Our planet may be heading to a point of no return.
Scientists predict that a domino effect of damage is on the horizon without intervention, including “hothouse” level warming. Climate change is likely to worsen, especially as the Trump administration is looking to relax emissions regulations. This could lead to irreparable harm to the ecosystem and to human health.
What is ‘hothouse’ warming?
Earth’s climate is “departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia,” and barreling towards several tipping points which “could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said an analysis published in the journal One Earth. “Most tipping interactions are destabilizing in nature,” and if “one element tips, it can trigger a cascade effect, pushing other systems past their thresholds.” This tipping may “already be underway or could occur soon for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, boreal permafrost, mountain glaciers and parts of the Amazon rainforest.” The shift could “raise global temperatures, accelerate sea-level rise, release vast stores of carbon and destabilize ecosystems.”
In the hothouse trajectory, “global temperature stays significantly above the 4°C rise of current worst-case climate scenarios for thousands of years, driving a huge rise in sea level that drowns coastal cities,” said The Guardian. Unfortunately, global temperatures are likely already as “warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years” and the progress is “advancing faster than many scientists predicted,” said Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates and one of the authors of the analysis, to The Guardian.
“Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.”
Read more: The Week UK
