Past the Tipping Point

Climate change has brought the global environmental crisis to its crux. The primary point that must be noted is that the pace of climate change is accelerating much more rapidly than had been forecast. Accumulation of carbon dioxide, rising temperatures, melting of the polar ice caps and of the “eternal snows,” droughts, floods: all are speeding up and previous scientific analyses, the ink scarcely dry, turn out to have been too optimistic. More and more, in projections for the next one, two, or three decades, the highest estimates are becoming accepted minima. And to that must be added the all-too-little-studied amplifying factors that today pose the risk of a qualitative leap in the greenhouse effect leading to runaway global warming.

See Michael Lowy, Monthly Review

A 2C increase in average temperatures around the mountain in the past 20 years has allowed the disease to creep into higher altitude areas, where the local population of four million has little or no immunity.

Chen-Qi - The World of Micro-Organism

Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights.

This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians -- the vast difference is due to the huge gap in consumption patterns in the two countries -- according to U.S. government statistics about per person emissions in 2006.

Reuters

Leading scientists like James Hansen say the maximum safe upper level for the concentration of CO2 particles in air is 350 parts per million. We're currently at 387. According to a study recently cited in Time magazine, we could ban automobiles and the internal combustion engine and abolish all industrial production, worldwide, and it would still take at least 900 years for CO2 levels to drop back below the 350 ppm tipping point.

Ocean levels will rise an average of at least 6 to 16 feet by 2100. The northern half of Antarctica's giant Wilkins ice shelf has begun breaking off; it will be gone within a few years. In the highest mountains in and around the Himalayas, millennia-old glaciers have vanished in the last decade, causing water shortages for hundreds of millions of people in the cities of China, Central and South Asia.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years," said Susan Solomon, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than 1,000 years."

The idyllic global climate that has prevailed for the last 10,000 years is changing. Catastrophe no longer looms, it's upon us. For example, the polar ice cap is doomed. Summer ice will vanish within 20 years; winter ice will be gone by 2085. Nothing can be done to stop it. It doesn't matter whether the United States and other countries reduce CO2 gas production by 30, 50 or 80 percent.

[Southwest North America is just one of 12 tipping points described.]

Overview - Aridity in Southwest North America is predicted to intensify and persist in the future and a transition is probably already underway and will become well established in the coming years to decades, akin to permanent drought conditions (4). Levels of aridity seen in the 1950s multiyear drought or the 1930s Dust Bowl are robustly predicted to become the new climatology by mid-century, resulting in perpetual drought. In California alone this will result in a number of impacts including on water resources, agriculture, and wildfire.

Wider impacts - Besides South-western North America, other land regions to be hit hard by subtropical drying include southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East as well as parts of South America. If the model projections are correct, Mexico in particular faces a future of declining water resources that will have serious consequences for public water supply, agriculture and economic development and this will (and already has) affected the region as a whole, including the United States.

Insurance aspects - Insurers are now alert to wildfire risk in the region. The most serious aspects of the tipping point for insurers would therefore be the indirect ones, i.e. economic and labour market disruption and a deterioration of public finances. On the positive side, investment in water management and alternative energy could provide opportunities for fund managers.