Climate
change escalating so fast it is 'beyond point of no return'
New
study rewrites two decades of research and author says we are 'beyond
point of no return'
Peter Walker
Global warming is
beyond the “point of no return”, according to the lead scientist
behind a ground-breaking climate change study.
The full impact of
climate change has been underestimated because scientists haven't
taken into account a major source of carbon in the environment.
Dr Thomas Crowther’s
report has concluded that carbon emitted from soil was speeding up
global warming.
The findings, which
say temperatures will increase by 1C by 2050, are already being
adopted by the United Nations.
Dr Crowther,
speaking to The Independent, branded Donald Trump’s sceptical
stance on climate change as “catastrophic for humanity”.
“It’s fair to
say we have passed the point of no return on global warming and we
can’t reverse the effects, but certainly we can dampen them,”
said the biodiversity expert.
“Climate change
may be considerably more rapid than we thought it was.”
The report, by an
exhaustive list of researchers and published in the Nature journal,
assembled data from 49 field experiments over the last 20 years in
North America, Europe and Asia.
It found that the
majority of the Earth’s terrestrial store of carbon was in soil,
and that as the atmosphere warms up, increasing amounts are emitted
in what is a vicious cycle of “positive feedbacks”.
The study found that
55bn tonnes in carbon, not previously accounted for by scientists,
will be emitted into the atmosphere by 2050.
“As the climate
warms, those organisms become more active and the more active they
become, the more the soil respires – exactly the same as human
beings," said Dr Crowther, who headed up the study at Yale
Climate & Energy Institute, but is now a Marie Curie fellow at
the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.
“Our study shows
that this major feedback has already certainly started, and it will
have a significant impact on the climate in the coming decades. This
information will be critical as we strive to understand how the
climate is going to change in the future. And it will also be
critical if we are to generate meaningful strategies to fight against
it.”
Dr Crowther, a
30-year-old Cardiff University Phd graduate originally from North
Wales, predicts climate change will lead to widespread migrations and
antagonism among communities.
“These effects of
climate change will certainly be felt disproportionately by poorer
people, particularly the billions of people whose livelihoods are
intrinsically linked to the land,” he added.
“But the impacts
on sea-level rise, ocean currents and the health of natural
ecosystems are equally devastating for a vast multitude of reasons.”
During his
presidential campaign, Mr Trump described climate change as a “total
hoax” and said it was a concept created by the Chinese to
manipulate US markets.
The billionaire
tycoon also tweeted in 2014: “It’s late in July and it is really
cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING???”
White House chief of
staff Reince Preibus has since said the 70-year-old will “have an
open mind” but Mr Trump’s threat to pull out of the 2015 Paris
climate deal still lingers.
The increasingly
popular right-wing Breitbart News website's reporting has repeatedly
poured scorn on climate change theories.
“Uncertainty is
nothing like a reason enough to suggest climate change isn’t
happening. There’s a nice analogy; if you step in front of an
oncoming bus, no doctor in the world can tell you how damaging the
impact is going to be.
“But we do know
the damage is going to be huge. This alone should be enough
information to persuade us to avoid the bus.”
What's the effect of
global warming on our seasons?
The last two decades
of the 20th century were the hottest in 400 years.
He added: “Sceptics
often say that scientists are just saying that climate change is real
so that they can keep their jobs.
“I would just like
to stress that I could get a hell of a lot more money than academia
offers me if I were to do a study that suggests that climate change
is not real."
Prof Ivan Janssens,
seen as one of the godfathers in the global change ecology field,
said the research had provided essential data to the climate change
model.
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the
UN and World Meteorological Organisation, is incorporating the
study's data.
“This study is
very important, because the response of soil carbon stocks to the
ongoing warming, is one of the largest sources of uncertainty in our
climate models,” said Prof Janssens, of the University of Antwerp.
“I’m an optimist
and still believe that it is not too late, but we urgently need to
develop a global economy driven by sustainable energy sources and
start using CO2, as a substrate, instead of a waste product.
“If this happens
by 2050, then we can avoid warming above 2C. If not, we will reach a
point of no return and will probably exceed 5C.”
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