Abrupt Climate
Change Are We on the Brink of a
New Little Ice Age?
The Day After Tomorrow:
Could it Really Happen?
The Day After Tomorrow, a new
movie released on Friday, May 28, is loosely based on the theory of “abrupt
climate change.” As a result of global warming, the Gulf Stream (part of the
Atlantic thermohaline circulation) shuts down. The North Atlantic region
starts to cool while heat builds up in the tropics. The result is a severe
storm, the likes of which have never been seen, and a dramatic change in the
global climate.
Could this really happen? Get
the facts from these frequently asked questions below:
Abrupt Climate
Change Happening
‘Climate change’ conjures up a picture of a gradual process occurring in
the timescale of the earth, hundreds if not thousands of years. Not anymore.
Since the mid 1990s, scientists have been asking if climate change might be
abrupt, in other words, it could happen suddenly, over a matter of decades or
even years, and be global in extent. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports.
The picture most people and most policy-makers have of
climate change is the one produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), which gives smooth projections of global warming ranging from
1 to 6oC by the end of this century, depending on the computer models used. All the models assume processes occur smoothly and linearly,
however, and do not predict abrupt change.
Real earth processes, however, are nonlinear,
often involving positive feedback and threshold effects that give rise to
abrupt, catastrophic jumps or swings between different states.
As more and more data on ancient climate accumulate, it has become clear
that abrupt climate change is a reality on many different scales, and has
occurred many times in the past.
Policy-makers need to
appreciate this abrupt change scenario, as it leaves little room for slow
‘adaptation’. Instead, every effort must be concentrated towards
prompt action to ameliorate global warming and preventing the worst from
happening. (scroll down on web page)
Global Warming
& then the Big Freeze
A global circulation of water between the surfaces and the depths of
oceans plays a major role in keeping the earth’s climate congenial to life.
But this circulation is unstable to global warming, with catastrophic
consequences. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports. (scroll down on web page)
NEWS FLASH
North America and Europe
may experience cooler climate next decade.
Malaysia Sun
Thursday 1st May, 2008
(ANI)
Washington, May 1 : A new study has suggested that Europe and North America may experience cooler climate during
the next decade, thanks to natural North Atlantic variations that could
temporarily mask the effects of human-driven climate change.
According to a report in National Geographic News, since record keeping
began in the 19th century, the North Atlantic climate has changed in natural
cycles that last a decade or more.
These shifts are likely associated, at least in part, with natural
variations in ocean currents.
Now, a new forecasting model, based on past and present sea surface
temperatures, has suggested the imminent onset of a cool-down cycle for
currents in both the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific.
"We believe that ocean currents and systems could, in the
short term, change global warming patterns and even mean temperatures," said Noel Keenlyside of
the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany.
Ocean currents may offset
global warming over coming decade
Thursday May 1 2008
Global warming is set to stall over the next 10 years as natural
variations in ocean currents counteract manmade climate change.
Researchers modelling the climate of Europe and North America found that
a major ocean current that brings warm water northwards is set to weaken,
potentially offsetting temperature rises caused by human activity.
To download the National Research Council's
Report in Brief on Abrupt Climate Change (PDF),
click here.
By disturbing a massive
ocean current, melting Arctic sea ice might trigger colder weather in Europe
and North America.
Megadisaster
Megafreeze
Abrupt Climate Change
Must see Videos
Peter
Schwartz - The Threat of "Abrupt Climate Change"
Full version
http://fora.tv/2006/01/13/Peter_Schwartz_and_Ralph_Cavanagh
Megadisaster Megafreeze Video
The Conveyor is one of the great unknowns
in humanity's unintentional climate change experiment.
"Global warming" may cause severe local cooling
The Great Ocean Conveyer Belt explained
The Science of Abrupt Climate
Change:
Should we be worried?
Freshwater Runoff into Arctic on the Rise,
Scientists Say
John
Roach
for National Geographic News
December
13, 2002
The six largest
Eurasian rivers are dumping a lot more freshwater into the Arctic Ocean now
than they were several decades ago, according to an international team of
scientists.
If this current rate of freshwater influx into the oceans
continues to rise, it could have a large-scale impact on ocean circulation
patterns in the North Atlantic, the team reports in the December 13 issue of
the journal.
Freshening Antarctic Waters Could Affect Currents
Freshening of deep Antarctic waters worries experts
Reuters News Service, April 21, 2008
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound
effects on the world's climate and ocean currents.
The scientists returned to the southern
Australian city of Hobart on Thursday after a one-month voyage studying the
Southern Ocean to see how it is changing and what those changes might mean
for global climate patterns.
Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found
that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom
of the ocean about 5 km (3 miles) down was becoming
fresher and more buoyant.
So-called Antarctic bottom
water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents
spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat
around the globe.
"The main
reason we're paying attention to this is because it is one of the switches in
the climate system and we need to know if we are about to flip that switch or
not," said Rintoul of Australia's government-backed research arm the CSIRO.
"If that
freshening trend continues for long enough, eventually the water near
Antarctica would be too light, too buoyant to sink and that limb of the
global-scale circulation would shut down," he said on Friday.
Cold, salty water also sinks to the depths in
the far north Atlantic Ocean near Greenland and, together with the vast
amount of water that sinks off Antarctica, this drives the ocean conveyor
belt.
At the poles melting occurring at alarming rate
The weather in the
Northern Hemisphere is controlled by the temperature of currents that
circulate on a giant treadmill, in which water cooled at the icy poles sinks
to the bottom, and moves slowly toward the equator, where it heats and rises
to flow northward again, mixing the seas. That is why
Europe's climate is
relatively moderate.
As the Arctic ice melts and ice shelves
collapse in the Southern Ocean, vast areas of open water are exposed. The
water absorbs heat from the sun that until now was reflected by the ice. As
that heat warms the seas, the treadmill is expected to slow, the IPCC has
reported. In the worst case, it could stop. The previous time that happened,
15,000 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was plunged into a brief and brutal
ice age, apparently within decades.
"It's like having a pool of warm water sitting in the
middle of what is supposed to be the air conditioner of the north," Scambos
said. "And it
will be within our lives, not our grandchildren's."
The northern Arctic is changing
first, and most noticeably. But the changes there are likely to be followed
by a "one-plus-two-plus-three punch" in the southern polar region, said Ellen
Mosley-Thompson, at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.
She has been drilling and measuring ice in polar regions and mountain
glaciers for 25 years, and has lived in frigid tents and battled brutal
weather for weeks at a time to get ice core samples.
Earl de
Blonville the Ice man Arctic Explorer
Says that the Gulf Stream recently shut down for Ten Days
See the video
Arctic forecast: Wet, and getting wetter
Canadian researchers warn of ominous future after finding link between
rise in greenhouse gases, increased precipitation
April 25, 2008
Peter Calamai
Science Reporter
Human-induced climate change isn't merely heating up the world's northern
regions, it's also making them a lot wetter with potentially dire
consequences, Canadian government scientists have just shown.
That increasing precipitation could eventually
slow the vital ocean conveyor belt that bathes the coasts of North America
and Europe with warm tropical water, Environment Canada researchers from Toronto
caution in a report published yesterday.
The global conveyor belt, formally called thermohaline circulation by
scientists, consists of warm tropical water, like the Gulf Stream, blown
north on the ocean surface by winds. In the Arctic, the current cools while
becoming denser, sinks and travels back south as the belt's return loop.
"It doesn't shut down entirely but what various people see is the
thermohaline circulation slowing down in the 21st century," said
research team leader Francis Zwiers, a world-recognized climate modeller.
Other researchers have estimated that a
complete conveyor belt shutdown could cause average annual temperatures in
continental Europe to plunge by as much as 5C.
That drop would rule out many crops now grown in Europe and create major
health concerns in countries like France and Italy where few homes have
central heating.
As well, some theories suggest a thermohaline circulation shutdown could
trigger an increase in major floods and storms plus the collapse of plankton
stocks on which fish and marine mammals depend.
Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream
Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian,
Thursday December 1 2005
The powerful ocean current that bathes Britain and northern
Europe in warm waters from the tropics has weakened dramatically in recent
years, a consequence of global warming that could
trigger more severe winters and cooler summers across the region, scientists
warn today.
Researchers on a scientific expedition in the Atlantic Ocean measured the
strength of the current between Africa and the east coast of America and
found that the circulation has slowed by 30% since a previous
expedition 12 years ago.
Ancient flood shut down Gulf Stream 8200 years ago
From Freezing to Overheating.
The
Arctic is melting and the Oceans are warming
Methane
frozen in the Arctic permafrost
and at the
bottom of the Ocean could cause
accelerated
overheating of the Planet.
Methane
is 20 times more potent
as a
heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere.
Consider the permafrost. The vast Arctic region in the north
encompasses land on three continents that has been deeply frozen since the
last ice age. A thin layer thaws each summer. By mid-century, half of it will
thaw to 10 feet, according to computer models of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and long-trapped greenhouse gases
will be released.
Already, the melting in Siberia is releasing methane,
a potent greenhouse gas, that had been buried for 40,000 years, feeding a
cycle of more warming and more melting.
"That's a serious runaway,"
Scanbos
said. "A catastrophe lays buried under the
permafrost."
METHANE EXPLOSION WARMED THE PREHISTORIC EARTH, POSSIBLE AGAIN
A tremendous release of methane gas frozen
beneath the sea floor heated the Earth by up to 13 degrees Fahrenheit (7
degrees Celsius) 55 million years ago, a new NASA study confirms. NASA scientists used
data from a computer simulation of the paleo-climate to better understand the
role of methane in climate change. While most greenhouse gas studies focus on
carbon dioxide, methane is 20 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas
in the atmosphere.
ScienceDaily (Sep. 8,
2006) — Frozen bubbles in Siberian lakes are releasing methane, a greenhouse
gas, at rates that appear to be “... five times higher than previously
estimated” and acting as a positive feedback to climate warming, said Katey
Walter, in a paper published today in the journal Nature.
Ticking Time Bomb
by John Atcheson
Published on
Wednesday, December 15, 2004 by the
Baltimore
Sun
The Arctic Council's
recent report on the effects of global warming in the far north paints a grim
picture: global floods, extinction of polar bears and other marine mammals,
collapsed fisheries. But it ignored a ticking time bomb
buried in the Arctic tundra.
There are enormous quantities of naturally
occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold
northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the
atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon
dioxide.
Melting permafrost methane emissions:
The other threat to climate change
Warming hits 'tipping point'
Siberia feels the heat It's a frozen peat bog the size
of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas
and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting
A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that
could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists
warn today.
Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an
area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France
and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed
11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia,
is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a
greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying
"tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the
Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that
itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.
A Storehouse of Greenhouse Gases Is Opening in
Siberia
By Volker Mrasek
Researchers have found alarming evidence that the frozen Arctic
floor has started to thaw and release long-stored methane gas. The results
could be a catastrophic warming of the earth, since methane is a far more
potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide…...
…….It's always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate
researchers: Gas hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor -- hard clumps of
ice and methane, conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure -- could grow unstable and release massive amounts of methane into
the atmosphere. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, more
worrisome than carbon dioxide, the result would be a drastic acceleration of
global warming. Until now this idea was mostly
academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it
seems more likely that it will.
Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Jun. 11, 2008) — The rate of climate
warming over northern Alaska, Canada, and Russia could more than triple
during periods of rapid sea ice loss, according to a new study led by the National
Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The findings raise concerns about the
thawing of permafrost, or permanently frozen soil, and the potential
consequences for sensitive ecosystems, human infrastructure, and the release
of additional greenhouse gases.
Sun Jul 20, 2008 1:19pm EDT
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The world's wetlands, threatened by development,
dehydration and climate change, could release a
planet-warming "carbon bomb" if they are destroyed, ecological
scientists said on Sunday.
Wetlands contain 771 billion tons of greenhouse gases, one-fifth of all
the carbon on Earth and about the same amount of carbon as is now in the
atmosphere, the scientists said before an international conference linking
wetlands and global warming.
“The biggest threat
to humanity is not likely to come from
a fiendish
superweapon created by a mad scientist but
from vast and
irreversible climatic change.” says Fred Pearce
NATURE PLANTS
DOOMSDAY DEVICE
By Fred Pearce The Guardian (United Kingdom) November 25, 1998
In the cold-war movie Dr. Strangelove, the Soviets built a Doomsday
Device deep in Siberia that
would extinguish all life on Earth if the US dropped a nuclear bomb on
the country. A crazed US
base commander Jack Ripper sets up a freelance bombing mission. It is
curtains for the planet.
A meeting in Paris next week will consider whether nature itself has
placed a series of doomsday devices round the globe that will be detonated by
global warming. They will use less dramatic language - positive feedbacks,
rapid non-linear responses, thresholds and so on - but the fear is that
global warming could be far more destructive than has been thought.
One such device, like that in Dr. Strangelove, is lying in the Siberian
permafrost. Billions of tones of methane, a
greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, are trapped close
to the surface, waiting to escape if the permafrost melts, warns Stephen
Schneider a climatologist at the University of California at San Diego. And global warming is happening in Siberia faster than almost
anywhere on the planet.
Another 10 trillion tonnes of methane is
trapped under pressure in crystal structures on the edges of continental
shelves, "the Earth's largest fossil-fuel reservoir", according to
Gerald Dickens, a geologist at James Cook University in Townsville,
Australia. This could be released as ocean waters warm and
destabilize the methane. He believes it happened before, around 55 million years
ago, and could again create a catastrophic runaway global warming.
Earlier this year, the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change
began looking for other
'imaginable surprises' in the world's climate system, says Schneider.
These will be discussed at
the conference in Paris on climate variability organized by the World
Meteorological Organization.
One theory, rapidly becoming an odds-on favorite, is that the Gulf Stream, the tropical flow that keeps Britain relatively
warm each winter, could be on the verge of breakindown. The world's ocean
circulation seems to have two 'modes'. One maintains the
GulfStream; the other does not. And geological evidence
suggests that it switches between the two modes without warning, and
virtually overnight. "The Gulf Stream has been flowing for 10 000 years.
But we are close to the cusp of a change," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam
Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany.
Last week, Rahmstorf placed on the Internet new research showing that global warming could push the system over that cusp and shut
down the Gulf Stream. The crunch could come within the next 50 years, though his best guess
is that we have another century before the big freeze.
"If the system
shut down, winter temperatures in the North Atlantic region would fall by 10
degrees Celsius within 10 years," says Wallace Broecker, a geochemist at
Columbia University in New York. "London would experience the winter
cold that now grips Irkutsk in Siberia."
The Gulf Stream is part of a global ocean
circulation system that Broecker calls "the Achilles heel of
the climate system" and depends on the saltiness of the North Atlantic. This
salty water is dense, and as a result, sinks to the ocean floor off the
shores of Iceland and Greenland. Like the swirl of water going down a plug
hole, this in turn sucks in the Gulf Stream from the tropics.
But computer models of climate predict that global warming will start to
melt the nearby Greenland ice cap, making the ocean less salty.
It won't sink, and there will be nothing to
suck in the Gulf Stream. Such a change would be irreversible, says Rahmstorf. "The flip could persist for thousands of years."
The atmospheric system probably has other 'modes' that can switch
abruptly, says Schneider.
One is El Nino, which flips in and out every few years, causing havoc
worldwide. The last El Nino was the most intense on record, and there is a
growing suspicion that this could be linked to global warming.
Some researchers predict an eventual near-permanent El Nino - bad news
for tropical rain forests and coral reefs, both of which suffered major
damage over the past 18 months as El Nino spread forest fires and hot waters
across the tropics.
And
bad news for forests is bad news for climate, too. As they grow, trees suck
up about a third ofall the carbon dioxide we pour into the atmosphere each
year. But maybe not for much longer.
Research published last month by the Hadley Centre, part of the UK
Meteorological Office,
forecasts that as the world warms early next century, tropical forests
will die. Instead of soaking up pollution, they will dump more carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere than all the world's power stations and cars have
produced in the past 30 years.
Perhaps the biggest danger, say scientists, is that some of the potential
causes of climatic
convulsions may be linked and could all go off together. For instance, gas bubbles in ice cores show methane concentrations in the
atmosphere have risen and fallen dramatically during past big climate
changes.
Climate shifts caused by flips in ocean
circulation could kill forests and release methane. And Broecker points
out that flips in the ocean circulation system often
appear like "El Ninos lasting a thousand years".
Even slow climate change can unleash sudden catastrophic events, says
Schneider. For instance,global warming could be on the verge of triggering
the destruction of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Its 3 million cubic kilometres of ice, enough to raise sea levels
worldwide by five metres if it came adrift, do not rest on solid rock but are
perched on an archipelago of submerged islands, some of which are active
volcanoes, with ocean water flowing underneath the ice. The fear is that warm waters or volcanic eruptions could release
the sheet into the ocean, causing a worldwide rise in sea levels 10 times
bigger than the current predictions.
It has happened before, and it could happen
again.
What are the odds? "Maybe 1 per cent; maybe 10 per cent, we don't know," says Schneider.
It might, according to current calculations, take a few hundred years for
the sheet to completely break up. But nobody is completely sure and, says
Schneider, "once started, the break-up would be irreversible".
The relatively stable climates of the past few thousand years appear more
and more to be an
historical aberration, a period of calm amid the storms. It is a calm
that has allowed modern
civilisations to develop largely unhindered by dramatic climate change.
But many scientists are becoming convinced that the greenhouse warming being
unleashed by modern societies could release the climatic demons once more.
The one certainty is that, as Rahmstorf puts it, "the risk of unpleasant surprises becomes
higher the more, and the more quickly, we change the climate".
Come in Commander Ripper. Do you read me?
Some 55 million years ago, after a long slow period of global warming,
water in the deep ocean suddenly warmed by about another four degrees and
released several trillion tonnes of
Methane into the atmosphere. This set in train an even more catastrophic
global warming at the surface, during which millions of species died. It was
a mass extinction comparable with the disappearance of the dinosaurs 10
million years before.
Nobody is quite sure why this happened, says geologist Gerald Dickens.
Perhaps a flip in ocean currents warmed the ocean and released methane from
the ocean bed. But "something snapped -everything happened at
once", he says. And he warns that events back then "may represent
an analogue for climate change today".
The fast-growing science of investigating past climatic change is
uncovering a mound of evidence - in tree rings, coral reefs, lake sediments,
ice cores and fossilised pollen - that climate typically
stays stable for thousands of years and then makes a dramatic shift in a
decade or less to a new stable state.
Jeff Severinghaus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US,
an expert on ice cores, says it is more like a light switch
than a thermostat dial. For instance, he found a five-degree lurch in temperature (the
equivalent of moving from London to Rome) in just three years about 14,600
years ago. More recently, says ocean modeller Stefan Rahmstorf, North Africa turned from a swamp-covered region into the Sahara
desert in just a few years.
'The Hellish Vision of Life on a Hotter Planet ' by MARK LYNAS
Buried within the newly released IPCC report is
an apocalyptic warning:
if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates, global
warming by the end of the century could total 6.4C. The scientists don't
say so explicitly, but a rise in temperatures of this
magnitude would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen
for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts
reached into the heart of Europe. It would cause a mass extinction of almost
all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled
survivors clinging to life near the poles.
An eco-alarmist fantasy? Unfortunately not.
Fact:EPA says that
25% of methane emissions to the atmosphere are from leakage from oil and gas
wells and pipelines. Methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse as than
CO2.
( from the book Stupid to The
Last Drop by William Marsden)
10% of global CO2 emissions result from
swamp destruction
Rhett
A. Butler, mongabay.com
December 10, 2007
More than 10 percent of annual carbon dioxide
emissions result from the degradation and destruction of peat swamps, reports
the first comprehensive global assessment on the links between peatland
degradation and climate change.
Global
warming is dictator's legacy
A
bungled attempt to turn swaths of Indonesian peat swamps into rice
plantations threatens to increase global warming on a massive scale, a
scientist said yesterday.
Susan Page, a geography
researcher at the University of Leicester, said annual fires provoked by
peatland drainage on the island of Borneo were releasing enough carbon
dioxide to swamp worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions agreed
under the Kyoto protocol.
"Tropical
peatlands are vast stores of carbon that have accumulated over thousands of
years. In a matter of
months, peatland fires can liberate 1,000-2,000 years' worth of carbon.”
At the current rate of burning, the peat
swamp's entire carbon stocks, built up over 27,000
years from forest litter too wet to rot, will be released into the atmosphere by 2040.
By Thomas Bell in Central Borneo
Last
Updated: 7:01pm GMT 28/11/2007
The destruction of peat bogs
in Indonesia, partly to grow supposedly "green" bio-fuels, releases more carbon dioxide every year than all of India or
Russia, and three times as much as Germany.
·
Logging damage revealed by secret filming
According to recent research by Wetlands
International, a conservation group, "the emissions in 1997 alone, which
was a particularly bad year, were estimated to have reached 40pc of global
CO2 emissions."
Biotic Feedbacks:
Will Global Warming Feed Upon Itself?
Bruce E. Johansen
Human-induced
warming of the Earth may be working in tandem with several natural feedback
mechanisms to accelerate climate change through biotic feedbacks. The possibility that human-induced warming may feed upon itself
produces a special sense of urgency in many climate scientists public
statements. Along with a sense of urgency, the possibility of biotic
"surprises" infuses a high degree of uncertainty into all forecasts
of global warming's possible effects.
George
M. Woodwell, one of the world's most respected experts on biotic-feedback
mechanisms, has written
A significant body of experience...suggests
that there are mechanisms entrained by a change in global climate that tend
to increase the trend of temperature change.... There is a possibility that
the warming itself may cause a series of further changes in the earth that
will speed the warming.... The most serious questions have to do with the
potential for...surprises, especially surprises which lead to positive
feedbacks. The potential appears significant.... (
Woodwell,
393, 406)
Woodwell
explains how global warming could feed powerfully upon itself:
Disruptions
of forests globally, especially in the higher latitudes of the northern
hemisphere will lead to a significant increase in the release of carbon into
the atmosphere. That release can easily be in the range of 1-2
billion tons per year. It means that allowing the warming to progress leads to a
potential for surprises. That's only one of the surprises.
If that were to
occur it would mean that correcting the problem would be even more difficult
than it is at the moment. The releases from the combustion of fossil fuels at
the moment (1996) are about 6 billion tons a year. The annual accumulation is
3-4 billion tons a year. Stabilizing the composition of the atmosphere would
require removing from current releases something of the order of 3 billion
tons, perhaps a little more, immediately. That's a half or more of the
current releases of fossil fuels -- a very important challenge.
Warmer temperatures speed the decay of organic matter in soils.
Forests...and tundra soils of the Northern Hemisphere contain sufficient
carbon to add significantly to the annual emissions, thereby speeding the
accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Such a positive feedback has not been
incorporated into current estimates of the warming. It is one
of several potential surprises lurking in the wings as warming proceeds. (
Epstein,
Current Effects)
Global Dimming Documentary
This is a film that demands action. It reveals that we may have grossly
underestimated the speed at which our climate is changing. At its heart is a
deadly new phenomenon. One that until very
recently scientists refused to believe even existed. But it may already have
led to the starvation of millions. Tonight Horizon examines for the first
time the power of what scientists are calling Global Dimming.
Global Dimming explained
David Suzuki Video
How humanity stands at a crossroads
This is an excellent video
It is an eye opening documentary.
If you have any comments or
have something that I can add to this site, I can be contacted at
webmaster@aroadmap2extinction.com
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