The climate change is a trend but it should be re-think, believes the European scientists from several universities. As ScienceNordic understood, people have pushed Earth beyond its limits, so it’s time to revise the strategy on climate.
A group of Earth System scientists have published the paper “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”, in which they explained that the group may behave as ‘complex system’, with well-defined states and transitions between them driven largely by feedback processes within the system, not only by ‘external’ drivers. This perspective of the climate change is not as radical as it sounds, say the scientists.
The ES paper writes about greenhouse gases’ theory – the more greenhouse gases we emit, the higher the Earth’s average surface temperature rises. The Earth System group challenges the almost universally accepted framework that human emissions of greenhouse gases will always be the dominant driver of climate change, no matter what trajectory climate change takes in the future.
As the examples show the fact of unstoppable melting of Arctic summer sea ice, such a constant process that accelerates warming in the north of the planet, increasing wildfires in the boreal forests and Amazon rainforest that release more CO2 to the atmosphere and have the great impact on ecosystems. E.g., the melting of permafrost in Siberia, which could release vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
In the paper published in PNAS, the scientists explain they can’t yet put specific probabilities on the size of the risk that a planetary threshold could exist that might propel us into a Hothouse Earth. That requires more research. But the science knows enough about the nature of the Earth System that this risk needs to be taken very seriously.
