The cause is known & the solution is known

From an Article by William B. Gail, PhD, New York Times, April 22, 2019
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Donald Rumsfeld famously popularized the term “unknown unknowns” in a 2002 news briefing when describing the challenges of linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction. Troublingly, climate change may also be strewn with such unknowns, and they pose daunting tests for how we face the future.

One is choosing among policy alternatives. Should we minimize tomorrow’s risks now by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or save money today and spend it on adapting to the effects of planetary warming once threats emerge more fully, like rising seas or prolonged droughts? The policy debate increasingly tilts toward adaptation. But we can’t adapt to perils from unknown unknowns. In such cases, adaptation will largely fail; only mitigation will be effective.

The National Climate Assessment released last fall provided an updated scientific summary of the “knowns.” The simple version was this: Earth is warming, humans are largely responsible, ecosystems are changing in response, and the impact on societies will be large.

The report also characterized the known unknowns, as Mr. Rumsfeld might put it — those things we know at a fundamental level but about which we seek greater certainty. They include how much Earth will eventually warm, how rapidly oceans will rise, where and when weather extremes and water shortages might occur, and whether potential tipping points (like the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets) will, in fact, occur.

Unsurprisingly, the report carefully limited speculation about unknown unknowns: the many initially small environmental shifts that are potential consequences of the changing climate. What will actually emerge is largely unknowable because of the highly unpredictable nonlinear response to the warming of Earth’s complex and adaptive physical and ecological systems.

Yet credible speculation on climate’s unknown unknowns is sorely needed by policymakers. Future generations will be affected by today’s policy decisions, whether the underlying science is complete or not. The basics are simple: The more we warm our planet, the more likely it is that deeply surprising environmental changes will ensue.

Most of these smaller environmental changes should be manageable, readily addressed through adaptation. Inevitably, however, a rare few will most likely evolve and expand until they threaten our security, health or economy. We lack the ability to predict which are which. This is the curse of unknown unknowns. Nevertheless, things we can credibly imagine should accentuate our concern for what we are unable to imagine.

Perhaps a routinely ice-free Arctic summer, altering polar ocean life in subtle ways, sets off an unpredictable cascade of complex changes throughout the global ocean ecosystem, devastating fisheries. Maybe agricultural pests adapt to climate change stresses by evolving novel and frequently changing abilities to destroy crops, leaving farmers struggling to keep pace and feed populations. One unsettling risk is that mutant diseases — like Zika and Ebola today and the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 50 million people — could emerge more often because of altered evolutionary competition in a changing climate, each a greater medical challenge than the last.

Environmental changes occur regularly; climate change significantly accelerates the process. Should warming progress too far, society risks being overwhelmed by the growing rate at which disruptive events could occur. Each new threat is likely to emerge and proliferate differently, undermining adaptation’s effectiveness.

Some threats might be so startling and strange that our imaginations would struggle to comprehend them even after they arise. Timely response efforts would be frustrated by poor knowledge about what is occurring and how to contain the threat.

Though climate change has yet to produce clearly attributed examples, Zika hints at this dispiriting future. Within a few short years, it transformed from an ignorable rare disease into a medical terror. Nobody saw it coming. Its long-term societal consequences run deep, with childbearing upended for people threatened by the mosquito that carries the virus. Though probably not a direct result of climate change, Zika starkly illustrates the type of inconceivable surprises, and their demoralizing consequences, that threaten to emerge with ever greater frequency should we fail to slow global warming.

Three millenniums ago, Homer foreshadowed our dilemma. He wrote of Odysseus returning by ship across the Aegean Sea, headed homeward to Greece after his great victory over Troy. Odysseus anticipated an arduous sea journey, but was unprepared for what followed: an interminable voyage punctuated by unimaginably difficult experiences one after another, from Sirens to the Cyclops.

Our decisions in the next few years will determine whether our climate journey follows a similar course. Perhaps current policy discussions will navigate society through the journey’s recognized risks. If warming progresses rapidly, however, the known concerns — increasing temperatures, sea level rise, a melting Arctic — will not be the whole story. Nature’s unforeseeable surprises, some unimaginable to us today, could become pivotal to our fate.

Without an aggressive policy commitment to mitigation by rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, our grandchildren could be destined to live in a world with nature’s unknown unknowns around each year’s turn.

>>> William B. Gail is a co-founder of the Global Weather Corporation, a past president of the American Meteorological Society and the author of “Climate Conundrums: What the Climate Debate Reveals About Us.”

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SEE ALSO: ‘We Are Not Moving Fast Enough’: Study Shows Cost of Melting Permafrost Could Total $70 Trillion

Surface Damages at Porter Ranch Site

Enormity of Billowing Methane Plume in California ‘Cannot Be Overstated’

<<< Porter Ranch leak, spewing methane since October, shows ‘gaping vulnerabilities’ in oversight >>>

From an Article by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams Blog, December 30, 2015

The toxic methane cloud that has been “billowing” for months over an underground natural gas reservoir near the affluent community of Porter Ranch just north of Los Angeles illustrates “gaping vulnerabilities” in oversight and enforcement of greenhouse gas pollution rules, a California newspaper editorial board declared this week.

A pipe leak has been releasing an estimated tens of thousands of kilograms of methane into the air every hour since mid-October, leading environmentalists like Erin Brockovich to declare it “a catastrophe the scale of which has not been seen since the 2010 BP oil spill.”

“The enormity of the Aliso Canyon gas leak cannot be overstated,” Brockovich wrote earlier this month after visiting Porter Ranch. “Gas is escaping through a ruptured pipe more than 8,000 feet underground, and it shows no sign of stopping. As the pressure from weight on top of the pipe causes the gas to diffuse, it only continues to dissipate across a wider and wider area. According to tests conducted in November by the California Air Resources Board, the leak is spewing 50,000 kilograms of gas per hour—the equivalent to the strength of a volcanic eruption.”

Aerial footage released last week by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) provided the first-ever bird’s eye view of what the organization called “one of the nation’s largest-ever methane leaks.”

Watch the footage below:

As Common Dreams has reported, methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas that packs over 80 times the 20-year warming power of carbon dioxide.

And that’s why the Porter Ranch leak has implications beyond California. “Events of this size are rare, but major leakage across the oil and gas supply chain is not,” said Tim O’Connor, director of EDF’s California Oil & Gas Program, last week.

“There are plenty of mini-Aliso Canyons that add up to a big climate problem—not just in California, but across the country,” he continued. “Regardless of what the future holds for the Aliso Canyon storage field, this is one reason why strong rules are needed to require that oil and gas companies closely monitor for and manage methane leaks.”

The Sacramento Bee echoed that call in a strident editorial on Tuesday. “[T]he fact that a leak of this magnitude happened at all raises all sorts of regulatory questions, starting with why natural gas was even being stored near a planned community of 31,000 people,” the editorial board wrote.

Despite warnings from environmental groups about methane’s climate impacts and Southern California Gas Co.’s own concerns about the site’s aging infrastructure, “state records show it has been more than a year since the pipe with the suspected leak was tested,” the editorial continued. “The leak was found by a gas company employee, not state inspectors. And the California Air Resources Board only recently has begun to home in on methane and other short-lived climate pollutants in addition to carbon dioxide.”

The Bee declared: “Clearly, more robust oversight is needed.”

Southern California Gas Co. officials told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday that they had “pinpointed” the source of the leak. But they also said repairing the leak could still take until the end of March.

For more on the leak and its implications not only for local residents but for the global climate, watch Brockovitch and David Balen, president of the Renaissance Homeowners Association, located just outside the breached well site, on Wednesday’s edition of Democracy Now!:

"Where Theory Fails": 8 Methane Spikes in 22 Years

Methane Blow-Holes Sign of Runaway Climate Change? <Where Theory Fails>

From an Article by Donna Lisenby, EcoWatch.com, August 2, 2014

Scientists think the mysterious crater found in the Arctic region in Russia may be a giant methane blow-hole that signals the beginning of runaway climate change. They are calling the point when frozen arctic methane in Canada, Alaska and Russia starts erupting into the atmosphere “dragon burps.”

“Dragon’s mouth” … is the name of the crater recently discovered in the Yamal Peninsula, in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia. Russian scientists said that they believe the 60-meter wide crater could be the result of changing temperatures in the region.

Check out this story that contains graphs showing such elevated methane levels that they labeled them WTF, where theory fails. Rising trend … the “dragon’s breath” methane spikes have been recorded eight times in the past 22 years.

If you have ever wondered whether you might see the end of the world as we know it in your life time, you probably should NOT read this story nor study the graphs or look at the pictures of methane blow holes aka dragon burps.

I think Dr. Jason Box, who has highlighted the appearance of dangerous spikes in methane above Siberia, sums it up best, “If we don’t get atmospheric carbon down and cool the Arctic, the climate physics and recent observations tell me we will probably trigger the release of these vast carbon stores, dooming our kids’ to a hothouse Earth.”

<P.S. A carbon tax is needed in every country, one at a time.>

>>> Donna Lisenby is the Upper Watauga Riverkeeper and the Waterkeeper Alliance Coal Campaign Coordinator from Boone, North Carolina. She appeared in the film Wal-Mart, the High Cost of Low Price where she exposed the retailers appalling failure to protect the environment. She has a Bachelor of Science degree and two grandchildren who motivate her work to ensure a healthy environment for future generations. <<<