It Has Been a Very, Very Bad Week for Climate Change

Wherever you are in the U.S, you’re likely experiencing extreme heat, wildfires, or drought. As of Aug. 3, 40 percent of the U.S. was under drought conditions, and 2021 is looking like it may end up being one of the driest years in a millennium. And, as of today, the wildfires have burned 2,063,146 acres of land.

But while that’s bad news, here’s the really bad news.

A major ocean current system that brings warm, salty surface waters toward the northern Atlantic may be headed for a collapse.

If this critical system falls apart, that will mean extreme cold in Europe and North America, and a rise in sea levels in the coastal Northeast. Some researchers believe that increased sea levels “will lead to significant elevation increases in storm surges by at least 2050 at all locations in the region.” They point to Boston and Atlantic City, N.J., in particular as most likely to be flooded.

Think of the ocean current system like a conveyer belt: While warm waters go north, they push colder waters down deep to travel south, where they will again be warmed and sent north, distributing heat across the planet.

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the current system “may have evolved from relatively stable conditions to a point close to a critical transition.”

But wait, as Ron Popeil always said, there’s more.

Last week saw a “massive melting event” in Greenland after a bad heat wave. The Danish group Polar Portal said that the new 41 gigatons of meltwater is enough to soak Florida in two inches of water.

Reuters reported that this was the third-biggest ice loss in Greenland on a single day since 1950. The other two records were set also in the last decade.

The country’s ice sheet is the second largest in the world, after Antarctica’s. Scientists have estimated that the melting of Greenland’s ice “has caused around 25 percent of global sea level rise seen over the last few decades,” Reuters said.

“Even if we stopped all emission of greenhouse gases today, the sea level would continue to rise for the next several hundreds of years,” Martin Stendel, a climate researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, told The Washington Post.

So now we have the combination of the melting ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica as well as the scary possibility that the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean will be disrupted enough to also cause a rise in sea level.

But the week’s news is not done with us yet.

Apparently, there’s something called a “methane bomb” we also have to worry about.

European geologists have suggested in a new study that, as Siberia’s wetlands permafrost is melting, methane is being released from formerly frozen ground in the form of microbial methane, but also in the form of thermogenic methane, which comes from limestone thawing in and under the permafrost. The geologists believe the thermogenic methane is being released “potentially in much higher amounts” than the microbial kind.

“As a result, the permafrost–methane feedback may be much more dangerous than suggested by studies accounting for microbial methane alone,” the study authors wrote.

The geologists said that a heat wave in 2020 led to a surge in these gas emissions. Methane warms the Earth “about 30 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide,” according to a study published in Science Daily.

In non-warming times, “the frozen permafrost acts as a cap, sealing methane below," Stephen Mufson wrote in The Post. "It also can lock up gas hydrates, which are crystalline solids of frozen water that contain huge amounts of methane. Unstable at normal sea-level pressure and temperatures, gas hydrates can be dangerously explosive as temperatures rise.”

So, to sum up: greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere, which then melts our massive ice sheets, which then causes sea level to rise, inundating cities — and making life on Earth ever more inhabitable.