Screenshot video "Changes of the Arctic ice cap". Image: nasa
What comes after climate change – Part 4
Some processes are pretty sure for the time of climate change, even if there are still uncertainties with regard to their tempo and their ejection, which depend in particular, when it comes to whose exhaustion is the combustion of fossil energy carrier in heaters, vehicles and in the industry and the industry Agriculture as well as the dance habits of humans redesign that less methane escapes into the atmosphere. In addition there are uncertainties about the so-called positive backcoping: Due to the thawing of the Permafrostboden, further methane will escape into the atmosphere, which is hitherto bound in the frozen ground. This leads to another emphasis, which in turn contributes to further thawing frozen soil. Similar re-coupling effects are possible if, due to the emphasis, an additional verbetrification of forest areas begins, CO2, which is now bound in the biomass of the Walder, go into the atmosphere, and further strengthen the greenhouse effect, which in turn is further emphasized and further proxy and custodiation leads.
Part 1: Climate change: Disgraturing the disaster is barely conceivable Part 2: What is changing in climate change? Part 3: Future of the Climate: From change over the catastrophe into chaos
Uber the exact exhibition and the periods of these processes prevails uncertainty. In particular, IPCC ames that it is essential for the effectiveness of these self-stronging effects whether the global emphasis can be credited to 1.5 degrees in the next decades to 1.5 degrees to the pre-industrial level or whether it exceeds 2 degrees. At the moment, however, nothing indicates that the 1.5 degree goal could be achieved. The reducing reductions in the production of greenhouse gases do not seem to be achieved in the industrialist nor in the developing policies.
Our future in the bad case
Hereinafter, a picture of the future is drawn that a rather pessimistic approach follows. There are no hopes that humanity could encounter the dangers of the climate catastrophe through new technical procedures. Also, the possibility that humanity could limit the damage due to waiver of climate-damaging action that a worldwide rethinking and conversion of economic systems designed to growth is as unrealically rejected. That may be considered to be too blackmail from optimists. But they will hardly be able to bring about the idea that there is a risk that there is no saving technology quickly enough to end themselves practical and in the world mab the outstob of greenhouse gases or even reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
So what can happen if the handling of people with their habitat developed as evokes as evidenced from the last one and a half centuries? What can it mean if the reminders are true, which speak of a possible end of our civilization within a few decades? Such a happening appears unimaginable, the thoughts horror chasing previews, as it approaches, when everything in the past 2-3 millennia in technical infrastructures, everyday lifestyles, political institutions and cultural rules, has been eroded and based on goes. Exactly this is to be conceivable, but is the goal of this series.
Let’s go through the different processes that threaten our habitat, once through and do we think about their destructive consequences. Let’s start with those who are the long-term, but at the same time scientifically secured most secured and at present already observable.
Long term, but hardly to stop: the increase in sea level
Through the melting of the continental ice compounds (Antarctic mainland ice cream, gronlandeis, glaciers in most mountains), it will come to the essential increase in sea levels. Model calculations show that in the case of a complete melting of the Antarctic ice, coarse parts of the northern Central Europe z.B. be flooded. The North and Baltic Sea will extend far across the Netherlands and the North German Level. Melts the entire ice of the Antarctic, then the sea level rises globally around approx. 66 m. This means all regions that are not more than 66 m above sea level today are flooded. For this purpose, Berlin, Dusseldorf and Koln were obvious, some areas of today’s northern Germany were still out of the lake. However, this is still in far away, the complete melting of the Antarctic ice will take a few centuries after today’s scientific findings. This process is still drawn over decades, overall after today’s forecasts over centuries, but in the end, a lot of lowlands will be underwater, and areas that never be on a crisp, are haunted by excess swarms. However, this development soon could be irreversible. Due to the relatively slow development, however, people can quite adjust to such a process.
The effect is understood in turn that the emphasis of oceans leads to the expansion of the water and thus to an increase in the sea level anyway. This increase can be up to two meters in the next decades. The IPCC just stops a middle sea level from about one meter to the end of the century probably. Does not sound much and you can imagine that it can succeed by custal protection measures to preserve the cities and infrastructures along the custodians against destruction.
There are island groups and custodian regions, for which already causes a rise in the water level of some dozen centimeters or even two meters catastrophic destruction, in particular if this increase is severed by storm surgery and tidal waves temporar – and that is to be bound as described below will. As you know, these world faces belong to the poor regions, an efficient and draft flood protection will not be possible there often. So we have to expect disasters in these regions, in the next decades, with disasters that will largely destroy the weak infrastructure and agriculture of the affected countries.
Shanghai is averaging 4 meters over the sea level. Image: Pierreselim / CC-BY-3.0
For other areas, an increase in the sea level of up to two meters seems to be used. The problem is that the custodian strips of the continents are particularly densely populated and that the infrastructures of these densely populated areas are destroyed by excessive swemming. New York is only 10 meters above sea level, Hamburg even only six, London on average 15 m. Parts of these metropolitan areas will also have to fight in the next decades with destroying floods. However, in the highly networked energy supply and communication networks, this will be felt deep into the regions, which are not affected by the overflows themselves. On the consequences we come to speak later.
Century floods in annual clock
However, in its latest report, scientists also point out that the destructive effects of the sea level rise by various interactions. On the one hand, on the one hand, that the rise of the sea level does not take place in all regions of the oceans, it varies with the marine dynamics, the custodian structure and also with the maws for custodian protection. In addition, the high sea level in connection with other implications of global emphasis must be seen, especially with the more common occurrence of extreme weather events. That can, the researchers wrote in their summary report, already drove in the mid-century that about survivors who have occurred in some custodian regions as early as every few hundred years, recurrent again 2050. This can make territory uninhabitable and meet the infrastructures of whole countries sensitive, which have built their main civilizational centers along the oceans. If extreme destroying weather events, which were described as early as century floods, soon every few years and then occur in terms of them, then a society has no more potential to eliminate the damage before the next catastrophe has fall in. Even sophisticated industrial nations have to use enormous financial and technical resources under such conditions for the preservation of a hazardous habitat, resources that the company are missing elsewhere.
However, the effects of the melting of the ice compounds are not limited to the increase in sea level. The latest IPCC Special Report on this topic summarizes research results that affect further dangers and that already in the next decades risks for civilization are far away from the skys of the oceans.
The Big Aletsch Glacier, 1979, 1991 and 2002. Image: L. Albrecht / Pro Natura Center Aletsch / CC-BY-SA-3.0
Due to the almost complete disappearance of the glaciers in Europe, Indonesia, the Andes and East Africa until the end of this century, for residents in and in the near these mountainous regions has catastrophic effects. The water supply and agriculture, the energy supply and, above all, tourism, of which people are dependent on these areas, are funded profoundly. It will come to more and to destroyed avalanches and mountain rings. Already today can be observed in the Alps, which are the effects of thawing of the Permafrostbander: Rockstinze destroyed traffic routes and make the entering of the mountains always insecure. Again, what would be a century event sooner, is usually. The destructed paths and straws are backed up again becomes the race with the next and ubensche’s mountain race.
Glacier Schwund: Dangers for the mountainous regions
The water supply of the mountainous regions depends on the triggering of the outflow in the mountain rivers, which were previously ensured by the glaciers. Snow fell at first on the cold glacier ice cream and was all delivered to the Taler only, so survivors of mountain rivers in the spring months are sent off and also in dry warm summers was supplied with clean fresh glacier water. When the glaciers are getting smaller and finally disappeared at the end of this century, this continuous water supply will not be there anymore. A huge amount of expenses will be invested in the construction of dam and jerkborne basins, so that the dangers of excess floods are reduced and the water supply can be ensured – funds, which in turn are missing elsewhere, not to mention that such systems in turn dangerous okosystems and habitat be destroyed.
Again, high-developed industrial nations will become increasingly being able to raise these investments, even if it will cost you a lot of strength that is missing elsewhere. And also in Austria and in Switzerland, Italy and Germany you will ask you to with which goal this investment is to justify. But in countries that are not the economic power, it will not be possible to protect mountainous regions before destroying infrastructure, agriculture and habitat.
Impact of the disappearance of the ice at the North Pole
Another consequence of the melting of the ice masses of the earth results from the disappearance of the ice shield in the Northern Polarmeer. The scientists are pretty sure that it will soon be normal that the ice at the north pole disappears completely in the summer. This has an impact on the weather in the middle width, so z.B. in Central Europe, because the ice has rough effect on the jerk radiation of solar energy, reflected, the supply of atmosphere with water vapor and the coarse airflow patterns in the atmospheric circulation. However, the exact effects here are still uncertain because not all physical interactions are understood and displayed in the climate models.
Especially this last effect shows but very clearly: Global embracing does not mean that it is just a bit warm. The global mid temperature, which is now calculated as a simple MAB for determining and communication of the progression of climate change, is itself a scientific-theoretical construction. It describes exactly the total growth of warew energy in certain layers of atmosphere. However, however, however, there is a lot different, but is very different and depends on many other conditions: the distribution of land, ice and sea and the arrangement of the mountains and the coarse vegetation flat. All of this ensures the dependent and stabilization of certain power patterns and weathering, and an increase in energy supply into this system, which is very different, even by the interactions on the earth, water or ice surface, has a destabilization of the well-known normal pattern patterns and Weather processes result.
An example is to explore: Due to the emphasis of the air and the surface water of the oceans, more water evaporates than before from the oceans, the warmer air can also take more water vapor than cold air. This water vapor can be transported over long distances without any cloud formation and then z.B., When the air mass meets a mountain, condense, form clouds, significant downstream, in the mountains also cause snowfall. The mountain residents become no longer of one "global emphasis" Remember, rather, they complain about strong snowfall in the spades of early year and rainy summer – which can even be dropped on the basis of lower sunlight even cowy than usual. Nevertheless, the strong occurrence of such weather events is an element of global climate change.
The examples show why it’s right to talk about the climate era here: the climate will be unpredictable and in a habe variable, as we can not imagine it with the usual fluctuations from year to year. The change processes run off in different time mabs and influence each other in a complex way, so that it is hardly possible to provide for by appropriate investment.
Part 5: How Okosystems are destroyed in climate change