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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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The recent American Geophysical Union's annual meeting featured a talk that presented computer simulations of planetary futures if human activity continued on its present course. Such meetings are generally staid affairs. But the findings motivated this scientist to title his presentation "Is Earth F**ked?"
Meanwhile, halfway around the globe in Doha, climate change negotiators continued to fiddle with treaty text as the planet gradually burns. While the negotiators may save the Kyoto Protocol to combat climate change as a stopgap until a new international treaty is negotiated in 2015, none of it is likely to be anywhere near enough.
Emissions continue to rise ever faster, making it unlikely that average temperature increases will fall below 2 degrees Celsius, the avowed target. Instead, the world is on course for at least 4 degrees C of warming [pdf]. Already, with slightly less than 1 degree C of warming, places like the Arctic have become unrecognizable.
In other words, the predictions that scientists made way back in 1990 have been spot on as far as temperature changes go. [David J. Frame and Dáithí A. Stone, Assessment of the first consensus prediction on climate change] Let's hope the present failure to take action against climate change doesn't make today's dire predictions hopelessly optimistic.
—David Biello
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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4 Comments
Add CommentI concur. Wonder if earth will become like her twin Venus or will microbial life restore the planet. We the non-existant shall never know.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am curious if there are any people left who still believe that human induced climate change is a liberal conspiracy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Earth's climate has varied far more than this in the past, and mass extinctions have wiped out over 90% of (recorded) species, but the sheer number of humans and their waste now places additional stress on its own and other species, in particular both through isolation of non-viable populations or contamination across natural barriers, so the outcome is unpredictable. Eventually, however, climate change will catch up with humanity and potentially numbers and greenhouse activity will decrease. But we wouldn't be here at all if the Earth did not occupy a very special place in our solar system, and indeed the universe, which as made it unreasonably habitable. Some people will survive. It doesn't really matter who, as long as knowledge is preserved. I'm not suggesting we should go on eating, driving and burning as if there were no tomorrow, but if as seems likely this will continue, tomorrow will to an extent look after itself. Dr James Lovelock argues that the priority should then be adaptation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNicholasunik: I agree with most of what you say.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever I don't think you are right when you say we (meaning life) wouldn't be here at all if the earth did not occupy a very special place, some other life-form might occupy the niche.
We don't know enough about life to make such a statement. Cognisance is important in what we call life, perhaps high temperature plasma is cognisant! I am partly referring to Sir Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud for this example, just taking temperature up to plasma level, Hoyle could not do this, after all his cloud came to our solar system to suck energy from our sun. Life could also exist at very cold temperatures in rivers of methane for example. All you need for life is Redox(reduction-oxidation) reactions and elector-chemical storage of information.
We shall never know all possible cognisant entities, at best we can know those that exist at our physical scale, in our time scale, in our temperature range, at our densities.