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Top Scientists Warn of ‘Ghastly Future of Mass Extinction’ and Climate Disruption

Phoebe Weston

13 January 2021: The planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” that threaten human survival because of ignorance and inaction, according to an international group of scientists, who warn people still haven’t grasped the urgency of the biodiversity and climate crises.

The 17 experts, including Prof Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University, author of The Population Bomb, and scientists from Mexico, Australia and the US, say the planet is in a much worse state than most people – even scientists – understood.

“The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts,” they write in a report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which references more than 150 studies detailing the world’s major environmental challenges.

The delay between destruction of the natural world and the impacts of these actions means people do not recognise how vast the problem is, the paper argues. “[The] mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilisation.”

The report warns that climate-induced mass migrations, more pandemics and conflicts over resources will be inevitable unless urgent action is taken.

“Ours is not a call to surrender – we aim to provide leaders with a realistic ‘cold shower’ of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future,” it adds.

Dealing with the enormity of the problem requires far-reaching changes to global capitalism, education and equality, the paper says. These include abolishing the idea of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing environmental externalities, stopping the use of fossil fuels, reining in corporate lobbying, and empowering women, the researchers argue.

The report comes months after the world failed to meet a single UN Aichi biodiversity target, created to stem the destruction of the natural world, the second consecutive time governments have failed to meet their 10-year biodiversity goals. This week a coalition of more than 50 countries pledged to protect almost a third of the planet by 2030.

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An estimated one million species are at risk of extinction, many within decades, according to a recent UN report.

“Environmental deterioration is infinitely more threatening to civilisation than Trumpism or Covid-19,” Ehrlich told the Guardian.

In The Population Bomb, published in 1968, Ehrlich warned of imminent population explosion and hundreds of millions of people starving to death. Although he has acknowledged some timings were wrong, he has said he stands by its fundamental message that population growth and high levels of consumption by wealthy nations is driving destruction.

He told the Guardian: “Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilisation – it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals – not consuming more junk.”

Large populations and their continued growth drive soil degradation and biodiversity loss, the new paper warns. “More people means that more synthetic compounds and dangerous throwaway plastics are manufactured, many of which add to the growing toxification of the Earth. It also increases the chances of pandemics that fuel ever-more desperate hunts for scarce resources.”

The effects of the climate emergency are more evident than biodiversity loss, but still, society is failing to cut emissions, the paper argues. If people understood the magnitude of the crises, changes in politics and policies could match the gravity of the threat.

“Our main point is that once you realise the scale and imminence of the problem, it becomes clear that we need much more than individual actions like using less plastic, eating less meat, or flying less. Our point is that we need big systematic changes and fast,” Professor Daniel Blumstein from the University of California Los Angeles, who helped write the paper, told the Guardian.

The paper cites a number of key reports published in the past few years including:

• The World Economic Forum report in 2020, which named biodiversity loss as one of the top threats to the global economy.
• The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment report which said 70% of the planet had been altered by humans.
• The 2020 WWF Living Planet report, which said the average population size of vertebrates had declined by 68% in the past five decades.
• A 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which said that humanity had already exceeded global warming of 1C above pre-industrial levels and is set to reach 1.5C warming between 2030 and 2052.

The report follows years of stark warnings about the state of the planet from the world’s leading scientists, including a statement by 11,000 scientists in 2019 that people will face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless major changes are made. In 2016, more than 150 of Australia’s climate scientists wrote an open letter to the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, demanding immediate action on reducing emissions. In the same year, 375 scientists – including 30 Nobel prize winners – wrote an open letter to the world about their frustrations over political inaction on climate change.

Prof Tom Oliver, an ecologist at the University of Reading, who was not involved in the report, said it was a frightening but credible summary of the grave threats society faces under a “business as usual” scenario. “Scientists now need to go beyond simply documenting environmental decline, and instead find the most effective ways to catalyse action,” he said.

Prof Rob Brooker, head of ecological sciences at the James Hutton Institute, who was not involved in the study, said it clearly emphasised the pressing nature of the challenges.

“We certainly should not be in any doubt about the huge scale of the challenges we are facing and the changes we will need to make to deal with them,” he said.

(Phoebe Weston is a biodiversity writer for the Guardian. Article courtesy: The Guardian.)

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Climate Campaigners Say ‘Listen to the Science’ as New Study Shows Earth Now Warmer Than Any Time in Last 12,000 Years

Brett Wilkins

28 January 2021: Climate campaigners on Thursday pointed to a study showing that Earth is hotter than it’s ever been during the entire epoch of human civilization as the latest proof of the need to treat human-caused global heating like the dire emergency that it is.

On Wednesday, the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature published a report revealing that an analysis of ocean surface temperatures found that the planet is hotter now than at any other time in the past 12,000 years, and that it may actually be warmer than at any point during the last 125,000 years.

Researchers Samantha Bova, Yair Rosenthal, Zhengyu Liu, Shital P. Godad, and Mi Yan detemined this by solving what scientists call the “Holocene temperature conundrum.” This was the mystery of why the global heating that began at the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago peaked around 6,000 years later—before giving way to the onset of a cooling period that lasted until the Industrial Revolution, when the current anthropogenic warming period began.

It turns out that the collected data, obtained from fossilized seashells, was innacurate, showing only hot summers while missing the colder winters.

“We demonstrate that global average annual temperature has been rising over the last 12,000 years, contrary to previous results,” research leader Bova, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, told The Guardian. “This means that the modern, human-caused global warming period is accelerating a long-term increase in global temperatures, making today completely uncharted territory. It changes the baseline and emphasizes just how critical it is to take our situation seriously.”

The study was published on the same day that President Joe Biden announced a series of executive actions on the climate crisis that were hailed by the youth-led Sunrise Movement as “historic.”

The orders will—among other things—freeze new oil and natural gas leases on public lands and offshore waters, establish an Office of Domestic Climate Policy and National Climate Task Force, and mandate that federal agencies eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and “identify new opportunities to spur innovation, commercialization, and deployment of clean energy technologies.”

The White House said that the orders “follow through on President Biden’s promise to take aggressive action to tackle climate change and build on the executive actions that the president took on his first day in office, including rejoining the Paris agreement and immediate review of harmful rollbacks of standards that protect our air, water, and communities.”

While Biden’s directives were welcomed as a necessary reversal from the policies and actions of the Donald Trump administration, climate advocates said that much more must be done—and in the case of fossil fuel expansion, not done.

Fridays for Future founder Greta Thunberg noted that the Biden administration has so far issued more than 30 new fossil fuel drilling permits, according to a Bloomberg report.

The drilling authorizations are being issued despite the administration’s planned moratorium.

(Article courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit newsportal.)

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Global Ice Melt Accelerating at Record Rate, Finds New Study

Sandhya Ramesh

27 January, 2021: The annual melting rate of global ice has accelerated rapidly and seems in line with the worst-case scenarios predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), new findings showed.

The peer-reviewed findings, made by researchers from the UK and published in European Geosciences Union’s journal The Cryosphere, is one of the first comprehensive analyses of all of global ice loss.

Excluding permafrost and winter snowfall on land, the survey covered all of the planet’s ice — 215,000 mountain glaciers across the planet, the polar ice caps, ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica, ice shelves in the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as sea ice in the polar regions.

Previous research has focussed on specific kinds of ice or icy structures like simply glaciers or polar caps.

Based on satellite and in situ data, the findings showed that melting around the world grew from 0.8 trillion tonnes in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tonnes by 2017, covering a time period that included the warmest 20 years on record as well as steadily increasing average temperatures every year and decade.

It also revealed that the Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017 — equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 metres thick covering the whole of the UK.

Over the four decades studied, ice loss accelerated at the rate of 57 per cent. Half of all ice was lost from land, and the melting of ice is thought to have raised sea levels by 3.5 cm already.

Current IPCC projections state that the sea level rise in this century could be limited to 26-55 cm if emissions are cut drastically and global temperatures rise by less than 1.5 C since pre-industrial times. But if emissions remain high, and temperatures exceed 2 degrees Celsius rise, sea levels are expected to rise by 52-98 cm.

Multiple studies have since indicated that IPCC’s worst case estimates are still too conservative. IPCCs projections for degrees of sea level rise are based on a range of known factors, but exclude unknown and less understood factors like cloud cover modelling.

What the findings show

The survey found that during the past four decades, every category of ice formation across the globe lost large quantities of ice.

The Arctic Sea ice saw a loss of 7.6 trillion tonnes, Antarctic ice shelves 6.5 trillion tonnes, mountain glaciers 6.1 trillion tonnes, the Greenland ice sheet 3.8 trillion tonnes, the Antarctic ice sheet 2.5 trillion tonnes, and the southern ocean sea ice (surrounding Antarctica) 0.9 trillion tonnes.

While the ice loss from the northern hemisphere was 58 per cent, the southern hemisphere lost 42 per cent ice.

Additionally, the melting accelerated the fastest for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the research found.

The study also found that 68 per cent of ice loss — from Arctic sea ice, mountain glaciers, ice shelf calving, and ice sheet surfaces — was caused by heating of the atmosphere. The remaining 32 per cent of loss, mainly of ice sheets and ice shelves, was driven by the warming of the oceans.

The melting damage

Melting of ice across the globe triggers a positive feedback loop where some melting of ice causes further melting.

Ice is white in colour, and thus acts like a giant umbrella around earth, reflecting a large portion of the sun’s light and heat. As ice melts, this albedo, or reflectivity, is lost, leading to increased absorption of heat by the darker waters or land underneath. This subsequently leads to a more accelerated melting of remaining ice.

The polar ice sheets of the world store more than 99 per cent of the earth’s freshwater ice on land, and consequences of such rapid and accelerated melting of ice is expected to raise sea levels drastically within this century.

These changes are expected to lead to increased freak and extreme weather events, excessive flooding, disturbances in oceanic currents, and a disruption in the earth’s natural water cycle.

(Sandhya Ramesh is the Senior Assistant Editor of Science at ThePrint India. Article courtesy: ThePrint, a news, analysis, opinion and knowledge venture.)

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Florida Professor Predicts Amazon Rainforest Collapse by 2064

Paul Brinkmann

The world’s largest rainforest ecosystem, the Amazon, will collapse and largely become a dry, scrubby plain by 2064 because of climate change and deforestation, a University of Florida professor predicts.

That forecast, published online in the journal Environment, gives the most specific date yet for the general demise of the Brazilian ecosystem, according to scientists familiar with Amazonian research.

The article, Collision Course: Development Pushes Amazonia Toward Its Tipping Point, was written by Robert Walker, a professor on the faculty of the university’s Center for Latin American Studies, who describes himself as a land change scientist.

“The best way to think of the forest ecosystem is that it’s a pump,” Walker told UPI. “The forest recycles moisture, which supports regional rainfall. If you continue to destroy the forest, the rainfall amount drops … and eventually, you wreck the pump.”

Walker said he’s spent a lot of time in the Amazon region talking to farmers and loggers who live there. He said poverty and poor use of government resources ultimately drives much of the deforestation.

“The people there, they don’t worry so much about biodiversity, the environment, when they have to worry about eating their next meal,” he said.

The rainforest can recover from periodic drought if those dry spells come years apart, according to Walker’s article. But a severe drought in 2005 began a period of more frequent and longer drought periods.

The Amazon covers about 2.7 million square miles, a little less than the lower 48 U.S. states. But it has shrunk by about 20 percent since intense development began, Walker noted.

“If southern Amazonia’s dry season continues lengthening as it has over the past few decades, the drought of 2005 will become the region’s new normal before the end of the century,” Walker wrote.

Such longer periods of drought are due not only to deforestation, but to global warming and climate change, Walker said.

That global impact means local actions won’t be enough to save the Amazon, which stores large amounts of carbon from carbon dioxide — a major contributor to climate change. The dry season has lengthened in the south by an additional 6.5 days per decade, Walker wrote.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has noted Increasing fire activity in the Brazilian rainforest, as seen by satellites.

The “rainforest has experienced three major droughts, considered once-in-a-century events in 2005, 2010, and in 2015-2016,” the agency said in a 2019 update.

Environmental advocacy in Brazil and around the world was strong in the 1980s and 1990s, Walker said, but it has collapsed since then.

His article takes aim at Brazil’s conservative president, Jair Bolsonaro.

“The upshot is that the deforestation rate has begun to rise, if slowly, after reaching its historic low point in 2012,” Walker wrote, noting that Bolsonaro’s administration “appears intent on scrapping all remaining restraints on the unfettered exploitation of Amazonia’s natural resources.”

The unique characteristic about the article is the specific predicted date for the Amazon’s demise, said another Amazon researcher, Nathan Moore, associate professor of geology at Michigan State University.

“The new thing … here is saying that we can see the edge,” Moore said. “[Walker] offers the first estimate, the year 2064, as when we will certainly have seen cataclysmic die-back.”

Moore noted that other researchers have only given estimates in broad terms.

“Everyone wants to just wave their hands and say ‘later in the century’ or something. So Walker is making a real commitment here,” Moore said.

Large areas of the forest will become grassland and will not return to a rainforest state, he said.

“All of the huge benefits of this massive forest will be gone, too — abundant water and timber, food, new medicines,” Moore said.

[Paul Brinkmann writes about space and Florida news for UPI. Courtesy: United Press International (UPI).]