The Daily Climate: Fatalistic Friday -- Abrupt Climate Change, Now Faster Than Ever
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) dropped a troubling report into the mid-December holiday news hole. According to this report, abrupt climate change will cause disruptions to both our infrastructure and the environment during the 21st century that will sorely test our abilities to adapt. And these changes are coming much faster than the IPCC predicted in its 2007 report.
I took a glancing blow at coving this last week, but want to give it more attention now that we're all creeping back into serious business mode.
Relying on up-to-date data regarding lengthy drought in the Southwest, the findings suggests an even dryer climate in the Southwest by the 2050s. Both human and natural causes may be at work, and modeling of smaller areas is needed to make more precise and actionable predictions.
The report also already-observed trends in the melting of Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets, to raise the possibility of four feet of sea level rise by 2100 -- as opposed to the 1.5 projected by the IPCC in its last report.
And based on both models and observations of the recent, sharp loss of Arctic sea ice, rapid and steady September sea ice loss in the Arctic is likely over the rest of this century.
On the upside, the USGS believes that a couple climactic tipping points that have worried scientists a great deal are less likely by 2100. One is a shutdown of the great Atlantic current -- the thermohaline circulation that brings warmth from the tropics up to eastern North America and northern Europe. And probably, we're not looking at a massive release of methane from the Arctic seabed and permafrost, either -- although the speed of emissions of this powerfully destructive greenhouse gas is likely to increase all the same.
"We have to act very fast, by understanding better and by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, because it's a large-scale experiment that can get out of hand," Konrad Steffen told the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin. "So we don't want that to happen." Steffen directs the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and was the lead author on the report's section on ice sheets.
Abrupt Climate Change: Report by the US Climate Change Science Program
And more Fatalistic Friday News:
NASA climate expert James Hansen makes personal appeal to Obama: End "profound disconnect" between action on global warming and the enormity of the problem (The Guardian)
Poll of international experts reveals consensus that CO2 cuts have failed – and their growing support for technological intervention (The Independent)
Sharp fall in hybrid vehicles sales as US tightens belt (Financial Times)
Move to Increase Logging on Oregon Land
(The New York Times)
Canada's vast forests, once huge absorbers of greenhouse gases, now damaged, add to problem (The Chicago Tribune)
Signs of Another California Drought Year (The New York Times)
Many delta islands may be lost (San Francisco Chronicle
Ocean Acidification Hits Great Barrier Reef (SciAm.com)
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