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Global meltdown: scientists isolate areas most at risk of climate change
Ian Sample, Guardian
Scientists have long agreed that climate change could have a profound impact on the planet; from melting ice sheets and withering rainforests, to flash floods and droughts.
Now a team of climate experts has ranked the most fragile and vulnerable regions on the planet, and warned they are in danger of sudden and catastrophic collapse before the end of the century.
In a comprehensive study published today, the scientists identify the nine areas that are in gravest danger of passing critical thresholds or “tipping points”, beyond which they will not recover.
Although the scientists cannot be sure precisely when each region will reach the point of no return, their assessment warns it may already be too late to save Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, which they regard as the most immediately in peril. By some estimates, there will not be any sea ice in the summer months within 25 years.
The next most vulnerable area is the Amazon rainforest, where reduced rainfall threatens to claim large areas of trees that will not re-establish themselves.
(5 February 2008)
Related from the BBC: Climate set for ‘sudden shifts’
and from the Independent: Scientists identify ‘tipping points’ of climate change.
UPDATE (Feb 5)
The paper cited is available online in PDF: Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. Timothy Lenton, one of the authors of the paper, has more at his website.
Destruction of world’s forests speeding up
Trees disappearing at alarming rate, raising climate fears
Edward Harris, Associated Press
In the gloomy shade deep in Africa’s rain forest, the noontime silence was pierced by the whine of a far-off chain saw. It was the sound of destruction, echoed from wood to wood, continent to continent, in the tropical belt that circles the globe.
From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia’s archipelagos, human encroachment is shrinking the world’s rain forests.
The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists – and was little heeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in destructiveness. The numbers have changed: U.N. specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back. And the fears have changed.
Experts still warn of extinction of animal and plant life, of the loss of forest peoples’ livelihoods, of soil erosion and other damage. But scientists today worry urgently about something else: the fateful feedback link of trees and climate.
(3 February 2008)
Review: The Changing Climate of South Texas, 1900 – 2100
Greg Harman, San Antonio Current
A land of extremes, Texas weather has always been a joke in progress: If you don’t like it now, wait a few minutes, lay back and enjoy it, etc. While ranchers have battled their way through many a drought since the Spanish first brought longhorns to these parts, it has been our underlying attitudes about nature that have turned to bite us back a good one. And roasting prickly pear with a butane torch won’t pull us through this time. Thanks to skyrocketing greenhouse-gas emissions linked to human industry, we’ve loosened the already unwieldy Texas weather a few more notches.
Just ask any of the Aggies involved in writing, researching, and editing The Changing Climate of South Texas, 1900 – 2100: Problems and Prospects, Impacts and Implications, released this month after repeated delays.
Bypassing the innocuously academic title, the choice of cover art – an apocalyptic, peyote-button projection of gathering sand storms and fence-crashing dunes sweeping away telephone lines, railroad tracks, and the determinedly rigid frame of a desert homestead – is a revealing visceral grab. The late Missouri-born artist Alexandre Houge is best known for such images – images of the Dust Bowl-era West. Gracing the cover of this Aggie offering, an attempt in nine chapters to project what Global Warming portends for South Texas’s agriculture, air quality, water resources, wildlife, and – of course – you and I, Avalanche by Wind may be the most accessible expression you find in the oversized, 158-page book.
As Rumsfeld would have us remember, there are known knowns. Changing Climate states them thusly.
By 2100:
- South Texas gets drier, hotter, and more unpredictable where violent weather is concerned.
- Loss of barrier islands and saltwater creep further reduce freshwater resources in the state.
- Stronger storms and longer droughts abound.
- And (the darling of simplicity) “South Texas’ character as a ‘problem climate’ will be exaggerated.”
(30 January 2008)
New book: Earth Under Fire, How Global Warming is Changing the World
Book website
Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World is a comprehensive look at the world wide effects of climate change. In dramatic photographs, maps and quotes from world climate science leaders, this one-of-a-kind book shows how the earth is being changed right now.
The book illustrates on-going shifts from weather extremes and melting glaciers to disruptions of animal migration and plant growth — including the strong impact on human life, cities and cultures.
Earth Under Fire ends with a vision of how we can slow global warming and improve the lives of people everywhere.
Photography, research and main text by Gary Braasch
Based on his acclaimed photo-documentation World View of Global Warming.
270 pages, 110 photographs plus maps, scientist essays, informative sidebars, detailed references and bibliography.
Published by University of California Press. In stores September-October [2007]. To order now, please use links at the top of the page.
(February 2008)
