A group of 22 scientists sounded an alarming call to action last week.
Their paper in the June 7 issue of Nature, a highly regarded, peer-reviewed journal, carries the benign-sounding title, "Approaching a State Shift in Earth's Biosphere." But their conclusions are nothing short of a disaster warning.
This group of biologists, ecologists, geologists, paleontologists and complex-system theoreticians from the United States, Canada, South America, and Europe have spent a year and half reviewing evidence that Earth may be approaching a state shift, a "tipping point" at which the global ecosystem may shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another.
If this happens, the world as we know it may not be recoverable, and these scientists conclude that this outcome is looking more and more likely.
An article by Paul Basken in last week's Chronicle of Higher Education explains the scientists' findings in layman's terms. According to Basken, the report centers on a measure of how much of the Earth's surface has been altered by people, "from forests and prairies to uses such as cornfields and parking lots."
Human beings now number more than 7 billion, and we have transformed 43 percent of the land we live on from its natural state to something else. That figure is expected to top 50 percent by 2025, when the world's population reaches 8 billion. At that point, environmental damage such as species extinctions, climate change, and chemical contamination may have accumulated to such an extent as to be catastrophic.
The report's lead author, Anthony D. Barnosky of the University of California at Berkeley, told Basken that the scope of these problems demands a global response. And this is where scientists like Barnosky and his co-authors begin to get really worried. Up to now, the nations of the world have not shown themselves to be either willing or able to cooperate on the scale that scientists now believe is necessary to avert irreparable harm to the planet.
We will have another opportunity this month at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 20-22. Dubbed Rio+20 because it is taking place 20 years after the Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992, this conference may be one of our last, best chances to come together as a species and take concrete actions in time to avoid that environmental tipping point that Barnosky and his colleagues have warned us about.
At the Delaware Environmental Institute, the multidisciplinary research and education institute at the University of Delaware that I have the privilege of directing, we recognize the complexity of the environmental challenges we are facing. Responding to these challenges involves more than scientists providing data and politicians passing laws based on that data. Our global society encompasses a myriad of ideological, cultural, economic, and psychological factors that must be taken into account to structure workable solutions.
In order to navigate our way forward, we do need scientists to measure what is happening to the Earth and engineers to devise technological fixes. But we also need philosophers to examine the ethics of what we do in relation to our environment, and historians, writers, and artists to tell the story in a way we can hear and respond to. We need psychologists and sociologists to tell us why we are so resistant to change as individuals and communities and how we can overcome those barriers. And we need economists and policymakers to build in the proper incentives to our markets and our governance so that we adequately value and protect the natural systems on which our lives depend.
People from all walks of life and all schools of thought have one thing in common: we spend our lives on this planet being sustained by a natural system that provides us with air, soil, water and food -- and abundant wonder and beauty -- but which is showing increasing signs of strain. There can be little doubt that we are the primary source of that strain. Let's hope that we can find a way to ease the strain before we reach the breaking point.
Dr. Donald L. Sparks is the S. Hallock du Pont Chair in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences and director of the Delaware Environmental Institute at the University of Delaware. He is an internationally recognized scientist in the field of environmental soil chemistry.
David Nussbaum: The Alarm Is Ringing, Time to Wake Up to Water
Jamie Henn: Countries Must End Fossil Fuel Subsidies at Rio+20
William S. Becker: Rio+20: The Young Can't Wait
Frances Beinecke: Ocean Lovers Urge Leaders at Rio+20 to Make Real Commitments to Restore Oceans
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/30/mail-on-best/#more-5526
Hide the decline. Stop saying end the skepticism.
Regarding Bob Carter what he did was remove bad proxy and falsified GCM data and showed the so called hockey stick trend was not accurate. The tree rings were shown not to be so responsive to temperature as was once believed, there are altitude alterations, humidity and all sorts of other considerations that alter the responses of proxies like sediment cores and tree rings.
I am not in agreement with Carter we are headed into a cooling trend at least not of any statistical significance.
1.) Here are two links to quotes from Dr. Curry about Muller:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html
‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html#ixzz1yaE9vRWQ
http://junkscience.com/2011/10/30/curry-damage-control-mullers-oversell-a-mistake-not-a-new-scandal/
Even if the simplest one is tragic to envision. We are overpopulated, plain and simple. It will take a population collapse of humans to save most life on earth, ultimately including us. I believe it is coming, and it will likely be a combination of disease, famine, and lack of clean water.
Below 200 ppm CO2, the biosphere will face mass extinction unlike ant the world has ever seen. Humans are saving the planet, not destroying it.
Ecosystems naturally "regulate and moderate the climate" as well as naturally taking care of those climate warming gases. When they rape ecosystems for agriculture, houses, parking lots and shopping malls, the sequestered heat trapping gases are re-released back into the atmosphere. Also, what sits on the surface of the Earth influences climate, precisely why cities and agriculture have hotter climates.
Ecosystems not only supply mankind with his natural resources that drive the financial economy, they provide mankind free gratis with all his lifelines to existence, from oxygen releasing, the atmosphere, the nitrogen cycle, fresh water, decomposition, seed dispersal, 99% of all pest control, including the control and regulation of human disease pathogens that cause epidemics. Science relates, frogs are in this eco-nomy and probably lizards and some species of birds. Frogs are falling extinct globally en masse and lizards aren't far behind. Most birds are in steep decline.
Cities, houses, parking lots, shopping malls and office complexes are as life giving as the dust on Mars, and Earth has lost 43% of her terrestrial ecosystems to "corn fields and parking lots".
"Saved by science.
Can science rescue me?
High technology, put me in the place I seem to be."
According to Bloombergs tracking of renewable expenditures since 2004, if the money wasted to date on wind and solar (35 and 85 cents a kwh) with low efficiency gas backup producing less energy and more GHG's than if the wind/solar was just skipped and high efficiency gas used instead, had been spent on nuke power the world would now be coal free saving a million lives annually from coal air pollution. The impeding warming precipice would have be moved back 50 years or more potentially saving billions of more lives.
Without gas or hydro backup and its enormous subsidy in money and blood of innocents, there would be no wind or solar.
The world's foremost climatologist James Hansen tells us these greenie Denialists are drunk on spiked Green Koolaid - there is a no future for civilization without a massive conversion to nuclear power.
Care to provide a link for this entirely unsubstantiated and completely fabricated statement (which you appear to be attributing to a specific source)?
http://www.newenergyfinance.com/PressReleases/view/224
California is devouring our fragile desert ecosystems for biodiversity killing windmills and dead fields of solar panels, mined from a rare earth mineral. More roads have to be built for construction and access, killing more ecosystem. Outside of Palm Springs there is a windmill factory. This desert ecosystem is as dead as if they had dropped a nuke bomb on it. One desert solar project had to be stopped because it was killing protected foxes. Killing ecosystems, kills all the reasons mankind is alive and Earth is a life giving and supporting planet.
Conversely, nuclear power consumes infinitely less tracts of the Earth and produces higher energy yield than all other sources of energy. You are correct. Wind and solar kill the planet and ecosystems like all the other sources; however, nuclear destroys less for high energy yield.
Duck and cover
your head in the sand.
There discover
a bright fairyland.
Dare not hover
with your helping hand.
Ditch your lover.
Don't take a last stand.
She'll recover
as she ditches man.
When we're fossils underground
she'll spin gayly round and round.
Wiser species will be found.
We need to ask, can a house, parking lot or city release oxygen, balance the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, naturally regulate and moderate the climate, naturally sequester those heat trapping gases that will be re-released back into the atmosphere upon ecosystem deforestation; provide the entirety of Earth's heat trapping gases and fresh water, plus create and renew a life giving soil;
provide seed dispersal, pollination and decomposition; 75% of all new medicines, 99% of all pest control and the control and regulation of human disease pathogens in the food chain with mankind?
All ecosystems are integrated with loops and feedbacks to both the climate and the atmosphere, and all ecosystems create the life zone of Earth, her biosphere/ecosphere.
Simplistically, man is killing all his lifelines to his very existence.