The Climate Change Conundrum

[Trakar]

The Climate Change Conundrum: What the Future is Beginning to Look Like for Wildlife
Posted by Jordan Carlton Schaul of Wildlife SOS on January 10, 2013

Jordan:...What are the relationships among climate change mitigation, biodiversity and land degradation?
Michael: There is no doubt that maintaining biological diversity should be a major goal in climate change mitigation. Diversity contributes to the resilience of an ecosystem to perturbations and disturbance. Furthermore, ecosystems and their biodiversity have important roles to play in sequestering carbon (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081205153515.htm; http://takvera.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/seagrass-meadows-are-key-carbon-sinks.html). Informed decision-making and careful management of natural ecosystems for mitigation can enhance this role and help to avoid potential negative impacts. As climate change increasingly puts a strain on ecosystems and their animal and plant populations, it is important to find ways to increase their resilience to current and future climate change. In addition, some species, may be able to adapt rapidly to climate change through natural selection (http://bio.research.ucsc.edu/~barrylab/classes/climate_change/Hoffmann_Sgro_nature_2011_adaptation.pdf ; http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/160/4/1728.full ), or through changes in phenology (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2012.01765.x/abstract)...

I encourage everyone interested in some of the ways that climate change impacts the natural world to read this interview in full at the following link.
The Climate Change Conundrum: What the Future is Beginning to Look Like for Wildlife ? News Watch

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - it gonna get hot this summer...

Administration’s New Climate Report: Next Ice Age ‘Has Now Been Delayed Indefinitely’
February 8, 2013 - A federal advisory committee appointed by the Obama administration to produce a report on climate change says that if Earth’s climate were still “primarily controlled by natural factors”—rather than by man-made global warming—then the next ice age would occur within the next 1,500 years.

But now, because of humans, the committee says, the next ice age has been "delayed indefinitely." “Confirmation of what are called Milankovich cycles (cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit that explain the onset and ending of ice ages) led a few scientists in the 1970s to suggest that the current warm interglacial period might be ending soon, plunging the Earth into a new ice age over the next few centuries,” the advisory committee said in a draft report released last month. “Scientists continue to study this issue today; the latest information suggests that, if the Earth’s climate were being controlled primarily by natural factors, the next glaciation would begin sometime in the next 1,500 years,” says the report. “However, humans have so altered the composition of the atmosphere that the next glaciation has now been delayed indefinitely.”

The U.S. Commerce Department created the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee in December 2010. In May 2011, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Jane Lubchenco named its governing panel. The committee was charged with developing a new National Climate Assessment report, following up on two previous reports published in 2000 and 2009. In January, the advisory committee released an 1,146-page draft report so the public could review it and comment on it. The statement that the next Ice Age had been indefinitely postponed came in a set of questions and answers appended to the end of the draft report. The question posed was: “What about global cooling predictions in the 1970s?”

The answer provided by the draft report blames the hyping of an impending “ice age” on the “popular press.” “An enduring myth about climate science is that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting ‘global cooling’ and an ‘imminent; ice age,” it says. “Where did all the discussion about global cooling come from?” it asks. “First, temperature records from about 1940 to 1970 show a slight global cooling trend, intensified by temporary increases in snow and ice cover across the Northern Hemisphere," it says. "Unusually severe winters in Asia and parts of North America in 1972 and 1973 raised people’s concerns about cold weather. The popular press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, carried a number of articles about the cooling climate at that time.”

The report says average U.S. temperatures have increased 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, but will increase anywhere from 3 degrees Fahrenheit to 10 degrees Faherenheit by the end of this century depending on future human activity. “The amount of warming by the end of the century is projected to correspond closely to the cumulative global emissions of greenhouse gases up to that time: roughly 3°F to 5°F under a lower emissions scenario involving substantial reductions in emissions after 2050 (referred to as the 'B1 scenario'), and 5°F to 10°F for a higher emissions scenario assuming continued increases in emissions (referred to as the 'A2 scenario'),” says the draft. The report claims the planet will be a cooler place if the nations of the world create a “scenario” where there are fewer people born and fewer emissions of fossil fuels.

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