February global temperatures should be a 'wake-up call'

Shepparton-based Slap Tomorrow used
the phrase "a wake-up call" some three
years ago, but still people sleep on, it seems.

Global temperatures for February showed a disturbing and unprecedented upward spike. It was 1.35℃ warmer than the average February during the usual baseline period of 1951-1980, according to NASA data.

This is the largest warm anomaly of any month since records began in 1880. It far exceeds the records set in 2014 and again in 2015 (the first year when the 1℃ mark was breached).

In the same month, Arctic sea ice cover reached its lowest February value ever recorded. And last year carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere increased by more than 3 parts per million, another record.

What is going on? Are we facing a climate emergency?

Read the piece on The Conversation by the Director and ARC Laureate Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre from the UNSW Australia, Steve Sherwood, and the Professor of Physics of the Oceans from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stefan Rahmstorf - “February’s global temperature spike is a wake-up call.”

(The Shepparton-based Slap Tomorrow’s first public forum in 2013 was sub-titled “A Wake-Up Call” and yet here we are some three years later still, apparently deep asleep – Robert McLean.)

Dr Katja Frieler considers the next century following the Paris climate agreement

Dr Katja Frieler, of the
 Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research,
considering the next 100 years.

At the Paris climate summit, delegates have struck an agreement that calls for the world to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5℃”.

But the climate action pledges made by 185 countries ahead of the summit don’t add up to 1.5℃ or warming or even 2℃. Taken together, they add up to a 2.7℃ world.

As the negotiations go on, 2015 is about to set a new global temperature record, and is likely to have reached 1℃ warming already.

Read the piece on The Conversation by the Deputy Chair, Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Katja Frieler - “This is what will happen to the climate in the next 100 years.”

Facts are facts, but bombing people with them is rarely useful

E

vidence illustrates that bombing people with facts about climate change rarely has any useful outcome.

Climate scientist, Ricarda Winkelmann,
from Germany's Potsdam Institute.

However, as frightening as the facts might be we have to incorporate them into our thinking and somewhere find the emotional and intellectual resource to get beyond being frozen into inaction and act to play our part, no matter how small, in making our communities more resilient.

The world’s fossil fuel companies seem intent on burning all the resources they have and a team of climate scientists, as intrigued as anyone else, considered the “worst case scenario” for the world if that was to happen.

A climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and the lead author of the study, Ricarda Winkelmann, said: “"We usually think about our generation, maybe the next generation. It is hard for people to think of Earth a thousand years in the future. But what we are doing right now, the CO2 we are emitting into the atmosphere, could change the face of our planet a thousand years from now."

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Climate Change’s Worst-Case Scenario: 200 Feet of Sea Level Rise”.

Global warming brings heavy rainfall records - PIK

H

eavy rainfall events setting ever new records have been increasing strikingly in the past thirty years.

While before 1980, multi-decadal fluctuations in extreme rainfall events are explained by natural variability, a team of scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research detected a clear upward trend in the past few decades towards more unprecedented daily rainfall events.

They find the worldwide increase to be consistent with rising global temperatures which are caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Short-term torrential rains can lead to high-impact floodings.

Read the report - “Record-breaking heavy rainfall events increased under global warming”.