here.

And here's a bunch more contact info:

Web: http://www.TurtugaBlanku.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TurtugaBlanku Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/turtuga_blanku Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Turtuga Blanku in CD Quality (recommended for the best music) or Lo-Fi (not recommended unless you have a very slow internet connection).

In this program I play a clip from a Turtuga Blanku tune called "No More" from his album Golden Bubble.

BLOG READERS AND PODCAST SUBSCRIBERS SUPPORT THIS PROGRAM, GETTING IT OUT TO NON-PROFIT RADIO STATIONS IN 4 COUNTRIES.

My special thanks to those who sent donations this week, and particularly the person who arranged a $10 a month contribution. All that helps me get through the summer, when donations crash. In a way, it's almost unfair that blog readers, and podcast subscribers pay the whole cost of Radio Ecoshock. The non-profit stations prohibit anyone asking for money, other than themselves. So a few people are really paying to get Radio Ecoshock to all those radio listeners on 87 non-profit stations! You are doing a good thing.

If you can help, click here for details.

Thanks for joining us this week. Stay tuned for more shocking news from Planet Earth. I'm Alex Smith. Keep caring about your planet.

CLIMATE DISRUPTION OF OUR LIVES

SUMMARY: Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers: Jet Stream waves & Polar Vortex. Dr. Daniel Brooks: parasites survive warming better than we do. Radio Ecoshock 150304

We thought global warming would be gentle and kinda nice. Instead it's weird and extreme.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen to it right now on Soundcloud!



JENNIFER FRANCIS: HOW THE ARCTIC DRIVES WEIRD WEATHER

In the 1990's we talked about "global warming". The planet would slowly warm, scientists told us. Maybe that would be good for people living with cold winters - kind of like Florida slowly moving to your house. Then we learned other things would be affected, like rainfall and rising seas, so we called it "climate change". Around 2008, scientist John Holdren said it should be "climate disruption".

Meanwhile, Europe has been back and forth between cold, and strings of rainy storms. Instead of nice warm winters, the Eastern United States has experienced a series of Arctic cold waves and record-setting snowfalls. I know my East Coast listeners are praying these kind of vicious winters are not the new normal. Is it possible they are?

In a 2012 paper titled "Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes", Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University offered a clear answer, based on observations. The Jet Stream, that high air current that can drive weather patterns, is now slower and wavier, due to warming in the Arctic. Her work has generated a little criticism and a lot of support.

Now three years later, Dr. Francis is back with co-author Stephen J Vavrus, with an update. They say we have entered a new era driven by something called "Arctic amplification". With so much at stake, it's a pleasure to welcome Jennifer Francis back to Radio Ecoshock. Her latest paper is "Evidence for a wavier jet stream in response to rapid Arctic warming." That was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in January 2015.

Here's a great explanation of the Polar Vortex weather and the Arctic science by Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm.

I'd like to look further into several issues raised in this interview with Jennifer Francis.

A NEW ERA OF ARCTIC AMPLIFICATION

First of all: why does this new paper say we are in a "new era" of Arctic amplification, or AA. We have reliable temperature and other weather readings from the Arctic starting in 1940. According to this paper, Starting in the 1990's, in the same time frame as sea ice declined, Arctic amplification could be seen in all four seasons - something not seen in records from the time records began in 1940, to 1990. So that's one sign.

Going further, the paper says, quote:

"It is important to note the recent emergence of the signal of AA from the noise of natural variability: since ~1995 near the surface and since ~2000 in the lower troposphere. This short period presents a substantial challenge to the detection of robust signals of atmospheric response amid the noise of natural variability. Thus for this study we define the period from 1995 to 2013 as the 'AA era.'"

I spent a little time with Dr. Francis on the natural cycle called the Arctic Oscillation, and sometimes called the Northern annular mode. We'll stick with Arctic Oscillation or AO.

NOTICE THIS STATEMENT BY JAMES HANSEN, WHICH EXACTLY EXPLAINS THIS PAST WINTER ...

"When the AO index is negative, there tends to be high pressure in the polar region, weaker zonal winds, and greater movement of frigid polar air into middle latitudes."

That's from Hansen's 2009 paper "If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?". It's too bad climate denier Senator James Inhofe is too dumb to understand it.

I specifically asked Jennifer Francis about the Arctic Oscillation, because if that's all it is, the awful weather pattern in the U.S. Northeast will just go away when the Arctic Oscillation goes positive. Francis has three answers really. First: the Arctic Oscillation is not a final indicator of getting a disturbed Jet Stream, and a Polar Vortex in North America. This past winter had a positive AO, and still got hit with polar weather further south. Secondly, we can see the pole is warming, with ice melting, permafrost thawing, and a much warmer winter in Alaska - because of climate change.

Finally though, the super-cold winters in Eastern North America will get less frequent over time because we are warming the whole planet. I did a Radio Ecoshock show titled "Summer in March" in 2012 because that winter was so freakily warm. Folks were playing tennis in New York city parks in January that year. Parents in Quebec couldn't get the traditional outdoor skating rinks to freeze.

The unpleasant answer is we have caused climate disruption. Expect the unexpected, good and bad.

NOT EVERYONE AGREES - YET

As far as other scientists expressing doubt about the work of Francis and her collegues - that is what scientists do! Underneath those quiet proper exterior, scientists are actually cut-throat thinkers. They live to disprove what others thought was real.

There has been some criticism of the work published by Jennifer Francis. For example, in December I interviewed Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the Snow and Ice Data Center. He hesitated to agree with your work, and suggested things like Tropical Storm Nuri hitting Alaska are also important factors. There was even a paper out from Elizabeth Barnes of Colorado State University which said she couldn't duplicate the Arctic-Jet Stream connection with her methods. You can download or listen to that December 2014 Radio Ecoshock interview with Kevin Trenberth here.

After the interview, a listener sent this link to a seemingly contradictory paper by another Radio Ecoshock guest, Noah Diffenbaugh.

But I'm with Jennifer Francis on this. First of all, the observation of the distortion of the Jet Stream is indisputable. We are experiencing this now, all too often. We can argue about whether there is enough proof that warming in the Arctic is causing a wavier Jet Stream, but so far it all make a lot of sense. It's based on the basic physics that warmth will move toward cold. That's what powers our weather systems, the difference between heat at the equator and cold at the poles. Along with the spin of the Earth, the temperature difference creates wind on the planet. It doesn't seem possible to me that the Arctic could be up to 30 degrees warmer than in the past, without affecting weather world-wide.

Further research published in August 2014 by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) supports the wavy Jet Stream - Arctic connection, using different methods.

If you read through the paper "Evidence for a wavier jet stream in response to rapid Arctic warming" you'll have to learn a few new terms. Just crank up Wikipedia and Google searches. As a reward, you'll get the big picture of what is driving weird weather in your world.

THE IPCC AND RPC - SCIENCE OR SCIENCE FICTION?



Evidence is growing that the Paris Climate talks at the end of 2015 are an exercise in futility. The European Union, considered the most climate-aware and progressive block at the table, are proposing emission levels which scientist I talk with say are not survivable, at least not for human civilization.

The latest document from the EU calls for cuts in greenhouse gas emission of “at least” 60% from 2010 levels by 2050. First of all - what happened to the 1990 greenhouse gas levels used in most previous talks? Global greenhouse gas emissions went up 24% from 1990 to 2004, and rose another 3% annually pretty well every year since 2004. We're way, way higher than 1990. So a 60% cut from 2010 levels doesn't mean very much.

The kicker is even if we make that goal, we are headed for a climate catastrophe, if we are still emitting 40% of 2010 levels in 2050, scientists guarantee polar ice will disappear over the coming centuries, in an unstoppable wave of climate disruption. A sixty percent cut by 2020 might stave off the worst.

Keep in mind that most other big polluters, especially the United States and China, are promising nothing like the European goals. And goals a generation away aren't likely to be met anyway.

How to international politicians get at these deadly greenhouse gas targets? They believe in fairy tales. And governments get that science fiction from the scientists they hire. I'm talking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC works out possible futures they call "Representative Concentration Pathways" or RCP’s. Learn that jargon, because they are talking about your future.

These days, there are three big representative concentration pathways in the latest IPCC assessment, the one that will be used by diplomats in Paris. The two lowest carbon pathways are shown on graphs. But the IPCC doesn't say those graphs assume that humanity will use a non-existent technology to geoengineer the planet, to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide.

A couple of Radio Ecoshock listeners alerted me to this dangerous charade. It's explained best by the UK film-maker and climate blogger Nick Breeze at envisionation. Here's the audio argument from Nick's latest film warning.

In this program I play the audio from a new short film by Nick Breeze, titled "Survivable IPCC Projections Are Based On Science Fiction". You can find it at envisionation.co.uk. Nick does some great interviews, often with prominent climate scientists. It pays to keep visiting his site.

Watch Nick's video here. And read all about it in Nick's blog entry here.

GET SOIL ON THE PARIS CLIMATE TALK MENU!

So the Paris Climate talks are already a sell-out of humanity and all species, even if they are a "success" which is doubtful. I'd say the best climate activists can do at this point, is to push their country governments to do far more, and to include a new vision of naturally capturing carbon back into the soil.

As we've heard from recent Radio Ecoshock guests, like Thomas Goreau (interview here) and Kristin Ohlson (interview here), we can lower the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by changing the way we do agriculture. That will need a parallel shift in our whole economy and lifestyles, but it can work. Unlike the fairy-tale tech of carbon capture and storage, we do know how to put large amounts of carbon back into the soil.

So far the Climate Talks do not even include the soil carbon option. Let's try and change that, before it's really, really too late. Get soil carbon into the Paris Climate talks. Pass the word.

DANIEL BROOKS: ADVANCE OF THE PARASITES WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

Humans are changing the planet in many ways. But we are not alone out there. There are diseases looking for new conquests, and parasites being spread around the world by air travel, shipping, and resource extraction. Experts warn we already in a crisis of Emerging Infectious Disease, or EID.

We have one of those experts with us now. Dr. Daniel Brooks was a zoology professor at the University of Toronto. He is now a Senior Research Fellow with the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology, at the University of Nebraska. Dr. Brooks is also a visiting scholar in Brazil and Hungary.

This week's interview with Daniel Brooks has a couple of key thoughts.

First, while humans mentally long for a single threat where we can focus, the natural world is too complex to accommodate our need. Unlike the movie "The Andromeda Strain", the experts don't think we will run into a single giant disease or parasite to knock off our species. AIDS, Ebola and West Nile virus arrive and manage to stay around, but don't do us in.

WEST NILE GAINING CALIFORNIA

By the way, if I sounded disappointed in the West Nile virus after the initial hype, here's some news. The extra-warm dry conditions in California brought the highest level of West Nile virus ever seen in that state. There were 798 human cases in 2014, five times the number recorded in 2011 at the start of this big drought. Twenty nine people died.

You might think drier weather means less mosquito diseases. But streams and even rivers that normally keep running enough to stay clear of mosquito larvae, end up with more stagnant pools to breed. Plus, with fewer water sources, more species come to those that are left, meaning a better transfer station for diseases to all kinds of species.

The Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito Control is warning Californians to expect “an intense West Nile virus year.” It's just another unexpected spin-off of climate change, and the very things Dr. Brooks warned us about.

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

But the first big thought from the Brooks interview is : with further warming we will be hurt by a thousand cuts. Picture finding a new beetle killing off your apple tree. It's been brought over from Asia in a furniture shipment. The bug carries a virus that slowly kills the tree. That gets into orchards all over. The cost of fruit goes up.

Meanwhile, house cats get a new virus originally from the tropics, but now capable of over-wintering in warmer climates. Vet bills, already in the billions of dollars in North America, go up.

There's another nasty tropical disease likely to arrive from the Carribean. It's "chikungunya". Before 2013, this Asian and African disease was never before seen in the Americas. It's here now, and likely to arrive in the southern United States, just like Dengue fever is now in Florida and Texas.

PARASITES SURVIVE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE

The second big take-away is that scientists have discovered that disease agents are very tough. In the interview, we heard about a 100 million-year-old parasite that survived the great asteroid strike 65 million years ago. When the dinosaur fish is specialized in went extinct, the parasite did not, and appears now in Arctic birds.

It's intriguing to hear that parasites can revert to ancient abilities in their genes to adapt to new hosts, and new challenges. As Dr. Brook warns at the end, the idea that we are in a golden age of health is an illusion, and there is no evidence that humans will win in the end, as climate change combines with international trade and expanding human populations. Unseen in our Twitter world, humans are always prone to becoming food for something else.

I didn't have time in this interview to get into a new concept in parasitic threats that Dr. Brooks and other scientists are using. It's called the Stockholm Paradigm. Please don't confuse that with Stockholm Syndrome, where a captive comes to love his or her captor.

After interviewing Daniel Brooks, journalist Dominic Basulto in the Washington Times summarized it this way:

"The new thinking, known as the 'Stockholm Paradigm' (not to be confused with the 'Stockholm Syndrome'), combines four different ecological concepts – ecological fitting, the geographic mosaic theory of co-evolution, taxon pulses and the oscillation hypothesis – to conjecture that pathogens may not really have as hard of a time finding a new host as we thought. They may already have the 'ancestral genetic capabilities' to switch to new hosts that are genetically close enough to the original hosts."

The Stockholm Paradigm is exactly the type of matrix of causes that breaks our simple human minds. It's hard for us to think about, but that's how nature operates, and simple is not a requirement for reality.

LESSONS FROM THE PLAGUE

Meanwhile, the news is full of more examples of how climate change will influence the appearance of new diseases and pests. Just this past week, a new study from Oslo, Norway re-wrote the history books of how the plague hit Europe in the 1300's, and kept coming back for hundreds of years afterwards.

According to the book "Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" about 90% of the people in Hopei province of China died from the plague in 1331. Fifteen years later the disease made it to the Volga River in Russia. The Mongol empire partly ended because their pony express system, which likely spread the disease, couldn't find enough riders left alive. A hat tip to Scott Gardner at the Manter Lab in Nebraska for that book info.

Scientists now think that periods of warmer and wetter weather in Asia stimulated the populations of plague-carrying ticks. And these were more likely carried by gerbils, not the black rat. The gerbils likely spread the plague to pack animals plying the Silk Road trade route to Europe, rather than just arriving by ship.

Evidence seems to show that the plague did not stay resident in Europe's rats, but instead kept arriving from Asia following warm weather spells there. Rats carrying the plague were themselves killed off, rather than harboring the horrible disease.

Europe was re-infected dozens of times. Investigating over 7,000 outbreaks of the plague, scientists from the University of Oslo found that weather in Europe was not a factor. But a warming spell in Asia was. The plague arrived about 15 years after each warming period. Like today, other factors like immigration and wars also helped spread the disease.

We don't know all the surprises coming our way, as this next warming pumps up the population of disease-bearing organisms. Oh, and by the way, a brand new deadly virus was just discovered in a man in Kansas at the end of February. He'd been bitten by ticks in the Spring. It took a while for the US Centers for Disease Control to realize this was a brand new virus, never seen before.

Check out this Washington Post article about our guest: "The Weird Way that Climate Change Could Lead to New Disease Outbreaks Around the World".

WHAT TO DO ABOUT DISEASES

The best we can do, Brooks says, is (a) admit climate change is real and then (b) start funding research and building infrastructure to deal with new pests and diseases we know are coming. Right now even in the West hospitals are operating on a just-barely basis. Agriculture is likewise dependent on a business model with no back-up system, and no fall-back position. It's not like we are rationally ready for a thousand challenges from the micro-world, much less the insects.

Here is the source for the new paper, taken from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln press release:

"Brooks' and Hoberg's article, 'Evolution in action: climate change, biodiversity dynamics and emerging infectious disease,' is part of a Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B issue on 'Climate change and vector-borne diseases of humans,' edited by Paul Parham, a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College in London."

THANKS FOR LISTENING!

...and a special shout-out to the small band of people who set up an automatic donation of $10 a month to Radio Ecoshock. I really need that support, and I think of you often - with gratitude. If you'd like to join those core supporters, just click the "subscribe" link on this page.

That's our time for this week. There are some solutions, but they all start with accepting what is real.

I'm Alex Smith. Thanks for listening, and join us again next week on Radio Ecoshock.

Near-Term Human Extincton: Making the Case

SUMMARY: Retired ecology Professor Guy McPherson says extreme climate change will wipe out humans before 2050. Psychologist Carolyn Baker says grieve now for lost future. Environmental Horticulturist Kim Eierman on eco-beneficial home planting. Radio Ecoshock 140910

LISTENER WARNING: If you are feeling depressed or even considering suicide, this is not the program for you. People suffering from PTSD may want to think twice. The subject matter is very depressing. However, in next week's show I will attempt to counter the argument made by our guests, with at least some bleak optimism, and why we may not be doomed.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality or Lo-Fi. And here is a short link you can use to share this interview via Facebook or Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/ly2zckx

OR... you can listen to it right now, and share it, via Soundcloud.



GUY MCPHERSON ON OUR EXTINCTION

Let me ask you: Do you have days when you feel we are doomed as a species? That's every day, for our next guest.

When a successful Professor of Natural Resources, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology left the University of Arizona, for his mud hut retreat, he probably didn't intend to stir up the world. But that's just what Guy McPherson has done. He's becoming a voice for the worst fears of many people.

In fact, McPherson says climate change has gone so far, so fast, humans will become extinct before 2050. Dr. McPherson makes his case, and offers ways to cope with the ultimate bad news, in a new book co-authored with psychologist Carolyn Baker. It's called "Extinction Dialogs: Living with Death in Mind". That's coming out this Fall.

Eventual human extinction may not be as impossible as it sounds. In addition to James Lovelock, two of the world's top scientists, Professor John Schullnhuber in Germany, and Dr. James Hansen, formerly of NASA, have worried we'll blow past any survivable limits to climate change. In a speech to the "4 Degrees of More" conference in Australia, Schullnhuber suggested that if we reach 4 degrees, the whole thing could easily slide to 8 degrees, which most of us would agree is beyond human tolerance. Hansen wondered if we might blow off the atmosphere altogether, as apparently happened on Mars. That possibility has since been discounted by other scientists.

Most of the big name scientists, other than James Lovelock, hedge their warnings with the idea that we could still save ourselves IF we mount a huge campaign to switch energy to renewable sources, and stop our carbon-wasting ways. Guy says it's too late for all that. We have already committed the Earth to a severe shift in climate, beyond the survival limits of not just our civilization, but of our species.

Let's find out why Guy McPherson thinks we are finished.

I ask Guy what he means by extinction. Does he mean most humans die, but there would be a few left in caves or around the Arctic ocean, as Dr. James Lovelock once suggested? His exact reply was: "I'm a conservation biologist, and when I say extinct I mean every member of the species is gone."

McPherson has woven the risk of nuclear power into his story of our end times. He's right to say that if the global electric grid goes down, for any reason, whether due to a massive collapse, or a solar flare or big nuclear war - then up to 400 nuclear reactors could melt down like Fukushima.

However, we don't know for sure that even those events would bring all electricity down, all over the world. So we may add a lot of radiation, leading to millions or even a billion cases of cancer, but that's not enough to depopulate the world, much less cause our extinction. That's my opinion, and I'm dead-set against nuclear power. I think they should all be shut down as soon as possible.

Guy says the oceans are dying. Anyone who lives near the ocean, as I did for 25 years, knows that isn't true - yet. A growing chorus of the best oceanographers do say ocean acidification from our carbon pollution can change the whole food chain in the seas, hugely reducing an essential source of human food. The oceans may fill up with acid tolerant plants and animals, lots of jellyfish. But I haven't found one ocean scientist that says the ocean is dying right now.

It's a serious worry though. Up to 96% of all ocean life did die off in the planet's greatest mass extinction event, the Permian, known as "The Great Dying." That was about 248 million years ago, and may have been due to global warming. But we think it took a long time, perhaps happening over a couple of million years. Certainly it didn't happen in a couple of decades.

THE CLATHRATE GUN

We talk about the threat of methane erupting in large quantities from shallow sea beds, and the melting permafrost. The sea-bed methane is frozen in a watery cage - the technical name for them is "clathrates". Some scientists have suggested that previous mass extinction events occurred when clathrates melt in such quantities that a methane burst destablized the climate into a rapid heating. Methane is at least 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Some scientists say for short durations (a few years) methane may be hundreds of time worse than CO2.

This extinction-level emission of frozen methane is called "the clathrate gun". Guy McPherson says the clathrate gun has already fired. He talks about recent explorations into the Arctic measuring methane, and maps released by the Arctic News blog, showing very high levels of methane around the northern polar region. Other scientists, such as climate scientists David Archer, and Gavin Schmidt - both previous Ecoshock guests, disagree, saying the amount of methane released so far in the Arctic is not signficant, compared to our CO2 emissions. David Archer interview here. They also note that methane emissions being discoverd in the Arctic may not be new, but may have been venting for a long time. We don't know all that yet.

WHEN HUMANS GO EXTINCT?

Nevertheless, Guy McPherson insists the clathrate release has begun, meaning it is too late to do anything about climate change. Our fate is sealed.

I ask Guy how he arrived at the date of 2030 as the time when humans would be extinct. Guy said he had not calculated the date himself. He relied on outside sources. The only other person he pointed to making that prediction was Malcolm Light, who posts on the Arctic News blog. The exact date humans will go extinct, according to Malcolm Light, is found in this blog posting.

I've broadcast and blogged about the serious problems with accepting Malcolm Light's predictions as science. His blog posts are just that - not papers that have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. His methods are suspect, as I outlined in detail in this blog posting last year.

In this interview, Guy gave us a scenario which leads to extinction. It involves:

* a dying ocean

* extreme weather killing off plants, and with them, agriculture

* a burst of heating due to methane

* a list of 37 positive feedback loops which ratchet up the speed of warming

* emissions of radiation from the world's 400 nuclear plants, when the world's power grids fail (partly due to climate chaos)

That isn't a very good summary. You need to listen to the interview to get Guy's explanation properly.

We also touched on the difficulty of facing this end-time, and the recent suicide of the iconic figure of the collapse movement, Michael C. Ruppert. In his last months, Ruppert accepted near-term extinction as a reality, and had Guy McPherson on his Lifeboat Hour radio show. Most of Mike friends though, say he had discussed suicide many time in the past, long before discovering near-term extinction. His closest associates think Mike's own personal problems overcame him. Still, I think human extinction is not a discussion for unstable or stressed out people.

I wanted to give Guy (and Carolyn Baker) a full opportunity to explain their case, without my interrupting with objections. That's the purpose of this show. I've reserved my reservations for next week's program.

You can download or listen to Guy McPherson's interview here in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

If you are tracking the development of various streams of our future and deep climate thought, this is going to be an interview of record and importance. Its' a hard interview to hear if you love life. Don't sell your possessions or make that good-bye video just yet. Be sure and tune in next week when my guests and I try to make the case that humans won't go extinct any time soon. Think deeply about what Guy McPherson says, but don't miss next week's show.

FOLLOW-UP LINKS FOR THE GUY MCPHERSON INTERVIEW

There were a couple of points where I asked Guy to send me his sources. That happened quickly, as Guy appears to keep an exhaustive database of his sources - something he's had to do for his new book.

1. First I asked for the title and author of paper in Geophysical Letters published March 2013 showing warming has accelerated. Here it is:

Magdalena A. Balmaseda, Kevin E. Trenberth, and Erland Källén, 2013, Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content, Geophysical Research Letters 40(9):1754-1759. (viewed 5 September 2014, dx.doi.org/10.1002/grl.50382)

2. I wanted the title, date, and link to the analysis by Sam Carana on the effects of exponential release of Arctic methane.

Sam Carana's analysis from 1 April 2013: http://methane-hydrates.blogspot.com/2013/04/methane-hydrates.html 3. What is the journal article mentioned, where the author suggests we could lose all of the ocean's phytoplankton?

Stephanie L. Hinder, Mike B. Gravenor, Martin Edwards, Clare Ostle, Owen G. Bodger, Patricia L. M. Lee, Antony W. Walne, and Graeme C. Hays, 2013, Multi-decadal range changes vs. thermal adaptation for north east Atlantic oceanic copepods in the face of climate change, Global Change Biology 20(1):140-146. (viewed 4 September 2014, dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12387)

4. Guy mentioned "David" Jaczko, former NRC Chairman. He meant Gregory Jaczko. While I found news articles with Jaczko saying the Indian Point reactor should be shut down, I didn't find one where Jaczko suggests it could take 60 years to do it. Guy tells me that time estimate by Jaczko is "within this clip, shot by citizen journalist and filmmaker Pauline Schneider: https://vimeo.com/83563406 "

You can follow Guy McPherson and a large debate about near-term human extinction at his blog "Nature Bats Last" (guymcpherson.com). He has a Facebook page here.

There is also a members-only Facebook page devoted to near-term extinction. Find that here.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXTINCTION: CAROLYN BAKER

I've been in contact with Carolyn Baker for years. We've talked in private and on the air about collapse, transition, the incredible flash-floods around Bolder Colorado where she lives, and the psychology behind our ability to deny many big changes are happening. Carolyn also sends me daily news links, from her news service. Some of the stories I've received through Carolyn led me to Radio Ecoshock interviews.

So when Carolyn Baker agrees with Guy McPherson, and co-authors a discussion about how to handle their realization that we are too far gone to hope for a way out, I have to pay attention.

Carolyn is less willing to put any date on when human extinction might occur. She's more concentrated on how people can handle this ultimate knowledge. Her solutions include offering life counselling, and leading workshops on how the hospice movement applies now in the last days of the human race. Hospice, if you don't know, is defined in Wikipedia as "a type of care and philosophy of care that focuses on the palliation of a chronically ill, terminally ill or seriously ill patient's pain and symptoms, and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs."

Human civilization is, Baker contends, terminally ill. Most of us just don't know it yet.

With that position in mind, Baker says we should start caring for one another. Her starting point, it seems to me, is to help people experience the grieving process. What are we grieving for? Everything that will be lost from a formerly bountiful planet. All the plants, the birds, the bees, the animals, the landscapes, and then finally humans, which will go extinct as our ecology spins out of control.

Once we grieve, then there is the work of living in a caring and meaningful way. Then even joy is possible, in our golden years, so to speak. Although Baker knows they will be difficult years.

Personally, I'm starting to think that Baker's process is probably worthwhile, even if we don't go as far as believing humans will become extinct. It is certain that gorgeous creatures are already going extinct, maybe daily. As things are going we are likely to lose iconic animals, like lions and elephants, but also countless species we don't even know about. We are already losing landscapes like the glaciers in Glacier National Park, and maybe soon a lot of the Amazon and Congolese rainforests, with all those species therein.

If we keep polluting at our current rate, it's also possible our descendants will be buffeted by outrageous storms, failing agriculture, rising seas, and many other things. So we may grieve in advance for them as well. Our recent guest from the Australian Psychological Society, Susie Burke, agreed that grieving is appropriate at this time. But she says "don't stop there" and turn that grief into activism. Find that S. Burke interview here.

Carolyn and I have a thoughtful conversation that might stir up a few people. You can listen to or download this interview as a separate item here, but I think it's better as part of the whole program, with Guy McPherson as well.

Carolyn Baker interview in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

Carolyn Baker is a one-woman whirl-wind. She produces a daily news service with the bleakest headlines from around the world - plus some tips for more positive living. She's the author of several books, including "Sacred Demise", "Navigating the Coming Chaos, A Handbook for Inner Transition" and "Collapsing Consciously, Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times". She's been a leader in the Transition movement. Following the untimely death of Michael C. Ruppert, Carolyn is the host of the popular Lifeboat Hour radio show, every Sunday night on PRN.

Follow Carolyn Baker at her "Speaking Truth to Power" web site here.

Her latest book with Dr. Guy McPherson is "Extinction Dialogs, How to Live with Death in Mind". You can pre-order the book at carolynbaker.net.

DOWN TO EARTH WITH KIM EIERMAN

Leaping from such a tall building as extinction, at the close of this program we land in our own backyards with environmental horticulturist Kim Eierman. She tells us how to live with nature, instead of creating the "green desert" of lawn-culture.

Sometimes big changes come one yard at a time. You know we need to move from lifeless lawn culture toward letting nature - yes messy nature - occupy our landscapes and our lives.

That's why I've called up Kim Eierman, the eco-beneficial gardener. Kim teaches at the New York and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and gives talks and workshops across America. She's an award-winning Environmental Horticulturist and Master Gardener. It was a relief to here this level-headed person cram so many useful down-to-earth tips into such a short interview.

We are going to have to call Kim back, because I sense a wealth of information in her. Meanwhile you should check out her web site.

You can download or listen to this short interview with Kim Eierman here.

NEXT UP....

I hope you can tell I respect both Guy McPherson and Carolyn Baker. But at a gut level, and in my brain, I object and disagree with their conclusions. In next week's Radio Ecoshock show, we'll take a look at the other side of this argument, - whether the impacts of climate change will move that fast, and how worth-while human lives could continue into the long future.

Find all our past programs at the web site ecoshock.org. My Facebook page is here, and I tweet out a notice about each new show - follow @ecoshock A growing number of people access the show from this Soundcloud page.

Listener donations make this show possible. If you feel like giving, and can afford it (don't go into debt for me!) - please click on the donate button on this page, or go to our donor information page at our web site, which has more options, including my address. My thanks to everyone who contributed over the past couple of weeks. You don't know it, but you helped launch yet another season of Radio Ecoshock.

Meanwhile, I have two pots of home-grown tomatoes stewing on the stove, and a big box of ripe pears waiting in the basement. I have to can them tonight, or they will go bad by morning.

The first frost is threatening to strike here, and I have about 20 tomato plants with lots more green fruit still waiting to ripen. I guess I'll be out there by tonight's bright moon, hanging old sheets over my plants. It's busy, busy time around the harvest.

As one of next week's guests would say: "stay well".

Alex