Waking the Giant

[Derby Cimate Coalition]

Last Saturday I heard Bill Mcguire, Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, talk about how a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes.

Ironically he was speaking in the Cromford Mills in Derbyshire, ironically because it was here, as much as as anywhere, that the Industrial Revolution can be said to have started. It was here that Richard Arkwright proudly opened the worlds first factory nearly 250 years ago. 

 

Bill Mcguire was a member of the UK Government's Natural Hazards Working Group, established in 2005 in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and in 2010 a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), addressing the Icelandic ash problem. He is a contributing author on the 2011 IPCC Report on climate change and extreme events.

 

As a result of hearing him I bought his book, called Waking the Giant. He explains simply how climate change does fact affect the solid Earth and its natural hazards. Of course this does not mean every earthquake, tsunami, and volcano is caused by climate change.

 

In the process of unpacking his argument Bill looks at the history of the earth and its changes, and is unequivocally convincing and scary about climate change which is happening so fast, and is perhaps the most scary thing I have read about climate change to date. As geologist who deal with changes of millions of years his view point is somewhat different, but ever so dramatic,

 

.... even with the best will in the world modelling something as complex and interactive as the Earth's climate may simply never be able to provide us with an accurate picture of what our planet will look like SO or 100 years from now and beyond. As physicist Niels Bohr first and most famously observed, and many others have since reiterated, 'predicting is very difficult; especially about the future'. Maybe then, the best way to gauge the nature of the world to come is to look back rather than to project forward. Zeroing in on the post-glacial period, for example, reveals the many and varied ways in which a dramatically changing climate evoked a dynamic response from the crust beneath our feet, and might do so again. Delving further back in time, studies of previous occasions when carbon-dioxide-enriched atmospheres were the order of the day, may leave us far more enlightened about the conditions that increased greenhouse gas concentrations might bring than any number of computer projections.

 

Bill Mcguire is absolutely clear we are in the midst of a the most dramatic changes, His opening chapters summarise the twists and turns by the IPCC and for example he reminds us about the underplaying of facts by the IPCC Fourth Assessment report 2007:

 

that neither the potential break-up of the polar ice sheets nor possible feedback effects, such as massive methane release due to wholesale permafrost thawing. are adequately addressed in the Fourth Assessment Report. The explanation provided is that the science in respect of these and other mechanisms is not yet fully understood or is poorly con- strained. The hard-nosed perspective, however, has to be that an assessment that explicitly flagged up the potential ramifications of ice sheet collapse, massive methane exhalation across the Siberian tundra, and the failure of the oceans to any longer act as an effective sponge for our carbon pollution and heat, would have stood very little chance of seeing the light of day.

 

He reminds us the subsequent synthesis report (written before the Copenhagen talks in 2009):

flags up the longevity of anthropogenic climate change, reminding us that the consequences of our activities today will still be felt 50 generations and more down the line. Because of the enormous inertia in the climate system, even when (and if) anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to nothing, global temperatures will barely fall at all for at least a thousand years.

 

 

He suggests

 A common failing of human beings, both as individuals and collectively, is their apparent inability to imagine a world or a life any different from the one they are experiencing at any given time. Arguably, this is the greatest obstacle faced by climate scientists trying to make national governments, institutions, businesses, and people generally wake up and pay attention to the massive threat they face--to appreciate what an appalling impact unmitigated anthropogenic climate change is slated to have on our world and our descendants

 

So if you want to hear about the relationship between climate change in fact affect the solid Earth and its natural hazards buy his book, or see a video here.

 

The arguments are, indeed earth shattering. However the thing that has driven me to write up these notes is above all the assessment and review of where we are with climate change. I found the arguments overwhelmingly powerful. Again.