The Mechanism leading to Collapse of Civilization and Runaway Global Warming


1. Potential for Methane Release in Arctic


- organic carbon in permafrost of about 500 Gt
- about 1000 Gt in hydrate deposits


[ See: How much time is there left to act? ]

2. Ocean Heat

As the image below shows, the July data for sea surface temperature anomalies on the Northern Hemisphere contain a trendline pointing at a rise of 2°C (3.6°F) before the year 2030. In other words, if this trend continues, the sea surface will be 2°C (3.6°F) warmer in less than 15 years time from now.

[ click on image to enlarge ]
Such a temperature rise would be a catastrophe, as there are huge amounts of methane contained in the form of hydrates and free gas in sediments under the Arctic Ocean seafloor. A relatively small temperature rise of part of these sediments could cause a huge abrupt methane eruption, which could in turn trigger further eruptions of methane.

[ click on image to enlarge, from: The Great Unraveling ]


The North Atlantic is warming rapidly, with sea surface temperatures as high as 22.2°C (71.96°F) recorded east of North America on April 11, 2015, a 12.6°C (22.68°F) anomaly, at a location marked by the green circle on above image.


Ocean heat is carried by the Gulf Stream from Florida via the North Atlantic into the Arctic Ocean. The huge amounts of energy entering the oceans translate into higher temperatures of the water and of the air over the water, as well as higher waves and stronger winds.

The image below shows sea surface temperatures on August 22, 2015, indicating that a huge amount of ocean heat has accumulated in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North America.

The image below gives a further idea of how much the water in the Gulf Stream is warming up, compared to how it used to be. On August 22, 2015, at a location near Florida marked by the green circle, sea surface temperatures were as high as 33.4°C (92.1°F), an anomaly of 3.8°C (6.8°F).

The image below shows that on September 1, 2014, a sea surface temperature of 17.5°C (63.5°F) was recorded at a location near Svalbard (green circle, co-ordinates in the black panel on the left), a 11.9°C (21.42°F) anomaly. 

As the bottom part of above image shows, sea surface temperatures around that location were substantially colder, indicating that this 17.5°C surface temperature was caused by ocean heat reaching that location from underneath the sea surface. In other words, subsurface temperatures of the water carried along by the Gulf Stream can be substantially higher than temperatures of the water at the surface, and this can be the case for the water all the way from the coast of North America to the Arctic Ocean.

Warm water carried by the Gulf Stream underneath the ocean surface will come to the surface where the sea is rather shallow. This appears to be confirmed by the image on the left, showing the situation on August 25, 2015, when sea surface temperatures near Svalbard were recorded as high as 17.3°C (63.1°F), as marked by the green circle, a 12.1°C (21.8°F) anomaly.

The Gulf Stream keeps pushing much of this very warm water north, into the Arctic Ocean, where it threatens to unleash huge methane eruptions from the Arctic Ocean seafloor.

A further contributor is a warmer North Pacific. The image on the right shows very high sea surface temperature anomalies around North America. On August 23, 2015, sea surface temperature anomalies as high as 6.4°C (11.5°F) were recorded in the Bering Strait, at a location marked by the green circle. This is where warm waters from the Pacific Ocean are flowing into the Arctic Ocean. 



- Changing Winds and Currents

Emissions by people are not only causing temperatures of the atmosphere and oceans to rise, they are also causing winds and ocean currents to change. Such changes can in turn result in heatwaves that are more intense and that persist for prolonged periods. Furthermore, strong northbound winds, combined with strong precipitation and waves can speed up the volume of warm water carried by Gulf Stream into the Arctic Ocean, as discussed in the post Watch where the wind blows. The image below shows waves higher than 10 m (33 ft) near Svalbard close to the edge of the sea ice on March 16, 2015 (green circle).

[ click on image to enlarge, from: Strong Winds And Waves Batter Arctic Sea Ice ]
The Climate Reanalyzer forecast for September 8, 2015, below shows typhoons in the Pacific Ocean close to the Arctic Ocean, as well as strong wind over the Arctic Ocean.

[ click on images to enlarge, from: Arctic Sea Ice Collapse Threatens - Update 7 ]
The image below shows wind on September 9, 2015, at three levels, i.e. surface level (left), at 700 hPs (center) and at 250 hPa (right).

Global warming affects wind in multiple ways, i.e. more intense cyclones and changing jet stream

- Cryosphere changes

A warming atmosphere, warming oceans and decline of the Arctic snow and ice cover all go hand in hand. While the IPCC concluded in AR5 that, for RCP8.5, the Arctic Ocean will likely be nearly ice-free in September before mid-century, Professor Peter Wadhams warned, back in 2012, that the Arctic Ocean could be virtually ice-free within a few years.

Sunlight that previously went into melting the sea ice, as well as sunlight that was previously reflected back into space by sea ice, would be absorbed by the Arctic Ocean instead. In other words, we can expect massive warming. In the above post, Prof. Peter Wadhams warned that warming due to Arctic snow and ice loss may well exceed 2 W per square m, i.e. it could more than double the net warming causing by all emissions by all people of the world.

Professor Peter Wadhams on albedo changes in the Arctic

Rising temperatures are causing the surface of Greenland to change, also resulting in albedo changes.

Thawing of the permafrost will similarly result in albedo changes, while much of the carbon that is contained in the permafrost can be expected to be released in the form of methane or carbon dioxide as the permafrost continues to thaw. The image below pictures permafrost decline as foreseen by the IPCC in AR5.

Obviously, rapid decline of the sea ice, permafrost thawing and melting on Greenland will come with albedo changes.
Such albedo changes will in turn make the permafrost decline more strongly and more rapidly than foreseen by the IPCC, while this will also cause more rapid temperature rises in the Arctic and ever more extreme weather events.

The image on the right shows the decline over the years of the snow cover on the Northern Hemisphere in June, through to the year 2015.

One of the dangers of this decline of the snow cover on the Northern Hemisphere is that rapid melting will cause huge amounts of warmer water to flow from rivers into the Arctic Ocean, as further discussed below.

- Warmer Water From Rivers


map from:

[ click on images to enlarge ]
As above image shows, sea surface temperature anomalies in the Bering Strait on August 4, 2015, were as high as 8.7°C (15.6°F). Such high anomalies are caused by a combination of ocean heat, of heatwaves over Alaska and Siberia extending over the Bering Strait, and of warm river water run-off.

As the image on the right shows, sea surface temperatures in the Bering Strait were as high as 20.5°C (69.1°F) on August 4, 2015.

As warm water flows through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, it dives under the sea ice and becomes harder to detect by satellites that typically measure water temperatures at the surface, rather than below the surface.

Another area of concern, marked by the bottom purple oval in the image below, is located in the north of Canada, as was evident back in February 2015.

The image below shows sea surface temperature anomalies in the Arctic on September 6, 2015.


Above image shows a trendline that is contained in the NOAA August sea surface temperature data for the Arctic and that points at a temperature of 6°C by 2030, a rise of several degrees Celsius and even more after 2030. Temperatures were a bit lower for the September data, but the trendline is similarly dramatic, as illustrated by the image below.

In September, Arctic sea ice is at its annual minimum, threatening multiple feedbacks to combine. As described above, the temperature of the water can be even higher below the surface than at the surface. Less sea ice and warmer oceans mean that there will be more opportunities for strong storms to develop that can mix ocean heat all the down to the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.


- Methane 


Conclusion from a paper presented at the 2008 EGU conference, on background
of a frame from a video interview by Nick Breeze with Natalia Shakhova.
Non-linear rise in methane levels can be expected given that methane's lifetime increases as more methane enters the atmosphere. As the image below shows, methane levels as high as 2845 parts per billion (ppb) were recorded on April 25, 2015. The average daily peak in 2015 through to August 27 was 2355 ppb, while the highest daily mean ranged from 1807 ppb (January 8) to 1846 ppb (August 24). Daily peaks and daily highest mean levels in 2015 are shown on the image below.

Things look set to get worse. As shown by the image below, from an earlier post, global methane levels have risen sharply from a low of 723 ppb in 1755. Mean methane levels were as high as 1824 ppb in 2013. That's a rise of more than 252%.
The image below, based on data from the World Metereological Organization (WMO), with added observations from the NOAA MetOp satellites for the years 2014 and 2015, further illustrates the recent rise of methane levels and the threat that methane levels will continue to rise rapidly.


[ Diagram of Doom, from: Near-Term Human Extinction - for more background, also see Feedbacks ]

4. Collapse of Civilization

As discussed back in 2011, much of the soot from firestorms in Siberia could settle on the ice in the Himalaya Tibetan plateau, melting the glaciers there and causing short-term flooding followed by rapid decrease of the flow of ten of Asia’s largest river systems that originate there, with more than a billion people’s livelihoods depending on the continued flow of this water.

The threat is that such rapid temperature rises will appear at first in hotspots over the Arctic and eventually around the globe, while also resulting in huge temperature swings that could result in further crop loss and depletion of supply of food and fresh water. As discussed in the 2007 post Ten Dangers of Global Warming, food supply could come under threat worldwide, with much industrial activity coming to a halt. 

Note that less industrial activity will not result in an immediate fall in temperatures. Instead, it would make that the aerosols that are currently sent up in the air by burning fuel and that are currently masking the full wrath of global warming, will fall out of the air in a matter of weeks. Until now, about half of the global temperature rise is suppressed by such aerosols. Stopping aerosols release overnight could make temperatures rise abruptly by 1.2°C (2.16°F) in a matter of weeks.

[ from: 2015 without Arctic sea ice ] 
Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide that is emitted now will take ten years to reach its peak impact, so we're still awaiting the full wrath of carbon dioxide emitted over the past decade. A recent study calculates that global mean surface temperature may increase by 0.5 °C after carbon emissions are stopped at 2°C global warming, and will have decreased only minimally from that level after 10,000 years. For those who thought that the world was at a comfortable distance from the 2°C "guardrail", remember that for the first seven months of 2015, global average temperature was already 1.26°C higher than the pre-industrial level.

5. Runaway Global Warming

Rapidly rising temperatures will cause stronger evaporation of sea water. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. Globally, water vapor will increase by 7% for every 1°C warming. Since water vapor is one of the strongest greenhouse gases, this increasing water vapor will further contribute to the non-linear temperature rises pictured below.
[ click on image to enlarge, from: Methane Levels Early 2015 ]

Earlier versions of 'the Mechanism' were posted at the Arctic-news blog as a post and as a page.  


  1. The Russians might want big engineering project the big rivers flowing into the arctic ocean to keep it from turning less salty which would screw up the thermohhaline adding to fresh water from melting polar ice. This is my idea! maybe I'm the first to think of it. The artificial lakes can be tapped and diverted to dryer parts of Asia and Europe for irrigation and and other uses.
    This the type of giant engineering the Russians were so gung ho on during the soviet era.

  2. Hello Sam
    I dont know if you saw this New Study — Risk of Significant Methane Release From East Siberian Arctic Shelf Still Growing
    Robert Scribblers article :
    Recent study by the now famous Semiletov and Shakhova team
    I also read a study a week or so ago that said the decarbonizing the atmosphere wouldn't do anything to help the ocean acidity issue.
    I should somehow keep track of all the studies I come across...
    Thanks for this excellent article.