Climate Change: Fire and Ice

Robert Frost famously wrote: “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.” It seems Frost may have been on to something…

Two recent reports are pointing fingers at black carbon and melting ice as the biggest dangers in relation to climate change.

Have you ever heard of black carbon? Probably not, but according to Nature.com, a study published in Nature Geoscience says that black carbon is responsible for 50% of Arctic temperature increases since 1890. Most estimates put the arctic temperature rise at 1.9 degrees Celsius, so if Nature Geoscience is right, black carbon is responsible for a 1 degree Celsius rise over the past century.

Black carbon is created when fossil fuels, biofuels or biomass are incompletely combusted- it is also commonly created in Asia by burning wood, coal, or cow dung for cooking/ heating. Diesel burned in America and Europe is also a major contributor, but the largest source of black carbon is the burning of forests and savannahs.

But what’s the big deal? Why is black carbon so bad? Well, for starters dark carbon particulates absorb sunlight and then give it off as heat. When they fall with precipitation they impair the ability of snow and ice to reflect sunlight, making it melt faster. So it’s double bad. Like, bad bad.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that black carbon only lasts for a few days or weeks in the atmosphere. That means that a significant reduction should have immediate results.

“Black carbon is part of a package of fast-action strategies that can achieve mitigation in the near term and slow Arctic warming, including targeting short-lived, non-CO2 climate forcers such as HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone, as well as increasing carbon sequestration through forest protection and production of biochar,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.

And then there is the ice: How the ice shelves behave is thought to be the number one factor in what happens with the sea level. 

Predicting climate change numbers and sea level rise is difficult and tricky, to say the least. Causes and effects are all new and uncertain. Several examples in New Scientist point to the inaccuracy of predictions due to unknown new factors- the only thing we can be sure of is that we really have no idea what is going on and what is causing it, but something is changing.

IPCC emissions scenarios, suggests sea level will go up between 0.5 and 1.4 metres, and most researchers agree that these estimates are too low as emissions have been rising faster than the IPCC’s worst scenario numbers.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a sea level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100, not counting major changes in ice flow. 

The global average sea level rise over the 1900’s was 17 cm.

There is the possibility that warm water will reach the Ross Ice Shelf in the future, changing, for the worse, all sea rise predictions and models.

So what does it all mean?

Whatever the predictions, a sea level rise of 1 meter will affect the 60 million people who live within 1 meter of sea level. This same rise will in turn give rise to a greater severity of storms and greater vulnerability of coastal cities like New York, Boston, and DC to hurricanes. It’s possible that an increased frequency will make it make sense to abandon these cities rather than continually pay to rebuild them. There are those who say what is happening now is no big deal, that the Earth has gone through greater changes in the past, but the human makeup of the Earth has changed- and when the climate does this time, there will be more humans around both to see it and to deal with the consequences.