Points of No Return or Tipping Points in Climate Change

After thinking over the previous article on the enormous task of creating wedges of non-greenhouse gas sources of power, it seems that tipping points should be renamed “Points of no return”.  Tipping things over is something we all do occasionally.  We right it, clean up, and no harm done.  With CO2 that lasts well over 100 years in the atmosphere, warming every minute of every day, and the projected trippling of energy demand in the next 50 years, climate tip-overs are not going to be reversed by righting, and are not going to be cleaned up with no resulting damage.

“Points of no return” has a much more ominous ring to it, as it should have considering the future growth in greenhouse gases.

As the summer Arctic ice cap continues to recede, the albedo or reflectivity of the summer Arctic area exposed goes from almost total reflection of the sun’s radiation back into space, to almost total absorption.  This is called a feedback mechanism for even more warming.  A human feedback is that many countries are planning to do drilling for oil in the ocean of the Arctic.  Pollution of the sea and destruction of wildlife and their habitat with little hope of containment or remediation seems inevitable.

Global warming and the shifting of areas with appropriate temperature ranges for species is predicted to wipe out a quarter of species.  That is why scientists want to start naming this as a new era of fossilization called the Anthropocene, for the vast changes we have and will make to the habitats and species on earth.

We will add a discussion of the effects of increasing acidification of the ocean from dissolved CO2, where the pH drop of about 0.1 so far is projected to increase to 0.3 by mid century and to 0.5 by the end of the century.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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