New Climate Study Predicts Total Loss of Arctic Tundra

Posted on November 9, 2005

A new warns that if global warming continues at its current pace, that there will be a near-total loss of Arctic tundra. The study appeared in the Journal of Climate. Using conservative estimates of even lower carbon dioxide emissions than we are actually producing, the scientists had a computer model predict what will happen to various regions of the Earth through the year 2300. Alaska becomes a temperate zone, the ocean rise and our world is transformed into something very different than it is today.

"The question is no longer whether we will need to address this problem, but when we will need to address the problem," said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, based at Stanford University.
"We can either address it now, before we severely and irreversibly damage our climate, or we can wait until irreversible damage manifests itself strongly," Dr. Caldeira said. "If all we do is try to adapt, things will get worse and worse." The paper's lead author, Bala Govindasamy of the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said it might take 20 or 30 years before the scope of the human-caused changes becomes evident, but from then on there is likely to be no debate.
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Consistent with many other studies, the model showed that the Arctic would see the most warming, with average annual temperatures in many parts of Arctic Russia and northern North America rising more than 25 degrees Fahrenheit around 2100. Antarctica would follow suit later, with temperatures there rising sharply around 2200. The impact on vegetation and landscapes would transform large areas of the earth. In the simulation, at least one ecosystem, the scrubby Arctic tundra largely vanishes as climate zones shift hundreds of miles north. Tundra would decline from about 8 percent of the world's land area to 1.8 percent. Alaska, in the model, loses almost all of its evergreen boreal forests and becomes a largely temperate state.

And for those who just cannot accept that global warming is not some kind of communist plot, here's a thought: how about reducing emissions so we're not choking on smog filled with lung cancer-causing pollutants? Think of all the money we'd save on chemotherapy and asthma inhalers.