WAKING UP TO ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE

Signs climate has entered abrupt shift. Includes Dr. James Hansen's video abstract of new science. Special report on smoke pollution from Indonesian peat fires by correspondent Yew Jin Lee, with 3 experts. Sample from "Unwelcome Guests" #726 "The Flight from Death". Radio Ecoshock 160420

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BECOMING AWARE OF ABRUPT CHANGE (again)

It's funny how things build up, how they leak out, finally reaching us. A couple returned to my village from their winter in the Philippines. She grew up there. They had never been so hot, and so dry. They are religious, and they prayed for at least a cloud, to get relief from the relentless sun.

Then I get an email from a radio friend abroad. He's Robin Upton, the producer who revived the deep alternative show "Unwelcome Guests" when Lynn Gary retired. Google it, or go to unwelcomeguests.net. As an aside, Robin said the heat was in the unbearable range. Heat laced with humidity - over 35 degrees C, or 95 Fahrenheit became the daily normal, flaring up above that at times. Upton was writing from his adopted home in Bangladesh.

A headline flickered in my brain, a one-off story asking if India was experiencing the worst drought ever. Or maybe the worst since 2002. Hundreds are dying of the heat. Fields have burned off dry. The only hope for millions, maybe hundreds of millions, is an above-average monsoon season, this June to September. In the meantime, in parts of the State of Maharashtra, a Criminal law forbids more than five people at a time at any water supply. The authorities fear conflict, maybe violence.

By the way, the super hot weather is melting snow and ice on Mount Everest faster. Changes in the cryosphere in the Himalayas may even create more heatwaves in Europe! Everybody is included in climate change.

Temp of 44C (111.2F) at VIDP (New Delhi, India) only 1.3C (2.3F) away from all-time April record of 45.3C (113.5F). pic.twitter.com/GDQAbsqWfd

— Anthony Sagliani (@anthonywx) April 16, 2016

One of highest temps in world today was Wardha, India with high of 45C (113F). Heat wave warnings much of India. pic.twitter.com/CL9XW2qv2y

— Anthony Sagliani (@anthonywx) April 16, 2016

Vietnam flashes up in my news and Twitter feed. Along with India and Bangladesh, Vietnam is going through a hot punishing dry period. Vietnam is normally a major exporter of rice. This year, not. A band of suffering has taken over south Asia. Yes, its partly because of El Nino, but a super El Nino adding it's might to the upward pace of global warming. That is one of the world emergencies being blotted out of our minds and screens by endless celebrity trivia, and fake political choices.

Drought in Vietnam









READY FOR EXTREME SOLUTIONS? PAUL BECKWITH ON COOLING WITH NUKES

During this past week, climate scientist Paul Beckwith ventured into our darker places. Paul is frustrated with scientists who are constantly surprise the climate beast is roaring already, in so many ways. The global community has had 21 COP meetings, the Conference of the Parties to a Treaty that has done nothing to stop escalating emissions and committment to a climate-damaged future.

Maybe, Paul wonders, a regional nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would stir up enough dust, to block enough sun, to cool us down for a few years. The dust of a decent sized nuclear explosion would spread throughout the northern hemisphere, likely cooling the planet an astounding one to one and a half degrees, within weeks. It might put a halt to the wildly growing melting of Greenland. The cooling might save the last of the reflective Arctic Ice cap.

Paul's second video on local nuclear war, explaining further, is here.

It's not just Paul talking about this. You can find a 2010 article on the same subject by respected scientist Alan Robock (and Brian Toon) as published in Scientific American here.

Paul explains we have lots of nuclear weapons. Just one big one from Russia or America would do the job. The cooling would last at least five years, maybe ten. Of course then the world would jump to new heat levels, because we've just hidden another ten years of huge greenhouse gas emissions under the nuclear cloud. Maybe we'd have to blow off two the next time.

As Beckwith stands in front of a screen explaining nuclear winter, I spy in the right hand corner another graphic explaining the nuclear explosion would also demolish most of the protective ozone in the Northern Hemisphere. Those who go outside without wearing a protective bag would ratchet up their risk of cancer. Everyone would have to wear eye protection to prevent blindness - at least everyone who could afford the special sun glasses. I suppose that didn't happen during nuclear tests in the 1960's, but then many seniors are getting multiple skin cancers. I just had one removed.

The whole project goes crazy, and Paul knows that. I think he's just telling us how serious this climate shift is, how we We are deluding ourselves about climate action, and the fact that we are not ready to cool the planet in this emergency.

JAMES HANSEN EXPLAINS WHY THE NEAR FUTURE WILL BE MORE EXTREME

Which brings me to James Hansen. Many of you know Dr. Hansen, the former Director of the Goddard Space Center of NASA - as the man who warned the U.S. Congress about dangerous climate change in 1988. He's struggled with this threat ever since. Last summer, Hansen and a collection of prestigious academics around the world, broke scientific protocol by publicly speaking about their research.

Paul Beckwith did a series of nine videos to explore and explain what Hansen and his co-scientists were saying. Find that video series on You tube, or at paulbeckwith.net.

This March, they officially published their study. It got some press. It's huge. Why haven't I said anything about it on Radio Ecoshock?

There are problems. First, of course I invited Dr. Hansen to appear on this program. I got no reply. I have no inside track to reach him. Hansen can pick his world media for appearances.

Second, there has been a fairly strong chorus of criticism of this paper. Of course a few complained that the process was broken. But Hansen says this scientific warning is much too important to wait a year before telling the population what is coming.

Other scientists simply disagree with either his conclusions, or his method of reaching them. A few have said, for example, that Hansen and team did not reach their vision of an ultra-stormy future in a ruined atmosphere by using models.

The paper refers to evidence of super storms, that could move 1,000 ton boulders inland from the shore. We can see these mysterious boulders on Caribbean islands. This is part of the paleoclimate record, but there are questions about how the Hansen team connected those time to these times. It is possible that the vision of dangerous and damaged decades to come was assumed, rather than proven. At that point, and really before then, I am not skilled enough to judge.

Plus, I think Hansen can be mistaken. I believe his promotion of nuclear energy as a solution for climate change is mistaken. I hope to have more on that in a future show.

That is partly why I haven't covered this story. Another part is a deep feeling that I might not be able to bear knowing what Hansen knows. You see, we've all been sold a picture of slowly developing climate change. In countless interviews scientists have cautioned that melting glaciers like Greenland and Antarctica will take hundred of years at least. The global mean temperature has only been going up slowly. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is discussing how we can still burn more fossil fuels, peak in a decade or two, and gradually come down, with quite survivable impacts. The seas will only rise slowly. It's the mantra of changes in geologic time.

If James Hansen is right, all this is wrong. The stakes are enormous, far larger than anything humans have experienced, bigger than the Earth has seen in more than 50 million years. The speed of change may be absolutely new.

I'm slowly collecting my files and links on the Hansen paper. He's gone to the press saying James Hansen is not an extremist. The science is what it is, the rapid changes we are seeing speak loudly. On March 21st, Hansen put out a video on You tube, explaining the work. It's 15 minutes long. If I can't interview the man, we still need to hear him speak. Here is James Hansen with "Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms Video Abstract."



In a way, Hansen spoke partly to other scientists. The full impact of what could happen is not explained, although I suppose for a scientist of his calibre to warn "all Hell will break loose in the North Atlantic" is pretty clear. Losing most of our coastal cities by the end of this century is clear enough. The time of the great storms is left to our imagination.

I'm going to re-read this paper, watch another dozen videos, listen to the scientific back talk. I'll come back to this paper when I know more. I'm also in touch with some of the co-authors of the paper, to get their views in coming programs.

MORE RECORD RECORDS IN ABRUPT CLIMATE SHIFT

Meanwhile the recording of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at Manu Loa Hawaii hit another frightening record of 409 parts per million. We started at 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution. During most of my life it has climbed slowly but surely. Now it's peaking, so that the new lows will be the old highs, and the new highs have never been seen on Earth for many millions of years.

Greenland has begun its summer melt season in early April. That's another record. Worrying news is pouring in from a wave of scientific papers around the world. My jaw drops, my nerves tingle, at least a dozen times a week. No one can keep up. All we know is that it's coming, and we are sleepwalking into a new more dangerous world. Sometime soon, or maybe yesterday, we reach the damage that can never be undone in thousands of years.

We are writing our wills for our descendants. Through our actions and inactions, we promise them a damaged atmosphere, with unstable weather and strange seas. The bugs, the plants and the other animals will move and change as they can. The future of our species cannot yet be written, even by the most imaginative science fiction writers, or poets of tragedy. Unless we can pull off a miracle of collective action, the future will be distorted beyond recognition. That is the only certainty.

INDONESIA IS BURNING AGAIN, COVERING EAST ASIA WITH SMOKE - A SPECIAL REPORT

We talked about the dry heat in East Asia, and the possibility of creating dust to cool the world in an emergency. But there is already a long season of smoky haze hanging over a lot of Asia, especially over Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Unfortunately, that smoky is unlikely to cool anything. It comes from burning tropical forests in the islands of Indonesia. There is black carbon in it, which will soak up sunlight and heat. Even worse, a lot of the fires are actually burning peat, that compact vegetative matter just one step below coal for carbon pollution. When the biggest peat fires erupted in Indonesia in a previous El Nino of 1997-98, it launched that country into the top three greenhouse gas polluters in the world. The peat fires continue, as big corporations and small land holders clear and drain the tropical forests, transforming them into palm oil plantations.

Check out this image of smoke from Indonesian fires covering Thailand and beyond

I got an email from listener Yew Jin Lee, offering to ask the experts why haze was covering Malaysia and Singapore yet again. Yew Jin is a Master's student studying Environmental Sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. He carefully crafted this report for Radio Ecoshock.

For Radio Ecoshock, Yew Jin Lee interviews Dr. Helena Varkkey, senior lecturer at the University of Malaya; Alan Tan, professor of the National University of Singapore Law School; and Dr. Rachel Carmenta, Post-Doctoral Fellow at CIFOR " the centre for international forestry research in Indonesia.

Under the smoke, endangered creatures like the Orangutan, and tropical plants, are disappearing as the forests are cut, and peatlands burn. My thanks to Yew Jin for digging into this, with original radio for Ecoshock listeners. Don't forget, you can download this radio report, or share it with others, using thesse permanent links:

Asian haze interview (17 minutes) in CD Quality.

In "Lo-Fi" (lower quality mono, suitable for those with low bandwidth or listening/downloading via mobile phones)

If you want to Tweet or share this on Facebook, here is a shorter URL for the Lo-Fi version: http://tinyurl.com/jnpwxz8

CLIMATE DENIAL AND OUR DENIAL OF DEATH... UNWELCOME GUESTS

Near the beginning of this program, I mentioned Robin Upton, now a resident of Bangladesh. Robin rescued one of the most popular underground radio shows, called Unwelcome Guests. It was founded by New York State resident Lynn Gary, who ran produced the show for years and years. Unwelcome Guests covers alternative speeches and ideas in depth, with a two hour show each week. You can get it at radio4all.net, or at unwelcomeguests.net.

As we play out this week, you will hear just the start of a full program #726 on the work of Ernest Becker. His book "The Denial of Death" won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1974, just before Ernest died. Only the Western culture struggles so hard to deny the reality of death, and I think that is directly connect to our parallel denial of abrupt climate change.

Good bye from me, Alex Smith for this week.

Five Stories Seldom Told

SUMMARY: Science fiction author Robert Marston Fanney selects 5 stories of science truth from his Robert Scribbler's Blog. Excerpts from oil guru Nate Hagens.

What is really going on? What are the big stories the media leaves out, while they fill the news with quirky headlines and fluff? All over the world, from pole to pole, the Earth and her species are going through big changes. The atmosphere is trapping heat into the oceans, air, and land.

This week I'm going to cover five of those big stories, with the help of one of the world's best risk watchers. He's author Robert Marston Fanney, and his launching pad is called Robert Scribbler's Blog.

At the end, we'll squeeze in a few words about the new oil poverty creeping into our lives, with a recent talk by former financial advisor and Oil Drum editor Nate Hagens.

I'm Alex Smith, and this is Radio Ecoshock.

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ROBERT SCRIBBLER ON EMERGING THREATS

We know humans and all species are about to live through a huge change not seen on this planet for over a million years. We have no memory of this planetary shift. No one has experienced it. The first stages are already happening.

As a science fiction author of Luthiel's Song and other works, Robert Marston Fanney has the imagination and ability to communicate. As a former specialist on emerging threats for the prestigious military publisher Jane's Information Group, he's learned how to research and pry into things. All of that, plus a special something else that is hard to define, leads to one of the most stimulating climate change blogs on the Net. It's called Robert Scribbler's Blog.

Robert Marston Fanney

Here's the catalog of recent blog posts we cover, or uncover:



* world-changing ocean currents

* cracks in the ice castle of Antarctica

* drought and fires in South America

* methane and blown craters in the Arctic

* the coming heat

HIDDEN CHANGES IN OCEAN CURRENTS

In an interview on KPFA radio Robert Fanney said North Atlantic current news should be a major story in the mainstream media, every night. It's not. If we went down the street asking about it, we won't find much comprehension. What makes a major driver of our weather, and civilization as we know it, so boring, so off the radar?

That KPFA radio interview with host Caroline Casey can be found here.

Here is Robert's blog on why we should worry about big climate-driven changes in ocean currents.

ANTARCTIC MELTING

I interview scientists about Antarctica, but they are often very, very cautious. In a way, science can only study the past, and barely captures the present. The future seems beyond it. What do these developments in Antarctica really mean?

I've just read a couple of papers about sea level rise expected from the melting of Antarctic ice. Some scientists suggest we might see about 1 meter of global sea level rise from Antarctica by the end of this century.

James Lovelock famously said humans might end up as a few breeding pairs huddled around a tropical Arctic ocean. It seems inevitable to me, that if we survive, humans a thousand years from now may be settled on Antarctica, as that continent is revealed by global warming.

Oh boy! - a whole new continent to plunder!

Check out Robert's most recent blog on Antarctica. And here is my feature interview on Antarctica with scientist Roland Warner from a few weeks ago on Radio Ecoshock.

SOUTH AMERICA - DROUGHTS AND A MAJOR CITY OUT OF WATER

Robert Maston Fanney, you've been one of the few bloggers who really pays attention to South America. I wonder if some of the climate disruption going on in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil may be related to changes in relatively nearby Antarctica. We know that changes in the Arctic have affected the Jet Stream, and weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

I haven't seen much science saying Antarctica is changing things in the Southern Hemisphere. That's because there is less land in the Southern Hemisphere and more oceans. In fact, the Jet Stream there has more or less intensified and moved closer to Antarctica. Scientists say that's one of the reason less rain is coming to Australia.

Let's get to what we do know for sure. Last Fall Robert raised the alarm about drinking water in one of South America's biggest cities, Sao Paulo. How many people live there, and what is happening now? I can imagine the non-stop media attention if water in New York was cut off for hours or days. Yet we hardly hear about Sao Paulo. Why?

We can definitely tie the drought in Brazil to deforestation or other changes in the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon was the constant rainmaker for Souther America, and now it's smaller and not as potent. This even affects cloud formation and rain in North Africa.

There's also been dry times, and an extended fire season in Chile. Robert just reported on that in Robert Scribbler's blog.

THE ARCTIC

Let's head to the other end of the Earth, the Arctic. There is a school of people who think methane eruptions from the Arctic sea bed could wipe out the human species in this century. Are you part of that crowd?

Right now, it is carbon emissions, coming from cities where we live, that is endangering the future of civilization and helping the on-going mass extinction of species. We'd like to put it far away, in the Arctic, but it's us, here in the "civilized" sub-tropics.

There are some strange signs in the far north. Robert tells us about dozens of craters that have appeared in Russia. They are likely methane explosions.

(The Yamal Crater, as seen above, would be miniscule compared to a Yakutia Crater reported by Russian Scientists yesterday. Image source: The Siberian Times via Vasily Bogoyavlensky.)

We talked earlier about the power of ocean currents. What is happening with warm waters entering the Arctic Ocean around Alaska, via the Barents Sea?

IS A FASTER WARMING COMING?

Let's talk about something that worries me. I keep hearing new science that suggests we may be entering a new warming phase. Things have been delayed, and now the heat is coming, this decade or the next. Here is Robert's blog on the prospect of heating: "Bad Climate Outcomes".

Let's say we get a warming event, in a single year, or over three years. What do you imagine that would look like?

Again, ocean currents may be a factor. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cycle of warmer or cooler surface waters in the Eastern Pacific - could that play into a heating event. It may have artificially cooled us (or minimized the warming we are due for) these past few years. When that changes to El Nino, we may be a burst of heat, as the planet did in 1998. But with added global warming gases, each heating event could be hotter than the last. Always setting records.

In a way, I think some climate hawks would like to see a really visible heat wave. At least that might galvanize the world and it's leaders into action. Could it be a good thing in a way?

On the side of pessimism, we may just get a slow, slow ramping up of warming, where we don't get enough impulse to react. It's the boiling frog effect. (That's not true by the way. Frogs will jump out of boiling water, even if we don't as a civilization.)

Robert Scribbler's blog has turned into a monster. It's become really popular with those in the know, kind of a thought-leader thing. I also appreciate the community of informed commenters that have built up around it.

From Washington Grove Maryland, we've been talking with science fiction author, emerging threats specialist, and climate blogger extraordinaire, Robert Marston Fanney. In literature, he's best known for the science fiction seires called Luthiel's Song. Find out more about Luthiels's song on Facebook. His previous Radio Ecoshock interview titled "I Have A Confession to Make" continues to be downloaded by people all over the world.

Check out Robert's blog for new postings on the rampant fires in Siberia (way to early in the season for that!)(he calls it "Siberia's Road to Permaburn Hell") and his update on the terrible drought in California.

NATE HAGENS ON OIL & ECONOMY

In the little time we have left, I'm going to give you a taster of a simple but important talk by former Oil Drum editor, financial advisor and academic Nate Hagens. This is from my recording at the launch of the World Watch Institute State of the World 2015 Report, on April 13, 2015 in Washington D.C.

This is where Nate Hagens explains -through the lens of energy - why real growth ended in the 1970's for most people in Western countries. Since then, as the cost of getting energy goes up, more poverty is created. At this point, about 40% of Americans are pretty well broke, and 52% don't have enough savings to survive 3 months out of work. GDP may go up, but real wealth is declining, - a fact that is hidden by ever increasing debt.

I invite you to listen to Nate Hagens' full 25 minute talk at the World Watch Institute. You can download it as a free mp3 here.

Meanwhile, we'll zip forward to Nate's quick summary of his presentation.

Get all the details, with some video, and the full World Watch report, at www.worldwatch.org.

CAN YOU HELP THIS RADIO PROGRAM?

Thank you so much for listening to Radio Ecoshock.

If you can afford it, I can use more help from listeners to cover the costs or producing and distributing this show. I'm shy about fund-raising, but the Ecoshock account is getting low, just as we approach the summer season. The bills will keep coming in.

I have a small crew of folks who donate $10 a month - and I'm really grateful for that steady support. You can do that easily and automatically from this page.

If you prefer a one-time donation, that's great too.

I know I should do a fancy fund-raising drive, but so far just making the program has taken up most of my time. Let's see if you can help this week, to keep Radio Ecoshock going.

Meanwhile, thank you everyone for giving me the opportunity to talks with amazing minds, and stay in the loop of people who are trying to change the world for the better.

Alex

Radio Ecoshock

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Melting Antarctica Will Shake the World

SUMMARY: New science on melting Antarctica. From Tasmania, polar expert Dr. Roland C. Warner. Then the return of Marjory Wildcraft, with more tips on growing your own groceries. Radio Ecoshock 150415

This week on Radio Ecoshock, we're going to the end of the Earth. It's a feature length interview about new science that shows Antarctica is melting. I guarantee you will read headlines, and see amazing video news, from the science you'll hear this week on Radio Ecoshock. For one thing, sea levels will rise around the planet, for centuries, reshaping the coastlines and civilization.

Then we'll finish up with the return of Marjory Wildcraft, with more tips on growing your own groceries. It's all food for thought and action.

I'm Alex Smith. The journey begins.

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DISCOVERIES ON ANTARCTICA: A SCIENCE UPDATE WITH DR. ROLAND WARNER

There's a lot of action in Antarctica - and that can bring changes all over the world. Here to discuss recent science is Dr. Roland C. Warner. He is a researcher with the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania. Tasmania is the closest Australian state to Antarctica.

In a shocking bit of news, Antarctica just experienced the two hottest days ever recorded there, namely 63.5°F or 17.5 C at the Argentinian Esperanza Base on Antarctic Peninsula. I've heard that was warmer than the temperature in Britain on the same day in late March.

Dr. Warner says it's not that surprising, because there is no doubt Antarctica is warming over-all, along with the rest of the planet. This one-day event doesn't mean much. A previous record was set in 1961. It takes a few thousand days to be "climate change."

According to the British Antarctic Survey on Warming in the Antarctic Peninsula over the past 50 years: that polar continent warmed by 5 degrees Fahrenheit ( 2.8 degrees Celsius), since 1950. In the interview Warner may have said 5 degrees C. but he meant 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Even 5 degrees F. makes this arm of Antarctica pointing toward South America one of the fastest warming parts of the whole planet.

That shows up in giant ice shelves cracking off West Antarctica, like the Larsen B. ice shelf that disintegrated in February 2002. The whole of West Antarctica is losing mass, as shown by the NASA Grace satellites that can measure mass from space. That means it's melting, and eventually several meters of sea level rise will pour out of that part of the continent.

3 KIND OF ICE, ONE KIND OF SEA LEVEL RISE

But hold on, we have to distinguish between three types of ice around the poles. They are:

* sea ice (the surface of the ocean freezes)

* ice shelves (permanently frozen water, over the sea, but anchored to the land)

* glaciers (ice based on land)

As Dr. Warner explains, we know since the famous bath-tub experiment by the ancient Greek scientist Archimedes, water levels will not rise when ice in water melts. That is why your drink does not overflow when the ice cubes in it melt: the same mass of water was already displaced by the ice.

So disappearing sea ice in the Arctic, or collapsing ice shelves in the Antarctic, do not directly add to sea level rise. However, Roland tells us, the ice shelves can retard the flow of glaciers into the sea, and speed up glacier melt when they disappear. So ice shelf collapse can indirectly add to sea level rise. There's lots of science on this.

Secondly, we've been talking about West Antarctica. The biggest portion of the Antarctic continent is "East Antarctica". (There's no point in talking about North or South Antarctica, since everywhere is more or less "North" there.) As recently as five years ago, I can remember reading that East Antarctica would not be a major factor in sea level rise in this century. Not much was happening there, it was said, and in fact some areas were getting colder, not warmer.

That's all been stood on it's head with new science. Last May I did a program on NASA's revelations that East Antarctica was also losing ice mass. Find the blog entry, and that program here.

Our guest Roland Warner is a co-author of a new study that shows massive ice loss from another giant of East Antarctica, the Totten Glacier.

The title of that new science is "Ocean access to a cavity beneath Totten Glacier in East Antarctica". The Totten is the largest glacier in East Antarctica. At 540,000 square kilometers, it's size is simply mind-boggling. For North American listeners, the Totten drains an area more than twice the size of all the Great Lakes put together. Aussies would say it's more than twice the size of the Australian State of Victoria.

Seventy billion tons of ice flows out of the Totten Glacier, into the ocean, every year. That's about the flow rate of Niagara Falls, and it is expected to increase. Why? Because, and this is the crux of the new paper, scientists have discovered deep channels where warmer water can flow right under the glacier. "Warmer" water isn't terribly warm, but it contains enough extra energy to melt the glacier from below.

GROUNDING LINES AND "UNSTOPPABLE" ICE LOSS

That takes us to another key concept going the rounds with experts. It's the "grounding line". My understanding is that's the point where the glacier reaches the sea and floats on top of it. But also: the geography below the glacier will determine what, if anything, will retard the flow of all that ice into the sea. The problem, according to NASA scientists, in West Antarctica, they haven't found any under-glacier mountain or ridge to stop glaciers there from pouring into the sea. That means that really big sea level rise is coming, and again according to NASA, the progress of West Antarctic ice into the sea is now "unstoppable".

A large Antarctic contribution to sea level rise will happen even if we cut all carbon emissions tomorrow. We have crossed that tipping point. That is why Antarctica will shake the world.

Please listen to this interview to get the real science, from a real scientist (which I'm not).

TWO STRANGE TWISTS TO THE ANTARCTIC STORY

We also talked about two strange twists to this story. I encountered the first from comments made by scientist Laurie Padman, a co-author of another paper titled "Volume loss from Antarctic ice shelves is accelerating." Here's the twist: as more glaciers lose mass in Antarctica (adding to global sea level rise) the sea levels around Antarctica, and Greenland, may actually go DOWN.

Why? Because water is attracted to mass, to heavy things, by gravity. If these polar continents lose a mile or more of ice from their land surface, there will be less mass, and so some of the water now attracted to those polar land masses will dissipate, and go elsewhere.

The kicker is that scientists think the extra (from rising seas AND from loss of polar mass) will show up in places like New England. New England sea levels may go up as much as 25% more than other place in the world. Ditto Japan.

The second twist is that Antarctica may actually see snow pile up higher, especially in East Antarctica, due to climate change. A generally warmer world holds more moisture in the atmosphere. That has to come down, and where it's cold, if falls as snow.

The projected increased snow in Antarctica is still rather an unknown. In our interview, Roland Warner said it would take another year of observations to "make it clear whether the acceleration in loss from Antarctic grounded ice sheet was a trend – disentangling the effect of variability in snowfall." In a follow-up email, he meant to say "several more years" and perhaps even another decade of observations. His comments are based on the paper “Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability”, B. Wouters, J. L. Bamber, M. R. van den Broeke, J. T. M. Lenaerts and I. Sasgen, Nature Geoscience 6, 613–616 (2013) doi:10.1038/ngeo1874 Find the abstract and illustrations for that paper here.

MUCH OF ANTARCTICA IS BELOW SEA LEVEL!

We talk about the real geography of Antarctica. Warner says if all the ice were gone, we could sail right through part of Antarctica, going from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean without going around Cape Horn at the tip of South America.

As Roland told me in email: "the fact that the region behind the floating part of the Totten has a large region with bedrock below sea-level is important for the potential sea level rise. This was reported in Nature in 2011: Young, D. A., et al. (2011), A dynamic early East Antarctic Ice Sheet suggested by ice covered fjord landscapes, Nature, 474(7349), 72–75, doi:10.1038/nature10114. Find the abstract for that paper here, or download a .pdf of that paper here.

It's not easy trying to map our this continent, below a mile or more of ice! Scientists are still working on it, and some parts of Antarctica are still unknown, the last frontier some would say.

We also talk about the lack of scientific consensus on how much sea level will rise by the year 2100. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been very, very conservative, suggesting one meter by the end of this century. Others say we will get one meter of sea level rise from Antarctica alone. Some scientists suggest several meters of sea level rise (more than 10 feet) is possible. We don't know yet.

Hanging in the balance are many of the world's largest cities, which would be partially submerged. Several countries in the South Pacific are almost guaranteed to disappear. Deltas supporting millions, as in Bangladesh for example, will fill with salt water, ending agriculture there. This may be the biggest question of climate change.

MAKING THIS UPDATE

I had a little difficulty finding a scientist with wide interests in Antarctica willing to give us this update. Roland Warner was brave to take it on, with an eye to keeping us in the research loop - because this is really important news for all of us, even though it takes place far away. The coasts of the world will be re-arranged, no matter where our cities are, because of melting in Antarctica.

Roland is a research scientist for the government-funded Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre. That's located in Tasmania. I thought the island of Tasmania was the part of Australia closest to Antarctica, but Warner tells me Australia claims islands that are closer still. In fact, Australia has laid claim to 42% of Antarctica. Many countries claim parts of the Continent, but all those are currently on hold, under the Antarctic Treaty established in the 1950's.

Warner has flown many times in an old World-War Two vintage DC3 airplane over Antarctica, as they make painstaking maps and measurements. The propeller driven planes can fly at the slow speeds needed to operate the instruments. It's many hours out and back, with no civilization below. Warner was also aboard the Australian ice breaker Aurora Australis when it made the closest approach ever to the Totten Glacier front, where it drops giant chunks of ice into the sea.

He's been part of a research venture called ICECAP - Investigating Cryospheric Evolution through Collaborative Aerogeophysical Profiling. Apparently ICECAP can also stand for Investigating Cryospheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate.

Find more about that here and here (University of Texas site)

Any way you take it, events on Antarctica will re-shape our world. We were lucky to get extended time from Dr. Warner. I also appreciate his help in educating me in preparation for this interview. Any errors found in this blog are my own, and not those by Roland Warner.

Listen to/download this 45 minute Antarctic science update with Roland C Warner in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

MORE ON GROWING YOUR OWN GROCERIES

Last week we featured Marjory Wildcraft, author of the wildly successful DVD series called "Grow Your Own Groceries". She organized a super-summit of small-scale growers, home gardeners and pepper gardeners - all free last week. It was the "Home Grown Food Summit" with over 30 presenters. Over 100,000 people tuned in for that!

That shows the amazing growth of people who want to grow their own food for a variety of reasons including:

* knowing factory foods are bad for your health (pesticides, toxics, fats, sugars)

* knowing factory farming is bad for the environment (global warming, soil loss, abuse of animals, GMOs)

* knowing the supermarket food system is fragile, and may fail without much warning

* experiencing the high cost of food, and looking for cheaper alternatives

That's just the short list. Did I mention crops failing due to climate change and extreme weather?

So I asked Marjory to come back, with more tips we can all use to grow food. In this interview, we assume you know why to do it. Now we get down to how to do it.

We had Sylvia Bernstein, one of the original writers about aquaponics, on our June 2013 Radio Ecoshock Show. Find the blog for that interview here. You can download or listen to that interview with Sylvia here. She's fabulous. But when I watched some serious You tube videos about it, aquaponics seems pretty tricky and demanding. It can be tricky keeping fish alive.

There's no doubt that aquaponics can provide some super veggies, really lush crops. But I worry it will require too much energy to keep the fish warm enough in the winters in northern states or Canada. Yet the people who have a mind to manage an aquaponics system have a lot of top quality food to show for it. It's up to you.

We all know gardening can help seniors maintain their mental and physical health much longer. But eventually we may not be able to handle the heavy work. We talk a bit about how can we set up a garden to keep going with very little effort. Thinks like raised beds can help those who have trouble bending over, for example. In fact busy working people need the same thing. We can't cover it all in a short interview. Check out Marjory's DVD course for her tips to save time and effort.

You know it's strange. You start following your heart into something, as Marjory did with her transition from a financial planner to personal food growing, (which I could also call personal liberty.) Then she teaches, communicates, and suddenly, Marjory Wildcraft has become a one-woman movement on her own. Of course, as we discuss, she's connected to a world-wide collection of home-growers, all sharing tips, all educating one another.

Listen to this second Radio Ecoshock interview with Marjory Wildcraft in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

If you missed last week's longer talk with Marjory, about the Home Grown food summit and her work, find that here in CD quality or Lo-Fi.

Check out last week's blog for a list of my favorite Majory Wildcraft You tube videos. You can learn a lot!

I'm prepping my own garden right now, with two new raised beds, a better compost bin, nets for the rasberries, and 8 inches of mulch all around.

Find all our past programs as mp3 downloads at our web site ecoshock.org Listen on the soundcloud page, at soundcloud.com/radioecoshock. If you can afford it, please help support me making this program. That's my life, dedicated to communicating alternative truths that can help us be ready for the future. Get the details on many different ways to contribute to Radio Ecoshock here. Any amount is appreciated.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and I hope we'll get together again next week, as we talk with the creator of the popular and inspiring climate work called Robert Scribbler's blog.

THE CRUNCH - Are You Ready?

From US Dept of Energy lab, Dr. Steven J. Smith says we will get hotter faster. Paul Goddard on why sea level went up over 2 inches in New England in 1 year. Carolyn Baker: preparing our minds and hearts for the coming troubles.

The Radio Ecoshock train is all booked up, ready to leave the station. We have two science reports: how we know the world will get hotter faster, and why sea levels along Eastern North America went up a couple of inches in single year. But first, I worry how we will cope with the coming bottleneck, when the economy crashes, along with climate disruption. Are you ready inside?

Then let's turn to the scientists. First, why temperatures will go up almost 2 degrees in North America and Europe in the next 40 years. After that, we'll investigate a case extraordinary sea level rise.

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

Or listen right now on Soundcloud!



CAROLYN BAKER: Love In the Age of Ecological Apocalypse

Our next guest, Carolyn Baker returns to Radio Ecoshock. Carolyn is the author of many books, including "Collapsing Consciously", "Sacred Demise" and now a brand new book: "Love In the Age of Ecological Apocalypse: the Relationships We Need to Thrive". She has been a former psychotherapist, and currently offers life coaching.

Carolyn and I share news stories, although I get more than I give, being a subscriber to her amazing daily news service. We're kind of online friends, but we don't agree about everything. For example, I want my listeners to know that I don't agree that humans will go extinct this century.

But here's the thing. I think humans are in for some terrible shocks in the future. We are badly prepared, mentally and emotionally, to handle what is coming. Carolyn has some really useful inside tech to help us deal. We're going to need it.

We both agree that humans are approaching an awful bottleneck due to multiple causes. I would include the impacts of climate change, the economy, possibly a new plague, energy and food supply problems.

On Carolyn's web site, looking through the videos page, I was surprised, and not surprised, to find her interview with preparedness guru Chris Martenson. Chris probably has a lot of male listeners, some of them preppers with extra gold, food, and guns in the basement. Maybe they need Carolyn most, to realize relationships and community may be the survival tools we need most.

It's my theory that millions of Western people have become disengaged from fundamental human feelings. They experience emotions through characters on TV or movies. That's when they laugh or cry on cue, along with the sound-track. Soon, it's time to get real, and experience our own emotions.

Let's say we have the real economic crash we deserve. Money becomes almost worthless, and jobs disappear. Even if it's just a major depression, millions of people may find their emotions are left back in a child-like state. They didn't get or take the opportunity to feel real grief from real life.

REACTIONS TO SOCIAL SHOCK EVENTS

I'm going somewhere with this. It seems obvious that an event or period where millions of people die is coming, possibly this decade, almost certainly during the next. I don't know if it will be famine, but there are just too many reasons why our population is unsustainable. What happens to the survivors, especially if they witness it all on TV?

Just think of the lasting emotional scar left by about 5 million human-caused deaths in the Holocaust during World War Two. Now let's picture millions of people dying, due to our wasteful lifestyles burning carbon, over-using pesticides and antibiotics, or filling the ocean with plastic. How would we handle it?

I think that post-traumatic stress disorder could become a result, but on a mass scale, almost viral. If we take those PTSD symptoms and draw them out on a big social scale, what does that look like?

The other possible reaction is seen in the medical diagnosis of "shock". The person becomes numb, may even fall asleep as the bombs fall, as happened in World War I. That is one of several reasons I called this program "Ecoshock". I think millions of people will go into a state of shock as the environment unravels from the stresses we have created. Can you picture that?

A third possibility arises, and that is the direction you take. We could learn to grieve and survive. How can grief help us get through things? The key question is: how do we stop grieving, and what follows next? Carolyn addresses all that in her book, and in our interview.

Carolyn has been counselling people, especially those newly aware of the coming challenges for years. A lot of that gets into this new book. A challenge we've talked about before, but which keeps coming up, is the situation where one person in a relationship sees the fragility of our system and wants "out" or at least want to prepare a fall-back position. The spouse, and it could be a man or a woman, doesn't see it, and wants to keep playing the role of debt and consumption. We talk briefly about handling that, but the in-depth material is in the book.

Is it harder to find friends and lover now, as the media and the economy encourages us to sit in our silos of the office and then the couch and TV?

Carolyn lost a friend, and in the process learned more about the hospice experience. She thinks with species disappearing daily, and beloved landscapes and natural experiences lost, we may all be in hospice. Does that mean we just sit around crying? Not at all says Carolyn. Some people in hospice find a new release, and learn to value every minute of every day. We can all learn from that. And yes, joy has an important place even in difficult times.

I'm always interested in how aware people use the media to get their message out. Carolyn writes books, pumps out a daily news service of headlines we all need to hear about, and she took over "The Lifeboat Hour" radio show after the passing of Michael C. Ruppert. The Lifeboat Hour had it's own share of collapsing, after the New York studio of the Progressive Radio Network (PRN) was flooded and badly damaged. PRN had to go to pre-recorded programs only, instead of popular call-in programs like The Lifeboat Hour.

Carolyn tried Global Collapse Radio out of the UK, but that folded when the founding partners split up recently. Now PRN is back with renovated studios, and The Lifeboat Hour is back with Carolyn Baker at a new time, Fridays at 2 pm. You can listen live at PRN, or download past shows here at podbean.com.

By the way, you can listen to Radio Ecoshock online on PRN every Saturday morning at 10:30 am Eastern Time. Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Carolyn Baker in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Check out all things Carolyn Baker at her web site Speaking Truth to Power.

STEVE J. SMITH - EARTH GETTING HOTTER, FASTER

Scientists have predicted how hot Earth can become, depending on our greenhouse gas emissions. But they seldom say how quickly that happens, or how it will develop in the region where you live. As biologists can tell you, when it comes to survival of the species, the rate of warming may be as important as the final temperature.

What's true for the animals and plants is just as true for humans and our ability to adapt our civilization. Speed matters. Biologists have been saying for decades the rate of change is key. Plants, animals and insects can only adapt so far, and in the living network, they have to move together, or species and systems begin to fail.

That's why I welcome a new paper titled "Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change." The lead author is Dr. Steven J. Smith, a past lead author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and currently a scientist with the Joint Global Change Research Institute, of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Maryland. That's part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Steven Smith joins us on Radio Ecoshock to discuss this new research.

This paper finds the rate of heating, and therefore the actual impacts of climate change, is speeding up. The world is heating at a faster rate than at any time in at least the past 1,000 years, probably more.

Smith tells us: "What these climate models project is that we are on the cusp right now of a new state of climate where the models are projecting that the rate of change will soon start to speed up, and be outside of the range that we saw historically."

There has been too little research into this rate of change. Previous work looked at a rate on a century scale. This paper tries to quantify what is happening in shorter, more meaningful time scales, like 40 years, something "comparable to the life-time of much of human infrastructure.

Another factor to consider: new science has emerged predicting that heat sinks like oceans and forest may not function as well in the coming decades. If those land and ocean heat sinks are declining in their uptake of CO2, could that speed up the rate of temperature increase even more?

I am referring to the 2014 study, “The declining uptake rate of atmospheric CO2 by land and ocean sinks,” M.R. Raupach et al. Biogeosciences, 11, 3453–3475, 2014 Paper here.

REGIONS MATTER

In the paper "Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change" we find this, quote:

"Although global temperature trends are on of the most commonly used metrics of climate change, climate impacts will be driven by regional trends."

Why do regional results matter as much or more than global forecasts? Farmers, and all of us care more about what will happen in our area.

Let's talk about a few regions of the Northern Hemisphere. What did these scientists find about the rate of temperature increases in North America? "In North America, the models showed a change from about .7 to about 1.8 degrees Centigrade over a 40 year period.... that's about 1 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit over that period."

What about Europe? The scientists found predictions of increasing warming there are similar to North America.

The Arctic is already fantastically warmer the past few years. Will it get even warmer, even faster? Yes, according to this study. Temperatures in the Arctic will go up 1.1 to 3 degrees degree C.by the year 2050.

What are the predictions about warming rates in Australia or New Zealand?

"Australasia has lower rates of change in both data sets". Due to the large amount of ocean in the southern Hemisphere, warming will come slower in places like Australia.

THE ANTHROPOCENE MANIFESTS

A key point I found in this paper is the concept that as this century progresses, the human fingerprint on climate change becomes easier to see. Right now we have a hard time saying that a certain violent storm or heat wave is due to human emissions, rather than natural cycles or variations. All that should become clearer by 2040 or 2050, although the whole question is still an active topic in science.

Steven Smith says it will likely be easier to attribute heat waves to increased warming, than rainfall. Extreme rainfall events may have several complicated causes, so they will be harder to directly attribute to human caused global warming, he says.

But the scientists cannot predict how humans will react to this heating. As Smith points out, there are no laws of physics governing human behavior. So the paper cannot take into account things like a severe economic crash which slashes carbon emissions. However, their paper concentrated on the 90% most likely range, so extreme events might be found in the 10% tails on the prediction curve, which they don't cover. Let's call that a Black Swan event, which may or may not ever happen.

Download or listen to this key science interview with Steven J. Smith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

A STRANGE CASE OF RAPID SEA LEVEL RISE IN NEW ENGLAND

Sea level rise has been called the single greatest impact of climate change. But we are learning sea level can go up regionally for other reasons. Surprising new research shows the ocean rose along the coast of New England by almost 4 inches for a couple of years.

Here to explain why is Paul B. Goddard. He's working on his PHD in climatology and climate modeling at the University of Arizona. Most recently, Paul was the lead author of a paper in the journal Nature Communications titled: "An extreme event of sea-level rise along the Northeast coast of North America in 2009–2010."

I've been told by experts, including scientists on Radio Ecoshock, that the major cause of sea level rise in places like New York city was subsidence - that the land was still sinking along the coast after the glaciers departed. But this new research found the sudden higher sea levels was not due to land sinking, which is a very, very slow process.

That shows just how complicated assigning the causes of sea level rise can be. If it wasn't subsidence, what did cause New England seas to go up 128 millimeters, or about 5 inches, in some places? It all has to do with ocean currents in the North Atlantic. In particular, the Gulf Stream changed.

Regular listeners must be bored with my repetitive amazement that the sea is not level. It isn't. Anyway, in this case, the outer, Eastward side of the Gulf Stream was lower than it's Western edge, which helped pile up water on the New England coast.

I'm assuming this new work is closely related to another paper. That's the one in Ocean Science led by H.L. Bryden. The title is "Impact of a 30 % reduction in Atlantic meridional overturning during 2009–2010". Scientists call it AMOC for short. Our guest Paul Goddard gives us the clearest explanation of these ocean currents that's I've heard.

I was astounded to find in that Bryden paper that this North Atlantic ocean current system is, quote:

"accounting for 25 % of the maximum combined atmosphere–ocean heat transport necessary to balance the Earth’s radiation budget."

Twenty five percent is a huge number! What happens if this system slows down - as some scientists fear it might. That could happen if a whole lot of fresh water floods into the far north Atlantic, due to melting in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic. The big ocean conveyor belt depends on heavy salty water sinking, and more freshwater could throw that out. That's the theme in the overblown Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow". Scientists do worry about this, but on a much slower scale, perhaps over a century or two. One side effect would be much colder weather for the UK and Europe.

Another key reason I thought this paper was important is: what if ocean circulation brings another big hike in sea levels - at the same time as a big storm-surge event like Hurricane Sandy. Wouldn't Sandy flooding have been much worse if it happened in 2009 or 2010? Yes it would, Goddard tells us.

This is one reason why I think the impacts of sea level rise are routinely underestimated. Ten or twenty millimeters of sea level rise in the near-term doesn't sound like much. But we have to couple that with things like a high Spring tide, storm surge, and now periods of change in ocean circulation.

The whole subject of how the ocean works is coming into a kind of renaissance. We are coming to appreciate two things: 1. how much we really don't know about the ocean and 2. the ocean is probably the biggest single factor driving climate in the coming centuries.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Paul Goddard in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Here is a good article in Science Daily to follow up on this strange case of rapid sea level rise.

THANKS FOR STICKING WITH RADIO ECOSHOCK

Thanks for sticking with it. We all need to feed our brains until we know what to do, without a doubt to stop us.

Next week we're starting a bit of change, as Spring arrives in the Northern Hemisphere. We'll talk with energy guru Richard Heinberg about his new book "Afterburn". And then Marjory WildCraft tells us about a big online summit on growing your own groceries. I hope this plants a seed in your mind.

A big thanks to those who donated to Radio Ecoshock last week. You keep me going, and keep the shows coming. Get more details here.

Check out our web page at ecoshock.org, the show blog with all the links at ecoshock.info and our busy page on Soundcloud, where we went past 20,000 listeners in just our first year in the cloud.

Thanks for listening, and caring about your world.

Heat and the Rising Sea

Coming up in this Radio Ecoshock show: what you and your government are not being told about the threat of rising seas. Plus, how climate change was a driver of civil war in Syria - and Yemen. We finish up with a frank talk about thawing permafrost and why millions of Russians think global warming is a good idea. More of the talk usually left unsaid - right here on Radio Ecoshock.

We don't very often hear about what is happening in Russia, especially now with the latest freeze in relations. So I'm happy to bring you this next interview about how the Russian north is thawing, and what that means for their economy, and the people who live there. Will disappearing permafrost change the future for the whole world? You bet it will.

Guests: Dr. Robert Nicholls, Dr. Colin Kelly, Dr. Nikolay Shilomanov

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

Or listen on soundcloud right now!



DR. ROBERT NICHOLLS: WHAT GOVERNMENTS AREN'T BEING TOLD ABOUT RISING SEAS

Scientists on Radio Ecoshock have warned that sea level rise, not heat, may be the biggest and most costly threat of climate change. We know coastal cities around the world are endangered. But are governments getting the best advice from official bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

A new report from researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK says "no". Their commentary, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, says critical risks are not being communicated.

The lead author for the paper "Sea-level rise scenarios and coastal risk management" is Professor Jochen Hinkel. He was on Radio Ecoshock this past February. Here to explain the new work is co-author Robert James Nicholls. He's an award-winning Professor of Coastal Engineering at the University of Southhampton. I reached Dr. Nicholls in the Maldives, an endangered island nation in the Indian Ocean.

Dr. Robert Nicholls.

The commentary we talk about was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. It is titled "Sea-level rise scenarios and coastal risk management"

Right at the opening of Nicholl's published commentary, the authors say the IPCC, quote:

"aims to understand and reduce uncertainty, a viewpoint that is quite different from the one of coastal management, which aims to reduce risks. Unfortunately, this is not spelled out clearly both within and beyond the IPCC reports."

The difference is rather large. Essentially if you look at sea level risk as a large Bell curve, the IPCC scientists take the conservative view that the central assumptions are the most likely, so that's what they tell governments. That's where under 1 meter sea level rise by the year 2100 comes from.

But wait. There is a 33% chance, shown as a fat tail of probability extending away from the main curve, that sea level rise will be far more serious. The most "extreme sea level rise" is what coastal planners on the ground want to know. Once they know how bad it could get, they can decide what berms, levees, dams, or tidal control measures will be needed. Once you spend some billions of dollars on coastal defences, you don't want to find it breached within 50 years.

The paper authors also say the Intergovernmental Panel results are not 100% reliable, because they are based on models, and even those model results are hard to understand. It sounds like we really don't know.

There's another huge problem, and that is when we try to interpret these global mean sea level rises to local realities. I've seen science saying, quote:

"Sea levels across the Northeast coast of the United States rose nearly 3.9 inches between 2009 and 2010".

We'll talk to the author of that work, Paul Goddard, in an upcoming Radio Ecoshock show.

That big rise along New England is temporary. It is attributed not to land sinking, but to changes in ocean currents. So it's not a simple equation for sea level rise. So much depends on other local conditions.

The highest global mean sea level rise prediction corresponds to the worst case IPCC scenario, which they call "RCP8.5". That is the course we are currently on. What would such a world look like, when my 5 year-old grandchild is an older man?

I'm concerned that governments, and our listeners, picture a gradual sea level rise which takes a century to really matter. But the forerunners can arrive much sooner. I'm thinking of things like hurricanes, storm surges, and super-tides. If sea levels go up faster and further than the middle-ground IPCC estimates, what would we see around the world?

Should governments try to prepare for the conservative, let's say optimistic, assessment of sea level rise? Or should they prepare for the extremes, even though that may cost many more billions of dollars in the short-term?

Nicholls tells us the most advanced countries in preparing for high sea level rise are the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. London, he says, can be protected for hundreds of years. They are already making plans for 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100.

New York is very vulnerable, as Hurricane Sandy showed us. New York City is not spending a few billion dollars to build the three tidal surge control gates it needs for the 3 entrances to their harbor. But at least, Nicholls says, NYC is built on solid rock, so flood control can work.

As I heard in a recent speech by Jeremy Jackson, that is not true for Miami. The land under Miami is very porous. There is no way to stop incursion by the sea. Jackson says that city will have to be abandoned. In our interview, Nicholls says some island nations in the Pacific will also have to be abandoned, and they know it.

To hear a longer presentation by Dr. Robert Nicholls, try this one: "Adaptation to sea-level rise" at the Geological Society of London, 2012 Shell Lecture, on You tube here.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Robert Nicholls in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

DID CLIMATE CHANGE CONTRIBUTE TO THE CIVIL WAR IN SYRIA? DR. COLIN KELLEY

Scientists have predicted climate change could lead to instability within some nations, and war. Long-time listeners may recall my February 2010 show with clips from a speech by Gwynne Dyer, author of "Climate Wars". After interviewing top military people in many countries, Dyer concluded that wars driven at least in part by climate change are an inevitable part of our future history. Find those clips in this show.

In a report released in October 2014, the U.S. Pentagon said the same thing. See my links to that Pentagon paper below. Now we have the first peer-reviewed study saying climate wars are not just the future. One may already have happened, in Syria.

We have the lead author of a new paper with us, Dr. Colin Kelley. Colin is a post-doctoral fellow and visiting scholar with the Geography Climate Hazards Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

His paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy, or PNAS, is titled "Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought".

Dr. Colin Kelley.

SYRIA IMPLODES

To sum up, in 2006 a multi-year drought appeared in Syria and its neighboring countries. After three years of drought, more than million Syrian farmers left their land, and went to the city to try to survive.

Syrian cities were already overcrowded. The population of the country zoomed from about 5 million in 1950 to over 20 million today. We don't know exactly how many refugees from the Iraq war streamed into Syrian cities, but it's thought to be well over 1 million people.

The government of Syria made the situation worse by helping intensive agriculture in North East Syria, considered the "bread-basket" of the country. Before the drought, about one quarter of Syria's GDP was based on wheat. That disappeared with the drought. Was it a mistake to promote such a water-intensive crop as wheat?

Have there been droughts in Syria before? Of course. But Colin Kelly and his associates calculated that the odds of a multi-year drought more than doubled with climate change. They concluded the overcrowding and crashing economy could not have happened without global warming. The authors don't call climate change a "cause" of the Syrian civil war, but a "catalyst" helping it happen.

Therefore, this is likely our first case of a "climate war". And like everything else about climate change, it arrived decades before the experts expected it!

Part of this stage was set by the 2011 study from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They found "Human-caused climate change [is] a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts". The NOAA paper of 2011 said sea surface temperatures are the primary driver of drought in the Mediterranean.

I asked Colin Kelley if his research could apply to other countries, particularly those who felt instability or the "Arab spring" around 2010-2011. He said the climate factor was not likely associated with regime change in Libya or Egypt. But his team is now investigating the impact of climate on the problems in Yemen. Yemen is notorious for mass hunger, even starvation, and it gets very little rain lately.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Dr. Colin Kelley in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

You can read what Joe Romm at Climate Progess had to say about Syria and civil war here.

See also: Pentagon Report: U.S. Military Considers Climate Change a 'Threat Multiplier' That Could Exacerbate Terrorism by Zoe Schlanger of Newsweek 10/14/14.

The Dept of Defense press release is here.

The actual report "Department of Defense 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap" was publicly available but has since been pulled from defense.gov. But it's still available for online reading here.

THAWING PERMAFROST AND THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY: DR. NIKOLAY SHILOMANOV

We live on a strange planet. Few people realize that almost a quarter of the land in the Northern half of this world is frozen. Under a thin layer that thaws under the summer sun, the land there is always frozen. It's called permafrost, and it extends from Alaska, across Northern Canada, Scandinavia, and finds another giant kingdom in the Russian north, in Siberia.

New science confirms the world's permafrost has been slowly thawing. Now with climate change, that pace has quickened. Here to explain what that means for society and the economy of Russia, is Nikolay Shilomanov. Nikolay is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at George Washington University and an Arctic researcher.

DR. Nikolay Shilomanov

What is permafrost? Shilomanov says it is just frozen dirt. It has to stay frozen for two years running to be called permafrost.

In North America, the small population of the permafrost lands have become accustomed to it. They have adapted to a solid icy foundation. In fact, they depend on it.

It's different in Russia. Due to the Soviet experiments in populating and industrializing their Arctic, there are over 5 million Russians living on permafrost. These are not aboriginal settlements, but serious cities with modern conveniences.

All the infrastructure to support those cities, and for the large oil and gas industry, is built on permafrost. As it thaws (land thaws", only ice "melts") - there is a real challenge for the foundations of buildings, and long projects like pipelines. About 25% of the world's gas reserves are found in permafrost lands.

Previous research used living materials like pollen or tree rings to study the Arctic past. Now a group from the Alfred Wegener Institute managed to measure time and temperature in land ice by taking ice cores from spikes of ice going down into the Permafrost. This is important, because biological markers, like tree rings or pollen, can show the temperature in the summer. But not what is happening in the winter, as the ice samples can.

It turns out that there was a long period where the summers were cooler than today, but the winters were warmer. Until recently, we didn't know that.

Nikolay is quite frank in saying that millions of Russians want more global warming. They are tired of long, cold winters, and see real advantages (for them) in a longer growing season.

This interview is based on the paper in Nature Geoscience "Long-term winter warming trend in the Siberian Arctic during the mid-to- late Holocene" by H. Meyer, et al Find the abstract here.

Here is a good article about this new research into Permafrost, found in E&E News.

Also see this authoritative article from the Afred-Wegener-Institut in Germany. It's interesting to note that despite the "cold war" between the U.S. and Russia, German and Russian scientists are still cooperating on tracking the impacts of climate change.

THANKS FOR LISTENING!

As always, I appreciate the brave minds who are willing to follow the adventure of living in this new age, the Anthropocene. The science isn't always easy for me, or for you, but we struggle together to understand, and then to act.

My special thanks to all the people who contribute real money to this Radio Ecoshock project. You keep it alive!

Don't forget to check out our soundcloud page. We're are heading toward 20,000 listens there.

Alex Smith

host and producer of Radio Ecoshock, as broadcast on 87 non-profit radio stations, in the U.S., Canada, UK, and Australia, and around the world on the Internet. Now in our 8th year.

The Engines of Life Hit Stall Speed

SUMMARY: The world could warm 17 degrees hotter - scientist Thomas J. Goreau. Plus America's most dangerous nuclear reactor, Indian Point 25 miles from New York City. Lawyer/activist Susan Hito-Shapiro. Radio Ecoshock

“I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what –- I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.”

- U.S. President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address, 2015.

INTRODUCTION

You can't make this stuff up. The hub of world financial activity, Wall Street and all, is gambling every day that two old reactors just 25 miles away won't finally melt-down, Fukushima-style. Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission thinks Indian Point has the most at-risk-for-an-earthquake reactors in the country. Later in this program we'll talk with environmental lawyer, activist and local resident Susan Hito Shapiro about the real threat.

But first, I found another jaw-dropping, gasp-for-breath story in climate science. Is two degrees Centigrade of warming safe? What about 17 or 20 degrees hotter? That's right. The United Nations panel on climate change doesn't tell you the ultimate destination. When our current emissions at 400 parts per million finally stabilizes, London will be a tropical swamp with hippos and crocodiles - again.

I've been on the climate watch since 1990. How come nobody told us? And our source is not a blogger from nowhere-istan. He's a scientist with decades of experience and a who's who of scientific connections. The only good news is there is some good news. Dr. Goreau can also see a way to bring the world's climate back to the place we can recognize, and survive. It's all in a day's work at Radio Ecoshock.

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

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!



THOMAS GOREAU INTERVIEW: TOWARD A WORLD IMPOSSIBLY HOT

Are we heading toward a super-tropical planet with today's coastlines deep underwater? We're going to talk about what the United Nations doesn't tell you, and the best way to save what's left. Our guest is Dr. Thomas J. Goreau. He studied planetary physics and astronomy, before getting his doctorate in biogeochemistry at Harvard. Born in Jamaica, among many fields of expertise, Thomas Goreau is an expert in coral reef science. He is President of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.

But I've asked Dr. Goreau to join us because of a startling speech he made last November at Tufts University. The conference was called "Biodiversity for a Livable Climate".

WATCH THE TUFT SPEECH FOR YOURSELF, HERE.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Thomas J Goreau in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

Let's just go over a few main points from my interview with Thomas Goreau. You probably haven't heard that news before, and may not hear it again. I'm not a scientist. This is just what I've found in Google searches, which you can do for yourself.

The actual climate record says that the world will keep warming for thousands of years. At our current level of 400 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it may settle out between 17 degrees and 20 degrees C. warmer, at least 30 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit. The seas will be some 27 feet higher, at least. Back in the last great warming period, the Emian, most of the world's coral reefs died, sea levels were super high, and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were only 280 parts per million, much lower than today.

I found that hard to believe. So I went back into the charts myself. Has the Earth ever been that hot? We won't count the very early days of the planet, or the time when a collision split off the moon. NASA estimates temperatures in the atmosphere may have hit 3600 degrees Fahernheit. There was no life then.

According to Wiki, the hottest point in the last 500 million years was around 15 degrees C warmer than the 1960 to 1990 average global mean temperature.

In days of living things, Earth was at least 5-8 degrees C, 13 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit than today, reaching 73 degrees global mean temperature, versus our 60 degree Fahhrenheit global average today. That was the the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or (PETM) around 55 million years ago. There was no ice on Earth, but palm trees and crocodiles around the Arctic sea. Many species went extinct.

There are two striking points about the United Nations approach to climate change, coming out of this interview with Thomas Goreau. First, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been blinkered to look at just the next 100 years at the most. We've all become conditioned to that, without asking what happens in the NEXT 100 years, or 500 years.

Sure, we'll all be dead by then. But think back. If people in Medieval Europe developed this fossil-fuelled civilization, right about now we'd all be struggling to avoid extinction, living on mountain-tops or in the Arctic. Most of our animal and plant friends, including our food, would have been long gone. That's what we apparently agree to leave to our descendants.

In his Tufts lecture, at 6 minute 30 seconds into the video, Goreau says the actual long-term climate change operates on a sensitivity about 10 times what IPCC projects, sea level 100 times, and CO2 much more again.

The second big point about the U.N. climate framework is they don't count carbon soil at all. They don't measure it. Nobody rewards people who can put carbon back in the soil. Our whole effort is not agricultural, but industrial. Let's cut back carbon emissions, close the coal mines and the Tar Sands. Sure, but that won't stabilize Earth's climate at all. It just makes our future less worse, or stalls the big change one or two hundred years.

The UN watered down the language on sinks, and focused on fossil fuels, wanted credits for photosynthesis, but not respiration. The whole carbon accounting system makes no sense. You can get credits for planting trees, even if they burn, or die. But there's no credits for putting carbon in the ground. Soils need to be counted as carbon sinks, and use that as the ultimate measurement. Governments are running away from reality.

IS 350.ORG AIMING TOO LOW?

I know plenty of so-called realists who blast Bill McKibben's 350.org for being so whimsical demanding we go backwards in carbon emission time. It's obvious carbon in the atmosphere is going up, up, up. Except... that does mean we are doomed, and our world with it. Thomas Goreau is part of a growing chorus of scientists and activists who expose the awful truth: even 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere is too high. We need to wind the carbon clock way back, to about 260 ppm.

Here is another video of Goreau on a panel, worth watching if you want to dive deeper.

Goreau says: Biochar treated at high temps doesn't decompose. There are forest fire ashes 350 million years old, still recognizable, didn't decompose.

We spend half the Radio Ecoshock interview talking not about climate catastrophe, but about the real solution that is out there in soil carbon. We do know how to do it! We could avoid climate catastrophe!

MORE SOIL CARBON RESOURCES

Find a lot more sources on soil carbon here at ecowatch.com.

Also listen to my interview with soil carbon champion Alan Savory. Here is the blog for that 2011 show on the soil carbon solution.

And listen to my 2014 interview with Courteny White on putting carbon back in the soil, to save the earth. Download/listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Courtney White in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Or read about in this Radio Ecoshock blog entry.

Goreau's latest book book is more of a scientific textbook (at $100-something dollars). It's "Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase" by Thomas J. Goreau, Ronal W. Larson, and Joanna Campe, published in December 2014.

ALBERT BATES AND THE BIOCHAR MOVEMENT

I just had an interesting email conversation with Albert Bates, the counter-culture thinker from The Farm. He's really into dirt, and getting carbon back into it. Albert is off teaching the ways of permaculture and carbon farming, this time in Belize. Some of the most ardent students, and maybe our best hope, come from South America, where the whole idea of biochar originated some 5,000 years ago. Some big names are getting interested in the soil carbon solution. Expect to hear more about it. If you don't, our great grand-kids may be cooked.

Perhaps coincidentally, Albert Bates' blog "Peaksurfer" has this in-depth article on the folly of nuclear power.

My second interview for this program looks at another way the world financial system can melt down, just like Fukushima.

THE REACTOR THAT COULD CAUSE US TO ABANDON NEW YORK CITY FOREVER

Today, and every day, tens of millions of Americans in and around New York City risk a Fukushima-style melt down of two nearby reactors. The Indian Point Energy Center is just 25 miles north of New York City. These old reactors have leaks, fires, and shutdowns galore. The reactors are within a mile of a known earthquake fault. For all this and much more, Indian Point could be America's most dangerous nuclear plant.

The triple melt-down of the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan taught us that a nuclear accident is not a local issue. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, or anywhere near an ocean, this is your problem. This is your story.

Two Indian Point Nuclear Reactors On the Hudson River, Outside of New York City

Radio Ecoshock investigates with long-time nuclear activist and New York State environmental lawyer Susan Hito-Shapiro.

Download or listen to this interview with Susan Hito-Shapiro in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

There are so many dangerous problems there, I hardly know where to begin. Why don't we start with mega-risk: the possibility of an earthquake. This was just in the news, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission turned down an attempt by the reactor operator to avoid doing proper quake risk studies.

The NRC is amazingly slow to protect the public. Entergy has until 2017 to come up with a plan to protect against a quake - and then more years to implement whatever hardening is needed. We just have to hope it doesn't blow before then!

MORE OVERLOADED SPENT FUEL POOLS - DANGEROUSLY EXPOSED

The other huge risk, revealed by the Fukushima melt-down in Japan, is the stupendous amount of highly radioactive spent fuel stored on site. What is the situation at Indian Point?

The Boraflex liners of storage ponds are aging, the battery backup is questionable, the pools are fantastically overcrowded beyond their design, some materials have been moved to dry cask, but not enough, there is no real protection for the ponds to contain nuclear radiation, and absolutely nothing to stop a jet-liner from crashing into these waste pool buildings, which have the strength of an average WalMart roof.

Other than that there's nothing to worry about, except of course the high earth quake risk and good old human error. While looking into all this, I came across news that a former supervisor at the Indian Point nuclear plant, Daniel Wilson, has been charged with lying to federal regulators about having reliable quality fuel for the emergency power generators.

AN EASY TERRORIST TARGET

There are 2800 tons of poorly protected, poorly guarded high level radioactive waste just sitting at Indian Point, on the edge of New York City. Remember, the 911 terrorists considered flying a plane into Indian Point, but decided to hit the World Trade Center instead. One of the 911 planes flew right over the nuclear reactors. There is nothing to stop that. Shapiro says today you can paddle a kayak right up to the reactor.

But Shapiro says the real every day risk is not terrorism - it's those old corroded reactors, unsafe at any speed. In a sense, until we shut these ageing reactors down, WE are the terrorists.

FIRE CODES? WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING FIRE CODES!

Amazingly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted an exemption to Entergy at Indian Point when it comes to fire regulations. The Indian Point reactors don't begin to meet basic fire safety requirements.

Here's just one example that Susan explains. The equipment is supposed to have fire suppression material. They used a material called "Hemyc" that was meant to give hours of protection, but under real-world testing only lasts about 24 minutes. That's how long before a major fire and nuclear accident can happen.

Here is a .pdf report "Fire When Not Ready" on the whole fire protection mess in pretty well all American nuclear reactors. The NRC knows some materials were simply falsified in testing, while others don't work even for an hour.

EVACUATION IS A SICK JOKE

Let's talk about getting out of Rockland County, or maybe even New York City, if and when the Indian Point nuclear plant blows. It looks to me like the NRC is only requiring an evacuation plan for a ten mile radius around Indian Point. That's strange, considering the American government advised its citizens to pull back 50 miles during the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Even the Governor of New York State acknowledges that there is no workable way to evacuate ten or twenty million people. As Susan Shapiro tells us, New York City is actually surrounded by the remains of an ancient mountain range. There are geographical bottlenecks which make an evacuation a nightmare.

We talk about the high cancer rates around the Indian Point reactor. Thyroid cancers near the Indian Point reactors are way, way above the average for the United States. Go to radiation.org for all the details on that. Then there's the incessant fish kills as hot reactor water goes into the Hudson River.

The list of negative effects just goes on and on - and that's even before there is a big accident there. When Indian Point melts down - think about it! Fukushima was much further from Tokyo, but the Japanese government at one point considered abandoning Tokyo. Only a fortunate wind saved that city. The prevailing winds in New York blow straight from the Indian Point reactor site.

If there is a nuclear melt-down, 25 miles from Times Square, it could cause a world-wide financial melt-down. Wall Street would be evacuated, along with the core of American media production. We're talking about trillions of dollars worth of real estate as well, all poisoned for centuries.

I said at the start of our chat, that a blown reactor is everybody's problem. That's triple-true of New York City, the world's financial capital. You would think Wall Street might worry they could have to leave town permanently due to a nearby nuclear accident.

Here are some notes from Susan Hito-Shapiro, as a follow-up to our interview. The study she refers to about putting solar on NYC municipal buildings was some years ago.

Susan writes:

"More recently the City University of New York did a study - the link is here - that show NYC rooftops can generate up to 5,847 MW. Indian Point only produces 2200 MW and since 2014 NYC only purchases 550 MW from Indian Point."

Other key points Susan forwards:

"Earthquake Risk:

* NRC doesn't use the Richter Scale , instead they useg-force ground acceleration. Indian Point containment buildings and spent fuel pools are designed to withstand .15g

* The 5.8 Earthquake in Virginia in 2011 registered .26g -.28 g.

* The Epicenter of North Ana was 10 miles from the Reactor, Indian Point's reactors are one mile from the intersection to two intersecting faults.

Energy Use:

* The 2013 Consolidated Edison Annual Report says 350 MW are being contracted from Indian Point. An unspecified amount of additional energy goes into the Lower New York State Grid, through daily auction of NYISO. NYS has not required Entergy to provide recordson sales and profits.

* New York City must have internal capacity tosupply 80% of its own energy."

ACTIVIST GROUPS TO CONTACT FOR MORE INFORMATION ON SHUTTING DOWN INDIAN POINT

Hudson River Clearwater (founded by Pete Seeger) and their Indian Point Campaign

River Keepers and their close Indian Point campaign

Scenic Hudson

All these groups co-operate as part of the Indian Point Faith Energy Coalition

...and this activist blog "Shut Down Indian Point Now!"

Here is Susan Hito-Shapiro's Facebook page.

What I didn't know, is that Susan Hito-Shapiro is also a film-maker, who more recently started up a biodynamic farm with her husband, Santi Hitorangi, in New York State. It's called "Goshen Green Farm". This is one high-powered woman, who can go from growing green to making formal legal presentations at nuclear waste hearings. Thanks Susan for all you do!

END WRAP

You may have heard more bad news about ocean extinction. I'll be talking with lead author Douglas McCauley about that. Paul Beckwith is coming back. Maybe we'll argue about Arctic methane. And I've got more mind-boggling climate science for you, as Radio Ecoshock paces back and forth inside the carbon cage.

Until then, keep calm and carry on.

Get this program, and all our past shows, as free mp3 downloads from our web site at ecoshock.org. Or visit the Radio Ecoshock Soundcloud page to listen in.

I close out this program with a tune from my buddy, California musician Dana Pearson, also known as vastmandana on soundclick. It's his new creation "The Engines of Life".

I also run a clip from British rap poet Dave Allen performing his piece "Serotonin Fix". Find it on You tube here. Warning, Dave's piece contains some rude words, and some hard truth.