Global warming: Faster, stronger, sooner
[image]
Greenland glacier breakup
Download:wwf_science_paper_october_2008.pdf
<http://tasmaniantimes.com/images/uploads/wwf_science_paper_october_2008\
.pdf>

Jon Sumby
CLIMATE change is happening much faster than the world's best
scientists predicted and will wreak havoc unless action is taken on a
global scale, a new report warns. The bleak report from WWF - formerly
the World Wildlife Fund - also predicts crops failures and the collapse
of eco systems on both land and sea.


The report says that the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) - a study of global warming by 4,000 scientists
from more than 150 countries which alerted the world to the possible
consequences of global warming - is now out of date.

WWF's report, Climate Change: Faster, stronger, sooner, has updated
all the scientific data and concluded that global warming is
accelerating far beyond the IPCC's forecasts.

As an example it says the first tipping point may have already been
reached in the Arctic where sea ice is disappearing up to 30 years ahead
of IPCC predictions and may be gone completely within five years -
something that hasn't occurred for 1m years. This could result in
rapid and abrupt climate change rather than the gradual changes forecast
by the IPCC.

The findings include:
* Global sea level rise could more than double from the IPCC's
estimate of 0.59m by the end of the century.
* Natural carbon sinks, such as forests and oceans, are losing their
ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere faster than expected.
* Rising temperatures have already led to a major reduction in food
crops resulting in losses of 40m tonnes of grain per year.
* Marine ecosystems in the North and Baltic Sea are being exposed to the
warmest temperatures measured since records began.
* The number and intensity of extreme cyclones over the UK and North Sea
are projected to increase, leading to increased wind speeds and
storm-related losses over Western and Central Europe.
The report has been endorsed by Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the
newly elected Vice Chair of the IPCC, who said: "It is clear that
climate change is already having a greater impact than most scientists
had anticipated, so it's vital that international mitigation and
adaptation responses become swifter and more ambitious."

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3353590/Climate-change-accele\
rating-far-beyond-the-IPCC-forecast,-WWF-says.html
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3353590/Climate-change-accel\
erating-far-beyond-the-IPCC-forecast,-WWF-says.html>

The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change

Only within the past decade have researchers warmed to the possibility
of abrupt shifts in Earth's climate. Sometimes, it takes a while to
see what one is not prepared to look for.
Spencer Weart PhysicsToday August 2003, page 30

How fast can our planet's climate change? Too slowly for humans to
notice, according to the firm belief of most scientists through much of
the 20th century. Any shift of weather patterns, even the Dust Bowl
droughts that devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s, was seen as a
temporary local excursion. To be sure, the entire world climate could
change radically: The ice ages proved that. But common sense held that
such transformations could only creep in over tens of thousands of
years.

In the 1950s, a few scientists found evidence that some of the great
climate shifts in the past had taken only a few thousand years. During
the 1960s and 1970s, other lines of research made it plausible that the
global climate could shift radically within a few hundred years. In the
1980s and 1990s, further studies reduced the scale to the span of a
single century. Today, there is evidence that severe change can take
less than a decade. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) has called this reorientation in the thinking of scientists a
veritable "paradigm shift." The new paradigm of abrupt global
climate change, the committee reported in 2002, "has been well
established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is
little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural
and social scientists and policymakers."1

Full story at:
http://scitation.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_56/iss_8/30_1.shtml
<http://scitation.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_56/iss_8/30_1.shtml\
>

Large Methane Release Could Cause Abrupt Climate Change As Happened 635
Million Years Ago
ScienceDaily (May 29, 2008) â€" An abrupt release of methane, a
powerful greenhouse gas, about 635 million years ago from ice sheets
that then extended to Earth's low latitudes caused a dramatic shift
in climate, triggering a series of events that resulted in global
warming and effectively ended the last "snowball" ice age, a UC
Riverside-led study reports.

The researchers posit that the methane was released gradually at first
and then in abundance from clathrates—methane ice that forms and
stabilizes beneath ice sheets under specific temperatures and pressures.
When the ice sheets became unstable, they collapsed, releasing pressure
on the clathrates which began to degas.

"Our findings document an abrupt and catastrophic means of global
warming that abruptly led from a very cold, seemingly stable climate
state to a very warm also stable climate state with no pause in
between," said Martin Kennedy, a professor of geology in the
Department of Earth Sciences, who led the research

"This tells us about the mechanism, which exists, but is dormant
today, as well as the rate of change," he added. "What we now
need to know is the sensitivity of the trigger: how much forcing does it
take to move from one stable state to the other, and are we approaching
something like that today with current carbon dioxide warming."

Study results appear in the May 29 issue of Nature.

"This is a major concern because it's possible that only a
little warming can unleash this trapped methane. Unzippering the methane
reservoir could potentially warm the Earth tens of degrees, and the
mechanism could be geologically very rapid. Such a violent, zipper-like
opening of the clathrates could have triggered a catastrophic climate
and biogeochemical reorganization of the ocean and atmosphere around 635
million years ago."

"One way to look at the present human influence on global warming is
that we are conducting a global-scale experiment with Earth's
climate system," Kennedy said. "We are witnessing an
unprecedented rate of warming, with little or no knowledge of what
instabilities lurk in the climate system and how they can influence life
on Earth. But much the same experiment has already been conducted 635
million years ago, and the outcome is preserved in the geologic record.
We see that strong forcing on the climate, not unlike the current carbon
dioxide forcing, results in the activation of latent controls in the
climate system that, once initiated, change the climate to a wholly
different state."

Full story at:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080528140255.htm
<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080528140255.htm>
One rapid change research site to visit is: `Rapid Climate Change
(RAPID) is a £20 million, six-year (2001-2007) programme of the [UK]
Natural Environment Research Council. The programme aims to improve our
ability to quantify the probability and magnitude of future rapid change
in climate.' http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/rapid/rapid.php
<http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/rapid/rapid.php>


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