During the “Climate Change Era” that we now live in, most of the reports have said that climate change will hit, if we don’t do something, and it will hit around 2050 to 2100. For most of us, we gave a sigh of relief as we realized it would be our children and grandchildren who deal with the threat of climate change the most.
Not so according to a new World Wildlife Fund report. In that report, it has been predicted that the climate is changing faster than had previously been thought. The report went on to state that the Arctic Ocean is losing its ice 30 years ahead of schedule, and what was predicted by the UN. New estimates state that the summer months could be completely ice free as early as 2013 and as late as 2040. To find the last time the there was no summer ice in the Arctic, you have to go back to before humans walked up-right, about 1,000,000 years ago.
Along with a quicker time schedule, new predictions state that the rise in sea levels by 2100 will be on the scale of 1.2 meters, and not the .59 meters previously thought and predicted.
All of this is being backed up by the slowdown in world food production due to the changing climate as yields of wheat, maize and barley have fallen in recent months. In Europe, the North and Baltic Sea are experiencing their warmest temperatures since records were first recorded, and the area of the Mediterranean is experiencing more droughts than had previously been recorded.
From these new predictions, one thing can be made clear by all of us. The climate is indeed changing, and it is changing faster than anyone could previously predict. The reason for this is that as the climate warms, it creates other factors that then contribute to further warming, like a runaway snowball that grows and grows. For example, as the Earth warms, it melts the permafrost of the Arctic, which then causes huge amounts of CO2 to be released, something that was not thought of in predictions from a decade or two ago. On top of that, plankton soak up a lot of CO2, but as the water warms from global warming, plankton die, which means more CO2 goes into the atmosphere rather than the oceans, thereby further increasing the effects of global warming.
Depending on who you are, it is either a fascinating, or a terrifying time to be alive.
