One Blue Marble Blog

A sobering new study by American, Swiss, and French researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* is suggesting that climate change occurring now is is irreversible, so we need to act now to cut emissions dramatically, or we risk turning up the global thermostat and not being able to turn it down. Dr. Susan Solomon,** a NOAA scientist who is one of the world’s acknowledged climate experts, says that global warming doesn’t act like many other self-regulating earth systems. Once we alter our climate, it’s just about impossible to turn back the clock.

“I think you have to think about this stuff as more like nuclear waste than acid rain: The more we add, the worse off we’ll be,” NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon told reporters in a conference call. “The more time that we take to make decisions about carbon dioxide, the more irreversible climate change we’ll be locked into.”

The reasons are simple. The earth is more than 70% water, and humanity is current being saved by the ocean’s ability to absorb heat and CO2. It’s the reason why global warming hasn’t been more dramatic. But this natural mitigation will eventually reverse, boosting temperatures and CO2 emissions, and that process will bring an incredible rise in sea level, and droughts that will turn some of the world’s most productive farmlands in North America and Europe into dust bowls and deserts.

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years,” she says. “What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years.”

Solomon believes that continuing business-as-usual for another two decades will be all we need to make such devastation unavoidable. Her study undercuts the assumption made in many quarters that some future technology will compensate for inaction today.

(Source: NPR, Washington Post, NOAA).

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* The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences also carried a study in this issue which suggests that Antarctica’s emperor penguins — featured in the wondering documentary March of the Penguins — will likely be extinct by 2100 because their habitat is melting.

** Solomon is a Nobel laureate who also holds the US National Medal of Science, the Great Medal of the Academy of Sciences of France and the Blue Planet Prize.