Except for an area around Labrador, southern Baffin Island, and the southern tip of Greenland, data from NASA shows record levels heat in most of the world in 2015

Except for an area around Labrador, southern Baffin Island, and the southern tip of Greenland, data from NASA shows record levels heat in most of the world in 2015
Photo Credit: NASA

No more Arctic as we know it

Within the next couple of centuries the “Great White North” could be a thing of folktales and legend according to a new study.

Temp rise- 8C global, 17C Arctic

That assessment comes from a group of Canadian researchers who say if carbon emissions continue as is, the world will warm considerably and the far north at an even  greater rate.

The new models show a global increase of an average of about 8-degrees Celsius, but the Arctic would see an average temperature increase of 17-degrees C.  Precipitation would also increase by a factor of four in the tropical Pacific, but be drastically reduced elsewhere in the world.

The report by researchers at the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University, both in west coast British Columbia, was published May 23 in the science journal Nature Climate Change, under the title, The Climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon

The scientists said global efforts to reduce carbon emissions (from fossil fuels) have to date been “limited”.

They say therefore that it is reasonable to consider a “business as usual” model in future projections and the effect on climate as trillions of tonnes of carbon are released into the atmosphere.

Lead author of the study is Kartarzyna Tokarska at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria. She says that by the year 2300, “If we continue to burn the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel resources, the Earth will encounter a profound climate change, with the global mean temperature rise ranging between 6.4 and 9.5 degrees Celsius. The relationship between warming and total amount of carbon emitted continues to be linear even for higher levels of total carbon emitted.”

Images illustrate how perennial sea ice has declined from 1980 to 2012. The bright white central mass shows the perennial sea ice while the larger light blue area shows the full extent of the winter sea ice including the average annual sea ice during the months of November, December and January. The data shown here were compiled by NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso from NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program
Images illustrate how perennial sea ice has declined from 1980 to 2012. The bright white central mass shows the perennial sea ice while the larger light blue area shows the full extent of the winter sea ice including the average annual sea ice during the months of November, December and January. The data shown here were compiled by NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso from NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program © NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio.
2012 © NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio.

The several modelling scenarios project if it’s “business as usual”, we will see five trillion tonnes of carbon/greenhouse gas (5EgC)  emitted into the atmosphere. Professor Tokarska says that even that might be a low estimate.  The scientists several models at this 5EgC level all show the temperatures far in excess of the goal of a 2-degree Celsius limit set by last year’s Paris climate conference.

In an interview on the site ResearchGate Professor Tokarska says,” he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment reports the linearity of the relationship between warming and cumulative carbon emissions up to 2000 PgC, the equivalent to two trillion tons of carbon, and very few studies looked beyond that. Only a few studies, using simpler climate models, have looked at this relationship for higher levels of cumulative carbon emissions.”

The Arctic climate would be similar to that of 50-million years ago during the Eocene epoch when there were forests and mammals roaming the region.

“The health and economic impacts of such warming would be vast and unprecedented in human history”

However, as part of that scenario, while precipitation would quadruple in the tropical Pacific, the vast agricultural areas in the Americas southern Europe would suffer potentially catastrophic droughts.  Other areas to suffer critical loss of precipation would include South Africa, Australia, the Mediterranean region and even the Amazon would be severely affected.

In reaction to the report, Matthew Huber, an earth scientist at both Purdue and the University of New Hampshire quoted in National Geographic says,  “The fixation on what happens by the year 2100 ((IPCC report))  is unhealthy and ignores the large risks that become apparent when thinking on longer time scales and with a more complete treatment of real physical and biological processes. The health and economic impacts of such warming would be vast and unprecedented in human history”.

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