(Try not to be discouraged please… please try to do a little bit more to help if you can manage it for Climate Resiliency or Recovery… I think we all find it hard at times… I certainly do. Courage… Let me know if I can be helpful please).
Roni
Thank you to Fred Krueger for sending these articles along. Let’s track whether the Reuters story gets picked up in US media, and demand why not. Maybe a Move On petition.
Jenny (thanks to Jenny too)
“It would be immoral to leave our grandchildren with a climate system spiraling out of control.”
–James Hansen
Isn’t it strange that we have to scan the European News to find information on climate change?
On the Brink: Planet Near Irreversible Point of Global Warming
Scientists issue dire call for action on climate change at conference;
we must stop warming or “cross the threshold”
We may have already passed the tipping points on global warming, say scientists at the Planet Under Pressure conference. At the London conference, scientists are giving a bleak view of the future of the planet due to catastrophic damage and growth by humans, saying we are close to the irreversible point of global warming.
Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, gave an urgent warning that humanity needs to act radically on climate change. “We can … cap temperature rise at two degrees, or cross the threshold beyond which the system shifts to a much hotter state,” he said.
Bob Watson, former head of the UN’s climate panel and chief advisor to Britain’s environment ministry, stated that the world has already passed any hope of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius, and stated that “we just have not acted. The need for action is becoming more and more urgent with every day that passes.”
Martin Rees of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of sciences, stated this this century “is the first when one species — ours — has the planet’s future in its hands.”
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Global warming close to becoming irreversible, say scientists
Reuters
27032012
LONDON – The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday.
Scientific estimates differ but the world’s temperature looks set to rise by six degrees Celsius by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to rise uncontrollably.
As emissions grow, scientists say the world is close to reaching thresholds beyond which the effects on the global climate will be irreversible, such as the melting of polar ice sheets and loss of rainforests. […]
In a worst case scenario, 30 to 63 billion tonnes of carbon a year could be released by 2040, rising to 232 to 380 billion tonnes by 2100. This compares to around 10 billion tonnes of CO2 released by fossil fuel use each year.
Increased CO2 in the atmosphere has also turned oceans more acidic as they absorb it. In the past 200 years, ocean acidification has happened at a speed not seen for around 60 million years, said Carol Turley at Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
This threatens coral reef development and could lead to the extinction of some species within decades, as well as to an increase in the number of predators.
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System Change, Not Climate Change
Agence France-Presse
Shadow of ‘Anthropocene’ falls over Rio Summit
Man’s catastrophic damage to the environment and disparities between rich and poor head the daunting challenges facing the Rio Summit in June, experts said on Monday.
The summit must sweep away a system that lets reckless growth destroy the planet’s health yet fails to help billions in need, they said.
“This century is special in the Earth’s history. It is the first when one species — ours — has the planet’s future in its hands,” said Martin Rees of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of sciences.
“We’ve invented a new geological era: the Anthropocene,” he said referring to an epoch shaped by Man, not nature. […]
“Under a worst-case scenario, it’s very likely, I think, that the Earth’s system will move to a new state of some sort, with a very severe challenge to contemporary civilisation,” said Steffen. “Some people have even talked about a collapse.” […]
The UN’s goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is already out of reach, said Bob Watson, former head of the UN’s climate panel and chief advisor to Britain’s environment ministry, as he presented the laureates’ study.
“If you look at the commitments today from governments around the world, we’ve only got a 50-50 shot at a 3 C (5.4 F) world, almost no chance of a 2 C (3.6 F) world, and to be quite honest I would say it’s not unlikely that we will hit a 5 C (9.0 F) world,” said Watson.
“That is clearly a world with significant adverse consequences for ecological systems, for socio-economic systems and for human health.”
He added: “We have to realize that we are looking at a loss of biodiversity that is unprecedented in the last 65 million years… We are clearly entering the (planet’s) sixth mass extinction.”