Polar bears already experiencing climate change.
Scientists from the United Department of Energy's
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have recently finished a study analyzing climate changes over many decades.
Everyone Most everyone knows that climate change is a real thing and an issue being accelerated by human activities. Researchers in this study looked at some of the potential present day,
near future impacts:
In this study, interdisciplinary scientist Steve Smith and colleagues at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory examined historical and projected changes over decades rather than centuries to determine the temperature trends that will be felt by humans alive today.
"We focused on changes over 40-year periods, which is similar to the lifetime of houses and human-built infrastructure such as buildings and roads," said lead author Smith. "In the near term, we're going to have to adapt to these changes."
Many studies have been performed showing how our climate is changing in an earth-sized lifespan. All of these studies point to both natural global variances as well as those that have developed as a result of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This study is one of the first to try to investigate the potential temperature changes happening in human lifespans.
The team calculated how fast temperatures changed between 1850 and 1930, a period when people started keeping records but when the amount of fossil fuel gases collecting in the atmosphere was low. They compared these rates to temperatures reconstructed from natural sources of climate information, such as from tree rings, corals and ice cores, for the past 2,000 years.
Taken together, the shorter time period simulations were similar to the reconstructions over a longer time period, suggesting the models reflected reality well.
Global temperatures over these 40-year spans show, in most cases, the normal variance that most every climate scientist agrees upon (see
James Inhofe and his
snowball of science). However, when looking at their models for the present 40-year span (1971-2020), they found that temperatures rose outside of what natural variability could account for.
Still, the researchers can't say exactly what impact faster rising temperatures will have on the Earth and its inhabitants.
"In these climate model simulations, the world is just now starting to enter into a new place, where rates of temperature change are consistently larger than historical values over 40-year time spans," said Smith. "We need to better understand what the effects of this will be and how to prepare for them."
Studies such as this one are important since they may have the ability, with momentum, to get legislators and corporations to begin enacting changes quicker, as our time has already run out.