The world is 'perilously close' to irreversible climate change. 5 tipping points keep scientists up at night. Five years ago, the United Nations' panel on climate change was charged with drafting a series of reports detailing its science, the effects on the planet and how humanity might save itself. The last of those reports arrived this week, and the news is dire. The world's scientists say the crisis is upon us, and unless we act now, multiple crucial planetary systems are on the cusp of permanent damage.
"We can't kick this can down the road any longer," said Andrea Dutton, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Since the 1880s, the Earth's temperature has risen more than 2 degrees, according to NASA. That may not sound like a lot, but it's enough to disrupt natural systems that support all living things—including humans. In a damning speech Monday, U.N. Here are five tipping points scientists say could start to teeter in our children's lifetime: Amazon rainforest becomes a savanna In most immediate peril is the Amazon rainforest. "The recent evidence has been quite alarming. The NSIDC #Arctic January update - Skeptical Science. Each month the National Snow & Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) issues an updated #Arctic Sea Ice update, and this week the January 2017 update has been published. 2016 has been and gone, and with it the impact of the cyclic El Niño warm phase has also passed.
You might perhaps speculate that some will latch on to that and suggest that arctic ice growth will rapidly rebound. You would be right of course. As an example here is a claim by Australian Climate Change denier Anthony Watts that popped up towards the end of 2016.. Since hitting its earliest minimum extent since 1997, Arctic sea ice has been expanding at a phenomenal rate.
Already it is greater than at the same date in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015. Put another way, it is the fourth highest extent in the last ten years. (about here is the right place to roll your eyes). TL;DR; … nope. Record low daily Arctic ice extents continued through most of January 2017, a pattern that started last October. Long Term Trends Tweets Like this: #Arctic Sea Ice Extent - Mid Jan Update - Skeptical Science. Extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2016 versus the the 1981-2010 average minimum extent (gold line) NASA The Arctic sea ice extent has never been seen this low before at this time of year. Right now in the middle of winter it should be growing, but it is not, the growth has once again stalled. To drive this point home, here are a couple of extracts from Michael Le Page’s Jan 16th article in New Scientist … The area of the world’s oceans covered by floating sea ice is the smallest recorded since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s.
That means it is also probably the lowest it has been for thousands of years … …The extent of Arctic sea ice should be growing rapidly during the northern hemisphere winter. It has been so warm that on occasions this winter the sea ice coverage has actually temporarily shrunk,… …In the Arctic, by contrast, there is a long-term decline in sea ice due to global warming. And when warm air intrudes, cold air spills south. December 2016 – Trends and Calculations. The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends. Political people in the United States are watching the chaos in Washington in the moment. But some people in the science community are watching the chaos somewhere else — the Arctic. It’s polar night there now — the sun isn’t rising in much of the Arctic. That’s when the Arctic is supposed to get super-cold, when the sea ice that covers the vast Arctic Ocean is supposed to grow and thicken.
But in fall of 2016 — which has been a zany year for the region, with multiple records set for low levels of monthly sea ice — something is totally off. Image obtained using a climate reanalyzer. At the same time, one of the key indicators of the state of the Arctic — the extent of sea ice covering the polar ocean — is at a record low. In fact, the ice’s area is even lower than it was during the record-low 2012: (National Snow and Ice Data Center) Twitter’s expert Arctic watchers also are stunned.
“Today’s latest #Arctic mean temperature continues to move the wrong direction . . . up. Business true false. Climate Deniers' Favorite Temperature Dataset Just Confirmed Global Warming. February smashed monthly global temperature records, according to the satellite data analyzed by the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). At the same time, a brand new study concludes that miscalculations explain why the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) satellite temperature dataset had appeared to show a relatively slow rate of global warming. So Ted Cruz and his fellow climate science deniers need a new meme to replace their “satellites find no warming since 1998” talking point, which replaced the “there’s been no warming since 1998” talking point after that one fell apart when 2014 became the hottest year on record — and again when 2015 blew away the 2014 record.
In fact, for those who live in reality, as opposed to in denial, satellite data, ground-based weather stations, sea-based buoys, and even weather balloons all reveal a steady long-term warming trend. The lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly, via UAH scientist Roy Spencer. How amazing is this temperature jump? Real-Time Carbon Clock Shows Climate Change 'Danger Zone' Is Imminent. Bloomberg’s Carbon Clock serves as an ominous reminder that carbon levels are rising rapidly.
The clock tracks the monthly average levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. The current number is slightly above 400 parts per million (ppm). “Carbon dioxide pollution is the primary reason the Earth is warming,” Bloomberg explained. “The number you see here estimates the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere right now, based on monthly averages.” Scientists estimate pre-industrial CO2 levels hovered around 280 ppm.
And don’t be fooled by carbon’s seasonal cycle, Bloomberg cautioned. The World Meteorological Organization reported in November 2015 that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations hit yet another new record in 2014, “continuing a relentless rise which is fueling climate change and will make the planet more dangerous and inhospitable for future generations.” Leonardo DiCaprio: ‘Revenant’ Drove Home Need to Take Climate Action. Page 4 of The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here. Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people.
In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
But their situation is precarious. NASA Says Antarctica Is Gaining More Ice Than It’s Losing & Here’s Why It’s Confusing. According to a new study that was recently published by NASA, Antarctica is actually gaining more ice than it has lost. NASA made the announcement after their satellites examined the heights of the region’s ice sheet, and the findings are contradicting the claim (with more than decades of research behind it) that Antarctica has been losing ice and that this loss is and has contributed to a rising global sea level. The paper is titled “Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses,” and was published in the Journal of Glaciology last Friday. (source) The authors of the study, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland and Sigma Space Corporation, analyzed satellite data showing that Antarctica has actually gained 112 billion tons of ice annually from 1992 to 2001 and it’s been increasing ever since. According to Jay Zwally, lead author of the paper and NASA glaciologist: With that being said, Zwally also mentioned that: One of these factors is the sun:
A curious cold spot in the Atlantic has scientists thinking their worst fears have come true. Though the world just experienced the hottest summer in recorded history, there is one blue spot on the global heat-map and it's disturbing scientists because it indicates a very dangerous situation. As pointed out in an article from Nature, the area in the north Atlantic is suffering some of its coldest temperatures to date and scientists think they know why. They believe that the currents in the Atlantic ocean are slowing.
Normally, the warm and cold water mix to create a normalized temperature. The cold, salty water in the north sinks and the warmer water from the south flows north to take its place. If the trend continues, scientists predict rising sea levels along the East Coast of the United States and temperature changes in Europe and North America. It's not known for sure if this is happening, but it is a long predicted possibility that if the Arctic glaciers were to melt, this would happen and the data seems to corroborate. Global Warming 'Hiatus' Never Happened, Scientists Say. Global warming has not slowed. The so-called hiatus remains just that—so-called. The world is warming as predicted and any apparent evidence that it is not doing so is a statistical illusion, according to U.S. scientists.
They report in the journal Climatic Change that they applied “rigorous, comprehensive, statistical analysis” to the global temperature data and came up with this unequivocal conclusion. And although normally scientists like to spell out the caveats, the margins of error and the uncertainties in their conclusions, the team get to the point with unprecedented firmness. “We find compelling evidence that recent claims of a ‘hiatus’ in global warming lack sound scientific basis. The very-much discussed and so-called pause, hiatus or slowdown in global warming has puzzled climate scientists for years. Non-stop Warming It did not, as some have claimed, stop. Yet others had begun to wonder about the completeness of the available data. Greenhouse gases piling on heat, says British Met Office. Man-made global warming is set to produce exceptionally high average temperatures this year and next, boosted by natural weather phenomena such as El Nino, says Britain's top climate and weather body.
"It looks very likely that globally 2014, 2015 and 2016 will all be amongst the very warmest years ever recorded," said Rowan Sutton of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, which contributed to a Met Office report released yesterday. "This is not a fluke," Sutton said. "We are seeing the effects of energy steadily accumulating in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, caused by greenhouse gas emissions. " The rate at which global temperatures are rising is also on track to pick up in the coming years, ending more than a decade in which the pace of warming worldwide had appeared to slow down, the report said. This "pause" has been seized upon by sceptics as evidence that climate change was driven more by natural cycles than human activity. Video.