On Sunday, a group of about 100 scientists, politicians, and others hiked 2 hours up the desolate side of an extinct volcano northeast of Reykjavik, Iceland to commemorate the final demise of the Okjokull glacier, Iceland’s first glacier to be entirely lost due to climate change.
Children among the group of ice mourners placed a copper memorial plaque at the site of the former glacier. Engraved on the plaque in Icelandic and English is the following remembrance:
A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.
August 2019 415ppm CO2
Image credit: The New York Times/Jeremie Richard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
Credit: NASA/RESOURCEWATCH. Satellite imagery of the November, 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The deadliest and most destructive California wildfire in history, the Camp Fire burned an area of 240 square miles, destroyed 18,804 structures, decimated the town of Paradise (pop. 26,000) and neighboring communities and killed at least 85 people.
“The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”
–Rachel Carson (1907-1964), marine biologist and nature writer, author of Silent Spring, a book that documented, with scientific evidence and a composite of true accounts, environmental and human health harms of DDT and the potential catastrophic consequences of over-use of toxic and persistent chemicals. Controversial in its time, the bestselling book engendered fierce and personal attacks on Ms. Carson by chemical companies, and is now often credited with having raised awareness of environmental challenges resulting in the creation of Earth Day and the EPA. The above quote seems relevant still, as we have made great progress in improving our air and water quality but are acutely aware of the easily observable affects and potential irreversible consequences of unfettered dispersal of another persistent chemical, fossil carbon dioxide.
Ice sheets in Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica are melting right now. You might imagine that looks like a dripping faucet. You might imagine it looks like many dripping faucets. You would be wrong.
It looks like this:
That’s a moulin (from a French word meaning, “mill”), a vertical chute through which melt water on the top of a glacier falls through the glacier to its base, lubricating the glacier’s movement at the base and speeding its descent to the sea.
That moulin is on Gilkey Galcier in Alaska. Similar scenes are also occurring on the Greenland ice sheet:
The Greenland ice sheet is dumping about 300 gigatons of ice into the ocean each year, according to NASA, making it the current largest source of sea-level rise from melting ice.
The good news is, this process is expected to take a few hundred years, and we have time to escape much of that fate. The bad news is, it’s a slow-developing disaster. The ice sheets melt at a rate much slower than the rate at which we’re emitting the CO2 that causes their melting. Every single moment, we are committing ourselves to more future melting, and more sea level rise. The time for doubt and denial is over.
Last week, I posted scientific findings regarding increased “sunny day” tidal flooding in U.S. coastal cities and its linkage to global sea level rise due to melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica. I went on to argue that the frequent assertion by our president and others, that increased investment in the fossil fuel industry creates jobs and has other economic benefits, ignores the devastating and surely greater economic costs that will occur if we continue to ignore climate change. Among those costs is the massive quantity of high-priced U.S. coastal real estate that will ultimately be immersed in the ocean if we continue with “business as usual.”
As it turns out, though much of our government is in denial about the economic realities of climate change, that denial is vanishing in the Florida real estate market. Both social scientists and real estate business insiders can measure the effect of this growing realization on coastal real estate prices in South Florida, a test case for highly valued coastal properties that ring the nation:
Figure 2 from this social science working paper, referenced in the Bloomberg article, by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Pennsylvania State University. “Displays the proportion of exposed transactions in coastal counties within the continental United States. Exposure is measured as an indicator variable that takes a value of 1 if a property will be affected by 0-6 feet of sea level rise.”
“At some point, we won’t be able to sell.” -Ross Hancock, homeowner in Biscayne Bay, FL, who faces a potential $60,000 repair bill for Irma damages to his condo not covered by insurance, and who has been trying for 2 months to sell it without success
“systemic fraudulent nondisclosure [of flood risk by real estate agents] … is pretty much what we have now.” -Albert Slap, owner of Coastal Risk Consulting, a South Florida flood risk assessment company (The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in 2017 that would require agents to disclose flood risks, but the Senate has not taken it up.)
“They’re not going to live here while we spend two years raising the streets.”
-Dan Kipnis, Miami Beach homeowner who has been trying unsuccessfully to sell his house for 18 months despite dropping the price by a more than one-third from $3.2 million, worrying that sea-level related projects and the associated property taxes are scaring prospective buyers away
“Homes exposed to sea level rise (SLR) sell at a 7% discount relative to observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach. This discount has grown over time and is driven by sophisticated buyers and communities worried about global warming.” -Asaf Bernstein, Matthew Gustafson & Ryan Lewis, authors of the cited social science working paper, summarizing their conclusions from a recent detailed study of the relationship between SLR exposure and U.S. coastal real estate prices
In previous posts, I’ve highlighted communities under ongoing assault by the direct effects of global climate change, including Shishmaref, Alaska and the nation of Fiji. And another nation, Kiribati, already doomed to submersion — in many of our lifetimes — beneath the rising Pacific Ocean. Make no mistake; in these cases we are talking about the preventable losses of the homes, livelihoods, and cultures of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans. These losses are happening right Before Our Eyes, by climate change driven processes that are well documented and obvious to anyone who cares to look. Softening permafrost. Shrinking beaches. Increasing storm damage. People suddenly erecting desperate sandbag seawalls around coastal communities that have persisted for thousands of years, until now. That we are continuing to contribute to these losses demonstrates a profound moral failing on the part of those of us who prioritize our continued ready access to cheap fossil energy (even though we have ready renewable alternatives) over the very viability of these distinct human cultures that have developed over thousands of years of people living in these locations.
But, for many readers of these posts, Shishmaref, Fiji, and Kiribati may seem like far-flung places. So let’s look at developments that may be closer to home.
You may be familiar with Miami, the 8th most populous metropolitan area in the U.S. and home to roughly 5.5 million people. What if I were to tell you that readily observable, direct consequences of climate change presently affect daily life in Miami, foreshadowing potentially existential challenges for that great U.S. city in the future?
In Miami, as any resident will attest (and as scientists have carefully studied and documented in peer reviewed journal articles), sometimes it floods on sunny days. It doesn’t require a hurricane, a storm, or even a rain cloud. Just a high tide and maybe a full moon. To see what that looks like, check out the photo at the top of this post, or simply search “sunny day flood Miami” in Google Images. That’s seawater flooding the city streets of Miami on a sunny day at high tide. It happens more and more frequently. Why? Because high tide has been getting higher since the streets of Miami were developed.
Brian McNoldy, an atmospheric scientist and Senior Research Associate at the University of Miami, has been tracking the high tide level at Virginia Key, a Miami barrier island, for two decades:
Clearly, high tides are getting higher. They are also getting higher at a rate that has been increasing over the past 20 years — nearly an inch a year, on average, over the past 5 years! An inch a year may not seem like much, until you consider that would result in a foot every 12 years, or over 6.5 feet in a typical American lifetime, and this is how the great city of Miami (built on porous limestone, so it can’t be protected by a seawall) is presently situated with respect to sea level:
The higher tides have resulted in a measured increase in incidents of “nuisance flooding” in the city (see inset bar chart in the graph above). More than just a “nuisance,” this comes at a real price; Miami Beach plans to spend $400 million over the next 20 years installing pump stations and raising the streets. “There is a lot of money going into these resiliency issues, so we are hoping to tap into that,” said City Manager Jimmy Morales, commenting on the city’s hopes of securing federal and state funds to pay for the improvements.
Miami is not the only U.S. coastal city facing chronic tidal flooding due to sea level rise. These are data on sea level rise since 1970, and associated increases in the frequency of tidal flooding events, measured in four other coastal cities:
Figure 4 from a summary report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 2014. Sea level has risen by about 3.5 inches globally since 1970, but more along the U.S. East Coast as shown in the upper left graph. This has resulted in a measured increase in the yearly number of days of tidal flooding — flooding caused only by high tide — in 4 U.S. cities.
The President loves to highlight present signs of strength of the U.S. economy. Presidents have been taking credit for good economic performance, when it occurs, since the dawn of our Republic. And, the economy (for many of us) is performing great right now!
There is always a rich debate about whether presidents can rightly take much credit for a good economy. I say, go for it! All presidents claim credit when the economy is good.
But, I think we should think very carefully about claims of causality between deregulation of the fossil fuel industry and economic and job growth, particularly from a president and administration with a history of ignoring and denying climate science.
Dow just crashes through 25,000. Congrats! Big cuts in unnecessary regulations continuing.
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!
First, it’s highly debatable that the recent broad economic growth could not have been achieved, or even further enhanced, while investing aggressively in renewable energy sources as science says we need to if we want to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes of climate change. In fact, any suggestion of an obvious direct link between job creation in the fossil fuel industry and performance of the broader economy is demonstrably false. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the Department of Energy, the coal industry employed 160,119 Americans in 2016 while generating 30.4% of U.S. electricity. Meanwhile, the solar industry employed 373,807 Americans while generating only 0.9% of U.S. electricity. If the strategy is about creating jobs, clearly expansion of the solar industry is a far better tactic than creating artificial advantages for a coal industry that is already dying of natural market-driven causes!
And, that tactic also happens to be consistent with what we need to do to prevent substantial economic harms in the long term. Whether Miami will get federal and/or state funding of the $400 million it needs to deal with flooding over the next 20 years remains to be seen, but I think we have recently observed there may be limits to federal spending on climate change driven problems:
Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble..
Projected coastline of the Miami metropolitan area now (left) and with 6 feet of sea level rise (right). Shades of blue indicate depths of seawater coverage. I created these images myself using this nifty NOAA tool, which enables you to map many parts of the U.S. coast with various projected sea levels.
Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas) is a Pacific nation comprising 33 atolls and islands and a population of about 110,000. When it gained its independence from the U.K. in 1979, it became the world’s only nation with residents in all four hemispheres. The atolls and islands of Kiribati have had permanent residents since they were settled by sea-going Micronesian explorers in canoes between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago.
The lands of Kiribati rise only 3-6 feet above a sea level that has been relatively stable for the last few thousand years, but less stable recently. The residents are now engaged in an ongoing battle with a rising sea that their president has already conceded they are destined to lose.
High tides flood and salinate farmland. Families erect sandbag walls in an effort to protect their homes.
Fiji is an island nation in the South Pacific Ocean comprising 332 islands, of which 106 are permanently inhabited by its population of about 900,000 people. They are the descendants of the Lapita people who settled the islands about 5,000 years ago, probably originating in Taiwan or southern China. Expert in seamanship and navigation, the Lapita people and their Polynesian descendants relied on a strong tradition of oral history and small wooden canoes to locate and ultimately settle the Pacific islands from Fiji to Hawaii across hundreds of miles of open ocean. This amazing feat of human exploration has been recently popularized in the movie, Moana.
Can you imagine the courage, faith, and skill it must have taken to set off from one tiny Pacific island to find another, across a hundred miles of open ocean in a small wooden boat, with only the stories of your parents and the stars as your guide? That’s what these folks did, around 5,000 years ago.
In just 3% of that time, since around 1850, the most industrialized among us have begun a process to rapidly deprive those brave folks of their homes, culture, and history. Their beaches are already vanishing due to climate change driven sea-level rise, as exemplified by the lonely tree pictured above. In fact, as discussed at the recent 23rd annual “conference of the parties” (COP) meeting under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bonn, Germany, a joint assessment of the World Bank and the Fijian government determined that Fiji will need to spend an amount equivalent to its entire yearly gross domestic product over the next 10 years to adequately prepare for higher sea levels and stronger storms due to climate change.
So the simple decision on the table is this.
Option A: Turn our backs on the 900,000 current citizens and the 5,000 year human history of Fiji. Blow off the descendants of the people who conducted their own version of the Space Race, before we did ours, by bravely exploring and settling the uncharted expanses of the South Pacific in tiny wooden boats. Enjoy our cheap fossil energy. Why challenge ourselves to do something new (solar, wind, batteries), even though engineers and economists now say those new things can sometimes be as cheap as fossil fuels? Drill, baby, drill!
Option B: Give those brave folks some respect and give ourselves a little bit of a healthy challenge. Revolutionize our relationship with energy and the earth. Replicate the glory of the last generation’s Space Race in that pursuit. We all just may be prouder, happier, and safer.
(After all, what’s been happening in Fiji is also beginning to happen in Houston and Miami. Or haven’t you heard?)
In 2007, photographer James Balog founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the most comprehensive ground-based photographic study of the Earth’s glaciers ever undertaken. Pioneering new automated time lapse technology, James and a team of scientists, videographers, and extreme weather expedition experts have setup 43 cameras to record the changes occurring in 24 glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, Canada, Austria, and the Rocky Mountains. Over the past decade, this has resulted in stunning time lapse recordings of the changing glaciers (spoiler alert, they are melting). Click each of the images below to see, in about a minute, the effects of 7-8 years of climate change on one of the world’s largest glaciers.
Along with expansion of the oceans as they heat up, the melting of the large, land-based glaciers in these videos directly contributes to sea-level rise. A recent scientific study of the melting of Antarctic land-based glaciers, published in the prestigious and extensively peer-reviewed journal, Nature, makes the following conclusion:
“Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated. In this case atmospheric warming will soon become the dominant driver of ice loss, but prolonged ocean warming will delay its recovery for thousands of years.”
The second of the above sentences refers to modeling results that quantified the expected effects of rising atmospheric temperature on the ocean temperature. The ocean heats up more slowly than the atmosphere. This means that atmospheric temperature changes we are “locking in” now will result in delayed warming of the oceans that will take millennia to reverse, even if we were to arrest the heating of the atmosphere now. This “sluggishness” of many of the Earth’s climate responses, very well understood by scientists, is important information for all of us to understand. As our leaders dither around with ignorant and disingenuous arguments about whether climate change is even happening (it is), balancing needs of the environment against short-term jobs in the fossil fuel industry (or, as evidence suggests is really the case, short-term profits for highly influential fossil fuel executives), we must understand that the decisions we are making right now, every day, are profoundly affecting the challenges of future generations, including the kids among us right now.
As you watch the videos below, imagine our children, and their children, and their children’s children, either erecting sea walls that will grow to 15 meter (49-foot!!) heights or abandoning our favorite coastal cities. Then, balance that against the potential for short-term job losses in the fossil fuel industry (keeping in mind that new jobs would presumably be created by the aggressive development of renewable energy). Destruction of our coastal cities and job losses in the fossil fuel industry are both economic harms, there is no doubt. Which is worse?
Video credit: EIS. Time lapse footage of the Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska, 2007-2015. EIS description: “The Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska, has experienced significant retreat and deflation in the recent past. Once flowing proudly across Mendenhall Lake, the glacier now takes a small piece of lake front real-estate far from where our cameras were originally installed, and even further from the view of the thousands of visitors who travel to see the glacier each summer.”
Video credit: EIS. Time lapse footage of the Columbia Glacier, Alaska, 2007-2015. EIS description: “Flowing from the heart of the Chugach Mountains in South-Central Alaska, the Columbia Glacier is one of the fastest changing glaciers in North America. In the last 30 years the glacier has deflated well over one thousand feet and has retreated about ten miles. This loss contributes to approximately one percent of total sea level rise (accounting for both thermal expansion and glacier mass melt).”
Video credit: EIS. Time lapse footage of the Sólheimajökull Glacier, Iceland, 2007-2015. EIS description: “The Sólheimajökull Glacier is a large tongue of ice that flows southward off of the Mýrdalsjökull Ice Cap in Southern Iceland. The glacier is retreating due to a combination of stream erosion and ice melt. The cracks or “crevasses” that can be seen forming parallel to the flow of the glacier indicate that it is spreading out and thinning as it continues to flow forward.”
Video credit: EIS. Ilulissat Glacier, Greenland, 2007-2014. EIS description: “The Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland is one of the fastest flowing glaciers in the World and contributes more ice to the World Ocean than any other glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. On May 28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and Director Jeff Orlowski filmed a historic breakup at the Illulissat Glacier. The event lasted for 75 minutes during which the three mile wide terminus of the glacier retreated a full mile. This rare footage has gone on record as the largest glacier calving event ever captured on film, by the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records.”
Click below to watch a 5-minute video of the largest glacier collapse ever caught on film, according to the 2016 Guiness Book of World Records.
On May 28, 2008, while setting up to capture time-lapse footage of the Ilulissat Glacier (also known as the Jakobshavn Glacier) in western Greenland, documentary filmmakers Adam LeWinter and Jeff Orlowski happened to be in the right place, at the right time, to capture on film a 75-minute calving event during which a chunk of ice roughly the size of Manhattan broke off the glacier and collapsed into the ocean, causing a virtually instantaneous one-mile retreat of this Greenland glacier.
The filmmakers’ footage of glacier changes in the Arctic, due to global warming, was ultimately part of a documentary film, Chasing Ice, which won an Emmy in 2014. (You can stream it on Netflix.)
In 2015, the same glacier lost another 5 square mile chunk of ice during a 2-day period in August. Its current melting rate is roughly three times its melting rate in the 1990’s, according to a scientific study published in 2014. The Greenland ice sheet is dumping about 300 gigatons of ice into the ocean each year, according to NASA, making it the current largest source of sea-level rise from melting ice.
Image credit: Matt Amesbury as reported by CNN and The Washington Post. Photo altered by me.
A ruggedly verdant scene. A lonely, mossy, wind-swept shore battered by white caps. Where in the world do you think it is? A craggy coastline of Ireland, perhaps?
Confession time: I (inexpertly) altered the photograph above. Here’s the original one:
Image credit: Matt Amesbury. Original photograph as reported by CNN and The Washington Post.
Those aren’t white caps. They’re icebergs.
Now, where do you think we are?
The western peninsula of Antarctica. Seem unnatural? If you think so, you’re right. At least, it’s unnatural compared with a similar photo that might have been taken 50 years ago or before that, which would have shown “a monochrome shot of ice.” That’s according to Dominic Hodgson, co-author of a new study of “moss cores” published in the scientific journal Current Biology.
Warming temperatures and dwindling ice, resulting from global climate change, are causing a “greening” of the western peninsula of Antarctica, where the study of a 150-year record of “moss cores” from 3 separate areas of the peninsula shows moss coverage has increased by “4 or 5 times” over the past 50 years. This creates risks of unpredictable ecological changes in Antarctica, for example, due to the growth of invasive plant species that could potentially spread there.
The greening of Antarctica parallels similar findings in the warming Arctic, where it may actually be occurring faster.
Image credit: 
