Unprecedented Climates predicted for 2050 and beyond
Friday, October 11, 2013 at 1:37PM Arstechnica has a post on climate change forecasts.
If there was one overarching point that the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reporttook pains to stress, it was that the degree of change in the global climate system since the mid-1950s is unusual in scope. Depending on what exactly you measure, the planet hasn't seen conditions like these for decades to millennia. But that conclusion leaves us with a question: whenexactly can we expect the climate to look radically new, with features that have no historical precedent?
The answer, according to a modeling study published in this week's issue of Nature, is "very soon"—as soon as 2047 under a "business-as-usual" emission scenario and only 22 years later under a reduced emissions scenario. Tropical countries will likely be the first to enter this new age of climatic erraticness and could experience extreme temperatures monthly after 2050. This, the authors argue, underscores the need for robust efforts targeted not only at protecting those vulnerable countries but also the rich biodiversity that they harbor.
Here is the group that prepared the prediction.
