Physicists predict Earth will become a chaotic world, with dire consequences
By Paul Sutter
Hottest Summers United States History
Hottest Summers United States History (1900, 1908, 1936 and 1988 Rate High.)
Humans aren’t just making Earth warmer, they are making the climate chaotic,
a stark new study suggests. The new research, which was posted April 21 to the preprint database arXiv, draws a broad and general picture of the full potential impact of human activity on the climate.
And the picture isn’t pretty.
While the study doesn’t present a complete simulation of a climate model, it does paint a broad sketch of where we’re heading if we don’t curtail climate change and our unchecked use of fossil fuels, according to the study authors, scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Porto in Portugal. .
“The implications of climate change are well known (droughts, heat waves, extreme phenomena, etc),” study researcher Orfeu Bertolami told Live Science in an email.
“If the Earth System gets into the region of chaotic behavior, we will lose all hope of somehow fixing the problem.”
Related: It’s ‘now or never’ to stop climate disaster, UN scientists say
Climate shifts
Earth periodically experiences massive changes in climate patterns, going from one stable equilibrium to another. These shifts are usually driven by external factors like changes in Earth’s orbit or a massive surge in volcanic activity. But past research suggests we are now entering a new phase, one driven by human activity. As humans pump more carbon into the atmosphere, we are creating a new Anthropocene era, a period of human-influenced climate systems, something our planet has never experienced before.
In the new study, researchers modeled the introduction of the Anthropocene as a phase transition. Most people are familiar with phase transitions in materials, for instance when an ice cube changes phase from a solid to a liquid by melting into water, or when water evaporates into a gas. But phase transitions also occur in other systems.
In this case, the system is Earth’s climate. A given climate provides for regular and predictable seasons and weather, and a phase transition in the climate leads to a new pattern of seasons and weather. When the climate goes through a phase transition,
this means that Earth is experiencing a sudden and rapid change in patterns.
Logistics problems
If human activity is driving a phase transition in Earth’s climate,
that means we are causing the planet to develop a new set of weather patterns.
What those patterns will look like is one of the most pressing problems of climate science.
Where is Earth’s climate headed? That depends significantly on exactly what our activity is over the next few decades. Drastically reducing carbon output, for example, would lead to different outcomes than changing nothing at all, the researchers wrote in the study.
To account for the different trajectories and choices that humanity could make, the researchers employed a mathematical tool called a logistic map.
The logistic map is great at describing situations where some variable — such as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere — can grow but naturally reaches a limit. For example, scientists often use the logistic map to describe animal populations: Animals can keep giving birth, increasing their numbers, but they reach a limit when they consume all the food in their environment (or their predators get too hungry and consume them).
Related: The 5 mass extinction events that shaped the history of Earth
Our influence on the environment is definitely growing, and it has been for over a century. But it will naturally reach a limit, according to the researchers. For example, the human population can only grow so large and can only have so many carbon-emitting activities; and pollution will eventually degrade the environment. At some point in the future, carbon output will reach a maximum limit, and the researchers found that a logistic map can capture the future trajectory of that carbon output very well.
Everything is chaos
The researchers explored different ways that the human logistic map could evolve, depending on a variety of factors like our population, introduction of carbon reduction strategies and better, more efficient technologies. Once they found how human carbon output would evolve with time, they used that to examine how Earth’s climate would evolve through the human-driven phase transition.
In the best cases, once humanity reaches the limit of carbon output, Earth’s climate stabilizes at a new, higher average temperature. This higher temperature is overall bad for humans, because it still leads to higher sea levels and more extreme weather events. But at least it’s stable: The Anthropocene looks like previous climate ages, only warmer, and it will still have regular and repeatable weather patterns.
But in the worst cases, the researchers found that Earth’s climate leads to chaos.
True, mathematical chaos. In a chaotic system, there is no equilibrium and no repeatable patterns. A chaotic climate would have seasons that change wildly from decade to decade (or even year to year). Some years would experience sudden flashes of extreme weather, while others would be completely quiet. Even the average Earth temperature may fluctuate wildly, swinging from cooler to hotter periods in relatively short periods of time. It would become utterly impossible to determine in what direction Earth’s climate is headed.
“A chaotic behavior means that it will be impossible to predict the behavior of the Earth System in the future even if we know with great certainty its present state,” Bertolami said. “It will mean that any capability to control and to drive the Earth System towards an equilibrium state that favors the habitability of the biosphere will be lost.”
Most concerning, the researchers found that above a certain critical threshold temperature for Earth’s atmosphere, a feedback cycle can kick in where a chaotic result would become unavoidable. There are some signs that we may have already passed that tipping point, but it’s not too late to avert climate disaster.
Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying: IPCC report puts the scale of climate risk in perspective (continuitycentral.com)
Scientists are observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across
the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.
However, strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While benefits for air quality would come quickly, it could take 20-30 years to see global temperatures stabilize, according to the IPCC Working Group I report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, approved on Friday by 195 member governments of the IPCC, through a virtual approval session that was held over two weeks starting on July 26.
The Working Group I report is the first instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which will be completed in 2022. “This report reflects extraordinary efforts under exceptional circumstances,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC. “The innovations in this report, and advances in climate science that it reflects, provide an invaluable input into climate negotiations and decision-making.”
Faster warming
The report provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades, and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.
The report shows that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming. This assessment is based on improved observational datasets to assess historical warming, as well progress in scientific understanding of the response of the climate system to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
“This report is a reality check,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte. “We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present and future climate, which is essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done, and how we can prepare.”
Every region facing increasing changes
Many characteristics of climate change directly depend on the level of global warming, but what people experience is often very different to the global average. For example, warming over land is larger than the global average, and it is more than twice as high in the Arctic.
“Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth, in multiple ways. The changes we experience will increase with additional warming,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Panmao Zhai.
The report projects that in the coming decades climate changes will increase in all regions. For 1.5°C of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons.
At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows.
But it is not just about temperature. Climate change is bringing multiple different changes in different regions – which will all increase with further warming.
These include changes to wetness and dryness, to winds, snow and ice, coastal areas and oceans. For example:
Climate change is intensifying the water cycle. This brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.
Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns.
In high latitudes, precipitation is likely to increase, while it is projected to decrease over large parts of the subtropics. Changes to monsoon precipitation are expected, which will vary by region.
Coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding in low-lying areas and coastal erosion. Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.
Further warming will amplify permafrost thawing, and the loss of seasonal snow cover, melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and loss of summer Arctic sea ice.
Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels have been clearly linked to human influence. These changes affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of this century.
For cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea level rise in coastal cities.
For the first time, the Sixth Assessment Report provides a more detailed regional assessment of climate change, including a focus on useful information that can inform risk assessment, adaptation, and other decision-making, and a new framework that helps translate physical changes in the climate – heat, cold, rain, drought, snow, wind, coastal flooding and more – into what they mean for society and ecosystems.
This regional information can be explored in detail in the newly developed Interactive Atlas interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch as well as regional fact sheets, the technical summary, and underlying report.
Human influence on the past and future climate.
“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed,” said Masson-Delmotte. Yet the new report also reflects major advances in the science of attribution – understanding the role of climate change in intensifying specific weather and climate events such as extreme heat waves and heavy rainfall events.
The report also shows that human actions still have the potential to determine the future course of climate. The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change, even as other greenhouse gases and air pollutants also affect the climate.
“Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate,” said Zhai.
Drought ravaged farms during the Great Depression in 1936.
Heat Waves Throughout History Find out what happens when things start to really
heat up with this look back at some of the most infamous heat waves in history.
London’s Great Stink of 1858
This summer heat wave has lived in infamy not only for its soaring temperatures but also for the malodorous stench it unleashed on England’s capital. Many Londoners had recently traded in their chamber pots for water closets, which flushed an unprecedented amount of water and waste into the city’s 200,000 cesspits. As sewage overflowed into the River Thames and its tributaries, the warm weather encouraged the growth of bacteria with an odor so noxious that sheets soaked in chloride of lime were hung from the windows of the newly built House of Commons in an effort to blunt the smell. London’s poor still drank from the Thames, and thousands died that summer from cholera, typhoid and other diseases; these epidemics had yet to be linked to contaminated water and were instead blamed on the reeking air. One newspaper declared that “whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.”
Amid public outcry, Parliament resolved to overhaul the city’s antiquated sewer system, enlisting the help of Joseph William Bazalgette, a brilliant and celebrated civil engineer. His sprawling network of drains and pumping stations, designed to handle 420 million gallons of liquid waste a day, officially opened in 1865 and became fully operational a decade later. Many credit Bazalgette with saving thousands of lives–and, of course, sparing countless noses from London’s intolerable stink.
The Great New York Heat Wave of 1896
At the end of the 19th century, New York City was home to some 3 million people, many occupying the notoriously cramped and stifling tenements of the Lower East Side and other low-income neighborhoods. When 10 days of relentless heat baked the Big Apple in August 1896, these abysmal living conditions went from an uncomfortable reality to a death sentence for an estimated 1,300 New Yorkers. Roasting in their jam-packed bedrooms and barred from sleeping in public parks by a citywide ban, many tenement dwellers sought a breath of fresh air on rooftops, fire escapes and piers. A sizable share of the heat wave casualties occurred when people fell asleep, rolled from their perches and plummeted to their deaths; others succumbed to heat stroke and other heat-related ailments. More than 1,000 horses also died during the crisis.
Even as the death toll mounted, the city government did little to address the disaster,
and the heat wave was on the verge of waning by the time the mayor called an emergency meeting. One relatively obscure official emerged as a hero: Theodore Roosevelt, the city’s police commissioner, who had angered New Yorkers earlier in the summer by cracking down on taverns that stayed open beyond the legal closing time. The future president instructed the police force to distribute free ice in tenement neighborhoods and provide ambulance services to the sick. According to some historians, the heat wave salvaged Roosevelt’s faltering political career and ultimately helped propel him to the White House.
The North American Heat Wave of 1936
In the United States, the timing of the 1936 North American heat wave could not have been worse. Battered by the Great Depression, bled dry by years of drought and blinded by perpetual dust storms, the country took yet another debilitating hit when temperatures soared to all-time highs in 12 states, clearing the 120-degree mark in some regions. (The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba also saw record heat that summer.) Like the blistering summer of 2010, the 1936 heat wave started early and followed an unusually cold winter, leaving Americans unprepared for such a drastic change in weather.
Reports of dramatic and horrific scenes poured in from around the country. The Midwest had been battling a grasshopper infestation for several years, and as temperatures climbed their broiled, lifeless bodies began dropping from the sky like antennae hail. In New York City, which hit a record high of 106 degrees, 75 seamstresses at a single factory fell into a collective, heat-induced swoon. In Detroit, one of the steamiest cities, doctors and nurses collapsed while treating patients, overcome by heat and exhaustion, and the morgues were overrun with bodies. By summer’s end, upward of 5,000 Americans and 1,100 Canadians had died from heat-related causes or drowned while trying to cool off in rivers and lakes.
The Chicago Heat Wave of 1995
Like much of the central and eastern United States, Chicago had suffered through the devastating heat waves of 1980 and 1988, which persisted for weeks and caused tens of thousands of fatalities nationwide. But in the summer of 1995, the Windy City lost approximately 700 residents in just five humid and sweltering days–a staggering mortality rate that exposed the city’s inadequate response system while debunking common assumptions about which groups are most susceptible to heat-related death.
On July 13, the temperature in the city hit 106 degrees and the heat index, which takes humidity into account to gauge how hot it actually feels, surpassed 120 degrees. As the heat lingered, much of Chicago’s urban infrastructure began to break down: excessive air conditioner use maxed out the power grid; relief seekers opened so many hydrants that several communities lost water pressure; and train rails and roads buckled, causing massive commuter delays.
Paramedics, hospitals and morgues were quickly overwhelmed, and midway through
the heat wave there was a backlog of hundreds of bodies. In the aftermath of the tragedy, researchers found that most of those who died were older men who lived alone, despite the fact that senior women outnumbered senior men in the area; they concluded that women’s stronger social connections to the community had acted as a defense. Four years later, when another heat wave hit the city, better preparation and a more rapid response limited the deaths to just over 100.
The European Heat Wave of 2003
In July and August of 2003, countries across Europe sizzled through what some scientists deemed their hottest summer since 1500 A.D. The scorching temperatures peaked in the last two weeks of August and claimed at least 40,000 victims, taking a heavy toll on the very young, the chronically ill and elderly people living alone or in nursing homes. Forest fires raged in Portugal, Spain and Italy, while melting glaciers triggered flash floods in the Alps and crops withered throughout southern Europe.
France was hit hardest by the crisis, suffering an estimated 14,000 fatalities as temperatures soared to 104 degrees in a country with an aging population and limited air conditioning. In France and elsewhere, the appallingly high death toll revealed a lack of preparedness for extreme weather in regions with historically temperate climates. Reports cited treatment delays, unawareness of heat-related conditions like dehydration and inadequate medical personnel. In the years since 2003, most European governments have developed action plans for extreme heat that emphasize green spaces, public education, warning systems and emergency measures for the most vulnerable.
For more information contact:
IPCC Press Office ipcc-media@wmo.int, +41 22 730 8120
Katherine Leitzell katherine.leitzell@ipcc.ch
Nada Caud (French) nada.caud@universite-paris-saclay.fr
Temperature Breakdown By Decade (weather.gov)
Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I
to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
The Working Group I report addresses the most updated physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, global and regional climate simulations. It shows how and why climate has changed to date, and the improved understanding of human influence on a wider range of climate characteristics, including extreme events. There will be a greater focus on regional information that can be used for climate risk assessments.
The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) as well as additional materials and information are available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Note: Originally scheduled for release in April 2021, the report was delayed for several months by the COVID-19 pandemic, as work in the scientific community including the IPCC shifted online. This is first time that the IPCC has conducted a virtual approval session for one of its reports.
AR6 Working Group I in numbers
234 authors from 66 countries
31 – coordinating authors
167 – lead authors
36 – review editors
Plus:
517 – contributing authors
Over 14,000 cited references
A total of 78,007 expert and government review comments.
(First Order Draft 23,462; Second Order Draft 51,387; Final Government Distribution: 3,158) More information about the Sixth Assessment Report can be found here.
About the IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide political leaders with periodic scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. In the same year the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by the WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC. It has 195 member states.
Thousands of people from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC.
For the assessment reports, IPCC scientists volunteer their time to assess the thousands of scientific papers published each year to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks.
The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change.
It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals. As part of the IPCC, a Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) provides guidance to the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) on curation, traceability, stability, availability and transparency of data and scenarios related to the reports of the IPCC.
IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency. An IPCC assessment report consists of the contributions of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. The Synthesis Report integrates the findings of the three working group reports and of any special reports prepared in that assessment cycle.
About the Sixth Assessment Cycle.
At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015 it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and the Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle.
Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming 1.5
degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty was launched in October 2018.
Climate Change and Land, an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems was launched in August 2019, and the Special Report
on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate was released in September 2019.
In May 2019 the IPCC released the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines
for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, an update to the methodology used by governments to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions and removals.
The other two Working Group contributions to the AR6 will be finalized in 2022
and the AR6 Synthesis Report will be completed in the second half of 2022.
For more information go to www.ipcc.ch
The website includes outreach materials including videos about the IPCC and video recordings from outreach events conducted as webinars or live-streamed events.
Most videos published by the IPCC can be found on
IPCC – YouTube and Vimeo channels.
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