Human extinction is a real possibility, without any consideration for climate change. This story is more shocking than anything you have read before in these letters (which for me is an odd sort of relief). It’s about the problem of declining fertility, called “Sperm Count Zero,” published by GQ magazine. Once again, it’s the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gets blamed, this time with a primary focus on the chemical industry. The evidence presented is not flimsy, and the potential solutions, as proposed, unconvincing.
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From Anthropocene magazine, a review of two recent studies about the effect of climate change on Earth’s ecosystems. One, which was widely reported last week, focused on widespread vegetation makeover. The other, less noticed, did some original research on the impact of a major heat wave on marine and terrestrial ecosystems in specific parts of Western Australia. The results led to some disturbing conclusions: “Researchers are increasingly realizing that the negative effects of climate change come not just from changes in average temperature but from extreme events. Heat waves are increasing in frequency and intensity, and are expected to do so more as climate change proceeds….The bigger picture, it seems, is that this is the way the biosphere as we know it ends: not with a bang nor a whimper but knocked back and back, one climate disaster at a time.”
–Note: The heat wave study has open access, with a link at the end of the report. One can read just the Introduction alone to learn that the implications of the study are really quite broad as heat waves everywhere are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity.
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Some personal comment: I keep thinking about the implications of a specific temperature chart that was introduced and discussed in a recent letter. Here it is again:
This chart, from James Hansen’s website, employs a baseline that is about equal to the preindustrial average, or maybe higher by about one-tenth, and updating ended with 2016 (2017 would have dropped a bit). It shows that average temperatures on Earth’s land areas are rising very rapidly, and now easily exceed the 1.5C target set by the Paris Agreement. Oceans lag far behind, now about 0.8C, and if the two were combined on this image we would see a global average reading of 1.1C, a more familiar number. The weighting of ocean to land reflected in the combination, based on area totals, is 70/30.
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I have calculated that if the trends of the past forty years continue at the same rate for another 20-25 years we would then see the combined global anomaly at 1.5C, land at 2.3 and oceans 1.1. The heat that has been “missing” at the ocean’s surface and close-by lower atmosphere would presumably be found to have been accumulating for years at varying depths below the surface, warming up the home of marine ecosystems. Nothing comparable can occur in the rigid and heat-resistant rocks and soils that underlie the surface of land. One must wonder if all the studies that project the effects of future climate change are taking this highly unbalanced temperature distribution into account? Or, can “fast” sensitivity (temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2, before full equilibrium is reached) be meaningfully described by just one number in situations where land and ocean results are so widely divergent? Today’s extraordinarily rapid CO2 increase seems to be just such a situation. How long will it actually last, before sea surfaces start to catch up?
One final thought—the rise in CO2 since 1750 has passed the half-way point (396 ppm) on a logarithmic basis, and we know that temperatures on land have risen by an average of 1.6 to 1.7C. That suggests a fast-response sensitivity outcome greater than 3.0C for a doubling, even before an increase in reflective aerosols is taken into consideration. Greenhouse gas, including lots of methane, is the simplest and maybe the only way to account for that much heating input.
Carl