We Need Ice
crack me off a chunk
What Good Is All This
Depending upon your memory or circumstance, we can perhaps remember thinking aloud when we were in math class long ago. If your memory is not that good but has dealt with children, perhaps this is more recent.
(said with passion) : This math stuff is stupid, when am I ever going to use this?
I am excited by my shift to once-a-week posting! When I started writing it was EVERY DAY! I started out that way because I had little confidence that I could do this. I needed the repetitions. I feel differently now and am thankful that folks have stuck with me as I transitioned from 7X to 4X to 3X to 2X and now, FINALLY, to once a week. During that period, I just concentrated on writing for myself and finding stuff I really enjoy on Substack for entertainment and inspiration. I am now at the phase of this project where I look at the statistics a bit on my posts. The big surprise to me is the posts I REALLY LIKE are often the ones that folks TEND TO IGNORE a bit. What sometimes motivates me is some comment about some aspect of a post that I perhaps took for granted in a post. A while ago I wrote a fun to create post about the Netherlands and learning to live with nature. It had the unlikely title “Polders and the Zuider Zee”. I really LIKED that post but it seemed to be meh for most of you. One of my readers commented about the unlikely factor of flooding being due to the geometry of the ocean floor. I think for many, geometry might have been that moment in middle school or high school when many might say “when am I going to use this?”. Here’s the old post if you want another shot. Today, the geometry of the floor of the ocean below Antarctica turns out to be important to all of us, especially if we like to vacation or live near the coast.
Time for Feedback
The word feedback has drifted to become a corporate word. When I was in school, one of my favorite classes (queue the laughter) was “Control System Theory”. Analog and now digital control systems for making all kinds of stuff have been with us in the modern world for a bit more than 100 years. A long while back, before we sold our home, our water heater “broke”. Being the cheapskate I am, this was merely an opportunity to repair rather than replace. Shortly thereafter, the time had come to upgrade one of our rentals to a modern thermostat that could be programmed. The original mercury thermometer is now considered a hazardous waste event to dispose of safely and properly. In both cases, I was still in the early days of posting. I wrote a post about each of them. They are provided if you have the time and inclination for a diversion. Both of these, at some level, is about “feedback”.
Life is Short, be Comfortable — all about thermostats
Some Like it Hot — water heaters
Why Are We Talking About Feedback?
When it comes to my posts, one day it is football, the next time it is errands and the next might be about amino acids and DNA recipes. A kind subscriber describes my topics as “eclectic” but when I look back at them in context, they sometimes appear a bit random. I am thankful that a growing number of you seem to enjoy them. Today our topic is the wonderful word feedback that I learned about a long time ago in “Control System Theory (CST)”. It turns out our thermostats and our water heaters are very basic examples of feedback controllers. We pick how cold or hot we want something and a bit of electronic wizardry we rarely think of turns on the furnace or water heater automatically to keep things just right.
When Feedback Fails
One of the most fascinating things about CST is we learned about the challenges of when certain systems make them VERY DIFFICULT to control. Most of this is about feedback. Some of the world’s best scientists have been hard at work for about five decades trying to understand the ongoing changes to our climate. What we learned in CST way back then for me still applies. We can only control things in a pretty narrow band. Once other things start changing it is common for control systems to fail and be overwhelmed by the feedback and overshoot. The math is rather cold-hearted and just advises when something ceases to be controllable. This is when the pilot turns on the fasten seatbelt sign. When this happens it is time for “Katie bar the door” if such simple choices are not available. For simple devices like thermostats and heaters, this is pretty easy. That is because we only have to react to the change in temperature of the air or the water. When only one thing is changing, we call that one degree of freedom.
Global Sea Rise & Feedback
Some of the best minds in the world have been warning for years that their estimates of the impact of climate change and sea-level rise might become hard to predict and become impossible to control. So it is time to get to the point. A climate model is built on a LOT OF VARIABLES (lots of degrees of freedom). When lots of things can be changing at the same time, it becomes difficult to predict and currently IMPOSSIBLE to control a system of that sort. In the earliest days, the models were VERY SIMPLE (not that many degrees of freedom). Climate models of only ten years ago portrayed clouds as 1-mile cubic boxes of condensation. That was the best the models could do. Today’s model predicts clouds in the 50-100 foot dimension. We are getting better fast! As they improve more, we are rapidly learning about how all of the inputs we are throwing into the atmosphere are now causing overshoot.
Today’s title is Thwaites and Feedback. Thwaites is the name of a glacier and an ice shelf in Antarctica. Why do we care about Antarctica? Freshwater is one of the deciding factors in why life is even possible. The rising troubles in the West as freshwater dwindles present existential threats to a way of life for many of us. 90% of ALL THE FRESHWATER in the world is in Antarctica. So many of us are coastal. Many of us surprisingly live either at sea level or slightly above (and even below in Venice, New Orleans, and the Netherlands). The very best of us humans at dealing with the water (The Dutch) have been building walls, dikes, and polders in earnest for about 100 years.
Building walls, relocating homes, and stilted construction are slow and plodding work. We are not built to accommodate the rising seas unless it happens VERY slowly. Feedback and overshoot are causing us to go past all of the targets we had hoped for before 2100, then 2050 and now as early as 2030. Does this mean the scientific predictions were REAL BAD? Not really, it seems. We have continued to exacerbate the problem with more carbon in the upper atmosphere. We are worsening an already NEGATIVE feedback loop. 2030 is coming up fast! When I think about seven years, that is about how long my favorite carnival barker Elon Musk has been assuring us his cars would be “full self-driving complete”. We know how to ignore late-night Chia Pet offerings but an extra 7-16 feet of water at the coasts sounds worse than lying about great cruise control.
The Thwaites ice shelf and glacier are the most studied on earth. Why is that? Even the most OPTIMISTIC predictions on sea rise consider a 2-meter rise in water just baked in by 2050. That puts about 10 million Americans underwater and only 28 years from now. In my experience, when I back up the clock to 1995 (about 28 years ago), my youngest son was born that year. The years have flown by. I will be 89 in 28 years and likely not writing this blog anymore and more concerned with incontinence. I like to think I will be around. I hope I will not be experiencing a world where 10-20 million Americans are displaced from their homes. It seems if we can see it coming, we should take the necessary steps to avoid the worst of the consequences. We study the Thwaites because we KNOW if it collapses then the world gets a 5-meter rise in the ocean level.
That level of water rise equates to 20 million Americans underwater and an additional 100 million people worldwide. These sorts of numbers become expensive and destabilizing to deal with. The math and science of this are complex and it is now a cottage industry for people selling ads on social media to just deny it all and refer to it as a hoax. The reality is places like Sacramento California, in the 20 million scenarios of a 5-meter rise lose HALF of its homes. The scale of the disruption is much higher than people can comfortably ignore. Five meters is about 16 1/2 feet. Such a rise in water level in almost any coastal community 365 days a year seems catastrophic to mean. Perhaps that is why we actively choose to ignore it.
There is some relatively simple mathematics that helps mathematicians, scientists, and engineers just flag different systems as things we can control and we just X through the ones we cannot. The ones we cannot control, we avoid. It is a primitive but effective approach. What is the solution when an airplane encounters turbulence? The pilot flies higher or lower to get out of it. The plane’s control systems are not equipped to fly comfortably in turbulence so they make us buckle up and secure our tray tables. Primitive but effective I guess. The solution in the scientific world is when we encounter an uncontrollable system, we have to adjust and find some other contributing aspect to it that lends itself to control or change our speed or temperature in order to make things behave in a stable fashion. For us, the only solution to this pending problem is to start building a lot of walls and stop introducing CO2, NOx, and methane.
Could You Pick Up Some Ice?
Since 1992 the Thwaites Glacier has lost about a trillion tons of ice to the ocean. Big numbers are rarely useful because our minds cloud over. Put simply, in 1992 we were melting about 33 billion tons of ice from this one glacier per year. Today we have increased to about 75 billion tons of ice per year. When it comes to controllable systems, we hope things stay the same and we pray they don’t get worse. Our prayers are being ignored.
In the case of this well-understood and studied patch of ice, we can now understand why things are getting worse. The Twaites glacier is being undermined from below and becoming like a diving board with nothing supporting it from below. When these sections of ice become sufficiently undermined (no longer attached to the sea floor), they catastrophically fail. The geometry of Thwaites, if it fails exposes the much larger sections of Antarctica to the water. It is as if we are spraying cold water on the ice. We all know what happens to the ice when we add water.
How did we miss this? It turns out that the glaciers in this region are really thick and are frozen through to the earth’s underwater surface creating a proverbial wall of protection to the inner ice sheets and glaciers. The sea surface is at a very steep grade. What is happening now is cold water is beginning to destabilize the connection between the ice sheet and the ocean floor. If it becomes undermined, ocean currents will begin to flow underneath the glaciers and SEPARATE THEM FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR. At that point, the glacier and ice sheet will float and the area below will rapidly get undermined by water flow. That is because when the steep slope of the ocean floor levels out, the ice that is there is NOT SECURED to the bottom. The edge of Antarctica will act as an insulator for most of the ice until it doesn’t. At that point, the feedback for melting goes pear-shaped and sea rise will become rapid, and PERHAPS not reversible. While sunlight might be slowly melting the glacier from the top, the effect of water flowing over its underside is a much more rapid way to melt the ice. Because the ice sheet is fresh water, when it melts and dissolves in seawater, every little bit just inexorably raises the height of the water. Sucks for us.
I am not a “negative nelly”. I am also a realist. It seems to me there is not enough broad consensus to stop the selfish loading of the dice we do with our actions each day. I think we “love our children and grandchildren” but we seem to like our large SUVs and tomahawk steaks a bit more. Passing off problems to the next generation is a time-honored tradition. My opinion is we are amazing but evolved animals with a significant selfish instinct programmed in our primitive lizard brains. All existential threats to the way of life or civilization have always selfishly been ignored until leadership emerges that guides us on the path less traveled. While not the same, I love the famous speech of President Kennedy in his roadmap to the moon speech. To paraphrase we don’t aim to do this BECAUSE it is easy, but rather BECAUSE it is hard.
I will ask each of you to consider the speeches of our current and recent President and imagine how they might inspire us to do the great things that we must. Change to avoid the worst consequences of climate change will require leadership. Choose wisely. An important term in CST was overshoot. We always sought to respond to errors quickly to avoid overshoot. What we came to know was that overshoot can be a catastrophe and leave you with few options for recovery and just a runaway system that no longer responds to control. For quite a while, the agreed standard for CO2 in the atmosphere at which we become very uncertain of the consequences was 350 ppm. We blasted through that a couple of years ago and the world didn’t implode. What we know is we are now at 414 ppm and rising without pause. The difference between 414 and 350 is 64 ppm and my professor would advise that is a lot of overshoot. If you went to the doctor and they were expecting 98.6 F, being almost 20% over expected is not a SMALL PROBLEM. The delay means that future mitigation simply becomes more difficult, more expensive, and more destabilizing. I hope it is time for all of us to vote for some thoughtful leadership soon. Leadership and inspiration in lieu of gaslighting for a change!
I am far from an expert but have tried to understand the basics of climate models. It is not controversial nor likely incorrect that 350 ppm CO2 is bad news. There is a TON OF INDIRECT science that tells us that the world hasn’t had that much CO2 in it for millions of years. The fact that we are at 414 ppm and climbing rapidly is very far beyond what the best minds feel is safe for our planet. Here is a live measurement of CO2 from Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This is the place we’ve been sampling for a long time.
Is Change Possible?
I am optimistic BUT…The way we arrived at the current situation is concerning. My sense is despite the doom and gloom talk about the climate and the role of CO2 in the upper atmosphere, I fear the world is not configured in a way to deal with it. Reforms in how countries relate to each other and their cooperative effort seems much more difficult to visualize than technical solutions. I wrote a post a while back titled “The Trifecta”. I believe there are lots more problems looming that are related to the CO2 discussion.
We have created a world with 8 billion mouths to feed. It is unlikely that not more than 1.5 billion of them (18%) engage in a lifestyle that is causing the damage. Simultaneously getting the selfish to sacrifice while protecting the endangered is the mission. Without some radical realignment, it is hard to see how we will convince the other 6.5 billion to not follow a similar path. In the last 20 years, about 1/4 of the world represented by just China and India have moved headlong seeking the first world living standard we have defined. From a political standpoint, the US as the leader of the world does not even have its house in order and engages on Facebook and Congress with slogans like burn baby burn and clean coal.
What I think is baked in is that the first world will slowly make changes and will adapt their living to protect their people from existential danger. I think the other 6.5 billion will be marginalized without a realistic means to respond. Perhaps when the misery sets in, drastic measures will ensue to keep a lid on the unrest. Researching “The Trifecta” led me to believe that just to feed the masses and avoid unrest, we will be unable to avoid the other drivers of CO2. For those interested, beyond the burning of carbon fuels, we also have
The Poll & Music
Here’s a couple of songs for tonight. Enjoy the music if you have the time. The first one is new to the posts, and the other we’ve played before.
What’s Next
Next week our title “Philosophy, Theology, and Science”.
Sources :
1Scientific American article on the collapse of glaciers https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarcticas-collapse-could-begin-even-sooner-than-anticipated
I'm glad you found your comfort zone with how often you write your essay. It was always about you finding that "happy place." All you had to do was close your eyes, click your heels three times and say, "There's no place like once a week. There's no place like once a week." :-)
Oh my, this is all very complicated and concerning. Thanks for breaking it down for us. I'm heartened by the fact that your readers accept that global warming is happening.