TellUs: Climate Change Irreversible Impacts

Climate change impacts associated with rising global temperatures

Photo: The Telegraph

Today’s blog will be addressing the changes that will happen to the world as global temperatures rise. The Paris Agreement in 2015 discussed the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Agreements aim was to implicate procedures so that the planet didn’t warm by an additional 2^oc, a vital tipping point. In fact it was discussed that we don’t even want to chance the temperature increasing by 1.5^oc. I will eventually do a separate blog just on The Paris Agreement and what it entails. However I just wanted to provide a quick, easy and understandable list of potential implications of rising temperatures. 

It’s important to note that the global impacts mentioned mask geographical variability - some areas will be warmer or cooler than the predicted global mean temperature rise. Also different warming levels will trigger different events, so timescales for events will differ. Furthermore these events do not take into account any future precaution techniques implicated by countries etc. Nevertheless the uncertainty is more about when these impacts will happen and their scale, as opposed to whether they will or not. These ramifications are provided from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Food

• A 2^oc increase leads to falling crop productivity and quality. This includes crops like wheat, rice, soybean and maize. Note that some locations may benefit
• Productivity worsens with higher temperatures, especially in low latitudes
• Fish and marine population distribution will shift, reducing fish catch

Water

• Water availability decreases (with increasing droughts in many mid- and low-latitude dry areas), it will increase in moist tropics and high latitudes
• Small mountain glaciers will disappear globally - potential water supply threats
• Around a 2^oc increase 1 billion people are exposed to increased water stress
• Around 4^oc there is a 70% decrease in run-off in the Mediterranean, African and South America

Ecosystems

• Marine life is threatened, as oceans get hotter and more acidic. This includes coral reef damage and death
• High risk of forest fires worldwide
• Loss of biodiversity, with a large percentage of species facing risk of extinction
• Around 4^oc there is up to an 80% loss in permafrost at high northern latitudes 

Coasts

• Increased damage from floods and storms - millions of additional people flooded each year in coastal zones
• Around 2^oc sea-levels rise 60cm by the end of the 21st century 
• Sea-level rise threatens islands, coastal areas and some major world cities

Extreme weather events

• Increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves - areas with high population density will experience extreme, high temperatures
• Increasing frequency and severity of flooding 
• At 2^oc 450 million people are experiencing more frequent river flooding
• Tropical cyclones are more intense and destructive

Risk of major irreversible impacts

• Continued reduction in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets
• Around 4^oc we see a 60% likelihood of irreversible decline of the Greenland ice sheets
• Increasing risk of abrupt, large-scale shifts in the climate system

I hope you found this blog informative and easy to follow. I appreciate you taking the time to read it! Subscribe to get notified when I upload, typically every other day and check out my social media links down below!

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Check out my previous blog: https://www.tellusabouttheenvironment.com/2019/08/tellus-amazon-fires-where-does-this.html