Laugh? I could have cried......

Where was I? Oh yes, Mother N.

I've drifted toward a very 'Lovelockian' view of how our planet and how She regulates herself. Stability and balance appear to be the short term aims of the system with only the longer view showing us just how varied a place it really is.

Our plants and animals seem to reflect this in their evolution. They will change to better fit a new environment but only over time. This adaptation has come about so as to suit the way the planet changes. When change is too fast then the plant/animal fails to adapt quickly enough and becomes extinct (either in that region or across the planet).

To enable this 'short term stability' Mother N. has developed a knack for soaking up change.....to a point. It reminds me of the first law of physics I ever learned, Hooke's Law, " The extension of a spring is directly proportional to the applied load...up until a point... that point being it's 'elastic limit'..." .I see Mother N. working in the same way but instead of having 'Elastic Limit's ' we have 'Tipping Points'. She Beavers away trying to keep things the way they were but if the forcing is all in one direction eventually She will say " Damn it!" and things will lurch upward to a new point of rest. Balance, after all, is the application of the least amount of effort to remain at rest.

What I see in Climate Change is a small ( but growing) forcing in one constant direction. Mother Nature will try and stomp on that forcing ( by her natural Forcing's and feedback's) but eventually she will concede defeat and Climate will, in an instant, switch up to the next closest 'balance point'.

The first of these major Tipping points has been reached and it is only a matter of time before we see a rapid , global, climate shift to a new rest point.

The trigger has not been our puny little GHG forcing but what that forcing has achieved over it's lifetime.

Take a chunk of land and cover it in ice. Over 90% of the energy hitting the land/ice gets bounced straight back into space. Remove the ice and the chunk of land soaks up over 80% of that energy and re-emits it back into the atmosphere above as infra red energy. That is a big change in an energy budget. A jump from 10% to over 80% in just one season.

This is what we are now seeing occur across the Arctic. Archaeologists are having a boon time as ice/snow patches melt away revealing relics from as far back as the end of the last ice age. Perfectly preserved for thousands of years in Mother N.'s fridge they are only now being defrosted as lands once ice/snow covered become bare earth. even the Ocean, once sealed in ice tens of metres thick is now seeing the light of day. We have to also realise that over summer the 'light of day' is 24hrs long there and amounts to a bigger chunk of incoming energy than is received at the equator.

A big change is underway and I fear that mother N. is about to say " hang it all!" and flip up to the next 'stable' place for global climate.

But what then?

Well remember that dormant portion of our Carbon cycle? It's day has come!

Should we have reached this 'Tipping Point' then no matter what we do with future emissions Mother N. is going to release the amount of carbon that used to form our carbon cycle the last time we saw such global temps. Put it another way. We sat at 280ppm CO2 for the longest of times. now we have raised that level to 400ppm CO2. Slowly temps will rise to match this level ( last seen many thousands of years ago with much higher sea levels due to much less land ice) . Much less land ice means 2/3rd's of Greenland's ice and all of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Below this ice lies the old remnants of the portion of the Carbon cycle that kept the planet warm enough to see so little ice around.

So below this ice and locked in the permafrost lies at least 120ppm  of CO2 waiting to rejoin the carbon cycle.

Even if we only see half this amount flood back into the system atmospheric CO2 will  breach another important climate threshold.

 35 Million years ago Global CO2 levels dropped below 450ppm. This saw the start of the glaciation of Antarctica. surely if CO2 levels go over 450ppm the reverse will begin to occur? Surely this will then liberate the portion of the carbon Cycle now dormant below East Antarctica's vast ice sheets?

And then what?.............