I want to flag four important major reports on the impacts from climate change. Three of these came out in June, the third a few months back. What all four do is underscore the urgency of our situation.
As you know, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out in 2007. The Working Group 2 report, on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” was launched in Brussels on April 6. Many of its conclusions were startling and unequivocal. AR4, of course, was based on hundreds of scientific studies which derived from thousands of datasets from around the world and in many different disciplines. An international scientific congress on climate change, “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions,” was convened this past March in Copenhagen. I wrote then on the State of the Science and how it had come to see the AR4 as not sufficiently indicative of the problems we’re facing.
The Copenhagen Climate Congress issued a synthesis report on June 18th. Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a key member of the team that issued the synthesis report, said “…there is evidence pointing towards the very real possibility of triggering tipping points…” These include “…the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the abrupt change to the Asian Monsoon to a substantially drier state, or the loss of water storage capacity in the Himalayan glaciers” as well as “…signs of tipping points in connection with ocean acidification.” What does this imply? “This may cause creation of areas in the ocean with less oxygen which could put places in danger such as the Great Barrier Reef. To recover ecosystems like that would likely take hundreds of thousands, if not many millions of years, although true recovery is impossible because extinctions are irreversible.”
Another major report on climate change impacts came out in mid-June, this one on how the US is being and will be effected. White House Sounds Alarm On Climate Change was the headline from CBS News. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco was quoted. “This report provides the concrete scientific information that says unequivocally that climate change is happening now and it’s happening in our own backyards and it affects the kind of things people care about.” The “Washington Post” said here that the report “…found that a warmer world, with average U.S. temperatures increasing four to 11 degrees, would significantly alter natural ecosystems and urban life.” It lists some of the findings such as heavier rainfall in the Northeast, higher temperatures bringing more insect pests, and that sea level rise of as much as three feet could inundate parts of South Florida.
Global Climate Change in the United States was issued by the US Climate Change Science Program, an interagency entity. It looks at the key areas of Society, Human Health, Energy Production and Use, Transportation, Water Resources, Agriculture and Land Resources, and Ecosystems and for nine discrete areas of the country.
At the same time as these two alarm bells were sounding, the UK was issuing its newest wake-up call on climate change: UK Climate Projections 2009 (UKCP09). Prognosis? Much hotter summers, and with less rainfall – as much as 60% less!
Finally, the National Academy of Sciences came out with its Ecological Impacts of Climate Change earlier this year. Like the US government report, the NAS study looks at “Climate Change in Your Backyard.” What we see are the impacts today on our forests, farms, waters, mountains and cities, and what the future holds.
These are all carefully considered studies, weighed and presented with the conservative voice of science. If you want to look straight into the mouth of hell, go to National Geographic Magazine’s article from April, Australia’s Dry Run, and the accompanying piece by Betsy Kolbert, Changing Rains. Australia’s seven-year drought is a heartbreaking story.
