Hi Peter and all,

"If the methane emissions are not stopped obviously total planetary climate runaway catastrophe is inevitable."
With respect, would you read my post from July 16 (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=CRISIS-FORUM;ce7d421.1207) and answer some of the questions there? As I said back then, I don't doubt that Arctic methane is indeed a nasty problem that is very likely to exacerbate an already potentially overwhelming unfolding climate catastrophe by ensuring elevated methane levels (and contributing to rising CO2 levels), but I haven't yet seen a credible geophysical mechanism capable of delivering thawing methane to the atmosphere fast enough for a methane spike.

"The loss of Arctic summer sea ice albedo has already been projected in the published science to lead to increased Northern hemisphere drought together with the increased climate variability and other extreme events."
Can you point to the literature linking NH drought with Arctic sea ice albido? Is this the idea that declining sea ice contributes to a higher amplitude of jet stream waviness and thence to a higher likelihood of loops getting "stuck" (blocking event)?

"global climate food security catastrophe is here-  ultimate human crisis."
The food security catastrophe has been here for decades and longer for many in Africa, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and other regions with a combination of extreme poverty and ineffective governance. Climate change is indeed a serious threat to food security, though the picture is complex as it also involves other important factors such as biofuels policy, agricultural subsidies, water stress, market speculation, government corruption, global inequality and much else besides. The supermarkets of Iowa are not going to have empty shelves as a result of this drought, but it is indeed a very worrying continuation of disturbing trends and a further illustration of the kinds of threats that are likely to worsen in the absence of major structural improvements of various kinds.

The point is that while climate change is a key threat multiplier and has a very insidious temporal lag rendering it too slow to match the horizons of political and business leaders but too fast to be comfortably ignored, it is not the only problem here. Disasters such as droughts, floods, famines and fires are hugely complex interactions of ecological, climatological, (geo)political, social, cultural and economic systems. 

"Because this drought is the result of the Arctic albedo loss feedback caused by global warming and the albedo loss is only going to get worse every summer we can only expect the drought to get worse."
In general, over the long term globally, this is likely true. But does this mean that next year the US will experience worse drought than this year? I don't think we have much reason to expect that with a particularly high degree of confidence, not least because we are apparently heading into El Niño conditions. So we'd expect wetter than average Americas and drier than average Australia (speaking very simplistically), and higher than average global temps (i.e. higher than the underlying trend). It's important to note that the fact that we are rolling more high numbers (and some incredibly high numbers previously unexperienced), doesn't mean that there are not still weather dice to be rolled or that low numbers might not still pop up. I found this discussion and extrapolation of the "climate dice" analogy to be particularly useful. http://planet3.org/2012/07/20/craps/

"It's going get worse in any case because it's happening in today's global warming of 0.8° C and where absolutely committed to 3 times this warming- I make it a definite fourfold increase."
It's important to distinguish between commitments in geophysical and political/economic/infrastructural senses. While it is true that thermal inertia of the oceans means we are geophysically committed to something like another 0.6ºC and while our mild unwitting solar radiation management in the form of aerosols from forest fires, wood stoves and un(der)regulated coal plants (esp in the emerging Asian economies) is possibly masking up to another 1ºC more (estimates on this vary quite a bit), these commitments are very different from the inertia in our human systems. Such inertia can take the form of sunk costs. Once a piece of infrastructure is built, it is unlikely to be "stranded" (retired early before its economic return has been maximised) and so the IEA has warned that by 2017 on our current trajectory, the infrastructure will be in place to ensure that - once it is used to continue emissions over the next five or six decades - we breeze past 2ºC. There is also political inertia, such that policy changes require a cycle of elections, mandates, debates, lobbying, legislating and implementing that can last years.

Yet let us note that the thermal inertia of the oceans is different in kind to the solar masking from aerosols. Thermal inertia is heat energy already in the oceans that has yet to work its way into the atmosphere and will do so basically whatever we do. Solar masking is an (uncontrolled and already massively dangerous) form of proto-geoengineering that can mask further risks for as long as it is continued. Unfortunately, the current costs of doing so include the respiratory health of billions of people (esp in Asia). The costs to the public health budgets of major populations are estimated to run easily into the trillions annually. This proto-geoengineering is shortening and worsening the lives of millions and millions of people.

It is worth noting that the dangers to respiratory health are largely due to (a) the fact that the a significant amount of the smallest of particles (PM 2.5) occur at ground level where they lodge in lungs and (b) the various toxins (mercury, etc.) released by coal and biomass combustion and so the kind of deliberate solar radiation management proposed by some on this list would not have these effects (though it may well have a variety of others: tropospheric ozone depletion, disruption of the hydrological cycle and acid rain being three of the most serious known unknowns). If either our inadvertent or later deliberate solar radiation management programmes were ever to be interrupted (deliberately or otherwise), models suggest that the masked warming would appear with great and potentially devastating rapidity. This is not a mask we can take off easily or quickly.

Furthermore, and even more importantly, both these forms of geophysical inertia are very different in kind to the various forms of inertia in the human systems. Human systems do not usually change overnight and so cultural, economic and political changes are slow. But they can. The usual example given is the transformation of the culture, economy and politics of allied nations during WWII, virtually overnight. Within a couple of years of the invasion of Poland, the UK had implemented widespread rationing, had a unity government and devoted vast quantities of economic output to the war effort, all without major civil unrest. After Pearl Habor, US manufacturers stopped making cars altogether, and within weeks were building tanks, boats and planes on a scale never before seen in human history.

Obviously, there are some big differences between the threats posed by National Socialism/Japanese imperialism on the one hand and ecological/climate threats on the other. The former are visible, concrete, located, immediate, personal and easily imagined. The latter are cumulative, disparate, largely invisible (appearing only in the graphs of aggregate data compiled over vast distances and long time periods), impersonal, global and with much more complex indirect causal paths. And so cultivating sufficient political will to fight Hitler is a different kettle of fish to cultivating sufficient political will to leave at least 80% of our fossil fuel reserves in the ground while cutting consumption in rich nations to a fraction of present levels and building a new cleaner infrastructural base while developing resilience to already committed impacts and undertaking massive reforestation (and perhaps other forms of carbon sequestration - I'll let readers add solar radiation management to taste...). I'm not pretending this is either easy or likely (not least given the kind of spiritual and psychological insights outlined by Prof Macintosh in his excellent book), simply pointing out that it is technically possible in a way that stopping the thermal lag of the oceans is not. Technically possible, just politically impossible. Faced with a geophysical impossibility and a political impossibility, I know which impossibility I'd like to tackle, even if the chances of success are slim.

Grace & peace,
Byron Smith

PhD candidate in moral theology
University of Edinburgh