Friday, November 29, 2019

Climate Tipping Point

Nature, the highly regarded magazine in the scientific community recently reported that we are close to, or have passed a tipping point in climate change making it next to impossible to reverse course  (Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against). Saying, 
Politicians, economists and even some natural scientists have tended to assume that tipping points1 in the Earth system — such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet — are of low probability and little understood. Yet evidence is mounting that these events could be more likely than was thought, have high impacts and are interconnected across different biophysical systems, potentially committing the world to long-term irreversible changes.
They noted as others have that projections for rising temperature have kept increasing with each successive analysis over time as the graph below shows.

Global Cascade
The article notes that there will be a cascading effect between interconnected systems as they feed on each other. In other words, a reduced Amazon forest (the earth's lungs) will exacerbate melting of the Arctic ice, which will..... It will be like when you replace a hose on the radiator system of an old car and the new hose puts pressure on other hoses that leads to another failed hose, which...

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