Keep it in the ground! We’ve all heard that advice, and largely approve. Mechanically speaking, nothing could be easier. The wonderful thing about fossil fuel products is that when kept in the ground they are almost perfectly safe, that is, the carbon should never be able to come out and link up with oxygen to make CO2. Nature actually did us a big favor by processing all of that carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it away in the first place, which nicely cooled the climate for many new life forms to develop, so let’s be thankful for fossil fuels. We should also mention how peat bogs and limestone and a few other things helped create and contain a cooling trend when times were too hot.
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It seems that when Nature gets on a roll it doesn’t know how to quit. Making the climate cooler eventually opened the door for permafrost to be rolled out in the far, far North. Permafrost could easily see to it that still more carbon was taken out of the air, via gobbling up dead plant matter, which cooled things enough for permafrost to go ahead and expand in a southerly way, for yet more cooling. As the permafrost base broadened and got more solid it created a stable platform upon which snows in the lowlands could stay put in the summer and gradually build up into glaciers. All that snow and ice, in turn, reflected away the local sunlight, which of course made things still cooler, thus allowing the permafrost to expand even further to the south, while gobbling up yet more plant matter and dragging the band of year-around snow and glaciers along from behind.
This equivalent of a “perfect storm” did its job well, maybe even a bit too well, as the planet was soon getting very, very cold and not too comfortable for life. Luckily there was a stop button. When the permafrost with its snow and ice consortium got too far south they had to contend with ever-stronger rays from the sun, and then that fellow named Milankovitch came along and spoiled the party. He tilted the Earth in ways that gave them still more sun, forcing the permafrost and its companions to back off a bit. (This actually happened many times, but there was always a way for the trend to pick up again and keep going deeper, until final limits were exposed.)
While this was going on it was found out that all the carbon being stored by the permafrost along the way was never securely locked up. Out on the edges, whenever dead plant matter got warm enough it would provide a meal for hungry microbes, who would then proceed to release carbon gases back into the atmosphere. As a consequence the whole process could start to reverse itself, with everything moving north again, but only up to a point. We’ve recently experienced such a point, with temperatures about half way between the original starting point and the final low. Most of the lowland glaciers are gone but a good portion of the permafrost, being buried at depth beneath a shallow layer of soil that acts as an insulator, has managed to hang on. There would have to be a great deal of extra heat applied in order to warm it up and pry it loose, and there just hasn’t been enough direct sun in the upper latitudes to perform such a task.. So where in the world would the needed amount of extra heat come from? I guess we now know.
In telling this story I have left out more than a few details, but think it captures the main theme of what has been going on in the Northern Hemisphere over the last five or six million years. We would surely like to keep the remaining permafrost carbon in the ground, but I can’t think of any way to do it, because of all the extra heat that is now firmly in place and showing results. There is enough of that carbon available to add a whole lot more warmth that can then act as further reinforcement. The same heat is also taking care of some unfinished business on the glacial side, including the big one in Antarctica. Perhaps we can slow this process down a bit by not continuing to add more and more heat from fossil fuels, which could give us a little extra time to dream up some clever new remedial technologies.
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Just three new stories today. This first one represents just the kind of thing we have to be looking for:
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A quick update on severe western wildfires that are being squeezed out of the news by too many hurricanes:
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A warning about future heat stress for people living in cities: