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A new study came out Thursday warning that even if we stop emitting carbon dioxide, the world has reached the “tipping point” for climate change. The paper says the reason is that Arctic permafrost – carbon-rich, permanently frozen land made of rocks, water and dead wildlife – is irreversibly melting and could continue to warm the planet for centuries by releasing carbon dioxide. Terrifying, right?
The only solution, the authors indicate, is to suck carbon out of the air by capturing carbon, which has not yet been proven to work on a large scale, or to use even more dangerous geoengineering technologies. The study’s findings and conclusions have been extensively covered and a little winded, but here’s the thing: the analysis has some big problems.
“To be fair, the document is crap that shouldn’t have passed any competent peer review,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist and energy systems analyst. “It’s an interesting thought experiment, but its results should be taken with extreme skepticism until more complex models of the Earth System produce similar results.”
The problems with the study begin with the title, which refers to the “melting of permafrost”. This is a red flag because, as Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist who heads the Arctic and Alpine Research Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder, observed, permafrost melts instead of melting.
“The pockets of ice stored here and there within the permafrost can melt,” he said. “But these are very distinct processes.” The distinction, she said, makes her think researchers don’t really know what permafrost is.
Even before entering the body of the study, the accredited authors made me raise my eyebrows. They are not climate scientists, they are business school professors. And it shows in the relationship, because their model is simplistic. Climate researchers have spent decades building models that take into account the complexities of climate. More complex models, for example, better illustrate ocean circulation patterns, which can have a large effect on long-term warming. They also more accurately show the amount of water vapor present in the atmosphere, which is a short-lived but common natural source of heating. The new card model lacks a lot of this.
“It doesn’t explicitly include things like the large-scale movement of air and water in the atmosphere and ocean,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The new report also overestimates water vapor concentrations, which causes the model to become unusually hot. Yet another major flaw in the model also overestimates the warming potential of methane emissions. The authors claim that methane will be the main driver of future temperature increases, but by doing so, they exaggerate the temperature increase that the concentrations of methane in their model could produce.
The more advanced models, Marvel said, are “more tied to reality” in their illustrations of water vapor concentrations and the timeline where Arctic ice is melting and permafrost is melting. This allows them to provide a more accurate picture of how and when these changes could create feedback loops where melting and thawing release more greenhouse gases and thus warm the planet. Because of these inaccuracies, the oversimplified model misrepresents how much warming we would really see if we immediately cut our emissions.
“Modern complex models of the Earth system generally show minimal expected future warming after zero emissions, even taking into account our best estimate of future permafrost melting,” said Hausfather.
Specifically, the new report stands in stark contrast to the most recent findings from the United Nations and European Union’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Geosciences.
“People miss it being a simple model created by non-experts,” he said. “I’m also worried that there is some bias to cover it, given its alleged dramatic findings.”
He noted that a 2019 meta-analysis of 18 models of the Earth system, in fact, found that the immediate stop of greenhouse gas emissions wanted drastically limiting warming, but received far less coverage than the new document.
To be clear, no climate expert argues that heating the feedback loops isn’t a problem or that thawing permafrost releases methane. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take action to rapidly reduce emissions. But Marvel said that by focusing on greenhouse gases from Arctic soil thaw, the authors’ suggestions for the future are all wrong.
“I want to be clear: thawing permafrost risks causing a sharp increase in atmospheric concentrations of methane. And methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. But methane concentrations are increasing dramatically right now, and it’s not because of the permafrost, “he said.” It’s because of the oil and gas industry and large-scale agriculture. “
It may be predictable to say, but it turns out we need to cut our carbon emissions and eliminate oil and gas immediately. It will not be easy to push through the necessary changes. As a groundbreaking 2018 IPCC report states, they will require “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” But the alternative is much worse, even without the fear of permafrost methane.
“If we can bring our emissions completely to zero, the decrease in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will more than offset any future additional emissions from the melting of permafrost,” said Hausfather.
Editor’s Note: The release dates within this article are based in the United States, but will be updated with local Australian dates as we know more.
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