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Page added on October 10, 2013
The Coming Plague
A climate plague affecting every living thing will likely start in 2020 in southern Indonesia, scientists warned Wednesday in the journal Nature. A few years later the plague will have spread throughout the world’s tropical regions.
By mid-century no place on the planet will be unaffected, said the authors of the landmark study.
“We don’t know what the impacts will be. If someone is about to fall off a three-storey building you can’t predict their exact injuries but you know there will be injuries,” said Camilo Mora, an ecologist at University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu and lead author.
“The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon,” said Mora.
The “climate plague” is a shift to an entirely new climate where the lowest monthly temperatures will be hotter than those in the past 150 years. The shift is already underway due to massive emissions of heat-trapping carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.
Extreme weather will soon be beyond anything ever experienced, and old record high temperatures will be the new low temperatures, Mora told IPS. This will affect billions of people and there is no going back to way things were.
“Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past,” he said.
In less than 10 years, a country like Jamaica will look much like it always has but it will not be the same country. Jamaicans and every living thing on the island and in its coastal waters will be experiencing a new, hotter climate – hotter on average than the previous 150 years.
The story will be same around 2030 in southern Nigeria, much of West Africa, Mexico and Central America without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, the study reports.
“Some species will adapt, some will move, some will die,” said co-author Ryan Longman also at the University of Hawai‘i.
Tropical regions will shift first because their historical temperature ranges are narrow. Climate change may only shift temperatures by 1.0 degree C but that will be too much for some plants, amphibians, animals and birds that have evolved in a very stable climate, Longman said.
Tropical corals are already in sharp decline due to a combination of warmer ocean temperatures and higher levels of ocean acidity as oceans absorb most the carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.
The Nature study examined 150 years of historical temperature data, more than a million maps, and the combined projections of 39 climate models to create a global index of when and where a region shifts into novel climate. That is to say a local climate that is continuously outside the most extreme records the region has experienced in the past 150 years.
Canada’s climate won’t shift until 2050 under the business as usual emissions scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls RCP8.5. The further a region is from the equator, the later the shift occurs. If the world sharply reduces its use of fossil fuels (RCP4.5), then these climate shifts are delayed 10 to 30 years depending on the location, the study shows. (City by city projection here)
Tropical regions are also those with greatest numbers of unique species. Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 species, while Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area, has only about 70 unique or endemic species.
Species matter because the abundance and variety of plants, animals, fish, insects and other living things are humanity’s life support system, providing our air, water, food and more.
“It’s an elegant study that shows timing of when climate shifts beyond anything in the recent past,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at Canada’s University of British Columbia.
Donner, who wasn’t involved in the study, agrees that the new regional climates in the tropics will have big impacts on many species.
“A number of other studies show corals, birds, and amphibians in the tropics are very sensitive to temperature changes,” Donner told IPS.
The impacts on ecosystems, food production, water availability or cites and towns are not known. However, the results of the study confirm the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions to reduce those future impacts, he said.
Developed countries not only need to make larger reductions in their emissions, they need to increase their “funding of social and conservation programmes in developing countries to minimize the impacts of climate change”, the study concludes.
Amongst the biggest impacts the coming ‘climate plague’ will have is on food production, said Mora.
“In a globalised world, what happens in tropics won’t stay in the tropics,” he said.
7 Comments on "The Coming Plague"
Newfie on Thu, 10th Oct 2013 3:59 pm
It’s been over 100 years since Svante Arrhenius calculated the effect of a doubling of levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And still the majority of people either don’t believe in climate change or don’t even know what it is. Hellooo ???
GregT on Thu, 10th Oct 2013 7:02 pm
Climate change is already here in Western Canada.
Spring arrived two months early this year. Bark beetles that have been historically kept in check by cold winter temperatures, have devastated tens of millions of hectares of our forests, and fish normally found in tropical waters off of the coast of Mexico and Central America are now routinely caught in our local waters.
We normally receive several good snowfalls each winter, and have temperatures well below minus ten degrees Celsius. The last two winters the ground has not even frozen. Summer flowers bloomed all year last year and lasted right through until the following spring. Species of birds that normally migrate south for the winter, stay year round now. Other species of birds not normally found here, are now routinely seen, thousands of miles north of their natural habitats.
We are routinely setting all time high record temperatures, rain no longer falls when it used to, and falls much more during periods that it never did before.
The changes in climate have been dramatic already, and according to meteorologists, are about to get much worse very quickly.
At this point in time, anyone that is still a climate change denier, is either a fool or is in a serious state of denial themselves.
Mike in Calif. on Thu, 10th Oct 2013 8:43 pm
The main thing in a “serious state” is the veracity of science which has sorely eroded since the 60’s (and not just in climate study).
No one denies the CO2 mechanism. But what was and still is in dispute is magnitude of effect. It simply cannot be known without hundreds of years of more data – and yet it is precisely amount and certainty which lies at the heart of the theory-as-fact and fact-as-panic phenomena. The future effect of elevated CO2 could range from negligible to substantial. There is no way to know.
It almost humorous that the consensus of “39 models” is offered as authority rather than the resounding lack thereof. The models, individually and collectively, are simply put … wrong. There are so many problems with models it’s hard to pick a place to begin much less in the case of global climate toys.
The short version of the foolish denier’s retort to the kingpin model output is this:
1) magnitude of (CO2) effect is not known
2) error is amplified in model iteration (longer the run the greater the error)
3) the models have not been validated through real-world feedback
But then, it doesn’t matter. These fuels WILL BE burned. China can’t stop. We won’t stop. Dig, pump and burn will continue unabated until the fuel runs out or the system collapses. “Global Warming” is more properly a planning tool for level heads (as opposed to hysterics) than a clarion call to “action” and “prevention” – the first of which is too late and latter impossible.
GregT on Fri, 11th Oct 2013 12:49 am
http://www.google.ca/search?q=how+to+talk+to+a+climate+skeptic&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari&gws_rd=cr&ei=kUlXUp7eJajmiwLhiIHIAQ
BillT on Fri, 11th Oct 2013 3:11 am
Mike, how do you plan for extinction? Maybe even in your lifetime, if you are under 30? Do you know what the world will be like in 40-50 years? I think it will be beyond supporting us or most life as we know it.
And, you are correct. Only a total collapse of the power grids all over the world could bring our system to a permanent halt. And I am not sure even that would so it.
GregT on Fri, 11th Oct 2013 4:54 am
My grandfather had a saying; You can lead cattle to water, but you can’t make them drink.
I am reminded of him just about every day.
We have highly educated people, who’s entire life studies have been focussed on increasingly more specific areas. These people are yelling at us as loud as they can, that we need to pay attention to what they are saying. Yet we still have other people that believe they know more than our scientists do.
Mike in calif would have you believe that smoking/ DDT/ nuclear radiation is still alright because,
1) magnitude of (carcinogens) effect is not known
2) error is amplified in model iteration (longer the run the greater the error)
3) the models have not been validated through real-world feedback
It is time to pay attention to reality.
If you went to your doctor and he told you that you had a terminal, but curable disease, what would you do? Seek alternate advice? Fair enough. What would you do if you went to 100 other doctors, and 25 of them said the same thing? Would you ignore them?
Now what would you do if 97 of those 100 doctors were in agreement? Would you listen to your neighbour Mike down the street, or would you listen to the doctors?
Personally, I would listen to the people that actually have some understanding of what they are talking about. Sorry Mike, but that would not be you.
Mike in Calif. on Fri, 11th Oct 2013 8:50 am
Bill: I was actually just suggesting an alternative to useless activism. They have good intentions, but their efforts are wasted. Their energies are better spent in “transition” groups or just planning for their own families. This century gets real ugly with or without global warming – which is potentially an exacerbating factor, but not a determining one.
GregT: Science is not consensus or acclamation; it is confirmation through duplication of result. Smoking, DDT, radiation and anecdotal doctors are irrelevant to this argument except that they affirm proper scientific method. They do not validate a predictive theory sans confirming results.
Hyper-specialization is not proving to be a boon to science, but a travesty in comparison to the stunning brilliance of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. These days a field biologist, tenured and financed, can discover an interesting new species in a far-off place – but he can’t even name it without consulting a Latin scholar. Why? Because in high school he was playing video games and in college he was compelled to take “Gender Studies” instead of Latin.
It is a irony of the times that we are becoming smarter in details, and more clever in incremental application, while becoming dumber in general method.
Science, in a word, has been democratized.