It’s only two years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report was published, but it’s already out-of-date, according to Dr. Christopher Field, one of the IPCC lead authors. Field says that the pace of global warming has accelerated beyond recent predictions because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased faster than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems.
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” said Dr. Field, founding director of Stanford University’s Department of Global Ecology at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) annual meeting.
Field says that recent emissions from burning fossil fuels have largely outpaced the estimates used in the UN panel’s 2007 reports because developing nations are increasingly turning to coal to generate cheap energy. But the more worrying concern is that Mother Nature is no longer cooperating.
New research suggests that that the Arctic permafrost is thawing much faster than expected, and that it holds more than one trillion tons of carbon — more than all the carbon released by humanity since the industrial revolution. Additionally, terrestrial and marine ecosystems are no longer absorbing carbon as fast as they did just a few years ago.
On one hand, warmer weather is driving stronger winds that have exposed deeper layers of water that are already heavily saturated with CO2. Carbon is also making the oceans more acidic, further reducing their ability to absorb CO2.
On the other hand, the heavy loss of trees throughout British Columbia and the US Midwest has cut the ability of our boreal forests to sequester carbon — as they’ve done for centuries. Similarly, devastating bush fires in Australia have also released incredible stores of carbon, and drying conditions, farming, and illegal logging in many of the world’s rain forests have made one the world’s great carbon sinks a potential long-term liability.
Another concern is that, in the northern hemisphere, snow melt is occurring earlier and earlier, so a great deal a sunshine that was previously reflected back into space is now being absorbed by a dark landscape. The same is true of the high Arctic, where record ice losses have exposed more of the Arctic Ocean, and lowered the region’s albedo.
(Source: The Washington Post, February 14, 2009).
Coming tomorrow: A Shadow Grows in the West
Very scary stuff. This is why my 11 year old daughter wants to become an astronomer so she can discover another planet we can live on. She is only 11 and she says adults are killing the planet, and she doesn’t understand why.
I read an article this morning that made me a little more optimistic. I thought this was a good starting point, and shows even low income housing can be green.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879595,00.html?cnn=yes