Klimawandel

Owen Gaffney, Stockholm University and Will Steffen, Australian National University

Here are some surprising facts about humans’ effect on planet Earth. We have made enough concrete to create an exact replica of Earth 2mm thick. We have produced enough plastic to wrap Earth in clingfilm. We are creating “technofossils”, a new term for congealed human-made materials – plastics and concretes – that will be around for tens of millions of years.

But it is the scale that humans have altered Earth’s life support system that is the most concerning.

In 2000, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed that human impact on the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and ice sheets had reached such a scale that it had pushed Earth into a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene and argued the current Holocene epoch was over.

(WeForum) There are those who say the climate has always changed, and that carbon dioxide levels have always fluctuated. That’s true. But it’s also true that since the industrial revolution, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have climbed to levels that are unprecedented over hundreds of millennia. So here’s a short video we made, to put recent climate change and carbon dioxide emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years

... ganzen Artikel auf WeForum.org lesen

(Spiegel Online) Die Erde erwärmt sich ungebremst - trotz aller Bekenntnisse zum Klimaschutz. Immer genauer untersuchen Forscher deshalb gezielte Eingriffe in die Atmosphäre, um Extremfolgen abzumildern. Die Methoden haben ihre Tücken.

... ganzen Artikel bei SpiegelOnline lesen

(Thinkprogress)“Extremely remarkable” 2017 heads toward record for hottest year without an El Niño episode. Normally, the hottest years on record occur when the underlying human-caused global warming trend gets a temporary boost from an El Niño’s enhanced warming in the tropical Pacific.

.. ganzen Artikel auf ThinkProgress.org lesen

(Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin) Mit unserem Lebensstil schädigen wir den Planeten unwiderruflich. Jeder weiß es, keiner tut wirklich etwas dagegen. Ein vorweggenommener Entschuldigungsbrief an unsere Kinder.

Liebe künftige Generationen,

sorry. Das mit der schmelzenden Arktis, das mit dem abgeholzten Regenwald, das mit den leergefischten Meeren, das waren wir. Wir haben euren Planeten ausgebeutet, eure Natur kaputt gemacht, euer Klima auf Jahrhunderte hinaus geschädigt. Unsere Wissenschaftler hatten uns zwar seit Jahrzehnten gewarnt, in immer eindringlicheren, verzweifelteren Worten, aber wir haben es nicht ernst genommen. Nicht ernst genug.

... ganzen Brief lesen auf http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/46223

(NewYorkTimesMagazine) All around the world, scientists are building repositories of everything from seeds to ice to mammal milk — racing to preserve a natural order that is fast disappearing.
It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island near the North Pole. A storm was dumping rain at a time of year when the temperature was usually well below freezing; because the water had short-circuited the electrical system, the electric pumps on site were useless. This subterranean safe house holds more than 5,000 species of essential food crops, including hundreds of thousands of varieties of wheat and rice. It was supposed to be an impenetrable, modern-day Noah’s ark for plants, a life raft against climate change and catastrophe. Local firefighters helped pump out the tunnel until the temperature dropped and the water froze. Townspeople from the village at the mountain’s base then brought their own shovels and axes and broke apart the ice sheet by hand.

... ganzen Artikel bei NYTimes.com lesen

14.07.2017 - Ein ungebremster Klimawandel hätte für Länder in Asien und Ozeanien verheerende Folgen und würde sich stark auf ihr zukünftiges Wachstum auswirken. Aktuelle Entwicklungserfolge könnten sich umkehren und die Lebensqualität abnehmen. Das zeigt ein Bericht, den die asiatische Entwicklungsbank (ADB) und das Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) erstellt haben.

In einem Business-as-usual-Szenario wird für den asiatischen Kontinent bis zum Ende des Jahrhunderts ein Temperaturanstieg von 6 °C erwartet. Einige Länder der Region könnten dabei noch weitaus heißer werden. So könnten die Temperaturen in Tadschikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan und dem Nordwesten Chinas um bis zu 8 °C steigen. Das zeigt der Bericht mit dem Titel A Region at Risk: The Human Dimensions of Climate Change in Asia and the Pacific.

... ganzen Artikel bei pik-potsdam.de lesen

(Independent) 'You can only be smacked in the face by evidence so many times and not see some kind of pattern,' says scientist.  Planet Earth is warmer than it has been for at least 2,000 years, according to a study that took its temperature from 692 different “natural thermometers” on every continent and ocean on the planet. 
In the most comprehensive assessment of how the climate has changed over the period to date, researchers looked at a host of sources of historic information, including tree rings, ice cores, lake and sea sediments, corals, mineral deposits and written records.
What they found confirmed the famous “hockey stick” graph, showing an undulating, but broadly flat, line followed by a sharp uptick that begins at around 1900.
The only plausible explanation for this sudden change is fossil fuel emissions, which have increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from about 280 parts per million in the 19th century to more than 400 today.

... ganzen Artikel auf independent.co.uk lesen