Global climate change is changing the places we know and cherish. Within our lifetimes, we will see the visible effects of global climate change on coastlines, coral reefs, glacier-carved mountains and other places, with potentially devastating ecological and economic consequences. While there is some uncertainty about the long-range predictions of the impacts of global climate change, there is no doubt that climate change is under way ? and we know enough to take action now.
Climate change is caused primarily by the release of heat-trapping gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, produced by vehicles, industrial processes, power plants and deforestation. The gases we emit today will linger in the atmosphere for decades. The longer we wait to take steps to reduce emissions, the steeper and more costly the cuts in emissions will need to be in the future to prevent dangerous rates of global climate change.
Climate change has the potential to undermine the past conservation work of governments, communities and organizations like The Nature Conservancy, eroding hard-won gains to protect wildlife habitat and biodiversity around the world.
Using widely accepted models of climate change, Conservancy scientists have overlaid maps of places at risk from climate change with maps of Conservancy land holdings. They estimate that the majority of the Conservancy's investments are in jeopardy of losing their ability to sustain biodiversity because the climate will become so altered that the plants and animals we have endeavored to protect at those sites will face untenable conditions.
To combat the threat of climate change to the natural world and to our way of life, the Conservancy supports pragmatic policies to reduce emissions causing global climate change.
Additionally, at several places where we work around the globe, the Conservancy is studying the anticipated impacts of climate change on biodiversity and how those places will respond. From this information, we can develop the tools and long-term conservation strategies that address a place's adaptation to a changing climate. Our work has only just begun in places like Alaska, China and North Carolina; some highlights follow. We now need to spread our climateadaptation projects to more sites to get a critical mass of data, tools and strategies that together can lessen the threat of climate change to Conservancy project sites.
Alaska
With some of the highest rates of warming experienced thus far, the Arctic provides a striking illustration of the impacts of climate change on people and places. Sea ice has shrunk substantially, and coastal ice melts three weeks earlier than it did just 30 years ago. With shifts in the seasons and scarcer, thinner ice, wildlife and native people who rely on the ice for subsistence fishing and hunting face an uncertain future.
Winter temperatures in Alaska have risen by more than 5ºF in the 20th century, leading to extensive melting of sea ice and permafrost in the tundra. As the frozen ground thaws, more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. These changes are having serious economic implications as roads crumble, pipelines buckle and entire communities are being forced to move inland. In addition, these changes are damaging habitat for Arctic foxes, polar bears and caribou.
In Alaska, the Conservancy is developing conservation plans that anticipate the likely climate change impacts on habitat for caribou and other species.
China
On the border between Tibet and Yunnan Province, climate change is one of the reasons why trees are moving upslope, where they are invading high-elevation alpine meadows and reducing the area available for rare plants, important medicinal plants and traditional yak herding. Neither the plants nor the people will find it easy to adapt because moving farther up steep, rocky slopes is not a viable option.
To protect alpine areas and freshwater ecosystems, the Conservancy is developing plans that integrate the multiple threats posed by climate change, land-use changes and increased demand for medicinal plants, timber and water.
North Carolina
The forests, wetlands, dunes, rivers and estuary surrounding the Albemarle Peninsula in eastern North Carolina comprise an extraordinarily productive natural system that hosts migratory birds, the endangered red wolf, and striped bass. Yet North Carolina's coast, like many around the world, is being changed by sea-level rise. In the Albemarle Peninsula, drainage ditches originally dug to drain farmland now channel salt water inland. This inflow is harming native vegetation and threatening natural diversity. Intrusion is further compounded by high tides and storm surges.
In North Carolina, the Conservancy is working to restore Albemarle Peninsula, preparing it for sea-level rise through a variety of efforts such as working with landowners to convert land to forests, installing floodgates to prevent saltwater intrusion, removing hard armoring along the coast and working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to incorporate additional adaptation measures in their management plan.
The Conservancy's climate-adaptation work alone will not be enough to avoid devastating impacts to plants, animals and natural communities posed by climate change. For the sake of the planet, practical policies to slow, stop and reverse the trend of emissions-causing global climate change must be adopted and implemented by governments everywhere.
___________________________________________________________
Join The Nature Conservancy's group on Gather for more environmental news, online events, podcasts, and opportunities for you to help save the Last Great Places on Earth.
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 13
One of the primary problems is that the Sun being a star can only get hotter every day, that's all it can do.
And in the past the moon would cause more volcanos as it too was much closer to the earth. And those volcanos were sometimes very large they would cause an ice age to occur on the earth, some of which were for millions of years But the moon is going away from the earth at the rate of an inch and a half every year, and will have less and less of an impact on the earthquakes and the volcanos in the future.
There was a time in the past when a day was six hours long, in today's hours, and there will be a time in the future when a day will be forty or so hours long, in today's hours. Longer days only mean hotter days and cooler nights.
By the way I'm a realist, not pessimistic.
Are you saying that because nature has been, is now, and always will be in some sort of flux, that we should do nothing about climate change?
I only ask because it seems like there's immediate and beneficial actions that we can take now to safeguard our planet for many generations in the future... if not until our star changes into a red giant.
Surely you wouldn't argue that just because mankind didn't have computer technology a century ago that we shouldn't be on the Web today, sharing ideas and facts on Gather? :)
As the solar activity has almost everything to do with global warming I'll just pass this stuff on to you folks.
We in this earth are currently in a warming cycle that has been going on since the seventeen hundreds or so. If the earth continues on as it has for the past several hundred centuries there will be a cooling cycle of the sun starting in the year 2031. As this has happened in a four hundred or so year cycle for some time now.
Some info for you on that as there is the 11 or so year cycle solar cycle of sunspots also but the Maunder Minimum is the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715 A.D., when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. It is named after the later solar astronomer E.W. Maunder who discovered the dearth of sunspots during that period by studying records from those years. During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, for example, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000–50,000 spots. That period was called the Little Ice Age.
Other historical sunspot minima have been detected either directly or by the analysis of carbon-14 in ice cores or tree rings; these include the Sporer Minimum (1450–1540), and less markedly the Dalton Minimum (1790–1820). In total there seem to have been 18 periods of sunspot minima in the last 8,000 years, and studies indicate that the sun currently spends up to a quarter of its time in these minima.
The evidence is that the next solar minimum will start around the year 2031. If so then there will be a cooler period after that.
As I wasn't able to get into Wikepeida I got this info from Ask at http://www.answers.com/Maunder%20minimum%20
Therefore, the oil will never stop running and is only a matter of cost.
Also as the oceans have heated up a bit there is now according to NASA 15% more water in the air, therefore, there will also be more rain.
Methane, which is nothing more that rot under the tundra, is around 100 times a greater threat than CO2. The Methane tho will only last around a hundred or so years, then it well dissipate, but will increase the temp on earth quite a lot faster than the CO2 we currently see.
Therefore, the melting of the permafrost is a greater threat than the current CO2 threat. Can we do anything to stop the Tundra permafrost from melting?
I really don't think so as this started a few years ago and is proceeding on a fast scale.
http://www.solcomhouse.com/Permafrost.htm
Svein Tveitdal, managing director of GRID Arendal in Norway, a UNEP environmental information centre monitoring the melting of the permafrost, told a meeting at the 21st session of the United Nations's Governing Council in Nairobi, Kenya today: "Permafrost has acted as a carbon sink, locking away carbon and other greenhouse gases like methane, for thousands of year. But there is now evidence that this is no longer the case, and the permafrost in some areas is starting to give back its carbon. This could accelerate the greenhouse effect".
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060617/NATION/606170360/1020/rss09
Global warming might be significantly worse than expected during the next century because the melting of carbon-rich permafrost in Siberia could expel hundreds of billions of tons of extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, scientists warn in a new study.
Experts said they can't be certain how large the effect might be, because they can't accurately estimate how much of the extra greenhouse gases will be absorbed by plants and the oceans.
The problem is as of now past us and we are all too late to do anything to stop this now.
So, don't worry, be happy, we failed.