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Climate Change Rate To Turn Southern Spain To Desert By 2100, Report Warns (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Southern Spain will be reduced to desert by the end of the century if the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, researchers have warned. Anything less than extremely ambitious and politically unlikely carbon emissions cuts will see ecosystems in the Mediterranean change to a state unprecedented in the past 10 millennia, they said. The study, published in the journal Science, modeled what would happen to vegetation in the Mediterranean basin under four different paths of future carbon emissions, from a business-as-usual scenario at the worst end to keeping temperature rises below the Paris climate deal target of 1.5C at the other. Temperatures would rise nearly 5C globally under the worst case scenario by 2100, causing deserts to expand northwards across southern Spain and Sicily, and Mediterranean vegetation to replace deciduous forests. Even if emissions are held to the level of pledges put forward ahead of the Paris deal, southern Europe would experience a "substantial" expansion of deserts. The level of change would be beyond anything the region's ecosystems had experienced during the holocene, the geological epoch that started more than 10,000 years ago. The real impact on Mediterranean ecosystems, which are considered a hotspot of biodiversity, could be worse because the study did not look at other human impacts, such as forests being turned over to grow food. The researchers fed a model with 10,000 years of pollen records to build a picture of vegetation in the region, and used that to infer previous temperatures in the Mediterranean. They then ran the model to see what would happen to the vegetation in the future, using four different scenarios of warming, three of them taken from the UN's climate science panel, the IPCC. Only the most stringent cut in emissions -- which is roughly equivalent to meeting the Paris aspiration of holding warming to 1.5C -- would see ecosystems remain within the limits they experienced in the Holocene.
Thanks!
I've lived on Miami Beach for 30+ years. In the last 6 years or so, when there is heavy rain, the water comes up over the sidewalk and completely floods the streets - **every time**. This never used to happen, and now it's totally predictable. So yeah, shit is happening, and you can observe it yourself if you choose to.
It's important to note that this is a worst-case scenario, which typically means its somewhat improbable. Of course, the worst-case scenario also just so happens to make the best headlines.
I'm not arguing that the climate isn't changing, or that's it's not worthwhile to curb pollutants and emissions. But I fear this constant fear-mongering is damaging climate science credibility as much as it's helping to push forward good environmental policies. This is highly reminiscent of the now laughable doomsday predictions around the time of our first Earth Day in 1970. Among these:
* Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years
* 100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years
* Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make
* Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World Will Be In Famine
* In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution
* Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License
* By The Year 2000 There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil
There's an interesting article on why most of these dire predictions didn't come to pass, noting some positive outcomes of the increased environmental awareness, like the Clean Water, Clean Air, Endangered Species acts, and other environmental protection laws.
When the experts have been consistently wrong with these constant doomsday predictions for 45 years, is it any wonder that people start to become skeptical of ALL climate and environmental sciences? That's not a good thing.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Quite a few Spaghetti Westerns were filmed there because it looks like the desert southwest region of the USA.
Southern spain is desert by most peoples definitions already.
every place where people are not actively agriculturing has been desolated by farming already.. like a fucking 1000 years ago by now?
basically, this leads to believe that they haven't actually been to spain. or even looked at google maps. just compare italy to spain. hell, if you looked at pictures of spanish civil war prior to WW2(!!!!) it's already like that.
https://www.google.co.th/maps/place/Spain/@39.8596584,-12.7036393,2880738m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0xc42e3783261bc8b:0xa6ec2c940768a3ec!8m2!3d40.463667!4d-3.74922
it's not desert only in places that have human agriculture, so fuck this study - give a better one.
Why is it that the feeblest minds always have the urge to invent words? Anyway.
You might have noticed that back then the continents were in a different position. Also that the dinosaurs didn't really care (or couldn't really influence) if large parts of those continents changed and became inhospitable. You might have noticed that a lot of them died out during the couple million years they "ruled" the earth. Not all of them due to the meteor, by the way.
Some of them because continents change and so do climates. It's not really hard to tell, but it's no big deal if 50% of a population of dinosaurs die out. There was plenty more to keep the species going.
Thinking about it... it's pretty much the same for humans today. So, why worry?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
whatever causes that
Google "Hadley Cells", they are basically convection currents, tropical storms create huge updrafts which reach the stratosphere and are pushed polewards from the equator by the rotation of the planet. At that altitude the air becomes cold and dry, the cold, dry air falls back to earth and forms the bands of deserts that circle the earth on each side of the equator. As the planet heats up the convection currents become stronger, making monsoons wetter and the desert bands wider.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That happened because the Syr Daria was diverted for irrigation, removing the Aral Sea's primary water source. It had nothing to do with climate change. It had everything to do with the socialism you espouse.