In a shocking report released by the World Climate Change Investigative Committee yesterday, scientists have warned of ’some really bad stuff, more bad than the last stuff’.
The report goes on to say that if we continue to burn fossil fuels, strip forests, and sneak empty coke cans into the black bin instead of the blue bin, then the human race is headed for that total annihilation and rapid extinction that they warned about before – only more so.
The latest grim warning also highlights a potentially crippling shortage of words to describe clime change events. It reports that ‘due to previous reports hyping up the patchy initial findings, they have needlessly squandered the world’s resources of really frightening words. ‘Where a one degree rise in polar sea temperatures should have just been ‘of some concern’ in 1989, this was reported in the press as ‘apocalyptic, Armageddon, and catastrophe,’ explained Professor Regis, the chairman of the committee.‘Now we have discovered even more really scary stuff, but we’ve used up the shock words.’ The Committee have timetabled all of the potential adjectives which can be used to describe cataclysmic climate changes in future, in order to conserve the few words they have left.
The general public have reacted with alarm at the latest findings but refused to despair at the apparent hopelessness of the situation. ‘I recycle my newspapers and buy my petrol from a green coloured pump, so I think everything is probably going to be OK if we all do that,’ said one consumer.
newsbiscuit.com
Climate Change Scientists Warn ‘Loads More Bad Stuff’
Climate change will lead to barren deserts
As the climate gets warmer, arid soils lose nitrogen as gas, reports a new Cornell study. That could lead to deserts with even less plant life than they sustain today, say the researchers.
"This is a way that nitrogen is lost from an ecosystem that people have never accounted for before," said Jed Sparks, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-author of the study, published in the latest issue of Science. "It allows us to finally understand the dynamics of nitrogen in arid systems"
Available nitrogen is second only to water as the biggest constraint to biological activity in arid ecosystems, but before now, ecologists struggled to understand how the inputs and outputs of nitrogen in deserts balance.
By showing that the higher temperatures cause nitrogen to escape as gas from desert soils, the Cornell researchers have balanced the nitrogen budget in deserts. They stress that most climate change models need to be altered to consider these findings.
Sparks and lead author Carmody McCalley, a graduate student, warn that temperature increases and shifting precipitation patterns due to climate change may lead to further nitrogen losses in arid ecosystems. That would make arid soils even more infertile and unable to support most plant life, McCalley warned. Although, some climate models predict more summer rainfall for desert areas, the water, when combined with heat, would greatly increase nitrogen losses, she added.
"We're on a trajectory where plant life in arid ecosystems could cease to do well," she said.
In the past, researchers focused on biological mechanisms where soil microbes near the surface produce nitrogen gas that dissipates into the air, but McCalley and Sparks found that non-biological processes (abiotic) play a bigger role in nitrogen losses. They used instruments sensitive enough to measure levels of nitrogen gases in parts per trillion that had never before been applied to soil measurements.
The researchers covered small patches of soil in the Mojave Desert with sealed containers to measure nitrogen oxide (NO), NOy (a group of more than 25 different compounds containing oxidized nitrogen) and ammonia gases that escape from desert soils. To rule out the role of light in this process, McCalley kept light constant but varied the temperatures in lab experiments.
"At 40 to 50 degrees Celsius [about 100-120 F], we found rapid increases in gases coming out of the soil" regardless of the light, McCalley said. Midday ground temperatures average about 150 F and can reach almost 200 F in the Mojave Desert.
"Any place that gets hot and dry, in all parts of the world, will likely exhibit this pattern," said Sparks.
In addition, the researchers note, more nitrogen oxides in the lower atmosphere creates ozone near the ground, which contributes to air pollution and increases the greenhouse effect that warms the planet.
With deserts accounting for 35 to 40 percent of the Earth's surface and arid and semiarid lands being the most likely areas for new human settlements, air quality issues, loss of soil fertility and further desertification need to be considered as the climate warms, the researchers said.
The researchers also point out that most climate modelers now use algorithms that only consider biological factors to predict nitrogen gases coming from soils.
"The code in climate models would have to change to account for abiotic impacts on this part of the nitrogen budget," McCalley concluded.
clickgreen.org.uk
Controversial new climate change results
New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.
The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.
This work is extremely important for climate change policy, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon free sink of already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease.
So is this good news for climate negotiations in Copenhagen? “Not necessarily”, says Knorr. “Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on Nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed”.
Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.
bristol.ac.uk
