NEWS
Study: Climate to transform by 2100
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Also by Nick Penzenstadler:
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by Nick Penzenstadler
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Current climates will be decimated by the year 2100, and new ones never before seen could be created, according to the findings of a global warming survey announced Monday by the University of Wisconsin.
Primary author and UW geographer Jack Williams said the findings would be published online sometime this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Williams said they analyzed climate model simulations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and looked at two different emission scenarios from now until the end of the century.
"We looked at the high end where we don't take major steps, and then the low end was results if we had significant mitigation," Williams said.
The current carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is around 380 parts per million but could hit between 550 and 850 by 2100, according to Williams.
According to co-author Stephen Jackson, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming — which collaborated with Williams at Wisconsin — the worst-case scenario would cause many climates near tropical highlands to disappear and create "novel" climates with environments unlike anything seen today.
"We really risk a lot of major ecological disruption for the vanishing climates, and many ecosystems we value both aesthetically and ecologically will disappear," Jackson said in a phone interview. "So the communities themselves will be disrupted and dissolve."
Jackson added the areas could lose their biodiversity with the extreme risk of extinction.
The new model revealed environments outside the realm of scientific study in the past, according to Jackson.
"For these novel climates that will appear, we don't have really good predictive capacities," Jackson said. "They don't exist anywhere today; we can't go look at it — we're going outside the envelope."
With the predicted effects, Williams said the regions would experience harsh temperature and precipitation changes, either becoming dryer or wetter.
Although Wisconsin doesn't fit the bill of the specific research findings, Williams pointed out the North American climate will also feel severe effects.
"Our analysis highlights certain reasons for novel climates, but it will be global and affect everyone," Williams said. "For example, we're not at risk of novel climates but we still had a very short ice-covered season on Lake Mendota — we're still feeling the effects."
UW professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences John Kutzbach co-authored the study.
Anonymous (March 27, 2007 @ 3:31pm):
the great part is, we will all be dead... so who cares!
Anonymous (March 27, 2007 @ 5:22pm):
I wonder, had the researcher said that this is not caused by humans, there would have been sources to contradict him.
Did anyone even notice that he used a local example to support his weak theory on global change?
Anonymous (March 28, 2007 @ 2:24am):
Yeah we may be dead but did you think about your grandkids? Ignorant. Selfish.
Anonymous (March 28, 2007 @ 1:23pm):
I noted that the comment about selfish and ignorant was posted at 2:24 a.m. on 3/28 - hope this matter isn't keeping the writer up nights!
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