> "Tipping point" on horizon for Greenland ice By Alister Doyle,
Environment
> Correspondent
> Mon Feb 4, 5:09 PM ET
>
> OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming this century could trigger a runaway
thaw
> of
> Greenland's ice sheet and other abrupt ****fts such as a dieback of the
> Amazon
> rainforest, scientists said on Monday.
"Tunderbar" <tdcomeau@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
"COULD"
Yup. Three is no way to tell if people are as stupid as you are. If
they
are as dumb as you then the interpretation of <COULD> is <WILLl>. But if
people are smarter, then there is increasingly less probability that the
COULD will materialize.
What is laughable about your form of personal stupidity is that your
faith
resides on the hope that people will actually do what you demand they not
do.
Ahahahahahaha..... You can't get ****ing dumber than that.
They urged governments to be more aware of "tipping points" in nature,
tiny
****fts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a
melt
of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon.
"Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth
projections
of global change," the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes
wrote
in a re****t saying there were many little-understood thresholds in nature.
"The greatest and clearest threat is to the Arctic with summer sea ice
loss
likely to occur long before, and potentially contribute to, Greenland ice
sheet melt," they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy
of
Sciences.
"Tipping elements in the tropics, the boreal zone, and west Antarctica are
surrounded by large uncertainty," they wrote, pointing to more potential
abrupt ****fts than seen in a 2007 re****t by the U.N. Climate Panel.
A projected drying of the Amazon basin, linked both to logging and to
global
warming, could set off a dieback of the rainforest.
"Many of these tipping points could be closer than we thought," lead
author
Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia in England, told Reuters
of
the study.
Other sudden changes linked to climate change, stoked by human use of
fossil
fuels, included a dieback of northern pine forests, or a stronger warming
of
the Pacific under El Nino weather events that can disrupt weather
worldwide,
they wrote.
A possible greening of parts of the Sahel and the Sahara, if monsoon rains
in West Africa were disrupted, was one of the few positive abrupt ****fts
identified by the scientists.
CLOSER
Even a moderate warming could set off a thaw of Greenland's ice sheet that
could then vanish in 300 years -- raising sea levels by 6 meters (20 ft),
or
2
meters a century and threatening coasts, Pacific islands and cities from
Bangkok to
Buenos Aires.
The U.N. Climate Panel foresees a rise in world sea levels ranging up to
about 80 cms this century and reckons that a thaw of Greenland would take
hundreds
of years longer.
The new study said a disappearance of Arctic sea ice in summertime could
happen in coming decades -- earlier than projected by the U.N. panel. That
could
stoke further global warming as dark water soaks up more heat than ice and
snow.
The re****t also identified risks such as damage to northern pine forests
--
widely exploited by the pulp industry -- because of factors such as more
frequent fires and vulnerability to pests in warmer, drier conditions.
But it played down some other fears, such as of a runaway melt of Siberian
permafrost, releasing stores of methane which is a powerful greenhouse
gas.
And it said a shutdown of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean that
brings
warm water north to Europe "appears to be a less immediate threat."
|
