Climate Letter #1543

Canadian researchers have detected abrupt degradation of Arctic permafrost (McGill University).  “Prior research in the field has tended to project a gradual degradation of the permafrost, with few direct effects on climate…..We used climate model data spanning the 1970-2100 period to understand probable changes in the Arctic climate and permafrost. What we came away with, was a picture of alarming changes to climate driven by permafrost degradation.”  The consequences lead to an even greater risk of rapidly rising air temperatures and extreme wildfires in the future.

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A new estimate triples the number of people in the path of rising seas (Science News).  “Sea level rise this century could flood coastal areas that are now home to 340 million to 480 million people…..That’s roughly triple the number of people estimated to be at risk using previous coastal elevation data…..The global threat from sea level rise and coastal flooding is far greater than what we thought it was.”  The new estimate was based on upgraded satellite imagery that better detects land elevation without interference from objects that exist above the land, which otherwise tend to overestimate the result for land alone.
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The False Comfort of Higher Seawalls (The New Republic).  (This story about the problems faced by coastal communities was written before the data in the above story was published.)  It describes how current infrastructure that was planned to hold back coastal flooding has been found inadequate for many reasons.  “In the coming decades, as communities in high-risk locations face larger and fiercer storms, and low-risk locations start to become high-risk locations, disaster preparedness will become a top issue for many governments. The data from global warming’s early years—and storms—suggests policymakers might want to update their toolkits.”
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Relief agencies say they are running out of money (OZY).  Requests for donations appear to be rising faster than the resources, and donors, while basically trying to be selective, are subject to both confusion and fatigue.  “But the new weariness isn’t a one-off, and it’s hitting the world’s most populated region at a time the U.N. is warning that climate change-related humanitarian crises are set to explode in numbers and scale.”
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An overview of recent findings in the way biodiversity is changing, and the implications for extinction (Climate News Network).  The most interesting result of recent research is that overall species richness is not changing much in different ecosystems but is rapidly being reorganized:  “that is, as some creatures or growths vanish from a cloud forest or an estuarine mudbank, the space they occupied is colonised by newcomers more comfortable with change…..as environments change, so does the mix of local species. Some migrate, some adapt, some invade. Overall, the richness of the local population may not change a lot…..on average, 28% of species were being replaced each decade…..the numbers of species in any local ecosystem might remain stable but the variety of life overall could still be diminished…..As such, a sixth mass extinction could still be happening while local scale richness shows little change.”
Carl

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