A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

September 9th 2012

Shell Gets The Arctic Green Light & Melting Ice Paves The Way For Offshore Madness

What a summer we’ve had eh, not just here in the UK where it was terrible, but globally; a season where weather went mad and Arctic ice caps took a long-awaited vacation from their comfy ocean abodes, whisked into the atmosphere by a warming world and natural craziness that literally none of us saw coming. Considering the summer isn’t actually even over yet, the impact of these factors is made all the more potent, and is much of the reason for such fervour in the media over drought, floods and food prices. What next?

Well for one thing, more ignorant foolishness is on the horizon, in the form of offshore drilling, perhaps the most lucrative and most idiotic fossil fuel resource we [apparently] have easy access to. Whose leading the revolution at sea? Why Shell of course, with backing by the American Interior and Obama’s government.

As we all have undoubtedly heard via the blaring sirens of the news outlets and internet aggregators, summer Arctic ice hit some pretty fancy milestones last month; let’s go over them quickly to put this post into context.

The level of melt reached its peak last August, on the 26th, falling to levels not seen for 30 years of recording, and a full 3-4 weeks before the usual point at which summer temperatures drive the highest reductions in ice, around mid-September. Not only was this melt way off the charts in terms of rapidity and severity, but it has now been touted as a rate so ‘amazing’ that it is considered by Dr Hansen, the famed climate scientist, to be unprecedented in scale in at least as much as 1,500 years, let alone 30, and that we as polluters should be trembling in our boots.

Carrying on with this theme, Hansen recently released a video detailing data for Northern Hemisphere average temperatures, where he compares 1951-1980 ranges to 2000-2011 records, and there’s an obvious contrast. The most common peak temperatures are a whole standard deviation away from the 1951-1980 means, and altogether the data shows deviations of up to 5 towards warmer temperatures, effectively stating that as we’ve progressed as a society, the past decade has seen more N Hemisphere warming than the whole 30 year period studied prior. It’s not a huge leap of logic to see that these massively pumped up temperatures, only set to increase, are likely responsible for most, if not all of the accelerated ice-melt being experienced in the Arctic.

How Long Will We Continue Denying Climate Change’s Link To Weather?

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There’s no denying the weather has been really quite screwed up of late, and this isn’t just on a local scale but a global one, affecting small and large nations alike.

Currently, large parts of SE Asia such as Beijing and Japan are suffering horrendous flooding after record-breaking precipitation falls for weeks on end, and there have been similar historical rains in many areas of Europe, the UK in particular. Alongside this, intense drought and insolation has been baking most of the entire United States for weeks, severely damaging crops across the agricultural belt of the continent and knocking food prices up globally, stirring fears of yet another food crisis if the weather is to continue.

Storms and hurricanes are of much higher magnitudes, striking with little warning to those in their paths, and regions of the globe so comfortably used to heavy snowfall and consistently cold winters are enduring some of the driest, mildest and frankly oddest seasonal variations seen in decades, perhaps centuries.

One theme slashes through all of these freak events like a warm knife through butter; the frequency and rapidity in which our weather systems are flipping from one extreme to the other is unprecedented in this day and age, and wouldn’t even fit into normal life some centuries past. Torrential rain which may have sat in place for weeks will be abruptly interrupted by beaming sunshine and glass-clear skies for yet more weeks, before thunderstorms and intense winds complete the freaky cycle. The fact these events are occurring within the same month, let alone the same season is reason to worry enough, and in many parts of the world, many are winning gold medals in trumping historical weather readings from as far back as records began.

Only recently NASA has posted studies demonstrating how far this weather screwing has gone. At some point during mid-July, the Greenland ice sheet, one of two major ice bodies on the Earth’s surface, the other being the Antarctic, experienced thawing of up to 97% of the entire ice mass, that’s 97%. For context, normal values read around 50% for the same time of year. This happens due to warming of and melting of the much thinner coastal ice and glaciers as summer comes round, and despite rates increasing steadily over recent decades, this year more than ever data fly through the roof. What makes this event so shocking, is that the normally impregnable central ice, which exceeds two miles thick in many places, melted just like any other part of the sheet, albeit to much shallower depths.

This scared scientists and followers alike as it not only flags up warnings in regards to future sea level rise and glacier loss, but such injections of fresh water can set up yet more complex and potentially devastating feedbacks in the ocean-atmosphere system, making things exponentially worse. Although much of the central meltwater will refreeze before long, it shows clear signs that the extreme weather we’ve been seeing can and potentially is having a direct effect on ice sheets globally, and the results can be incredibly quick and powerful. After further study, it’s suggested some 70% or more, perhaps even 95% of the melting can be attributed to climate warming and it’s associated impacts on weather systems.

However, it is necessary to note that this sort of abnormal melting does seem to occur in 150 year cycles, with the last in 1889, and therefore some of the alarming data can be tempered with this in mind, but this should not take away from a few key points. The fact that this sheet has experienced melt like this in the past, when man-made warming could not have been in effect, is important, but not absolute; if we see this melting occurring more commonly over the next few years, we’re seeing clear signs of breaking the natural flow of things. Even if we don’t, it’s a stark reminder of what could easily happen to the ice sheets globally if we continue to pump GHGs into the atmosphere. To ignore this, natural or not, would surely be foolish?

Sustainable Use Of Arctic Fossil Fuels & Getting Norway On Our Side

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A recent deal was struck between the UK and Norway detailing the future plans for energy supply and security in both nations, a smart move considering that Norway supplies over a quarter of our entire energy needs, yes, our entire needs, and keeping them on our good side will suit us well come the inevitable throttling back on fossil fuel supply.

However, veiled beneath this seemingly uncharacteristically farsighted decision is a deceptively evil motive. At the very heart of the entire agreement lies a single key set of words; ‘sustainable use of the Arctic and it’s energy resources’. Now, to anybody who knows just an atom of stuff on the Arctic, its energy resources, and its current state in the global climate, you will instantly take umbrage and offence to this claim.

This, to me at least, is the crux of it. The Arctic is melting at a faster rate than nature has experienced for hundreds of thousands of years, with plenty of evidence for these rates increasing, and with this melt comes some interesting things. As land previously covered in ice is revealed and permafrost, bogs and peatland warm up, the number of oil, coal and gas reserves generated by millennia of pressure, will skyrocket.

So, when someone says they’re motive is to ‘sustainably utilise’ these fossil fuel resources, of which are no doubt being revealed at an accelerated rate due to burning of the very same things, alarm bells instantly begin ringing in my head. Sustainable, fossil fuels, and a melting Arctic just shouldn’t be in the same sentence, let alone the same room.

This agreement is also seen by many as opening the door to multiple large and powerful fossil fuel companies and drilling conglomerates to milk the UK and it’s money to finance their moves into this warming gold mine, or should that be oil mine (?), until every last drop is drunk and the climate soars over 2-3˚C. Why this may seem slightly premature, theres plenty of evidence to suggest that Norwegian fuel giants will have no qualms in pushing us Brits and Cameron around when it comes to crunch time.

Statoil, a Norwegian behemoth of fossil fuel supply has known to have threatened the UK in the past, warning that there ‘are other place we can sell our gas to aside from the UK’. What’s worrying is that Norway has this very power in its hands if wishes to wield it in the future, as not only are the Northern European nations of Scandinavia and further doing very well economically, politically and socially, but providing over 1/4 of our energy gives them one hell of a noose to tighten.