Residual Warming and Clathrate Bombs

There are a lot of changes coming to our world, but I tend to think that most of them are surmountable. Our civilization is massively wasteful, humans can be pretty resourceful when pushed against the wall, and not every country is as stupid as America.

I don't expect that the 2 billion poorest people in the world will see it this way when their food is turned into motor fuel, but neither do I expect that we'll see the wealthiest countries to turn into Mad Max overnight. I also don't expect a massive world war over resources -- there are many powerful actors on the international stage these days who depend on controlled intercine warfare that would stand to lose if an actual large scale 'hot war' broke out.

Change on the scale we're talking about tends to happen in a series of minor crises, over a number of years and decades ... and while you're living through it, these kinds of massive changes in lifestyle tend to happen relatively slowly.

However, the wild card in all of this is climate change.

Humans have added around 100 parts per million of carbon to the atmosphere. What is so insidious about this, however, is that most of the effects of this Co2 is being masked by air pollution:

"(S)ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean." Source.

This is a process called global dimming, which was documented in a great Nova piece. Actual real-world data confirmed this process in the week following the 9/11 attacks, when shutting down air travel led to an increased temperature in the continental United States.

Why? We removed a major source of air pollution; this pollution is more effective at blocking solar energy if it's deposited into the upper atmosphere (from the back of a jet engine).

Lou calculated that, "If we reduce our burning of fossil fuels enough to trim even 50% of the effect of their aerosol emissions (and we likely have to cut far more than that), we’ll add 0.6 W/sq. meter to the net effect of human-induced warming. That would push our net “contribution” from all human activities from about 1.6 W/sq. meter to 2.2 W/sq. meter, an increase of 37.5%."

So when we finally get around to reducing particulate pollution, we'll unmask the true effects of the global warming we've unleashed so far. Quite literally ... we have seen only a small percentage of the climate change effect of the 100 ppm of Co2 we've pushed into the atmosphere so far.

The potential of all this residual heat setting off a clathrate bomb scares me a hell of a lot more than running out of cheap oil does.