Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Sales, a geologist who has had careers in college teaching, petroleum research and old house renovation for affordable housing. He lives in Danville.
[O]ne of the most complex issues we face is global warming.
Most of the world’s glaciers are retreating (melting back faster than they move forward). However, some are advancing (moving down-valley faster than they melt back, and rapidly — sometimes up to 10 meters a day). These glacial “advances” are some of the most often cited evidence against global warming. However, they are actually strong evidence for global warming.
Glaciers move in two ways: “Cold” glaciers are frozen to their beds and creep slowly down hill as every ice crystal in them deforms. They call it hyperbolic flow — if you put a line of stakes across a frozen glacier and survey them a year later they will make a graceful hyperbola – like a loose necklace around someone’s neck. “Hot” glaciers, however, become unfrozen from their beds, and literally float down valley en-mass, buoyed up by the excess water from the melting. These are called “surging” glaciers. Put a line of stakes across a surging glacier and in a few days they are gone.
Glaciers are similar to pancakes — both are too weak to support themselves, so they flatten and spread out. If you have two identical measuring cups full of the same pancake batter and pour one on a dry and one on an oiled griddle, the one on the oiled griddle will be flatter and cover more area – an analog for Antarctica’s surging glaciers. The difference between the size of the two pancakes represents the additional sea ice that is now surrounding Antarctica — its ice sheet is becoming a flatter pancake. Via seismic, we know how much water is under Antarctica’s ice sheet — there are 400 sub-glacial lakes, the biggest, Lake Vostok, at about 5,000 square miles, is about the size of Connecticut.
As global warming accelerates, we may well see both lakes and icebergs about the size of Texas.
Surging glaciers explain why there is more ice in the ocean around Antarctica — that excess surging ice is forming floating ice shelves that break up. One chunk that broke off was bigger than, again, Connecticut. As global warming accelerates, we may well see both lakes and icebergs about the size of Texas. But the “Texas-sized damage” may already have been done — there’s a huge lag time on melting 4,000 feet of ice — warm surface water entering the pervasive cravassing has more than adequate access to get its heat down there, causing as much melting from the bottom as from above. If we shut down global warming tomorrow morning, we might still see Texas-size chunks of ice shelf breaking off Antarctica. That’s why timing is critical — we are building up a mass of climate-altering inertia that may haunt our progeny for centuries.
All this extra melting raises sea level, and at an ever-accelerating pace. If you want your drink to stay cold longer, would you put ice cubes or the equivalent in crushed-ice in it? Every time a crack develops in the world’s biggest icebergs, it almost doubles the surface area available for melting. By the time that iceberg has degenerated to sea pack ice (like the crushed ice in your drink), its surface area has increased a million times, as has its rate of melting — it again graphs hyperbolic. That pesky “hockey stick” graph, those who deny global warming hate so much, is reality. That’s what’s going on in Antarctica, that’s also why many of the world’s glaciers that don’t reach salt water, are advancing — they are surging in their own melt-water.
The Himalayas’ dwindling glaciers and waters from them are the best case in point, and they are playing a very cruel trick on humanity: Slow onset of global warming, with the growth of industry over about the last century, has produced increasing stream flow and ground-water replacement. Man is the ultimate opportunist, filling every niche available — if they have more water, they can grow more crops and have more kids. This has encouraged vast overpopulation in the countries that rivers from the Himalayas provide water for, most of Southeast Asia — call it two billion people. When these glaciers finally melt away, this water will dwindle drastically, and may finally force a good percentage of these billions of people to migrate elsewhere — I have heard that the Chinese are already looking for land in Africa. However, they better not migrate to most of the world’s largest cities (New York City and Miami are two) — these cities are built very near sea level and people now living in them will be migrating also — we got a taste of that during the coastal flooding from Hurricane Sandy. If you’ll pardon the expression, Hurricane Sandy was just the tip of the iceberg. We have recently seen the stress that migration of about a million people is causing — multiply that a thousand times, to a billion …
In conclusion, a little on the psychology. Its simple in the ultimate — nobody, including me, likes to have their party rained on. With gas below $2 per gallon, it’s the biggest party humanity has ever had … but wait till we feel the hangover. We must transition out of fossil fuels. We won’t see it, but our grandkids will be living when this horror gets really bad. Renewables can’t handle it by themselves, and a growing number don’t want them to. Even with renewables only supplying a small percentage of our energy, there is a lot of push-back. If renewables supplied all of our energy, Vermont would look like an overdone Christmas tree, it would take too long to do it, and the cost of energy would be too high — most renewables are subsidized. Even Hydro-Quebec has drawbacks — there’s significant energy loss and risk in long-distance transmission.
There’s a fast, business-like and business-friendly solution — Vermont and America should emulate the Thorcon-Indonesia Consortium — sign a memorandum of understanding with Martingale to buy Thorcons. Put them out behind Vermont’s electric substations and hook right into the existing grid. No more risk from ice storms and cyber attacks.They won’t clutter up ridge lines, and they are completely buried. Then go national — have Bernie, in the Oval Office, hire Donald to make golf courses over all of America’s Thorcons – he’ll need the work and cut us a good deal.
