WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW CAN KILL YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN!

WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW CAN KILL YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN - Hidden Heat and Arctic Ice Death Spiral


[The Europeans have a green masterplan, while America, quagmired in the black oil economy, has none.]


[China has taken the lead in green technology innovation, while "American ingenuity" has been stifled by the Big Oil lobby]

What almost no American knows is Latent Heat (Hidden Heat), and when Latent Heat becomes Sensible Heat, it can eventually cause the disintegration of human civilization and the extinction of up to 85% of all species on Earth, including our own.


[Big Oil has spent $250 million in waging its Global-Warming-Denial campaign, dumbing down Americans in a matter of life and death]

Let me give one quick example. Fill a pot with ice water, containing 1 kg (2.2 lb) of ice cubes. Stir it with a thermometer, and it will read 0C/32F. Now put the pot on a stove and turn on the heat.

Question: When will the water begin to warm up?

Answer: After all the ice has melted. It takes 80 calories of heat to melt one gram of ice WITHOUT RAISING THE WATER TEMPERATURE. It take 80,000 calories to melt the 1 kg of ice cubes without raising the water temperature by one degree. After the ice has all melted, on the other hand, the water temperature will rise rapidly to the boiling point.



This is a small scale demonstration of the real thing: the Arctic Ocean. As long as there is sea ice remaining in the Arctic Ocean left to melt, the water temperature will remain relatively cool. But once the sea ice is gone, its temperature will rise, and rise rapidly. It is estimated that the Arctic Ocean will be ice free in the summer some time within this coming decade.


[Massive melting of land glaciers worldwide, including the 2000 in the Himalayas, which feed 8 major Asian rivers, which in turn feed 3 billion people in China, India and SE Asia]

The resulting sudden rise in Arctic Ocean temperature will cause a 2-stage devastation:


[Due to global warming, there is 5% more water in the atmosphere than previously, but the warmer air can hold 20% more water before saturation, thus leading to a progressive decline in the global relative humidity]

1. the global Millennium Drought, which will cause severe food shortages in diverse places, including even homeland America, and massive famine in the driest of densely populated regions, and



2. the detonation of the Methane Time Bomb, leading to Runaway Global Heating, which can raise the global temperature by some 15C/24F, causing the mass extinction of up to 85% of all species on Earth within 2 centuries, as it once did 251 million years ago in the End-Permian Mass Extinction cause indeed by global heating.

For more details, please watch the two video below, the first a 30-minute interview of Anthony Marr by WGCH radio:

Anthony Marr on WGCH radio, Greenwich CT, Aug 2, 2010 from Anthony Marr on Vimeo.

And the second, a 70-minute speech by Anthony Marr on the subject:


[Anthony Marr's lecture at the Round Hill Community Church Center, Greenwich, CT, on August 5, 2010 - in HD-video

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http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52896

Arctic Ice in Death Spiral
By Stephen Leahy


UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 20, 2010 (IPS) - The carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have melted the Arctic sea ice to its lowest volume since before the rise of human civilisation, dangerously upsetting the energy balance of the entire planet, climate scientists are reporting.

"The Arctic sea ice has reached its four lowest summer extents (area covered) in the last four years," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado.

The volume - extent and thickness - of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month, Serreze told IPS.

"I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It's not going to recover," he said.

There can be no recovery because tremendous amounts of extra heat are added every summer to the region as more than 2.5 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean have been opened up to the heat of the 24-hour summer sun. A warmer Arctic Ocean not only takes much longer to re-freeze, it emits huge volumes of additional heat energy into the atmosphere, disrupting the weather patterns of the northern hemisphere, scientists have now confirmed.

"The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic," James Overland of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States told IPS in Oslo, Norway last June in an exclusive interview. ' Paradoxically, a warmer Arctic means "future cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception" in these regions, Overland told IPS.

There is growing evidence of widespread impacts from a warmer Arctic, agreed Serreze. "Trapping all that additional heat has to have impacts and those will grow in the future," he said.

One local impact underway is a rapid warming of the coastal regions of the Arctic, where average temperatures are now three to five degrees C warmer than they were 30 years ago. If the global average temperature increases from the present 0.8 C to two degrees C, as seems likely, the entire Arctic region will warm at least four to six degrees and possibly eight degrees due to a series of processes and feedbacks called Arctic amplification.

A similar feverish rise in our body temperatures would put us in hospital if it didn't kill us outright.

"I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic," Serreze said.

If the Arctic becomes six degrees warmer, then half of the world's permafrost will likely thaw, probably to a depth of a few metres, releasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated there over thousands of years, said Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost.

Methane is a global warming gas approximately 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2).

That would be catastrophic for human civilisation, experts agree. The permafrost region spans 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe and contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere – 1,672 gigatonnes of carbon, according a paper published in Nature in 2009. That's three times more carbon than all of the worlds' forests contain.

"Permafrost thawing has been observed consistently across the entire region since the 1980s," Romanovsky said in an interview.

A Canadian study in 2009 documented that the southernmost permafrost limit had retreated 130 kilometres over the past 50 years in Quebec’s James Bay region. At the northern edge, for the first time in a decade, the heat from the Arctic Ocean pushed far inland this summer, Romanovsky said.

There are no good estimates of how much CO2 and methane is being released by the thawing permafrost or by the undersea permafrost that acts as a cap over unknown quantities of methane hydrates (a type of frozen methane) along the Arctic Ocean shelf, he said.

"Methane is always there anywhere you drill through the permafrost," Romanovsky noted.

Last spring , Romanovsky's colleagues reported that an estimated eight million tonnes of methane emissions are bubbling to the surface from the shallow East Siberian Arctic shelf every year in what were the first-ever measurements taken there. If just one percent of the Arctic undersea methane reaches the atmosphere, it could quadruple the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere.

Abrupt releases of large amounts of CO2 and methane are certainly possible on a scale of decades, he said. The present relatively slow thaw of the permafrost could rapidly accelerate in a few decades, releasing huge amounts of global warming gases.

Another permafrost expert, Ted Schuur of the University of Florida, has come to the same conclusion. "In a matter of decades we could lose much of the permafrost," Shuur told IPS.

Those losses are more likely to come rapidly and upfront, he says. In other words, much of the permafrost thaw would happen at the beginning of a massive 50-year meltdown because of rapid feedbacks.

Emissions of CO2 and methane from thawing permafrost are not yet factored into the global climate models and it will be several years before this can be done reasonably well, Shuur said.

"Current mitigation targets are only based on anthropogenic (human) emissions," he explained.

Present pledges by governments to reduce emissions will still result in a global average temperature increase of 3.5 to 3.9 C by 2100, according to the latest analysis. That would result in an Arctic that's 10 to 16 degrees C warmer, releasing most of the permafrost carbon and methane and unknown quantities of methane hydrates.

This why some climate scientists are calling for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, recommending that fossil fuel emissions peak by 2015 and decline three per cent per year. But even then there's still a 50-percent probability of exceeding two degrees C current studies show. If the emissions peak is delayed until 2025, then global temperatures will rise to three degrees C, the Arctic will be eight to 10 degrees warmer and the world will lose most its permafrost.

Meanwhile, a new generation of low-cost, thin-film solar roof and outside wall coverings being made today has the potential to eliminate burning coal and oil to generate electricity, energy experts believe – if governments have the political will to fully embrace green technologies.

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Anthony Marr, Founder and President
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
Global Anti-Hunting Coalition (GAHC)
Anthony-Marr@HOPE-CARE.org
www.HOPE-CARE.org
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www.HomoSapiensSaveYourEarth.blogspot.com
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www.ARConference.org