We must deal with climate change, feedback loops and tipping points
THIS year has brought some devastating developments with climate change. The intense heat-dome over the West Pacific coasts of North America and Canada, started one month before California’s hot season and extended to the Canadian Arctic, bringing record-breaking temperatures. Elsewhere, there have been extensive storms and unprecedented flooding in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
A report by international scientists and meteorologists in response to the West Pacific heat-dome argues that global warming is happening faster than forecast by existing climate change computer models and casts doubt on the ability of these models to accurately grasp the dynamics of current global warming and provide reliable predictions for the future.
Greatly improved forecasting models may well be important, but fail to address the changing dynamics of global warming between human driven green house gas emissions and nature’s feedback loops. We know that nature is not a supine, detached observer of climate change. It interacts with human-driven change, producing chain reactions which add, in their own right, significant green house gas emissions to the overall quantity in the atmosphere.
For example, emissions from the 142,500 acres of woodland burnt this year in California will have added a vast amount to the overall atmospheric levels. This is not to mention the loss of carbon sinks as trees burn or, indeed, the additional carbon emissions from wildfires in Canada or other US states surrounding California.
Wildfires are only one of many natural feedback loops.
Improved forecasting does not solve the controversy and lack of peer agreement around the scientific concept of ‘tipping points.’ This concept has been around for two decades but has yet to elicit an agreed model for applying data which can reliably determine when a ‘tipping point’ has been reached or passed. A ‘tipping point’ is a point when climate change become irreversible.
The Climate Crisis Advisory Group, indeed, warns of more ‘tipping points’ around the globe.
Without a better understand of natural feedback loops in conjunction with human-driven climate change – that is, their severity in developing global warming, their capacity as game changers in setting the pace for climate ‘tipping points’ – we cannot have truly effective climate emergency policies at national or local government levels.
Chris Lamb
Bristol