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TechnoratiNine ways in which the Earth could be tipped into a potentially dangerous state that could last for many centuries have been identified by scientists investigating how quickly global warming could run out of control.
A major international investigation by dozens of leading climate scientists has found that the "tipping points" for all nine scenarios - such as the melting of the Arctic sea ice or the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest - could occur within the next 100 years.
The scientists warn that climate change is likely to result in sudden and dramatic changes to some of the major geophysical elements of the Earth if global average temperatures continue to rise as a result of the predicted increase in emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.
Most and probably all of the nine scenarios are likely to be irreversible on a human timescale once they pass a certain threshold of change, and the widespread effects of the transition to the new state will be felt for generations to come, the scientists said.
"Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic [man-made] climate change," they report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study came out of a 2005 meeting of 36 leading climate scientists who drew on the expertise of a further 52 specialists. It is believed to be the first time that scientists have attempted to assess the risks of what they have termed "tipping elements" in the Earth's climate system.
The nine elements range from the melting of polar ice sheets to the collapse of the Indian and West African monsoons. The effects of the changes could be equally varied, from a dramatic rise in sea levels that flood coastal regions to widespread crop failures and famine. Some of the tipping points may be close at hand, such as the point at which the disappearance of the summer sea ice in the Arctic becomes inevitable, whereas others, such as the tipping point for the destruction of northern boreal forests, may take several more decades to be reached.
While scenarios such as the collapse of the Indian monsoon could occur within a few years, others, such as the melting of the Greenland ice cap or the West Antarctic ice sheet, may take several centuries to complete. "Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point in this century under human-induced climate change," said Professor Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia, who led the study.
A tipping point is defined as the point where a small increase in temperature or other change in the climate could trigger a disproportionately larger change in the future. Although there are many potential tipping points that could occur this century, it is still possible to avoid them with cuts in greenhouse gases, said Professor Lenton.
He added: "But we should be prepared to adapt ... and to design an early-warning system that alerts us to them in time."
Irreversible changes
- Arctic sea ice: some scientists believe that the tipping point for the total loss of summer sea ice is imminent.
- Greenland ice sheet: total melting could take 300 years or more but the tipping point that could see irreversible change might occur within 50 years.
- West Antarctic ice sheet: scientists believe it could unexpectedly collapse if it slips into the sea at its warming edges.
- Gulf Stream: few scientists believe it could be switched off completely this century but its collapse is a possibility.
- El Niño: the southern Pacific current may be affected by warmer seas, resulting in far-reaching climate change.
- Indian monsoon: relies on temperature difference between land and sea, which could be tipped off-balance by pollutants that cause localised cooling.
- West African monsoon: in the past it has changed, causing the greening of the Sahara, but in the future it could cause droughts.
- Amazon rainforest: a warmer world and further deforestation may cause a collapse of the rain supporting this ecosystem.
- Boreal forests: cold-adapted trees of Siberia and Canada are dying as temperatures rise.
© 2008 The Independent
25 Comments so far
Show AllMeanwhile at least Europe seems to be moving. Sweden and Norway intend to have zero carbon societies and economies by 2030. The EU has now tougher targets for fossil fuel reduction. Across Europe you find communities that have become entirely selfsufficient through renewable energy. It is by far not mainstream, but it is a growing movement. Not far from where I live is a community with 10.000 people who produce 130 % of their energy needs. The average household in this community pays 40% less for their energy, because the system is owned by the community itself and not by a company with greedy owners and shareholders who just want to squeeze as much profit out of it as possible to be able to afford glamorous lifestyles. Being in the formerly poorest area of Austria, they now attract high tech companies and produce more jobs than they need. It is those examples that will finally take the power away from the big corporations and their political lackeys, who would say anything to make their influential donors happy. Instead of arguing with them, we should just bypass them and do our own thing as much as possible.
Another major tipping point that the scientists seem to have overlooked, which we are apparently approaching fast: the melting of the permafrost in Siberia, Canada and Alaska is releasing huge amounts of methane to the atmosphere and will become self-sustaining.
The United States in particular faces a stark choice of direction, with the fate of the planet at stake. Do we, led by our oil and coal barons and militarists, continue to spend our resources on playing "king of the mountain" with the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves, or do we take the lead in a world-scale drive to move to a post-fossil-fuel future?
It is no accident that the brutal, anti-democratic Bush Administration leading us into a state of eternal warfare is also the leading climate-change denier. Unfortunately McCAin, Clinton and Obama seem to agree that the US can maintain military domination of the world and simultaneously take the lead on climate change. This won't work. Massive "street pressure" against war and militarism is thus essential to both faces of the fight for the planet.
I don't want to spoil the party, but the inevitability of the catastrophe this article warns against seems to me to have the range of available solutions shielded by the organisational system which governs the decision-making process of human civilisation.
It seems to me that as individuals, mere paupers and Congress-members alike (in the US), we all more or less agree - yes it's a problem we need to do something about it.
The absence of a single global government means that there is a certain element of anarchy on the planet. Nations are pitched in competition with each other and any rules are arrived at not in the best interests of all humans (nor animals and plants) on the planet, but by bargaining between the interests of one group and another. In the course of this process the interests of all members of the planet can be overlooked while squabbles take place over some scrap here or there.
In this present instance, one of those scraps is fossil fuel and how much we can use it. We have come to rely on this resource, which it turns out is upsetting the basic conditions on the planet which we rely on to live.
The problem is this, we are so used to certain material conditions and rewards in the developed countries that we feel that without them life would be unbearable: meat-based diet, cars, as many babies as we want, travel, reliance on antibiotics, unrestricted use of electricity and everything it allows us to do (watch television, use air-conditioning in Summer and heating in Winter). Without this, we don't dare speak out loud but deep down we might well reason, life would not be worth living. The politicians we elect know we feel this way. So would we vote for a President and for a Congress who even hints at interfering with these "necessities" of ours?
We might also reason: why should I give up driving my car and eating meat if my neighbour doesn't also? Or if my neighbour does, then why should I do it if the people in China won't give it up?
Our governments, the politicians are quite possibly correct to believe that anything other than lip-service is electoral suicide when it comes to undertaking to sacrifice the standards of living to which we have become accustomed.
We may have forgotten that happiness and joy comes from community and the basics and from experiencing the joys of nature rather than exploiting it. Advertising tells us in 100s of ways every day, with billboards, television, shop fronts and so on that we can not possibly be happy nor accepted by our peers unless we have the latest fashion accessory and gizmo, nor unless we look like the computer manipulated images of models with which they bombard our senses daily. Any of us who remembers a day away from it all, a bushwalk or a swim in the sea may remember awakening into a moment of liberation from the mass consumer hypnosis most of us suffer.
But unless we are prepared individually in our daily lives, as well as en masse, to talk about this with our friends regularly, to awaken our community to the reality of the threat and the reality of our own responsibility for awakening from this apathy, and to demand our politicians to do the only thing that may just save us from the devastation of moving beyond that tipping point (if it's not too late), then and only then can any one of us claim to be fulfilling our own personal responsibility.
At some point, we each need to realise for ourselves this one thing: "As long as I live, I am always responsible".
here is a solution... free public transit
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com
.
LIBERTAS FUGIT
i know, i was being 'funny'...........but i have heard about these creatures. in fact someone recently got some photos of them, but when i tried to go to the website, it had been blocked by the local server.......i'll look them up again, as you've suggested. and yes, maybe they will be the only ones to survive and evolve again into humans. will we get it right next time????
Meanwhile ..
"Last night, a federal judge struck down a waiver issued by the
White House that would have exempted the U.S. Navy from obeying
a key environmental law during sonar training exercises that
endanger whales.
In doing so, the court affirmed the bedrock principle that we do
NOT live under an imperial presidency. Both the White House and
the military must obey and uphold our environmental laws."
NRDC.org
Nature Giving Way to Virtual Reality
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID – 1 day ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.
Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts," wrote co-authors Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic. "We think it probable than any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation."
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hTi4XU85d466p-DzNMv1GpEVxsBwD8UJQ77O0
Just got a letter from the rotten repub. Congressprick Tom Petri saying we had to be careful not to move too fast on fighting global warming for economic reasons.
The jerk doesn't understand that simple low risk conservation measures could reduce energy consumption by 25 % in a very short time. Insulation, lighting control, appliance energy standards could be implemented. Animal and human waste digesters could produce energy and prevent methane release very soon. This material is already collected in many cases in open storage areas so a cover and processing is occasionally done now so the science is well known.
Failing to do what we can now will make it impossible to do enough in the future.
Coco, I was referring to a number of species of tubeworms, crabs, anemones, etc., that have been discovered living next to deep sea volcanic vents. They don't utilize our CNO system to survive, but they do thrive down there at hundreds or thousands of atmospheres of pressure, in total darkness. Perhaps this is nature's answer to our destroying the surface of the planet, turning it into a hot acid soup.
Google Lifeforms in deep sea volcanic vents Quite fascinating.
Have you ever seen a headless chicken take off running after decapitation? That's us. The decapitation occurred in 1973 during the OPEC crisis. Instead of making fossil fuels obsolete via American ingenuity after the Mideast cut us off from our drug of choice, our leaders made sweetheart deals with the Saudis to keep the oil coming at dirt cheap prices...initially. The Saudis bought our T-bills with US-supplied petrodollars and with the interest on their T-bills they had US contractors build malls, roads, airports, hospitals, etc; Brilliant, no?
Too clever by 1/2. Hey chicken, look in the mirror. You got separated from your head about 30 years ago. Now you're just running on nerve memory. Last one to leave don't forget to turn out the lights.
Early warning system? I changed my lifestyle in the early 80's based on what i learned about the greenhouse effect. Most of the rest of the world has been sleepwalking through this these last 25+ years. This is nothing new. And the situation has continually proven to be much worse than the conservative scientific predictions of the times. And now, when it it literally screaming out at us, what does the vast majority of humanity do? Not a damn thing that can be even remotely considered significant. Our denial and stupidity are truely epic in proportion ...
It is a tough thing to face such a serious situation with hope and compassion, but panic, depression, and finger pointing will get us nowhere. The massive changes that so many people advocate make a whole lot of sense, such as a massive reduction in fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and people say we should do this, we should do that. But look, 95% of you will hop in your car tomorrow for a commute, or buy processed packaged foods from far away, or heat your house with fossil fuels, or all of the above at once. So when is the change going to start? Just being aware of the problem is only the first step, it's very important, and many are NOT aware of exactly what is going on, but awareness is only the beginning. Make choices everyday that reduce your impact, walk, ride a bike, join a CSA, grow a garden, and encourage your friends and family to wake up and start actually doing the right thing. The worst thing you could do is keep the right ideas to yourself or wallow in a state of self pity. No matter what happens we must act now to change our lives, no matter what the uninformed, uncaring masses of the world do, we must proceed with these necessary changes.
"We must live, not die, no matter what happens, we must go on" - Scott Nearing
In spite of scientific data that clearly indicate how serious the problem of climatic change has become, none of the presidential candidates seem to be aware of the seriousness of this issue. Among the republican candidates only McCain has seriously suggested any solution and that has earned him the scorn of the other candidates and conservative voters. The democratic candidates are more aware of the problem, but I haven't heard very much from any of them. I was under the mistaken impression that our leaders would at least try to protect our society from perceived and known threats so that our country could survive. It's not happening.
LIBERTAS FUGIT
'surviving without sunlight and at tremendous pressures' were they inmates of 'guantanamo'???
Ref:
usgs.gov/nws/aviation/satellite/watervapor/internat'l
usgs.gov/ earhtquake activity, 8=30 days record; a third to half again as many as a year ago.
Imagine the earth turning into a slightly cooler clone of Venus, with the only living things the descendants of the tube worms and other creatures that now exist near the volcanic deep oceanic vents, who do not rely on the Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen cycle, surviving without sunlight and at tremendous pressures.
Doom n Gloom wrote: "Imagine waking up one night gasping for breath in an oxygen starved atmosphere."
More likely, imagine waking up one night gasping for breath in a fuel-starved civilization that has 50 million wood stoves in the Washington-New York-Boston corridor.
Imagine waking up one night gasping for breath in an oxygen starved atmosphere.
The optimists have constantly reminded us that there is uncertainty in our scientific prognostications and that things may not be as bad as predicted. Unfortunately, they (we) have ignored two important facts: that scientists are inherently conservative in their pronouncements and that the uncertainties cut both ways.
Every prediction so far has been far too optimistic. Climate change will occur much earlier and be much more pronounced than we suspect.
Once you get something moving it's not so easy to get it stopped, and when the arctic tundra belches out all that methane we start down a long, steep hill.
And in Antarctica, an area the size of Jamaica recently broke off, drifted south, then east and crashed into the western side of Antarctica, cutting off the hunting grounds and entry/exit for two species of penguins, including the Emperor penguin who resides no where else on Earth. Many, many penguins died because they could not reach the shore, or fell into crevaces created by the crashing island of ice onto their shore.
Right you are, WTF. The more we look into this, the worse the news gets ...and the timelines just keep shrinking.
WTF don't forget the large chunk of the arctic ice sheet that broke free of Banks Island (the big island just north east of Alaska) this January. Yes, the arctic ice sheet is breaking up in winter.
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=81d8dce6-c366-46d...
"The fractures are huge," says Barber, who recently returned from the Amundsen and says some cracks are more than 100 kilometres across (60 miles).
"We drove our ship down of one of them and you couldn't see the sides of it."
"A tipping point is defined as the point where a small increase in temperature or other change in the climate could trigger a disproportionately larger change in the future. Although there are many potential tipping points that could occur this century, it is still possible to avoid them with cuts in greenhouse gases, said Professor Lenton.
He added: "But we should be prepared to adapt … and to design an early-warning system that alerts us to them in time.""
So let me get this straight... We're changing the way that the planet functions in ways that we do not understand, quantitatively or often qualitatively. It looks like these things will happen soon (and I'm with WTF on this one... sooner than scientists and the media are widely admitting). We can still avoid the worst if we stop emitting greenhouse gases.
But we should adapt. Professor Lenton here admits the obvious. Given all of the above, we know that we need to stop doing what we're doing. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, stop cutting down and burning forests, and completely change the way that our societies interact with the earth. As much as we know what we need to do, we know that we will not do it.
Welcome to the sad, ironic beginning of the end of civilized history. We already designed an "early-warning system to alert us in time." It's called scientific inquiry, and it's been blinking red with warnings about how what industrial civilization is doing is killing the planet.
It is critical to note that this study was conducted in 2005; much more evidence has since surfaced. E.g.,
- The Greenland tipping point is much closer than 50 years, based on recent evidence from seismological studies of glacial volume reduction is far greater than previously thought.
- Arrays of seismometers going into Antarctica as a part of the International Geophysical Year are starting to show similar data as in Greenland.
- Models of El Nino are currently ignoring the "Trash Vortex" (see CD article elsewhere) and the impact of higher albedo on Pacific ocean energy capture.
I contend such tipping points are much closer.