Individual and Community

April 6, 2007
Emissions Already Affecting Climate, Report Finds
By JAMES KANTER and ANDREW C. REVKIN

BRUSSELS, April 6 — Earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being affected, for better and mostly for worse, by the atmospheric buildup of smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, top climate experts said today.

And while curbs in emissions can limit risks, they said, vulnerable regions must adapt to shifting weather patterns and rising seas.

The conclusions came in the latest report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has tracked research on human-caused global warming since being created by the United Nations in 1988. In February, the panel released a report that for the first time concluded with 90-percent certainty that humans were the main cause of warming since 1950. But in this report, focusing on the impact of warming, for the first time the group described how species, water supplies, ice sheets, and regional climate conditions were already responding.

At a news conference capping four days of debate between scientists and representatives from more than 100 governments, Martin Parry, the co-chairman of the team that wrote the new report, said widespread effects were already measurable, with much more to come.

“We’re no longer arm waving with models,” said Dr. Parry, who identified areas most affected as the Arctic, Sub-Saharan Africa, small islands and Asia’s sprawling, crowded, flood-prone river deltas. “This is empirical information on the ground.”

The report said that climate patterns were shifting in ways that would bring benefits in some places — including more rainfall and longer growing seasons in high latitudes, opening Arctic seaways, and reduced deaths from cold — but significant human hardship and ecological losses in others.

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Global Ecological Collapse?

The UN exaggerates problems, but gets solutions right

Ronald Bailey | March 31, 2005

Most ecosystem services that support life and human society are being degraded and used unsustainably, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) just released by the United Nations. According to the report, efforts to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, which include halving the number of people living on less than $1 per day, reducing child and maternal mortality, and establishing universal primary education by 2015, will be significantly impeded if these ecosystem services are allowed to deteriorate further.

One of the chief findings is that “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history.” And why not? After all, as the report notes, since 1960 human population doubled while the world’s economic output increased six-fold. The report alarmingly asserts that “more land was converted to cropland since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined.” This claim evidently depends on the selection of the baseline. If the UN authors had chosen 1961 as the baseline, as U.S. Department of Interior analyst Indur Goklany points out, between 1961 and 1995 cropland increased by only 10 percent (from 1.34 billion hectares to 1.48 billion hectares) and total land area devoted to agriculture also increased only 10 percent (from 4.5 billion hectares to 4.9 billion hectares). That sounds a lot less alarming. In fact, deeper in the report, the UN authors acknowledge, “Most of the increase in food demand of the past 50 years has been met by intensification of crop, livestock, and aquaculture systems rather than expansion of production area.” Land area devoted to cropland is falling in developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union.

Consider the bounty of nature in terms of human services. Ecosystems provide humanity with provisioning services such food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water supply; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling. The MA, compiled by more than 1300 experts from 95 countries, looked at 24 different ecosystem services and found that 15 of them (see page 41 of the report for a list of some of them) are being degraded or used unsustainably.
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Ecological Collapse refers to a situation where an ecosystem suffers a drastic, if not permanent, reduction in carrying capacity for all organisms, often resulting in mass extinction. Usually, an ecological collapse can be precipitated by a disastrous event occurring on a small time scale, such as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event which was an ecological collapse widely believed to be caused by an impact event.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_collapse