During that same period, the front of the glacier retreated 7 miles.Īll of this has led 97 percent of climate scientists to agree that warming trends are very likely the result of human activity. The decrease in thickness of Alaska’s Muir Glacier between 19. Miami is already seeing more severe flooding, and on the other side of the world in Indonesia, Jakarta is both drowning in rising seas and sinking because the city has pumped up too much groundwater, leaving the land to collapse like an empty water bottle. And it’s not just the volume of extra water in the oceans that people have to worry about: As water warms, it expands, pushing sea levels even higher. This releases CO 2 and the even more potent greenhouse gas, methane, kicking off a terrible feedback loop: More emissions from the Arctic landscape means more warming, and more thawing, and more emissions.Īs glaciers continue to pour meltwater into the ocean, sea levels are quickly climbing. As frozen soils known as permafrost rapidly thaw, () are opening up in the Arctic. But the land itself is also in literal upheaval. The Arctic and Antarctica are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, which is of course leading to the rapid melting of glaciers, which in turn raises sea levels. Meanwhile, at the Earth’s poles, landscapes are transforming quickly and dramatically. To keep the climate livable, we may need to prepare for a new era of geoengineering. Scientists and policymakers are also beginning to explore a whole range of last-ditch efforts-we’re talking some serious sci-fi stuff here-to deliberately, directly manipulate the environment. And the world’s biggest cities are driving sustainable policy choices in a way that rival the contributions of some countries. Renewable energy in the form of wind and solar is actually becoming competitive with fossil fuels. Thankfully, it seems most of the world’s nation-states are beyond quibbling over the if of climate change-they’re moving rapidly onto the what now? The 2015 Paris climate agreement marked a turning point in the conversation about planetary pragmatics. (Oh, and while it used to take mathematicians months to calculate how the odds of specific extreme weather events were affected by humans, they’ve knocked that data-crunching time down to weeks.) But that’s little solace when the historical trends are so terrifyingly real. Now, true, any individual weather anomaly is unlikely to be solely the result of industrial emissions, and maybe your particular part of the world has been spared so far. We are already seeing the effects of a dramatically changed climate, from extended wildfire seasons to worsening storm surges. Along with those shifts will come radical changes in weather patterns around the globe, leaving coastal communities and equatorial regions forever changed-and potentially uninhabitable. Global sea levels will rise by up to 6 feet. Today, we know that, absent any change in our behavior, the average global temperature will rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. For decades, scientists have carefully accumulated data that confirms what we hoped wasn’t true: The greenhouse gas emissions that have steadily spewed from cars and planes and factories, the technologies that powered a massive period of economic growth, came at an enormous cost to the planet’s health.
0 kommentar(er)
