Stark Differences In Climate Impacts Between 1.5 And 2 Degrees Of Warming

Yale Environment 360

Aerial views of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast, October 30, 2012.  U.S. Air Force/Mark C. Olsen

A difference of just half a degree of global warming, from 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, would mean that an additional 5 million people worldwide will have the land where their homes are located be permanently submerged underwater, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The research, led by scientists at Princeton University, analyzed the global impacts on sea levels of 1.5 degrees C of warming, the current target of the Paris Agreement, compared to 2 and 2.5 degrees. It looked at data from tide gauges across the globe and created local sea level rise projections. The scientists examined what would happen to everyday sea levels, but also to extreme sea-level events, such as storm surges.
The study found that under a 1.5 degrees C scenario, global mean sea levels could increase 1.6 feet by 2100, 1.8 feet for 2 degrees of warming, and 1.9 feet for 2.5 degrees. It also found that if nations managed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, extreme sea-level events could still be catastrophic for coastal communities. The New York City area, for example, could experience one Hurricane Sandy-like flood event every five years by the end of the century.
“People think the Paris Agreement is going to save us from harm from climate change,” the study’s lead author, DJ Rasmussen, a graduate student at Princeton, said in a statement. “But we show that even under the best-case climate policy being considered today, many places will still have to deal with rising seas and more frequent coastal floods.”

Links

• What Would a Global Warming Increase of 1.5 Degrees Be Like?
• How Air Pollution Has Put a Brake on Global Warming
• Urban Heat: Can White Roofs Help Cool World’s Warming Cities?
• Awaiting Day Zero: Cape Town Faces an Uncertain Water Future
• How the Trump Administration Distorts Analysis of Key Environmental Rules
• How a Wayward Arctic Current Could Cool the Climate in Europe
• Climate Connection: Unraveling the Surprising Ecology of Dust
• As Oceans Warm, the World’s Kelp Forests Begin to Disappear
• In Drive to Cut Emissions, Germany Confronts Its Car Culture
• Climate Change and the Human Mind: A Noted Psychiatrist Weighs In
• Taking the Long View: The ‘Forever Legacy’ of Climate Change
• The World Eyes Yet Another Unconventional Source of Fossil Fuels
• Investigating the Enigma of Clouds and Climate Change
• The Nitrogen Problem: Why Global Warming Is Making It Worse
• Paul Hawken on One Hundred Solutions to the Climate Crisis
• Running Dry: Seeking Solutions to South Asia’s Looming Water Crisis
• America Heads to the Exit: What Trump Got Wrong about Paris

What Do We Think About Climate Change, And Why?

Psychology Today - Richard Maxwell* | Toby Miller*

Studies of attitudes to climate change show they correspond to political views

A recent longitudinal review of studies into the US population’s beliefs about climate change since the early 1980s discloses that they are very similar to positions on other major political issues, such as violence, racism, and socialism. In all such cases, the clue to a divided society lies in “partisan and ideological polarisation enhanced by communications from elites.” In other words, people largely follow the arguments put forward from their side of electoral politics and within their preferred media sources.
That said, various attitudes to climate change are specific to how people think about risk; the faith they have in science; and their religiosity, gender (women get it, men less so), and life experiences. Even when people believe the science, they largely decline to place a high priority on mitigating the impact of climate change when compared with managing local pollution, controlling gun use, or maintaining consumption as a way of life. And Americans often refuse to accept that climate change is caused by human conduct.
The partisan aspects to these divisions relate to the transformation of both major political parties since the 1960s. The Democratic Party has gone from an alliance of rural segregationist Southerners and industrial Northerners into a new grouping of the culture industries, highly-qualified urban professionals, secularists, minorities, and immigrants. The Republicans have transmogrified from an alliance of manufacturing capital and suburbanites into one formed of evangelical Christians, rural workers, investors, and military families.
On the Republican side, an emergent disaffection with university-based intellectuals, technocrats, and other urban ‘experts’ has been part of these changes, alongside, and as part of, a deepening faith in other kinds of intellectuals, such as charismatic preachers, businesspeople, and stock-market journalists. Given the record of the latter in improving the lives of their flocks, and the failure of trickle-down economics, one might have expected a rejection of such authorities and a return to faith in traditional sources of reason and rationality. This has not occurred. Why?
We’re increasingly being told by researchers from various sectors of the academy that the reason so many folks accept and even favour economic and social policies that work against their own self-interest is their love of money and loathing of expertise—the sense that those who speak out against educational and policy élites do so with a common touch that also holds out the promise of upward mobility. It doesn’t seem to matter that this distorted American dream twists reality into a miasma of falsehoods and fantasies.
Such affinities have profound roots, as one of our most enduring media—books—can illustrate. Almost a century ago, F Scott Fitzgerald penned these famous words in his short story, “The Rich Boy”: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different”.
A decade later, Ernest Hemingway wrote the following in “The Snows of Kiliminjaro”: “The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him”. ‘Julian’ stood in for Fitzgerald in the story, after the real-life author had reacted badly to being directly named in an earlier version.
There’s a reason we still read these deeply flawed, arrogant, self-satisfied, tortured, and torturing critics and fans of American life. It’s not just to do with their clipped, clear prose, and reporters’ eyes. They understood that the majority of our population prefers emulation to envy, something confirmed by polling. Fitzgerald and Hemingway’s words may not have disabused readers of a belief in the dollar transcending class privilege of the kind that populists are, ironically, so often born into. But they found a way to ask what differentiated those with real, unearned power from the rest of us—especially folks who place such touching faith in their pronouncements.
If the truth about climate change is to percolate throughout society, we must offer people the truth about how profound social inequality has become—and that the current extent of it was not always the case, and need not remain so. That will be part of persuading American opponents to climate science that their misapprehensions about the possibility of upward mobility match their environmental misunderstandings, such that they may even prosper from green policies.
This is not to denounce people who hold the beliefs we are problematizing, and certainly not to favor one half of our Tweedle-dum Tweedle-dee corporate politics. Rather, we want to offer everyday climate deniers an alternative perspective, one founded in facts and probabilities, in history and contemporaneity, rather than myths and dreams—however beguiling the latter may be. Better to follow élite knowledge than élite power. One lets you share in its wealth; the other—not so much.

*Richard Maxwell, Ph.D., is a professor and chair of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York
*Toby Miller, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary social scientist

Links

• The Link Between the Refugee Crisis and Climate Change Talks
• Motivated Reasoning
• Storytelling Enhances the Influence of Science-Based Writing
• Are You in Climate Change Denial? Three Signs to Look For
• Fighting Climate Change in a Post-Factual Age
• Why Do People Want to Refute Climate Change?
• This Is Your Child on Climate Change
• Climate Change: A Psychological Challenge
• Emotional Causes of Climate Change Denial
• The Climate Change Winds (of Fear) May Be Shifting 

Ancient Climate Swings Forced Early Humans To Get Their Crap Together And Innovate

Gizmodo - George Dvorsky

On the left, old-timey stone tools of the Acheulian, and on the right, the sexy new compact tools of the Middle Stone Age. Image: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

Our species made its debut some 300,000 years ago. During the preceding millenniums, our continent of origin underwent environmental shifts that very likely influenced the trajectory of human evolution. Archaeologists working in Kenya have uncovered new clues to support this assertion, showing the surprising extent to which climate change influenced the behaviour of early humans and their approach to technology.
Dramatic climate instability in east Africa, starting around 360,000 years ago, had a pronounced effect on human evolution, but also on human culture, according to three new studies published this week in Science. As the African landscape changed, so too did the animals who lived upon it. This forced early humans to spread out, establish trade routes and construct innovative new tools in order to adapt and survive. Ancient climate change, according to this view, changed both our biology and our behaviour. What's more, these cultural shifts happened tens of thousands of years earlier than what was suggested by earlier archaeological discoveries.
Anatomically modern humans, otherwise known as Homo sapiens, emerged just prior to the onset of the Middle Stone Age, a period that lasted from about 280,000 to 40,000 years ago. Before the Middle Stone Age, humans lived in the Early Stone Age, an era characterised by the popular Acheulean stone handaxe. The new studies explore the environmental, ecological and technological changes that happened in East Africa during this critically important transitionary time in human evolution. All three studies focused on excavations done at the Olorgesailie Basin in southern Kenya, a region that, for the past 75 years, has yielded artefacts dating as far back as 1.2 million years ago.
The first study, led by Richard Potts from the Smithsonian Institute's Human Origins Program, looked at well-preserved sediments pulled from Olorgesailie, a rift that extends for 65 square km. Around 360,000 years ago, this region started to change, converting from a floodplain to a region that fluctuated wildly between very wet and very dry conditions. Eventually, the basin transformed into a gigantic grassland. It was this environmental shift, says Potts, that set the stage for the Middle Stone Age and the emergence of our species.
The shift from floodplain to grasslands had a profound effect on the flora and fauna that lived there, and thus the humans who depended on both. Climate change resulted in a changing of the guard, especially among the grazing animals. A number of elephant and horse species went extinct, replaced by animals that were significantly smaller in size, such as the springbok antelope.
For early humans, this represented an inconvenient truth: Access to food was becoming highly unpredictable. To adapt, the hunter-gathering clans had to disperse and spread out, gather information, and, in the words of the researchers, make an "investment in social resource exchange networks" - in other words, they had to start trading goods with other clans. These adjustments may have been disruptive, but together, they promoted foraging efficiency, reduced risk, and improved the overall "fitness" of the species, according to the research.
"This change to a very sophisticated set of behaviours that involved greater mental abilities and more complex social lives may have been the leading edge that distinguished our lineage from other early humans," said Potts in a statement.
Archaeological evidence collected in Kenya bears this out. Prior to the environmental shifts and the onset of the Middle Stone Age, humans living in the Olorgesailie Basin made stone tools from rocks collected in the area; some 98 per cent of these tools, namely Acheulean handaxes, were made from stones found no further than 5km away. But this changed entirely by about 320,000 years ago, as evidenced by the presence of tools and other artefacts made from obsidian, chert (a coloured stone) and quartzite - materials that came from far away. This means trade and long-distance travel had likely become an established part of human life.
"This represents a significant revision in African hominin behaviour at or near the time of origin of Homo sapiens," write the researchers in the study.

Rocks known as chert were used as a colouring material. Photo: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

The second study, led by Alison Brooks from George Washington University, is an extension of the first, providing additional details about the artifacts found buried in the Olorgesailie Basin. Brooks' team analysed stone tools, weapons and pigments found at five different sites dated to between 500,000 and 298,000 years ago, looking for signs of technological development and trade networks. This approach allowed the researchers to see how the tools changed over time.
At the older sites, the tools were larger and bulkier, with handaxes manufactured from volcanic rock found in the region; for the Acheulian culture, this was the way of things for hundreds of thousands of years. But at the younger sites, dated to between 320,000 to 305,000 years old, the tools suddenly became smaller - more compact - and featured entirely new designs. Unlike the single-use handaxes, the new tools of the Middle Stone Age were highly specialised and crafted with care. The stones were knapped to a fine point, and likely attached to the end of a spear for use as a projectile weapon to hunt both large and small game. Other tools were forged into scrapers or awls.
Revealingly, slightly less than half of the artefacts found at the younger sites were made from obsidian, for which there was no local source. Obsidian is a hard and brittle volcanic glass that produces very sharp edges when fractured. This was a highly valued tool, and quite literally the "killer app" of its day. The closest sources of obsidian to Olorgesailie were located more than 25-50km away, suggesting trade or long-distance travel. The researchers also found no less than 46,000 obsidian flakes at the site. This means that obsidian was delivered to Olorgesailie as a raw material, and not imported as a finished product; the humans who lived at Olorgesailie knapped the obsidian themselves.
In addition to the obsidian, another commonly imported resource was brown or white chert. In a really cool discovery, the researchers uncovered a lump of red ochre pigment with a pair of holes punched into it, and it's now one of the oldest ochre artefacts ever found. The archaeologists speculate that colouring pigments were used to denote identity or status, among other possibilities.
"We don't know what the colouring was used on, but colouring is often taken by archeologists as the root of complex symbolic communication," Potts said. "Just as colour is used today in clothing or flags to express identity, these pigments may have helped people communicate membership in alliances and maintain ties with distant groups."
Taken together, "this evidence indicates that distinctive technological features of the African Middle Stone Age reflecting innovation, standardization, and new cognitive abilities were already developed in eastern Africa before 300,000 years ago," write the authors in the new study. Also, the establishment of trade suggests a new behaviour in the human repertoire: "the formation of networks of exchange or procurement over a significant area."
The third study, headed by Alan L. Deino from the Berkeley Geochronology Center, tied everything together by dating the samples and artifacts found at the Olorgesailie sites. Using argon and uranium dating techniques, Deino's team confirmed that the larger tools belonged to the older Acheulean era, and that Acheulean tech started to disappear around 320,000 years ago, replaced by Middle Stone Age tools and weapons. "These results establish the currently oldest repository of [Middle Stone Age artifacts] in eastern Africa," write the researchers in their study.
Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who's not affiliated with the studies, says these new papers confirm a new picture that's emerging, one displaying a "synchronicity" between the evolution of physical traits in humans and the onset of modern behaviours, beginning more than 300,000 years ago in Africa.
"Long it was believed that 'anatomical modernity' developed well before 'behavioural modernity,' Hublin told Gizmodo. "I find it striking that the gradual changes that my team described between [ancient] Homo sapiens and recent modern populations, especially regarding brain evolution, are now chronologically well matched by the changes observed within the African [Middle Stone Age]."
Hublin is referring to a Nature study he co-authored last year showing that Homo sapiens made their debut 300,000 years ago, and not 200,000 years ago as previously assumed. As Hublin points out, these new studies mesh rather nicely, showing the emergence of not just a new kind of hominid, but an entirely new approach to technological development and social organisation - one triggered by climate change.

Links

• Changing environment influenced human evolution
• A Cultural Leap at the Dawn of Humanity
• The Role of Climate Change on Early Human Society & Creativity in Kenya’s Olorgesailie Basin
• Ancient climate shifts may have sparked human ingenuity and networking
• Our ancestors in East Africa were making sophisticated tools far earlier than we thought

Will Our Beloved Waratahs Survive Climate Change?

Australian Geographic - Tim Low

New research shows that our waratahs can withstand a lot.

Image Credit: Wikimedia/aussiegall 

NSW’S FLORAL EMBLEM, the waratah (Telopea speciosissima), has a new career in climate change research. In greenhouses and the field, waratahs are helping scientists foresee the future.
When fed extra carbon dioxide in one experiment, young waratahs thrived. This was expected because carbon dioxide is plant fuel, which means many plants should benefit from a high carbon world, unless it brings worse droughts, which it may.
When subjected to high temperatures, waratahs from around Sydney outgrew those from the Blue Mountains. Plants often grow better when temperatures are raised, surprising though that may seem. Over the years scientists have found that eucalypts, banksias, lillypillies and many other trees and shrubs thrive if temperatures are raised a few degrees, provided they have enough water.
But waratahs in the Blue Mountains endured so much cold during the last ice age they may have lost what it takes to benefit from warming, the researchers suggested. The good news is that these plants weren’t harmed by the heat.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia/Rexness)

In the wild this waratah species isn’t found north of Newcastle, but it is grown in southern Queensland for the flower trade, confirming that waratahs can take more warmth than they are used to.
Another experiment saw waratahs, along with other shrubs from around Sydney, planted in woodlands 600 kilometres further north, near Grafton, to see what insects attack them. In a warmer future, insects will spread south, so this experiment was a way to anticipate that. Waratahs themselves will remain around Sydney rather than relocating, because they need sandstone soils.
Most of the plants that were moved to Grafton, including waratahs, had fewer insects chewing and sucking them than they face around Sydney. That is good news for the plants, although the experiment only ran for a year so didn’t prove much.
The research gives hope that waratahs will continue to brighten the bushland around Sydney for a long time yet. The honeyeaters that pollinate them will be pivotal to their success. Waratahs near the coast differ, genetically, from those in the mountains, and birds moving pollen between different stands will ensure that some offspring produced in each location have the best genetic makeup for the climates of the future.

Links

• How Australia’s animals and plants are changing to keep up with the climate
• Turning Up The Heat To Push Many Australian Plants To The Brink, New Study Finds
• Climate change is affecting Australian plants today
• How Australia's animals and plants are changing
• Turning up the heat to push many Australian plants to the brink
• Implications of climate change for Australia's biodiversity

10 Ways Climate Change Is Affecting Australia’s Wildlife, According To Science

Business Insider - Daniella Brandy

Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

Climate change (and the resulting destruction of nature) is the top problem facing the world, according to millennials.
The way we are going, the future looks dire. Our way of life as we know it will end if we don’t make some drastic changes soon.
Even a 3C rise in global average temperatures could spark a whole series of catastrophic events.
By 2100, there could be 10,000 heat-related deaths, dangerous water shortages in both rural and regional areas, we wouldn’t be able to grow food or work outdoors, and infrastructure would be put at risk. That’s just for starters.
But climate change doesn’t affect just humans. The environment has taken a battering, and changed for the worse in many ways.
The impact on Australia’s biodiversity is just as real, and just as devastating.
Over the last 10 years or so, a staggering 50% of animal species in Australia has been wiped out due to climate change.
The affect of climate change on Australia’s wildlife is widespread, and is getting worse.
Entire ecosystems will no longer be self-sufficient, would break down and be unable to sustain a population.
Total extinction is likely for a large portion of both currently endangered and non-endangered animal species, unless something is done to mitigate the devastating affects of climate change on the animal population.
This chart from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) shows the percentage of animal species likely to be at risk of extinction in just over 60 years.

Percentage of species projected to be at risk of local extinction by the 2080s. The chart shows three different global climate change scenarios, modelling risk both with dispersal and no dispersal. WWF

Amphibians and mammals are especially at risk, facing an 81-89% likelihood of extinction due to climate change.
Here are just some of the ways Australia’s wildlife has been affected by rising global temperatures due to climate change:

1. Warmer oceans cook the Great Barrier and Ningaloo reefs alive

Great Barrier Reef iStock

The Great Barrrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef have experienced devastating destruction of their coral reef systems over recent years due to climate change.
The Great Barrier reef has lost half of its cover in the last 27 years.
A hotter, more acidic ocean leads to coral basically being cooked alive.
Polluted water from increased run-off is infecting the sea life, and crown-of-thorns starfish that thrive in warmer water are swarming the marine habitat and attacking the coral.
The Australian government will invest $60 million over the next 18 months into its restoration and preservation. 64,000 jobs rely on its prosperity.

2. Marine turtles produce more females than males, leading to decreased breeding

 Marine turtle iStock

Marine turtles are producing more females due to the higher temperatures. The sex of the turtles is determined by the temperature at incubation.
Hatchling eggs are buried in the sand, so the warmer the weather, the warmer the sand, and the higher probability of females being born.

3. Rock wallabies face food and habitat loss from extended drought

Wallaby iStock

Rock wallabies face further food and habitat loss from extended drought due to climate change.
A temperature increase of even 0.5C would see normal habitat for the rock wallaby such as Recherche Archipelago in Western Australia, the Western Australian Wheatbelt and Barrow Island off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia practically uninhabitable. Longer and more severe droughts will decrease options for food and sustenance, and competition amongst different species in the area ramps up for what little food there is.

4. Forests are less productive, and more trees die 

The Devil’s Marbles in the Devils Marbles Conservation Reserve in the Northern Territory iStock

Fauna isn’t the only wildlife affected in Australia by climate change. The impact to local flora has also been major, and could lead to catastrophic consequences in the future.
There’s increased frequency of drought in some regions as a result of reduced rainfall, increased temperatures, more natural disasters and water loss.
Forestry is facing an increased risk of declining productivity and tree mortality.
Eucalyptus trees are especially affected, and lose vital nutrients.
Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the eucalyptus leaves will alter the palatability and nutrient density and quality of these leaves, and species that eat them and rely on them for sustenance will die. These species include the koala, glider, and the ringtail possum.
Which has in turn can lead to…

5. Koalas don’t get enough nutrients from the leaves

Tim Marshall/Merlin Entertainments via Getty Images

Koalas are not getting enough nutrients and moisture from eucalytpus leaves because more trees are dying and the ones remaining aren’t getting enough nutrients from the dry soil.
As a result, koalas will travel to find food, taking them out of their natural habitat up in the trees, leaving them vulnerable to predators.

6. Female butterflies in Southern Australia are leaving their coccoons earlier, effectively being born prematurely 

iStock

Higher temperatures speed up butterfly growth and development by 1.6 days every decade.
On average, a butterfly’s life span is about 12 months.
That’s 2.3% of their total lifespan that they’re losing every decade due to climate change.

7. Vector-borne diseases from insect bites are on the rise 

iStock

Climate change has been a big factor in the rise of vector-borne diseases (carried by insects) that has affected animal (and human) health.
Increased temperatures and rainfall facilitate vector reproduction. These events result in an increased incidence of insect-borne diseases.

8. Breeding seasons happen earlier or later than normal, and are shorter in length

iStock

Newly-born animals may not be born at the opportune time when food is available nearby because increased temperatures cause breeding season to occur either a week earlier or later than normal every decade.
As a result, vulnerable young need to travel further for food and shelter and are more susceptible to predators.

9. Snow melt has pushed the Mount Pygmie possum to the edge of extinction

iStock

The Mount Pygmie possum is one of the most threatened species by climate change.
This particular possum lives in colder climates in only three known locations in Australia — Mount Higginbotham and Mount Buller in Victoria, and Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales.
It is one of rarest species on the planet, but faces total extinction from increased snow melt and shorter winter hibernation.

10. Animals are leaving the hot, humid rainforests and moving up the mountains to where it is cooler, although they are not adapted for the climate

iStock

Animals adapted to the wet, humid climate of Australia’s dense rainforests are getting too hot as temperatures increase, and head upwards towards mountain ranges where the climate is cooler and more comfortable.
But they’re not adapted to this climate or food sources within these ranges, and can’t get the sustenance they need.
They also face competition for food from species they haven’t encountered before and so are unable to protect themselves.

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With so much bad news, it can be difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
But there are many opportunities to take positive action.
It is important for Australians to realise they can help and to do their part, however small.
A range of initiatives have been set up by the Australian government to try and mitigate the devastating effects of climate change.
In Australia, there is the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the (Great Barrier) Reef 2050 plan, the Emission Reductions Fund, the Carbon Farming Futures program, amongst others.
A global initiative set up in partnership with the World Wildlife Fun (WWF) is Earth Hour which aims at widening the awareness of climate change across the globe.
It encourages everyone to switch off the power for one hour on March 24 at 8:30pm AEDT and reconnect with the natural environment.
An estimated 6 million Australians will take part this year, and millions more from 180 countries.
There are also many ways to be further involved in addition to simply switching off the lights that night, which you can find here.

Links

• What are the impacts of climate change?
• Climate change could empty wildlife from Australia's rainforests
• Meet the Australian wildlife most threatened by climate change
• How Australia's animals and plants are changing
• Climate change will hit Australia harder than rest of world, study shows
• Climate change impacts in Australia