CLIMATE BREAKDOWN Reports: How Black Carbon & Wildfires Flip the Switch on Mountain Snow Melt

IMAGE: Winter ski mountaineering in the WALLOWAS, Northeast OREGON Text pdf http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/the-amplified-cryosphere.pdf A key aspect of the CLIMATE BREAKDOWN Reports is both learning and developing ‘on the fly’, so to speak, a new DESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGE of climate change. This is a language that is at once general and qualitative and relative when we ZOOM OUT for a landscape point of view; AND, it is a language that is specific and quantitative and absolute when we wish to ZOOM IN for macro measurement detail. Both aspects are seen as scientifically vital and complementary. Another aspect of CLIMATE BREAKDOWN Reports is that the language we develop becomes essential to the wider circle of what we might call a new living Earth awareness. This is awareness as we undertake the joyous, life-long work of becoming native to a place. This is an awareness that always looks two ways, both OUTWARDLY into the relevant features of the natural world like snowpack or temperature or elevation, and INWARDLY, looking at the coherence of questions and theories conditioning the eye that perceives. I see this two-ways style of seeing as part of my daily philosophical / yoga practice. A key part of this practice is learning to learn, is becoming spiritually independent, and is healing the loss of natural sensitivity caused by hydrocarbon man culture that has caused the climate crisis in the first place. This edition of the report addresses the fascinating theme of reflectivity or ALBEDO, or how WHITE surfaces reflect energy back out to space, and BLACK surfaces absorb the energy. Or why skiers wear black in winter, and hikers wear white in summer. Specifically we explore the implication of Dr. James Hansen’s recent proposal that Earth, when seen from space, has become a very much darker place. Here’s a quick summary of his work. Don’t worry if you don’t yet understand all the concepts and details. That will come with time. • 0.5% albedo reduction: Since the early 2000s, precise satellite data shows Earth's albedo has decreased by about 0.5%. This has "staggering implications" for the climate system. • 1.7 watts per square meter (WimP): The 0.5% albedo decrease corresponds to a 1.7 Wn increase in the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth, averaged over its entire surface. • Equivalent to 138 ppm of CO2: Hansen notes that this 1.7 Wm7 of absorbed energy is so huge that if it were a direct climate forcing, it would be equivalent to increasing atmospheric CO2 by 138 pm. However, he clarifies that most of this change is a climate feedback rather than a forcing. • Over 100 ppm CO2 equivalent: In a January 2024 paper, Hansen and his colleagues wrote that the albedo decrease since 2015 is equivalent to a sudden CO2 increase of "more than 100 ppm". Now, let’s leap into our DEEP DIVE and see what these numbers mean locally, in both the CENTRAL ALPS of SWITZERLAND, and the WALLOWAS of Northeast OREGON: