"First, if we have four more years of Trump, we’ll probably lose any chance of keeping the global average temperature from rising only 1.5 degrees Celsius instead of 2 degrees"
We lost that chance before we set it as the target. These numbers represent the annual average temperature, but Feb, 2016 hit 1.51 degrees above the pre-industrial level. If we hit zero emissions tomorrow, temps will continue to go up for another 30 or 40 years.
South Pole sea ice is now vanishing at an alarming rate, too
Antarctic sea ice loss has suddenly sped ahead of the long-running decline in the Arctic.
The background: The disappearance of Arctic sea ice has been accelerating since the late 1990s, outpacing rates predicted by climate models and seizing media attention (see “ How nuclear weapons research revealed new climate threats”). But it’s been an altogether different story at the South Pole, where ice cover gradually increased in recent decades, confounding scientists trying to work out the exact nature of the complex interactions in the global climate system.
A dramatic reversal: That story seems to have come to an abrupt end, however, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Antarctic’s sea ice cover reached its annual peak in 2014 and has since declined by around 2 million square kilometers (more than 770,000 square miles). It's a dramatic reversal, wiping out about 35 years’ worth of gains in a few years, according to the study by Claire Parkinson, a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. |
