Aug 01, · “Global warming will most likely eliminate most of the glacier ice in the Alps within a few decades,” said Wilfried Haeberli, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich Jul 27, · One-Stop Digital Resource on Maritime / Shipping Industry. Analyst opinions, market reports, industry news, shipping & capital markets data, stocks, bonds, FFAs Nov 19, · Many Christians are asking CMI to comment on global warming (‘climate change’) said to be caused by human-generated carbon dioxide (CO 2). This happens particularly at ministry events where we have a Q&A. It is certainly a ‘hot topic’, and many are confused because of the conflicting messages. Until now, CMI has largely avoided the issue
When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think. To read an global warming fact or fiction essay version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here. Peering beyond scientific reticence. It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, global warming fact or fiction essay, many much closer at hand.
Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, global warming fact or fiction essay, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen.
But Arctic permafrost contains 1. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale global warming fact or fiction essay two decades, it is 86 times as powerful.
In other words, global warming fact or fiction essay, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.
Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories in the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data showed the globe warming since more than twice as fast as scientists had thought in fact, the underlying story was considerably less alarming than the headlines. But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopiasperhaps the global warming fact or fiction essay result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible global warming fact or fiction essay of imagination.
But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too. In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response.
Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world.
Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U. Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the history of the planet shows that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years.
The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids.
In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas.
The most notorious was million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating, global warming fact or fiction essay.
This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he saidthis spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to years.
These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.
And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural global warming fact or fiction essay, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.
The bahraining of New York. Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.
Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees.
At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner. Sincethe planet has experienced a fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come.
The five warmest summers in Europe since have all occurred sinceand soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, global warming fact or fiction essay, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in At four degrees, the deadly Global warming fact or fiction essay heat wave ofwhich killed as many as 2, people a day, will be a normal summer.
At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, global warming fact or fiction essay, anywhere, in the world today. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century.
Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add global warming fact or fiction essay the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in the heat index registered temperatures as high as degrees Fahrenheit.
As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year. It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago.
With dialysis, global warming fact or fiction essay, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is degrees outside my door.
It is not a record high. Praying for cornfields in the tundra. Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple global warming fact or fiction essay crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them.
And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.
Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are right — theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity.
Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced.
Bywithout dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, global warming fact or fiction essay, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. Remember, global warming fact or fiction essay, we do not live in a world without hunger as it is.
Far from it: Most estimates put the number of undernourished at million globally. has warned that separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million this year alone.
What happens when the bubonic ice melts? Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen.
There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since global warming fact or fiction essay humans were around to encounter them.
Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice. The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times.
As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2, present-day reindeer were infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.
What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first effect is geographical. Before the early-modern period, when adventuring sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human provinciality was a guard against pandemic.
Today, even with globalization and the enormous intermingling of human populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as another limit, but global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortés did. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, global warming fact or fiction essay, you will.
As it happens, Zika may also be a good model of the second global warming fact or fiction essay effect — disease mutation. But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects some diseases: Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster.
Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates that by5. A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.
Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1, ppm by At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, global warming fact or fiction essay, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected.
The three myths of climate change - Linda Mortsch - TEDxToronto
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Global warming can be mitigated only with global action. The IPCC notes that climate change will be limited only by “substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” Nov 19, · Many Christians are asking CMI to comment on global warming (‘climate change’) said to be caused by human-generated carbon dioxide (CO 2). This happens particularly at ministry events where we have a Q&A. It is certainly a ‘hot topic’, and many are confused because of the conflicting messages. Until now, CMI has largely avoided the issue Jun 17, · Guest essay by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. is fiction. Skeptical Science: "This Is Not A Joke" Global Warming Our Greatest Threat Says Biden - What Happened To White Supremacy? The FBI have been suspect for a long, long time as not working for
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