Why some scientists are pressing the UN to prioritize climate ‘tipping points’ | 24CA News
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This week:
- Why some scientists are urgent the UN to prioritize local weather ‘tipping factors’
- How a warmth pump works
- Researchers are taking a look at pika poop to see how local weather change is affecting this mountain mammal
Why some scientists are urgent the UN to prioritize local weather ‘tipping factors’
While environmentalists are getting ready for the COP28 local weather summit in Dubai later this month, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can be assembly to debate its subsequent assessments of the state of worldwide warming.
After a record-shattering summer season — with 2023 on tempo to turn out to be the most well liked yr in recorded human historical past — one of many key choices for the IPCC is whether or not to emphasise the prospect of runaway, irreversible international warming by issuing a particular report on local weather tipping factors.
Tipping factors are points of the local weather system “prone to abrupt and or irreversible shifts” pushed by optimistic feedbacks, mentioned Tim Lenton, a local weather scientist on the University of Exeter within the U.Okay. who has been researching tipping factors for twenty years.
For instance, “as the Greenland ice sheet melts, the surface descends in altitude, which brings it into warmer air, which tends to accelerate the melting,” he mentioned.
Some of those feedbacks can turn out to be so sturdy they turn out to be “self-propelling,” Lenton mentioned, growing warming even with out the addition of extra greenhouse gases.
The problem of tipping factors has been briefly raised in earlier IPCC complete studies, however the subsequent set of them is not due for an additional 5 to seven years.
“It’s just not adequate risk management or sensible to wait around for a slow cycle of reporting like that,” Lenton mentioned. “We have to be more fleet of foot.”
While Lenton helps a UN report on local weather tipping factors, he is convening a gaggle of greater than 200 scientists who’re producing their very own tipping factors report, exterior the purview of the IPCC, to be launched in time for COP28.
Thomas Stocker, a former co-chair of IPCC Working Group I, which research the bodily science of local weather change, mentioned the 2012 IPCC particular report on managing dangers of utmost occasions motivated him to name for a tipping factors report.
He mentioned it might reply to among the persistent questions which have been round since 2001, when the IPCC first checked out what have been then known as “surprises” within the local weather system.
Luke Kemp, a researcher on the Cambridge Centre for the Study for Existential Risk within the U.Okay., mentioned one of many “scary” points of tipping factors is that scientists nonetheless do not have clear data of what the early warning alerts are. Nor does the scientific group know when precisely “the feedbacks are likely to become self-amplified to the extent where they’re difficult to handle.”
Kristie Ebi, a professor of worldwide well being who research the well being dangers of local weather change on the University of Washington in Seattle, mentioned addressing worst-case eventualities involving tipping factors “helps give our future self a leg up and be in a place where we can be more resilient.”
For instance, she pointed to the development of the bridge to P.E.I., accomplished in 1997, which was constructed to permit for one metre of sea-level rise. Adding the additional metre did not value that rather more on the time and retrofitting would have been very costly, she mentioned.
In 2021, Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the historical past of science at Harvard University, argued that having completely established the hyperlink between human exercise and local weather change, the IPCC ought to now concentrate on points reminiscent of mitigation, adaptation and tipping factors.
“Scientific resources are finite … it is really important for the scientific community to be strategic about where the bulk of the effort is placed,” mentioned Oreskes, co-author of the 2010 guide The Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
Stocker famous that local weather scientists confronted “fierce resistance” from governments in getting the idea of a “global carbon budget” authorized in earlier IPCC studies. But it has turn out to be one of many key items of data for measuring progress on emissions reductions.
“Had it not been for our ambition to have that controversial topic in the summary for policymakers, we would not be where we are today,” Stocker mentioned. “I think with tipping points, we can make the same arguments.”
Oreskes mentioned “the whole point of the tipping point report is to say it’s not too late to avoid the worst catastrophes, like the dieback of the Amazon or the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet.”
Since the IPCC operates on consensus-based decision-making, Canada would wish to comply with fee a particular report on tipping factors.
“We support science, we support the development and the better understanding of climate science and its impact,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault mentioned in an interview. “And if that means, for example, supporting a special report on tipping points, it’s certainly something that I would be supportive of.”
Regardless of how the local weather group examines the tipping factors, the hazard of crossing them is obvious.
“If you cut off a leg of a starfish, the starfish can grow that limb back,” Oreskes mentioned. “But if you cut off the leg of a human, we don’t grow legs back. Most of our ecological systems are more like people than they are like starfish.”
— James Westman
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Reader suggestions
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The Big Picture: A heat pump in action
There’s been a lot of talk of late — both in political discourse and in this newsletter — about heat pumps, a longstanding low-carbon technology to heat and cool buildings. For those who still don’t fully understand the science, we thought we’d provide a handy graphic.
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Scientists are looking at pika poop to see how climate change is affecting this mountain mammal
As the climate continues to warm, scientists say sensitive species like the pika — a small, mountain-dwelling mammal that looks like a mouse — can act as an early warning system for more widespread impacts.
Pikas may be adorable, but their poop doesn’t really have the same appeal — that is, unless you’re a biologist who knows it may hold valuable information about what climate change is doing to the creature’s alpine home.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus are developing a genetic monitoring tool that could provide insights on this. By analyzing pika DNA, including from their poop, researcher Kate Arpin and the university’s Russello Lab say they could soon track individual pikas, monitor the interconnectedness of different pika populations and record those populations’ evolution in near-real time.
The American pika can be found at high elevations throughout parts of the Canadian Rockies and B.C.’s Coast Mountains, in rocky, barren habitats with little soil and vegetation. Hikers in western Canada may be familiar with their characteristic call (“eep!”).
Pikas are widely considered one of the animals most vulnerable to climate change. As temperatures rise, forests climb to higher elevations, reducing the amount of habitat available for pikas, said Tony Einfeldt, an ecologist with Parks Canada.
Warmer temperatures can also make it harder for pikas to find enough food and decrease the winter snowpack, which they rely on for insulation during the winter.
Biologists expect pikas will be forced to move to higher elevations, which could further isolate populations from each other — a common driver of decline among many species.
“One approach of catching that course of early can be to take a look at the modifications… that will end in these more and more island-like mountainous areas by genetic instruments,” said Einfeldt, who says park ecologists are currently monitoring pikas by recording the piles of dried vegetation that the mammals gather as a winter food source.
“They present us this pulse, this barometer of what is taking place in our most delicate ecosystems,” said Erik Beever, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and Montana State University.
Limited evidence shows certain U.S. pika populations may have some ability to adapt, but in other areas, pikas are seeing widespread decline. The status of Canadian populations is less well known largely because of a lack of genetic data, said Arpin.
She says she hopes the genetic monitoring tool she and her collaborators have built may soon change that. The tool is already extremely accurate when it comes to analyzing a pika’s genetic material from tissue samples, even those dating as far back as 1930.
The more degraded DNA found in their scat is trickier to analyze accurately, with error rates close to 30 per cent. Still, Beever is optimistic.
“I might argue that the rapidity of growth and evolution of those molecular instruments is fairly mind-blowing, and particularly on the entrance of non-invasive methods [like scat sampling].”
Arpin says while this sort of genetic monitoring is very new, there have been breakthroughs for other species.
“Recent work … has developed the identical sort of genetic monitoring software for polar bear and for deer [scat] samples,” she said. “There’s positively promise in utilizing these kinds of genetic monitoring instruments sooner or later.”
If sampling is done over many years, researchers could even potentially watch the species evolve through its poop.
If researchers are able to achieve high accuracy with fecal samples, it would mean a change of approach for the Parks Canada ecologists monitoring pikas — as Einfeldt already knows from Arpin’s request for samples.
“Usually, we’re making an attempt to keep away from touching the poop,” he said. “But we donned our rubber gloves and bought our forceps out and went digging by their latrines that they kind in these rocky environments, searching for the freshest, greatest poop we might discover.”
— Darius Mahdavi
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