As the debate on climate change rages on, 550 scientists have gathered under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to bang out a new report on the impact humans have on the environment.
Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a United Nations organization, told reporters that it will be easier to impletment difficult changes now than have to deal with the problems climate will eventually cause
"In other words, if we don't stabilise the climate of this planet, then these impacts are going to be progressively more serious," he said.
In a related study Scientific American has added a new wrinkle to the conversation that should spark a new level of controversy on the subject.
Using what is referred to as the "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS) as a guide, researchers at Scientific American are claiming that the global temperature could rise to a level that "would harm all sectors of civilization-food, water, health, land, national security, energy and economic prosperity" by as early as 2036.
The scientific community reached a consensus years ago that a rising of two degrees C (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of the overall global temperature would begin to have dire results on the future health of the planet.
The ESC is a basic guide the scientific community uses to look at what potential point in the future that two degree C rise in temperature could happen if we continue emitting CO2 into the atmosphere at our current rate.
To see at what point in the future that potential increase might occur, researchers at Scientific American began plugging some different number scenarios into the ECS guide. Using various climate scenarios that included natural factors such as volcanoes and the sun, along with human factors like greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants, the researchers found that the two degree threshold for what is deemed dangerous warming could happen by as early 2036 - merely 22 years from now.
Critics of this prediction are claiming that the planet is actually in what is called a global warming 'pause' that may last for over 20 years they predict, and that the Arctic sea ice has already started to recover.
A recent research paper in the journal Climate Dynamics (https://link.springer.com/journal/382) by Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr Marcia Wyatt - claims the planet is currently in this aforementioned 'pause' and a condition they refer to as a 'stadium wave' is going to lengthen that pause for at least another 20 years.
"The stadium wave signal predicts that the current pause in global warming could extend well into the 2030s," Wyatt explains in the journal paper. "The stadium wave also forecasts that sea ice will recover from its recent minimum."
And so the debate on climate change rolls along with the future of the planet hanging in the balance.
