Runaway Climate Change: When The Angry Climate Beast Awakens

The "Anthropocene" May Be Much Shorter Than Expected

Much has been made of the “Anthropocene”, a period when the human race became the dominant factor within the Earth System. But our understanding of this phenomena may be a little too much on the human supremacism side and a but too little on the awakened Earth System side. Climate scientist Wally Broecker likened the Earth System to an “angry beast” and we (humanity) “are poking at it with sticks.”

That beast can be quite quiescent and stable within limits, but once those limits are broken it can suddenly awaken and charge toward a new stable state; scientists call this non-linear change, or “abrupt” climate change. As we continue to increase the levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere we keep pushing the Earth System toward a non-linear cliff that we do not know the exact location of. Once over the cliff there will be no going back.

Positive feedbacks will then kick in and drive the non-linear cliff fall to a new lower (for humanity) point of equilibrium accompanied with a collapse of GHG sinks (e.g. forests, the oceans, wetlands) and an acceleration in emissions from possible sources (e.g. those very sinks that contain a huge amount of carbon, permafrost etc.).

Humanity had been “lucky” into the current century that CO2 does act as a growth accelerant to vegetation, and therefore some of the extra anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been stored in a “global greening” effect. But that effect is both limited by other inputs (water, minerals) and by rising temperatures, with the latter now turning global greening into global browning; a previously CO2 enhanced sink now becoming a source. Making the above worse is human-driven land use change, such as agricultural and other development within the Amazon Rain Forest which is slowly but surely destroying the “lungs of the world”.

Can we see the signals from the Earth System that the Earth System is awakening and getting ready to run?

• Northern Boreal Forests

  • The Canadian forests have already become a carbon source, after long being a substantial carbon sink, due to much more widespread forest fires and insect infestations (both driven by higher temperatures)

  • The northern boreal forests cover 10% of the worlds land surface but store 33% of the land’s carbon, and forest fires have turned them into a carbon source.

    If this trend continues, the boreal forest may very soon become the dominant source of global emissions from biomass burning, overtaking the notorious tropical peatland fires (such as those in Indonesia in 2015) in terms of global significance and adding further to the “fire–carbon-climate warming” feedback.

Amazon Rain Forest

• The Amazon rain forest is already emitting more CO2 than it absorbs, and that imbalance is getting worse over time.

Global wildfires across all of the world’s forests are “burning through the carbon budget that humans have allocated themselves to limit global heating” according to a new study. In fact there already is no “carbon budget” as that assumes the successful large scale use of BECCS/CCS.

• Peatlands (a type of wet land)

  • Peatlands store a huge amount of carbon and increased temperatures together with human actions are both drying them out and causing peatland fires. At what point do these turn into a major net omitter? We don’t know. Peatlands also produce CH4, as well as CO2, and increased temperatures allow the organisms that produce that CH4 to be more active.

  • Not Peatland Wet Lands (e.g. marshes and swamps)

    • These store less carbon that peatlands but are open to all the same pressures.

• Permafrost

  • This has already moved from sink to source, and increasing temperatures allow the related organisms to increase output of both CO2 (dry conditions) and CH4 (wt conditions). Increased Arctic temperatures also lead to increased rainfall, which increases the waterlogged conditions that produce CH4 instead of CO2. As the former has 100 times the climate impact of CO2 within a two decade timeframe, it is a very wild variable with respect to rapid discontinuous climate change.

The video above is a BBC one, so it has to end with the obligatory “hopey changey” segment.

The above list is not an exhaustive one. We must also remember that when humanity cuts anthropogenic GHG emissions that only reduces the rate of increase in atmospheric concentrations. Very large cuts in anthropogenic emissions would be needed to start to even halt the rise in atmospheric concentrations; about 70%. There are also delayed effects that mean that warming of about 0.5 degrees centigrade would still be in the pipeline. Global anthropogenic CO2 emissions may fall by a small amount, 1-2%, this year mainly due to Chinese efforts, but such reductions will take decades to reduce emissions by 70%. This reduction may also not include methane and other emissions, with methane being a much larger problem in the short-term; especially when considering the breaching of feedback loop limits. The increased natural emissions then simply makes this problem worse, and we are seeing an accelerating increase in the warming effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as CO2, Methane (CH4), Sulfur Dioxide and other GHG concentrations increase.

Anthropogenic emissions of methane have been known to be significantly understated for many years, with governments colluding with the oil and gas industry to facilitate expansions in production and LNG transport without adequate safeguards to limit methane emissions. An academic journal article (one of many) in 2015, this article by Bill McKibben in 2016, this from the Guardian in 2023, and this in 2024. Natural gas (pretty much all methane) is not a “clean fuel” that supports a “bridge to the future”, but rather a Big Lie that is a bridge to climate catastrophe; as I detailed here.

The US government, the Canadian government, the Australian government etc. are facilitating a huge lie about the levels of methane that escape during exploration, production and transport; a huge lie that facilitates industry inaction and further expansion. Methane is the big climate change risk for the next couple of decades with respect to abrupt climate change, given its 100x climate change impact (when compared to CO2) over a two decade period (after that it is mostly oxidized into water and CO2). And warmer, wetter wetlands and permafrost create increasing emissions of methane; recent chemical analysis has shown that methane emissions form these sources are increasing.

We are risking hitting the point where cuts to anthropogenic GHG emissions will be offset by increases in natural emissions created by the global warming trend; the beast will have started to take back control and may soon not be stoppable by humanity before the Earth System makes its move to a very different equilibrium. So far this year, global temperatures have averaged over 1.5 degrees centigrade above the UN IPCC “pre-industrial” benchmark (which in itself is a political compromise which is 0.2 degrees centigrade above actual pre-industrial times prior to 1750), boosted by an El Nino.

If we compare 2024 to the last significant El Nino year of 2016 year, to remove natural variability “noise”, we see a trend of 0.25 degrees centigrade warming per decade. Given that the 2016 El Nino was larger than the 2024 one, this understates the growth trend which may be as high as 0.3 degrees centigrade per decade. Stripping out the effects of the El Nino we get a trend value of 1.3 degrees centigrade above the UN IPCC benchmark for 2024. That puts us at at least 1.55 degrees trend in 2034 (1.8 degrees with an El Nino), and 1.8 (2.05) in 2044; assuming a non-accelerating trend.

We may get “lucky” and the ice sheets will kick into accelerating collapse, a collapse which will soak up a lot of heat in the process of converting ice into water - slowing down climate change for a while. But of course, that will mean much faster increases in sea levels and great storms as massive “blobs” of cold ice and cold melt fresh water float on top of the ocean sea water, and meet much warmer water bodies (Hansen’s “Storms of my Grandchildren”). But at the same time, the loss of the Arctic sea ice may rapidly accelerate local warming as the dark sea takes in much more of the Sun’s energy than the white ice. This would create quite extreme temperature gradients in the Northern Hemisphere that would lead to extremely chaotic weather patterns - “Super Storms of my Grandchildren”?

The above is why this blog is called Geopolitics and Climate Change, the two greatest risks to modern human civilization. And also why I consider that geo-engineering is now humanity’s climate change Plan A. We passed the point where mitigation alone will work quite a while ago, especially when the all of the UN IPCC “net zero” plans started to rely on the busted myth of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct carbon capture and storage (CCS/CCUS); the victory of establishment growth-facilitating bullshit and profiteering over actual science. Pointed out by Kevin Anderson since the first use of BECCS by the establishment and corporate shills of the IPCC in 2014 to plug the emissions hole without any scientific backing. The current head of the UN FCCC (UN Framework Convention for Climate Change), Simon Stiell, is a businessman and politician not a climate scientist; representing the top 1% of humanity that emits as much GHGs as the bottom 50% of humanity. That elite group owns and includes the politicians, the newspapers, the universities etc., and have framed the discussion to protect their own lifestyles and wealth.

Nearly three and a half decades after the Rio Earth Summit and four and a half decades after the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) agreed on the dangers of climate change to modern human civilization, society has still not reached the consensus required to take the real substantive mitigation actions. Rather, the debate in Western nations is between the green-myth techno-utopians selling greenwashing BS like CCUS, and the outright anthropogenic climate change deniers. In the short-term, geo-engineering is the only way to square the climate change circle. It may just kick the can down the road, as ocean acidification and species loss and other symptoms of overshoot also threaten modern civilization; while dumping the costs on the global poor. As John Rockstrom points out, there are many areas of Earth System overshoot that threaten non-linear changes to new equilibriums that will be an existential threat to modern human civilization.