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Post by thelmadonna on Feb 1, 2022 16:55:22 GMT
A heads up for folks in the path of this lot.
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Post by swamprat on Feb 1, 2022 17:08:22 GMT
That there global warming is a real b****.....
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Post by thelmadonna on Feb 1, 2022 17:20:34 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Feb 1, 2022 22:11:15 GMT
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Post by erno86 on Feb 3, 2022 16:49:19 GMT
"Why Are Scientists So Worried About The Doomsday Glacier?| Unveiled"
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Post by erno86 on Feb 3, 2022 16:55:32 GMT
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Post by X on Apr 3, 2022 19:48:42 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Apr 5, 2022 18:26:41 GMT
IPCC’s starkest message yet: extreme steps needed to avert climate disasterJeff Tollefson, 05 April 2022
Radical emissions cuts combined with some atmospheric carbon removal are the only hope to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, scientists warn.
One success story in the battle against climate change is that renewable energy sources such as wind turbines have dropped significantly in cost over the past decade.
Humanity probably isn’t going to prevent Earth from at least temporarily warming 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels — but aggressive action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and extract carbon from the atmosphere could limit the increase and bring temperatures back down, according to the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report makes it clear, however, that the window is rapidly closing, and with it the opportunity to prevent the worst impacts of global warming. Above the 1.5 °C limit — set by the Paris climate agreement in 2015 — the chances of extreme weather and collapsing ecosystems grow.
“The IPCC tells us that we have the knowledge and technology to get this done,” Inger Andersen, executive director for the UN Environment Programme, said at a press conference to release the report. “But increased action must begin this year not next year, this month not next month, and indeed today, not tomorrow.”
Approved by 195 governments after a marathon negotiating session that ran over schedule by two days, the roughly 2900-page report focuses on options for curbing emissions and mitigating the impacts of global warming. The document, compiled by hundreds of scientists across 65 countries, is the last of a trilogy comprising the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment, with the first two reports covering the underlying science and impacts of climate on humans and ecosystems.
Multiple sources involved in the virtual session told Nature that the negotiations to finalize the report bogged down as government delegates hashed out perennial arguments over climate mitigation. In particular, negotiators for India raised questions about emissions scenarios in the report, arguing that they assume too much action on the part of developing countries and do not adequately reflect questions of equity and responsibility. Negotiators for Saudi Arabia scrutinized language related to carbon-capture technologies and the future of fossil fuels. Although these debates pushed the negotiations into overtime, sources say they did not impact the findings or distort the underlying science in the report.
Coming more than three decades after the panel’s first climate assessment, the sixth instalment delivers the most forceful warning yet about the consequences of inaction. The question now, scientists say, is whether governments will at last step up to the challenge with actions rather than unfulfilled pledges.
“Despite more mitigation efforts by more governments at all scales, emissions continue to increase,” says Karen Seto, a geographer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a coordinating lead author on the report. “We need to do a lot more, and we need to do it quickly.”
Key points from the report:
• This is one of the most stringent warnings yet from the IPCC. The message? Time has almost run out. Models suggest that global emissions need to peak, at the latest, by 2025 and then decline rapidly for the world to have a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Carbon emissions would also need to nearly halve by 2030 and hit ‘net zero’ in the early 2050s to meet the goal. Given current policies, some scientists estimate that the world is on track for a nearly 3 °C rise above pre-industrial levels.
• But the report is not entirely doom and gloom. While emissions continue to rise, there are also signs that some mitigation efforts have had impact. The price of renewable-energy technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels and batteries is plummeting, and the global economy is getting cleaner. Global energy intensity — a measure of the amount of energy required to drive the economy — decreased by 2% annually between 2010 and 2019, reversing the trend from the prior decade.
• To prevent temperatures from significantly overshooting the 1.5 °C threshold, some fossil fuels will need to remain in the ground. According to models that hold global warming to only slightly above this limit, emissions from existing and planned fossil-fuel projects already exceed the allowable carbon budget.
• For countries to achieve the net-zero emissions goals that they have set, dialing back emissions won’t be enough — they will also need to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This will offset residual greenhouse-gas emissions from sectors that are harder to clean up, such as industry or aviation. Nations could achieve carbon uptake by expanding forests and improving agricultural practices, or through a variety of nascent technologies that can capture carbon emissions either from industrial sources or directly from the atmosphere.
• Despite concerns about the costs of mitigation, meeting climate goals won’t break the global bank: models suggest that global economic growth will continue over the coming decades, even with aggressive action to curb emissions. Although the global gross domestic product at mid-century is projected to dip slightly in scenarios where climate policies have been enacted compared with scenarios where they haven't been, most research suggests that the economic benefits of limiting warming — including improved health and reduced climate damages — exceed the cost of mitigation.
• Still, wealthy nations will need to contribute financial aid to low-income countries, to address inequities in climate vulnerability and accelerate the clean-energy transition in a way that benefits all. Those nations that have emitted the lowest amounts of greenhouse-gas emissions are often the ones most affected by climate change: the 88 countries that comprise the Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States groups within the UN climate framework are collectively responsible for less than 1% of historical carbon emissions.
The good news and the bad news
The report makes clear that current energy, economic and political trends put the world on course to shoot well past 1.5 °C of warming. Scientists have long been warning of this, but some say it’s time to start thinking about what that means in terms of climate strategy.
“I think we are getting closer politically to a situation where we seriously have to ask how we are going to deal with that overshoot,” says Oliver Geden, a social scientist with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin and a coordinating lead author on the report. While it still might be technically possible to limit warming to 1.5 °C, he says, the actions required would be unprecedented.
But the report also provides reason for optimism by highlighting climate technologies and policies that are already driving emissions down in many countries. The immediate goal is to accelerate those efforts and ramp up climate finance to ensure that it’s a truly global effort, says Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center For Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental think tank in Arlington, Virginia, and a White House adviser under former US president Barack Obama. Longer term, governments need to invest in research and development activities to explore the feasibility of carbon-removal technologies that could help bend the curve in decades to come.
“It’s a Herculean effort, and so we better get started,” Keohane says.
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00951-5?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=94700c0bdc-briefing-dy-20220405&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-94700c0bdc-43274133
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Post by swamprat on Sept 28, 2022 14:12:56 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Sept 28, 2022 19:37:11 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Mar 4, 2023 1:53:54 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Jul 4, 2023 17:00:55 GMT
Catastrophic climate 'doom loops' could start in just 15 years, new study warns
By Ben Turner published about 24 hours ago
Climate "tipping points," such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, could come within a human lifetime, scientists have said.
Earth's ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet's warming climate has warned.
According to the research, more than a fifth of the world's potentially catastrophic tipping points — such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and the sudden transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna — could occur as soon as 2038.
In climatology, a "tipping point" is the threshold beyond which a localized climate system, or "tipping element," irreversibly changes. For instance, if the Greenland ice sheet were to collapse, it would also reduce snowfall in the northern part of the island, making large parts of the sheet irretrievable.
Yet the science behind these dramatic transformations is poorly understood and often based on oversimplified models. Now, a new attempt to understand their inner workings, published June 22 in the journal Nature, has revealed that they may happen much sooner than we thought.
"Over a fifth of ecosystems worldwide are in danger of collapsing," co-author Simon Willcock, a professor of sustainability at Bangor University in the U.K., said in a statement. "However, ongoing stresses and extreme events interact to accelerate rapid changes that may well be out of our control. Once these reach a tipping point, it's too late."
Unlike the well-established link between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change, the study of tipping points is a young and contentious science.
To understand how rising temperatures and other environmental stressors could cause complex ecosystems to break down, scientists use computer models to simplify ecosystems' dynamics, enabling them to predict the fate of those ecosystems — and when their tipping points could be reached.
But if these simulations miss an important element or interaction, their forecasts can land decades off the mark. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations' most important body for evaluating climate science) said in its most recent report that the Amazon rainforest could reach a tipping point that will transform it into a savannah by 2100.
The researchers behind the new study say this prediction is too optimistic.
According to the researchers, most tipping-point studies build the math in their models to focus on one predominant driver of collapse, for example deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. However, ecosystems aren't contending with just one problem but rather a swarm of destabilizing factors that compound one another. For example, the Amazon also faces rising temperatures, soil degradation, water pollution and water stress.
To investigate how these elements interact and whether these interactions can, in fact, hasten a system's demise, the scientists behind the new study built computer models of two lake and two forest ecosystems (including one which modeled the collapse of civilization on Easter Island) and ran them more than 70,000 times while adjusting the variables throughout.
After testing their systems across multiple modes — with just one cause of collapse acting, with multiple causes acting and with all of the causes plus the introduction of random noise to mimic fluctuations in climate variables — the scientists made some troubling findings: multiple causes of collapse acting together brought the abrupt transformation of some systems up to 80% closer to the present day.
And even when the main cause of collapse was not allowed to increase with time, 15% of the collapses occurred purely because of the new elements.
"Our main finding from four ecological models was that ecosystems could collapse 30-80% earlier depending on the nature of additional stress," co-author John Dearing, a professor of physical geography at Southampton University in the U.K. told Live Science in an email. "So if previous tipping points were forecast for 2100 (i.e. 77 years from now) we are suggesting these could happen 23 to 62 years earlier depending on the nature of the stresses."
This means that significant social and economic costs from climate change might come much sooner than expected, leaving governments with even less time to react than first thought.
"This has potentially profound implications for our perception of future ecological risks," co-author Gregory Cooper, a climate systems researcher at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., said in the statement. "While it is not currently possible to predict how climate-induced tipping points and the effects of local human actions on ecosystems will connect, our findings show the potential for each to reinforce the other. Any increasing pressure on ecosystems will be exceedingly detrimental and could have dangerous consequences."
Catastrophic climate 'doom loops' could start in just 15 years, new study warns | Live Science
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Post by erno86 on Jul 7, 2023 18:32:47 GMT
"Violent tornado hits homes near Didsbury, Alberta"
5 days ago...
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Post by swamprat on Jul 11, 2023 14:05:02 GMT
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Post by HAL on Jul 23, 2023 22:24:29 GMT
The problem of global warming will never be solved.
To fix it you have first to stop the biggest cause of all.. the inexorable rise in the human population. Everything stems from that.
More people means a need for more energy to grow food etc and this means you can never catch up.
I can't see any fix for this one that will be acceptable to most people least of all to governments.
I can see one easy, pain free one that will, in the long term work. But it isn't practicable in today's religious and political climate.
Any guesses ?
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