Scientists: Climate Change is Happening Faster than You Think

And you thought the news about global warming was already bleak: well, now scientists are saying it’s even worse than we’ve been told. Because greenhouse gas emissions have increased faster than expected and higher temps are triggering self-reinforcing biofeedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, the pace of climate change is likely to be much faster than recent predictions.

From The Washington Post:

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel’s 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

According to scientists on the panel, unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as a result of ‘feedback loops’, which are speeding up natural processes. Among the most prominent examples is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere.

Christopher Field warns that the permafrost holds over 1 trillion tons of carbon and as much as 10% of that could be released this century. And that’s not all: the permafrost also contains methane, which is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.

Similar feedback loops are taking place in the oceans and on land, with rising carbon dioxide levels making sea water more acidic and shrinking ice cover causing the Northern Hemisphere to absorb, rather than reflect, the sun’s energy.

The U.N.’s next assessment of Earth’s climate trends will, for the first time, include policy proposals – but it’s not scheduled for release until 2014.  Nations with high greenhouse gas emissions simply can’t wait that long – they’ve got to start doing whatever they can. The time for serious action was yesterday, but there’s still a hope of catching up. It’s just going to take serious commitment, which we can only hope the leaders of the world can muster up in time.

Link [The Washington Post]

Photo credit: NASA via MSNBC

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