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Saturday, May 12, 2018

What I just Discovered about Climate Change..

I read a great deal on climate change.. yet some of the information by Quantumrun Forecasting on their website and excerpted below, was new to me, or perhaps it made more of an impact because of the way it was simply presented.. 

Feedback loops are already coming into play.. it really is our last chance.. 


Feedback loops, in the context of climate change, is any cycle in nature that either positively (accelerates) or negatively (decelerates) impacts the level of warming in the atmosphere.

An example of a negative feedback loop would be that the more our planet warms, the more water evaporates into our atmosphere, creating more clouds that reflect light from the sun,which lowers the earth’s average temperature.

Unfortunately, there are way more positive feedback loops than negative ones. Here’s the list of the most important ones:

As the earth warms, ice caps in the north and south poles will begin to shrink, to melt away. This loss means there will be less gleaming white, frosty ice to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. (Keep in mind that our poles reflect up to 70 per cent of the sun’s heat back to space.) As there is less and less heat deflected away, the rate of melting will grow faster year-over-year.

Related to the melting polar ice caps, is the melting permafrost, the soil that for centuries has remained trapped under freezing temperatures or buried beneath glaciers. The cold tundra found in northern Canada and in Siberia contains massive amounts of trapped carbon dioxide and methane that—once warmed—will be released back into the atmosphere. Methane especially is over 20 times worse than carbon dioxide and it can’t easily be absorbed back into the soil after it’s released.

Finally, our oceans: they are our biggest carbon sinks (like global vacuum cleaners that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere). As the world warms each year, our oceans’ ability to hold carbon dioxide weakens, meaning it will pull less and less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The same goes for our other big carbon sinks, our forests and our soils, their ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere becomes limited the more our atmosphere is polluted with warming agents.


We need to urgently help farmers with drought proofing farming


We are told that chances are, the Eastern part of India will receive more rain that before because of climate change. But Quantumrun points out that a warmer climate means our most farm-able soil will also suffer from higher rates of evaporation, meaning the benefits of greater rainfall will be canceled out by a faster soil evaporation rate in many places around the world.

Modern farming tends to rely on relatively few plant varieties to grow at industrial scale. We’ve domesticated crops, either through thousands of years of manual breeding or dozens of years of genetic manipulation, that can only thrive when the temperature is just Goldilocks right.

For example, studies run by the University of Reading on two of the most widely grown varieties of rice, found that both were highly vulnerable to higher temperatures. Specifically, if temperatures exceeded 35 degrees during their flowering stage, the plants would become sterile, offering few, if any, grains. Many tropical and Asian countries where rice is the main staple food already lie on the very edge of this Goldilocks temperature zone, so any further warming could mean disaster.

Acknowledgement : The above post is adapted from Quantumrun Forecasting.

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