Climate Change – A Ticking Bomb

OUTLINE

Introduction
2018 – The Fourth Hottest Year
History of Climate Change

• Warning to Humanity
• World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

Effects of Global Warming

• Species Extinction
• Food Insecurity and Nutritional Deficiencies
• Farewell to Coastal Cities and Island Nations
• Social Conflict and Mass Migration
• Lethal Heat
• Surging Wildfires
• Hurricanes: More Frequent, More Intense
• Melted Polar Ice and Permafrost
• The Spread of Pathogens
• Dead Corals

Half a Degree Matters

Conclusion
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Globally, the summer of 2018 was intense: deadly wildfires, persistent drought,
killer floods and record-breaking heat. Although scientists exercise great care
before linking individual weather events to climate change, the rise in global
temperatures caused by human activities has been found to increase the severity,
likelihood and duration of such conditions.

The year 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record. Only 2015, 2016 and 2017
were hotter. The Paris climate agreement aims to hold temperature rise below
1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, but if humankind carries on its business-as-usual
approach to climate change, there’s a 93 per cent chance we’re barreling toward
a world that is 4 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century, a potentially
catastrophic level of warming.

In 1992, 1,700 scientists around the world issued a chilling “warning to

humanity.” The infamous letter declared that humans were on a “collision course”
with the natural world if they did not rein in their environmentally damaging
activities.

Such apocalyptic thinking might be easy to mock, and not entirely helpful in
inspiring political action if the end times are nigh. In 2017, however, more than
15,000 scientists from 184 countries co-signed their names to an updated—and
even bleaker—version of the 1992 manifesto.

The latest version, titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second

Notice,” asserts that most of the environmental challenges raised in the original
letter—i.e., depletion of freshwater sources, overfishing, plummeting biodiversity,
unsustainable human population growth—remain unsolved and are “getting far
worse.”

“Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate

change due to rising [greenhouse gases] from burning fossil fuels, deforestation,
and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat
consumption,” the paper states.

“Moreover,” the authors wrote, “We have unleashed a mass extinction event, the
sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be
annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”

But they stressed that “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our
failing trajectory, and time is running out.”

The Amazon, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, could lose about 70 per
cent of its plant and amphibian species and more than 60 per cent of its birds,
mammals and reptile species from unchecked climate change, according to a
2018 study by the University of East Anglia, the James Cook University and World
Wildlife Fund (WWF).

They analyzed the impact of climate change on nearly 80,000 species of plants,
birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians inhabiting the WWF’s 35 “Priority
Places” for conservation.

This incredible loss of biodiversity affects humans, too. “This is not simply about
the disappearance of certain species from particular places, but about profound
changes to ecosystems that provide vital services to hundreds of millions of
people,” the authors warned.

While climate change could actually benefit colder parts of the world with longer
growing seasons, tropical and subtropical regions in Africa, South America, India
and Europe could lose vast chunks of arable land. For coastal countries, rising
seas could inundate farming land and drinking water with salt.

Staple crops such as wheat, rice, maize and soybeans, which provide two-thirds
of the world’s caloric intake, are sensitive to temperature and precipitation and to
rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. A sweeping 2017 study
showed that every degree-Celsius of warming will reduce average global yields of
wheat by 6 per cent, rice by 3.2 per cent, maize by 7.4 per cent and soybeans by
3.1 per cent.

What’s more, according to a recent paper, carbon dioxide levels expected by

2050 will make staple crops such as rice and wheat less nutritious. This could
result in 175 million people becoming zinc deficient (which can cause a wide array
of health impacts, including impaired growth and immune function and
impotence) and 122 million people becoming protein deficient (which can cause
edema, fat accumulation in liver cells, loss of muscle mass and in children,
stunted growth).

Additionally, the researchers found that more than 1 billion women and children
could lose a large portion of their dietary iron intake, putting them at increased
risk of anaemia and other diseases.

Unless we cut heat-trapping greenhouse gases, scientists predict sea levels could
rise up to three feet by 2100, according to the International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment report.
This could bring high tides and surges from strong storms, and be devastating for
the millions of people living in coastal areas.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a report

earlier this year that predicted parts of Miami, New York City and San Francisco
could flood every day by 2100, under a sea-level rise scenario of three feet.

Entire countries could also be swallowed by the sea due to global warming.
Kiribati, a nation consisting of 33 atolls and reef islands in the South Pacific, is
expected to be one of the first.

Kiribati won’t be alone. At least eight islands have already disappeared into the
Pacific Ocean due to rising sea levels since 2016, and an April study said that
most coral atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century.

In 2017, New York Magazine Deputy Editor David Wallace-Wells wrote an

alarming and widely read essay called “The Uninhabitable Earth” that focused
almost entirely on worst-case climate scenarios. He discussed that, with
diminished resources and increased migration caused by flooding, “social conflict
could more than double this century.”

The article’s scientific merit has been fiercely debated, but the World Bank did
conclude in March 2018 that water scarcity, crop failure and rising sea levels
could displace 143 million people by 2050. The report focused on Sub-Saharan
Africa, South Asia and Latin America, which represent 55 per cent of the
developing world’s population. Unsurprisingly, the poorest and most climate-
vulnerable areas will be hardest hit.

Today, around 30 per cent of the global population suffers deadly levels of heat
and humidity for at least 20 days a year, a 2017 analysis showed. If emissions
continue increasing at current rates, the researchers suggested 74 per cent of the
global population—three in four people—will experience more than 20 days of
lethal heat waves.

“Our attitude towards the environment has been so reckless that we are running
out of good choices for the future,” Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at
Manoa, the study’s lead author, told National Geographic.

“For heatwaves, our options are now between bad or terrible,” he added. “Many
people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heatwaves.”

The Camp Fire, which burned more than 150,000 acres in Butte County in
November, was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history,
killing at least 85 people.

The Mendocino Complex Fire, which started in July and torched roughly 300,000
acres in Northern California, was the largest fire in the state’s modern history.

The second-largest was 2017’s Thomas Fire, which burned 281,000 acres in
Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

If greenhouse gases continue rising, large fires that burn more than 25,000 acres
will increase by 50 per cent by the end of the century, and the volume of acres
that will be burned by wildfires in an average year will increase by 77 per cent,
the report said.

“Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt typically
cause soils to be drier for longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a longer
wildfire season, particularly in the western United States,” The Union of
Concerned Scientists explained in a blog post.

“These hot, dry conditions also increase the likelihood that wildfires will be more
intense and long-burning once they are started by lightning strikes or human
error.”

It’s not currently clear if changes in climate directly led to 2017’s major
hurricanes, including Harvey, Irma, Maria and Ophelia. What we do know is this:
Moist air over warm ocean water is hurricane fuel.

“Everything in the atmosphere now is impacted by the fact that it’s warmer than
it’s ever been,” CNN Senior Meteorologist Brandon Miller said. “There’s more
water vapour in the atmosphere. The ocean is warmer. And all of that really only
pushes the impact in one direction, and that is worse: a higher surge in storms,
higher rainfall in storms.”

NOAA concluded this June that, “It is likely that greenhouse warming will cause
hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher
rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”

The Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and
continued loss of ice and snow cover “will cause big changes to ocean currents, to
circulation of the atmosphere, to fisheries and especially to the air temperature,
which will warm up because there isn’t any ice cooling the surface anymore,”
Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of
Cambridge, told Public Radio International. “That will have an effect, for instance,
on air currents over Greenland, which will increase the melt rate of the Greenland
ice sheet.”

Not only that, frozen Arctic soil—or permafrost—is starting to melt, causing the
release of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It’s
said that the permafrost holds 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as
much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Wadhams explained that the fear is that the permafrost will melt in “one rapid
go.” If that happens, “The amount of methane that comes out will be a huge
pulse, and that would have a detectable climate change, maybe 0.6 of a degree.
… So, it would be just a big jerk to the global climate.”

Disturbingly, permafrost is full of pathogens, and its melting could unleash once-
frozen bacteria and viruses, The Atlantic reported. In 2016, dozens of people
were hospitalized and a 12-year-old boy died after an outbreak of anthrax in
Siberia. More than 2,000 reindeer were also infected. Anthrax hadn’t been seen in
the region for 75 years. The cause? Scientists suggested that a heat wave thawed
a reindeer carcass that was infected with the disease decades ago, according to
NPR.

While we shouldn’t get too frightened about Earth’s once-frozen pathogens wiping
us out (yet), the warming planet has also widened the geographic ranges of ticks,
mosquitoes and other organisms that carry disease.

“We now have dengue in southern parts of Texas,” George C. Stewart, McKee
Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and chair of the department of veterinary
pathobiology at the University of Missouri, told Scientific American. “Malaria is
seen at higher elevations and latitudes as temperatures climb. And the cholera
agent,Vibrio cholerae, replicates better at higher temperatures.”

As the world’s largest carbon sink, our oceans bear the brunt of climate change.
But the more carbon it absorbs (about 22 million tons a day), the more acidic the
waters become. This could put a whole host of marine life at risk, including coral
reef ecosystems, the thousands of species that depend on them and the
estimated 1 billion people around the globe who rely on healthy reefs for
sustenance and income.

According to Science, “Researchers predict that with increasing levels of

acidification, most coral reefs will be gradually dissolving away by the end of the
century.”

These climate predictions are worst-case scenarios, but there are many more
dangers to consider in our warming world. A report recently published in the
journal Nature Climate Change found “evidence for 467 pathways by which
human health, water, food, economy, infrastructure and security have been
recently impacted by climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves, precipitation,
drought, floods, fires, storms, sea-level rise and changes in natural land cover
and ocean chemistry.”

Since the 19th century, the Earth has warmed by 1 degree Celsius. Now, a major
IPCC special report released in October warns that even just a half-degree more
of warming could be disastrous.

“Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5ºC or higher
increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the
loss of some ecosystems,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of IPCC Working
Group II.

The panel said that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C could go
hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society.”

By Lorraine Chow