New alarming reports on global warming
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Posted on March 2, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
What will it take to get governments to spring into action appropriate to the real threat of global warming (which some prefer to call “climate change,” but is about warming, nonetheless).?
In yet another instance of the bad news in front of us, London’s The Guardian reports that scientists doing research for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “are now unable to place a reliable upper limit on how quickly the atmosphere will warm as carbon dioxide levels increase.” The fear is that the temperature could rise “well above the ceiling” that past scenarios have indicated.
“The three previous reports assumed that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase average global temperature by between 1.5 and 4.5C. Since then, computer models have foreseen increases as high as 11C, and some scientists wanted the naturally conservative IPCC to raise the upper end of the range. Others said such a move would be misleading and alarmist.”
Temperature increases in this range could mean everything from the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which would cause ocean levels to rise to catastrophic levels, threatening coastal cities, as well as island and low-lying nations (e.g., Bangladesh, the Maldives), to the disruption of the ocean Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures across Europe, to mass extinctions, among other potential disasters.
A rise of 4.5C would be disastrous. A rise of 11C could threaten human existence.
Seems we’d want to do something about this – soon.
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