Nature

Huge Impact Caused by Just One Degree of Global Warming

So what would happen in the case of a rise of 4 to 11 degrees?

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

15th of May 2008, 08:50 GMT

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It is obvious that global warming is already impacting clime, water regime, plant and animal life. So far, a new analysis published in the journal Nature is the most exhaustive one, gathering data on the effects of global warming around the world, from cannibalistic polar bears to melting glaciers and earlier-blooming plants, all of this being directly linked to human activity.

The analysis elaborates on the conclusions of a 2007 report by the

UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it could support political advocacy on the issue. At the moment, Researchers are worried because the impact that global warming has already had, even if was only with 1o F (0.6o C). By the end of this century, global warming may rise Earth's temperatures by 4 to 11o F (2 and 6o C) before the climate stabilizes again in 22nd century.

"The new report is similar to findings presented by the IPCC since 2001 - only now the alarm bell is ringing louder. We need to start paying attention to the bell, because if we don't there's going to be a lot of extinctions, I'm afraid," said co-author Terry Root, a biologist at the Stanford University in California.

The team gathered data as old as from 1970 on 829 physical systems (from melting glaciers to warming waters) and 28,800 living plant and animal species. All these systems have experienced changes over the last three decades, and these changes matched predicted forecasting connected to human-induced global warming in 95% of the physical systems and 90% of the species. Statistical analyses strongly connected the global and continental temperature changes.

"It is very unlikely for there to be any other reason for those linkages, other than the human influence on the temperature. At the continental scale, the link was strongest in North America, Asia, and Europe. Central and South America, Africa, and Australia lack sufficient data for a robust correlation," said lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

"The message from the analysis is more of the same but worth noting because it highlights the need for adaptation to a warming world. Any time we can get people to notice that global warming is affecting us right now is good. What we're doing is finding a lot more instances of it," Root concluded by saying.

TAGS:

warming | temperature | melting

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