8 October 2015, TomDispatch, Welcome to a New Planet Climate Change “Tipping Points” and the Fate of the Earth. Not so long ago, it was science fiction. Now, it’s hard science — and that should frighten us all. The latest reports from the prestigious and sober Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make increasingly hair-raising reading, suggesting that the planet is approaching possible moments of irreversible damage in a fashion and at a speed that had not been anticipated.Scientists have long worried that climate change will not continue to advance in a “linear” fashion, with the planet getting a little bit hotter most years. Instead, they fear, humanity could someday experience “non-linear” climate shifts (also known as “singularities” or “tipping points”) after which there would be sudden and irreversible change of a catastrophic nature. This was the premise of the 2004 climate-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow. In that movie — most notable for its vivid scenes of a frozen-over New York City — melting polar ice causes a disruption in the North Atlantic Current, which in turn triggers a series of catastrophic storms and disasters. At the time of its release, many knowledgeable scientists derided the film’s premise, insisting that the confluence of events it portrayed was unlikely or simply impossible. Read More here
Category Archives: Ecosystem Stress
11 September 2015, The Independent, Refugee crisis: Is climate change affecting mass migration? John Kerry painted an apocalyptic vision of climate change last week as he addressed a global warming conference in Alaska. “You think migration is a challenge in Europe today because of extremism, wait until you see what happens when there’s an absence of water, an absence of food, or one tribe fighting against another for mere survival,” the US secretary of state warned. Few experts would argue with Kerry’s analysis of the future, but some would argue his vision is already upon us. The current refugee crisis marks a watershed moment in the history of global warming because it’s the first wave of emigration to be explicitly linked to climate change, according to one leading scientist, who predicts rises in temperature and increasingly extreme weather will unleash many more mass movements of people in the future. Professor Richard Seager acknowledges that there is much more to the Syrian uprising than the climate, but says that global warming played a key role in creating the conditions that fuelled the civil war behind the refugee emergency. “Syria was destabilised by 1.5 million migrants from rural communities fleeing a three-year drought that was made more intense and persistent by human-driven climate change, which is steadily making the whole eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region even more arid,” says Professor Seager, of Columbia University in New York, who published a report into the role of climate change in the Syrian conflict in March. Read More here
Beyond the fighting and fanaticism, another long-term threat menaces the world’s troubled regions.
7 September 2015, The Conversation, Restoring and conserving nature in the Anthropocene means changing our idea of success. The Earth has unofficially entered a new epoch – the Anthropocene. It suggests that humans are the dominant influence on the planet’s ecosystems and biosphere – the sum total of life and non-living material on Earth. Many ecosystems have changed so radically that it is no longer possible to restore them to what they once were, and in other situations it is not appropriate. Instead we need to look at what we can change, accept the things we can’t, and recognise that humans are now an important part of nature. Restore, reclaim, reintroduce? Accepting humans as part of nature will require a shift away from traditional views of restoration and conservation. Governments and communities worldwide spend enormous sums of money and countless hours of work on restoration projects, aiming to reverse the degradation that we have wrought over the past few centuries. The United Nations, for example, has agreed to a target of restoring 150 million hectares of land by 2020, costing about US$18 billion each year. In Australia, federal and state governments have several very large restoration programs targeting, in one case, the Murray-Darling Basin – to protect and restore the degraded flowing waters and wetlands of our most iconic river system – and, in another, the Great Barrier Reef – to maintain and restore the universal value of our most iconic marine ecosystem. There is an elephant in the room. In most cases, restoration efforts aim to return ecosystems to a state closer to what they looked like in the past and how they functioned before modern society. This target is often termed an “historical baseline” . Read More here
4 September 2015, Climate News Network, Global tree census highlights need to restore forests. Mapping the density of forests reveals that there are far more trees on the planet than previously thought – but humans are destroying 15 billion a year. An international collaboration of scientists has just completed the ultimate green census – by calculating that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees. The latest estimate is far higher and almost certainly more accurate than any previous attempt. But the bad news is that humans are removing trees at the rate of 15 billion a year – and there are now about half as many as there were at the dawn of civilisation. For every person on Earth, there are 422 trees – in total, more than 3,000 billion deciduous or evergreen growths with woody trunks greater than 10 centimetres at breast height. The researchers based their study on close analysis of satellite imagery, and of data from 429,775 plots of trees as measured on the ground in 50 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Statistical techniques. They counted forests in 14 “biomes” − or different kinds of climate, soil and topography − and in places not normally associated with trees, such as deserts, savannah, swamps, tundra and high mountains. They then they used statistical techniques that could extend their sample density measurements to the whole terrestrial world. The scientists report in Nature journal that the tropical and subtropical forests are home to 1.39 trillion trees, while the boreal forests of the north contain 0.74 trillion, and the temperate zones hold 0.61 trillion. Read More here