20 July 2016, Climate News Network, Humans play high-risk ecological roulette. Analysis of millions of records by thousands of scientists across the world shows that human impacts have helped push the planet’s vital biodiversity into the danger zone. Humans have reduced biodiversity – the teeming variety of plant and animal life that competes and co-operates in every ecosystem – tobelow safe levels across more than 58% of the planet’s land surface. This is ultimately bad news for human food security because biological diversity underwrites what naturalists call the resilient ecosystem services on which humans and all higher animals depend – crop pollination and pest control, nutrient decomposition and recycling, water and air purification − and because that 58% of the terrestrial planet is home to 71% of all humans, That humans are reducing biodiversity − and at a cost to the disturbed ecosystems − is not news. Separate research teams have repeatedly warned of thedangers of extinction of species. Biggest picture But Tim Newbold, a bioscience research associate at University College London, and colleagues report in Science journal that instead of drawing conclusions from one or a series of studies, they looked at the biggest picture available. The research, which is part of a British partnership study called PREDICTS, analysed 2.38 million records made by other scientists of 39,123 species at 18,659 places. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
19 July 2016, Climate News Network, Climate change’s costs are still escalating. Scientific reports released for a conference today on disaster risk reduction warn that people are already dying and economies being hit by climate change − and that the dangers are growing. The massive economic and health losses that climate change is already causing across the world are detailed in six scientific papers published today. Perhaps most striking is the warning about large productivity losses already being experienced due to heat stress, which can already be calculated for 43 countries. The paper estimates that in South-East Asia alone “as much as 15% to 20% of annual work hours may already be lost in heat-exposed jobs”. And that figure may double by 2030 as the planet continues warming − with poor manual labourers who work outdoors being the worst affected. The release of the papers coincides with the start of a conference on disaster risk reduction, held in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, and jointly sponsored by the International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) and the UN Development Programme. The aim is to alert delegates to the already pressing scale of the problem and the need to take measures to protect the health of people, and to outline the economic costs of not taking action. Read More here
16 July 2016, Climate News network, Cyclones set to get fiercer as world warms. New analysis of cyclone data and computer climate modelling indicates that global warming is likely to intensify the destructive power of tropical storms. Powerful tropical storms − known variously as cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes − bring death and destruction to huge swathes of the Earth’s surface. And new research suggests that they are likely to become even stronger. Storms such as the super-typhoon Nepartak that scoured Taiwan earlier this month with winds of 150 miles per hour and then flooded parts of China, are expected to grow even fiercer as the planet warms. That trend is not clear yet, but scientists in the US say it soon will be. Ironically, one of the main reasons why these storms will gain in power is theeffort in many countries to reduce air pollution. Damaging as it is in stunting and shortening lives, the one arguable benefit of filthy air is its ability to dampen the effects of greenhouse gases (GHGs) on cyclones and their like. Over the last century, tiny airborne particles called aerosols, which cool the climate by absorbing and reflecting sunlight, have largely cancelled out the effects of GHG emissions on tropical storm intensity, according to a new scientific review paper published in Science journal. Read More here
11 July 2016, Carbon Brief, Shifting global cloud patterns could amplify warming, study says. A new study sheds light on one of the biggest uncertainties in predicting future changes to Earth’s climate: clouds. Clouds both warm the planet by insulating the Earth’s surface like a blanket, while simultaneously cooling it by reflecting away energy from the sun. Climate models predict that as the Earth warms in response to greenhouse gases, clouds will shift towards the poles and sit higher in the sky, further speeding up warming. But clouds are tricky to measure and until now, scientists haven’t been able to find direct evidence that these changes were actually happening in the real world. The new study published in Nature uses satellite data to identify how cloud patterns have changed in recent decades, confirming the pace of warming predicted by climate models. Satellite data Scientists use weather satellites to measure the extent, height and thickness of clouds. But these measurements suffer from several issues that can limit how useful they are for detecting long-term changes in cloudiness. Small discrepancies in the data are caused by satellite sensors degrading over time and being replaced by new, more precise instruments. Another issue is the gradual change in the orbit of satellites themselves, says the study’s lead author, Prof Joel Norris, professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. He explains to Carbon Brief: Read More here